Anju Kishore (Diaspora Dual Identities)

Anju Kishore

A Foreign Accent

Appa’s Gulmohar stands

an elderly guard

gnarled, yet of girth, wide

as if justifying the decades past

Its crown canopies the little house just behind

Dare I touch the trunk that I knew once as a stalk

or sit lightly on the buttress root

that now runs alongside the old compound wall

A Doberman from the house bounds up barking 

as I linger outside the gate

A stranger looks up from my childhood porch 

that wears a not-so-old coat of paint

I am a trespasser now on the house appa built

Quickly, I gather its present form into my mind

to look later for the window

that waited for a vendor's jingling cart

or for the postman with magic in his bag

For now

I spare the Gulmohar its questions, and walk away 

from the times that life had left behind

The twilight presses closer to me

with the urgency of chowmein joints

and the blazing store-fronts of American brands

Soon, stars will appear, not over a dark, solitary terrace

but in the tall columns of tightly packed apartments

I look for the undulating mounds of red earth

crowned with pebbles over which a girl

skipped and slipped on her way to a distant school

The shrubby meadows are gone too

Restaurants now play host

where cattle were once let loose

Yet

from the familiar curve of a road 

to that small shrine now squeezed by traffic 

a faraway voice drifts up to me

It's the old soul of the new city calling out by name

the girl, whom the decades 

have only outwardly changed

Anju Kishore is a Pushcart (Poetry) Prize 2022 and 2024 nominee, a Touchstone Award 2023 longlister, and an award-winning editor of numerous free-verse anthologies. She is the author of ‘…and I Stop to Listen’ (2018) and ‘My Conversations with God, Life, and Death’ (2025). Her poems are part of several anthologies like Aatish 2, The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2022 and 2023(Hawakal and Pippa Rann Books, UK respectively), and Late-blooming Cherries 2024 (Haiku Poetry from India, Harper Collins) to name a few. She has dabbled in online theatre and is currently exploring Japanese forms of poetry.

---

Setu, April 2025