Irani Chai at Six

The shutter rattles up at six
and the street comes in with it —
a broom’s dry vowel, a milk van idling,
pigeons rearranging the ledge of the mosque across the road.

Behind the counter the milk
has been awake longer than any of us,
a skin forming and breaking on its face
like a thought it keeps deciding not to have.

The waiter sets the cup down without a word
beside the Osmania biscuit,
which is already softening in the steam,
as if it knew.

At the next table, an old man in a skullcap
reads yesterday’s Siasat, folding it
the way you fold something you mean to keep.
Two college boys split one cup between them,
arguing about a cricketer
with the seriousness of lawyers.

Nobody here is in a hurry yet.
The ceiling fan turns as if remembering how.
The mirror on the far wall, flecked with age,
holds all of us a little older than we are.

I dip the biscuit, count to three,
lose it anyway to the cup —
and this, too, is a kind of morning prayer:
the small loss, the fishing out with a spoon,
the sweetness that stays on the tongue
long after the city has begun.