Beautification

a park bench
sits
in the widest stretch of green, skirting concrete freshly paved,
with the grain of old wood showing through at its feet, peels of paint down its slivered cheeks, hanging in unsightly wrinkles by its eyes,
where the cooky blind cat in Number 3 scratched it,
Shankar's puppy Khudrat cut his milk teeth,
Jenny the-first-time-jogger right-angled her undusty shoes and tied her shoelace self-consciously,
around the notch where the old man Salunkhe leaned his stick,
and the slight depression of old wood into which hawker Hakim offloaded his cane basket of fruit,
and the invisible oblong where Jehangir put his book down when playing hooky from the tutor's place - where his mother whacked him when she found out-
where the cuckold Shankar the plumber lunged out at his wife and missed,
and the homeless drunk guy put down his bottle on it just there - where did it go…
where Sachin the defeated champion of the under-14 league lashed out with his bat never to pick it up again - sore loser he always was,
and two-timer Amit scuffed it once in the morning, and once in the evening,
where sometimes in the afternoons when no people came by, a few birds would sit and peck for crumbs or termites, pretty as a picture postcard...
where grandmother Misquitta and her neighbour Joanna sat to talk of how their children had changed…
and that secretary nobody-thought-to-ask-her-name sat primly in the evenings reading her book,
and Stella sat thinking of killing herself, really...
where Mr Pinto dug nails in when his business partner had skipped town,
where old man Joe still sits to place his chess pieces with knobbly fingers the kids make fun of, on his roll-up board no matter how many times they roll off the sloping bit and will never learn,
where little Dona and little Saurabh first kissed and first necked and tell the stories still of how they met over dinner in their falling-to-ruins tenement across town, from which they still come to sit upon it and just remember when things get tough…
and where Shanti met Veer for the last time when she wanted him to carve their names in the wood but he went off to marry Preety instead,
where Chottu was brought for his first ever walk and saw his first pigeon on the backrest of a faded bench and his mother to this day swears he gurgled at as though he understood what she was saying….

But it’s just a bench, and it’s been here too long and the town around it's changed and deserves better.
Besides, it’s ugly now.
It will be varnished and polished and made over in the morning, the corporator promised, thanks to funding from the Shankarsethji, whose mother - God bless her soul - loved the park.
A shiny little plaque in her name will be placed there where it is most inconvenient for Miss Patty to rest her back.
But it will be, he vows, as good as new.
Beautiful.