I sit and watch my nephews at play.
Helmets and shoes on, satchels on the back,
They are pretend-astronauts now.
“We are on our way to Mars,” they announce.
The drawing-room sofa becomes their spaceship,
The velvet cushions become its wings.
Perhaps this is the way to survive this quarantine –
Finding solace in pretence.
For you remain silent and out-of-reach,
And my days here elapse in reverie.
Like that rainy evening in Paris,
When the Eiffel Tower stood glimmering before me,
But I couldn’t reach the top,
And I went spinning round and round instead,
In the carousel of my dreams…
© Vidya Venkat (2020)
An anthropologist among the journalists 