FOR GOOGLED ACQUAINTANCE

When she was fifteen
Sreekumar Verma told her
That his poems
Turned out
Exactly as long
As the sheet of paper
He happened to be scribbling on.

Not Alan Maley. Ahem.

On her first landmark
Visit to Crossword
She met R. Sriram
Marveling his empire of books
Recalling their frail memories
Across an intervening decade
And a pregnant belly.

Wonder where Ameen Merchant,
Who gave her
Her first copy of Midnight’s Children,
Is.

Vasantha Surya
Told her to read Chomsky
“There’s such a nice chomp in it,”
She said, sweetly.
Will she as sweetly forgive
The blue-pencilled query:
“Is this a cookbook for the Yanks?”
In the fiction manuscript that cast
“Vadai” as “a spicy lentil doughnut”?

And Sujatha Devadoss
Sujatha Devadoss Pelletier.

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