To the Chinese Restaurant- Anjum Hasan (Poem with Explanation)
Hi Friends, This blog is an attempt to help you understand the poem. I hope you read and enjoy. To The Chinese Restaurant We come in here from the long afternoon stretched over the town’s sloping roofs, its greasy garages and ice-cream parlours, its melancholic second-hand bookshops with their many missing pages. Life’s not moving. We sit at a red table, among the dragons, near the curtained-off street-facing windows with their months’ old orangeade. Out in the streets there are schoolboys with their ties askew and the garish fruit-sellers. We eat more than we need to. We eat so that our boredom’s no longer dangerous, so that from the comfort of soup, with the minor pleasures of chopsuey, we can fend off the memory of cities unvisited, unknown and unknowable affairs, people with never-fading lipstick and confident gestures who we will never be. One day soon we’ll be running, our lives will be like the blur seen from a bus, and we won’t read each other’s letters thrice. But right there ...
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