The very day in bless'd disarray,

this is no time to stay in place.

As begging kids and homeless dogs

flee the chasing skies above,

they drive the lovers of College Street

to shelter in Raga Malhar or a hookers' beat.

You laugh: I cry

at the sight of a storm

more solid than the ground

beneath our feet.

You say:

Let's set up a new home.

It's not enough to live in this world:

We should be lived in as well.

Let mad dogs and sad urchins

set up home in us.

Let singing lanes lined with lovers,

and syphilitic males peeing into sewers

migrate into us

and continue as before.

Please, let this storm live evermore.

Most of all, may we be lived in,

you say,

by the elements above

the reach of our grasping love.

May our meetings

by chance or design

become family to sly

cycles of time

that only themselves know

what moves them to lift

mortals into their flow

and enfold them, entwined.

And if all this turns true,

the wind and rain may yet

find in the city within us

on a kalboisakhi day

a feral completion too.

Asad Latif is an editorial writer for The Straits Times, Singapore. He graduated with Honours in English from Presidency College, Kolkata, and read History for his Master of Letters degree at Cambridge, where he was a Chevening Scholar. He was a Jefferson Fellow at the East-West Centre, Honolulu, and a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Harvard. Among his books is Celebrating Europe: An Asian Journey (Singapore, 2012).