The cynicism in my blood cannot deny that I’ve experienced perfection.
The ease with which I can complete his sentences, without a wasted breath, as if it were the same mouth uttering them words.
The balance that keeps my grandparents married has to be Perfection. If she were any less deaf or he blind to her devotion, they would long have battled out of the bedroom.
The blanket that wraps us when Amma matches my curves in sleep. A knowledge that no one else can possess of every cell that shapes me. Because they were her own before me.
The smoke that twirls seductively into my lungs from that distant first drag; lone and potent perfection, your express ticket out of this world.
When the mouse walks straight into the trap, welcoming its death, the time has come for Perfection.
The simplicity that is fish curry, dead fish swimming in their private spiced sea. Its earthiness remembers the sea and I weep for the sea the fish miss.
What else is the column of hollering monsoon that takes me in from the noise in my head if not Perfection?
It was ingenuity that brought me Perfection that I never sought. In a foreign land where English paraded out of mouths and where English was the only language between us, we took to our mother tongues. Tongues, yes plural, different; languages that we did not share. We spoke thus, in two tongues when knowledge, a lost boy, was vying to be found. While our tongues mouthed coherent syllables, our ears replied to senseless mouthfuls thrown at us from the other. Our understanding wasn’t tongue deep. In the ungainly comments we spouted at passersby, we didn’t speak or hear each other. We were being each other. She and I were, in that moment, two friends, perfectly in tune, when no words made sense and we recognised Perfection.