Yellow Curtains

What they do best is divide the constricted world.
There: war, traffic fumes, lanes full of hungry bitches.
Here: bedrooms, soup boiling, 3 a.m. dreams.
In the mornings the house is awash with them –
yellow – more colour than cloth, less tangible than light.
 
The curtains are an act of selfishness.
They turn the house neat, guiltless, middle class;
they correspond to our talk about the family, what to cook.
The colour conspires in this – safe, domestic yellow,
cheaply cheerful plastic smiley yellow.
 
But I don’t want to leave it at that –
they are cassia yellow, sunny honey, lemon melon,
clichéd Van Gogh yellow. When it rains at dawn,
you open the window so that the milk-light filtering through
them is under our eyelids when we go back to sleep.

I look at them often, thinking
love must do this, must love do this, love must do…
As a child, yellow was my metaphor for happiness
and here we are now with our fantastically yellow curtains,
and now I have the image and I have that
to which it corresponds.

Anjum Hasan

Anjum Hasan is the author of the novels The Cosmopolitans, Neti, Neti and Lunatic in my Head, the short story collection Difficult Pleasures, and the collection of poems Street on the Hill. She is books editor at The Caravan magazine and lives in Bangalore.