Quintessential Man

On the unsuspecting,

Monday Morning,

Of a quaint Bombay December,

When calling cuckoos

Rise above sultry emotions 

Of the metropolitan, urban

City-life lapping millennials

Who run after the tiniest 

Dirty white, deeply set pearls 

Of life,

Took place a murder,

Why sir, in the worst of English accents,

A mur-dhur,

That shook the city like a quake

He was a probably a man,

His handsome eyes were set

On an angular face that adhered

Like the best of slaves

To the contours of the Golden ratio

His brown curls dangled across,

High cheek bones that jutted

Like rocky cliffs on the Irish coast

Nay, but he had never been

To Ireland in his life

And not yet, in his death 

The police arrived like they do

Rampant in yellow brown blazers

Shiny black belts over

Bulging bubbles of tissue 

And beret hats slanting sordidly

Jabbing the Bombay air that now reeked of murder

Some stated, some thought

Some felt sorry for his youth

And others removed parts of lunch stuck on their teeth  

The body was lifted and examined

For wounds

But there were none

No physical ones at least

If it was a murder,

Which it should be

For there was no news 

Worth sharing

And on the side lined Bombay papers

The ink was running dry 

It was due to poisoning 

And if there was a cause behind it

Which there could be 

Because burning causes lead to burning demands 

It was because he was probably a man

But not thoroughly a man

And perhaps practically a man

A man for all official purposes

But not quintessentially a man

His feminine curls might have incited

Hatred

Or was it his calming, soothing presence 

Or the way he,

With all his thousand faults

Blended in the ragged cloth of society while others

Perfectly normal others struggled 

To find a thread to cling on

So the murder 

Of the ‘others’ column ticking 

Probably a man, maybe not

Was just the taking away of life

Because there was reason

And a reason so solid in its standing 

That nobody had anything to say

Yes he was murdered but because

And the reason stood

Even for unseasoned children of 

Elementary schools 

Who barely knew

It overlapped their mental capacity for pain

With frozen waves of a frozen sea

And they could see nothing

But the reason