Look at the treacherous mechanics of this slave-like desperation. A sceptic spine stretched long and tall, passionate plump white knuckles on hands clasping onto the end of the tablecloth out of a gutting childlike fear, too many futile words martyred right behind the teeth, lying static and bloated under the tongue, and mushy lungs always short on breath, hoarding air like misers. The body is sore.

Think of the face of man, his diligent eyes staring into the abyss, the sharp inherited nose of his dead dad, and the stuttering speech of an unhappy wretch. Think of the slick noose tightening around the neck, the hair matted with oil, a single braid plastered behind the ear like a dead tail, the back running with sweat, the sanctity of labour, the profanity of the malice festering in the heart. And most of all, think of the things that drive you away from God, and of all the things that push you back to being on your knees again, knowing nothing is listening, knowing there is no unified truth just as there is no unified self. The meaning of life is shaking.

The man creates and finds God in little things like the backyard laden with weed, the bricks that makes roof, the cloth that hides, like the reflection of your face at the bottom of the golden glass. There is an overflowing quantity of God in each triviality that I behold. I thought of it as inevitable as death and I knew death as the most honest God, and memory as an estranged one. As of late, I found it in the frail, white canes of the blind couple on the bus stand every morning, on their faces always ghastly blank, in their hands always clawing at one another, on his wrinkled shirt hanging limp, and her curled toes squirming on the scorching tar. I wonder if they ever catch the bus, whether they snuggle on the bench for hours and then leave for their home, feeling like they've worked. Is God the pity i feel? Pity with a passion that feels like the whole damn world breaking open inside me, that’s the divine spark, raw and unpolished, burning right through the grime.

When I say that there is someone, that there is animal-electricity inside our veins and also a senseless power playing its cards and pulling levers, willingly pushing us in these corporeal machines, continually gaining sadistic pleasure from the pain inflicted on us by ourselves, and by one another, or someone that is pleased with all the joy and love we make, I say it because I am simply not fond of the God they told me to talk to, to have faith in, to fight for, to die for like a dog in a ditch. My God left me an orphan in a red room with wet floor, and I have no one in the sky. That is the God of dead men. There is belief in heading your way out, there is belief even in the lack of it. Belief is ever-changing, it is my parent. It taught me what to do with my hands when I got scared, it raised me and let me down continually, kissed me and abandoned me. It is the most a parent gets, i am a child of everything i chose to believe in.

But i am not child anymore and I am not yet adult, I am meandering in the useless limbo of youth. I am again on the brink as always, jaded and lifeless, knotted in dense thoughts of mortality, breeding easy kindness, and the desire for bliss. I am trying to make a meaning out of this state of temporal death. Always acutely aware and conscious that nothing that is tangible or devoted is ever capable of loving a thing like me for I am complacent and no longer gullible. Faith cannot lead me blindly, faith cannot ride on hope's back. I am Godless, all of my victories are hollower than they've ever been, so utterly doomed that I feel capable of no good. The age-old machinery of panic starting up again, seething softly in the base of my skull. I fear it is getting to me again. It's getting to me how average I am at everything I love, all of my callings are unanswered, and my self is untethered. But despite it, i rub off all such traces of divinity off me.

It eats me away how I cannot find salvation in my parent's faith anymore. I bleed from the same wounds i inflicted on them, I tilt and look at my lineage, at the stagnant faith of my progenitors, and i feel like a monstrous exile, a freak of consciousness cursed with too much sight and too little peace. There is paranoiac horror on my lips. Why cannot I be like them? Why cannot i believe them? Why does faith come so naturally to them and feel impossible to me?Why did you make me reach for you only to leave me reaching? Why did you let me feel abandoned by something I was trying so desperately to trust? Was I ever meant to belong to you? At what point does faith become self-deception?

So I will throw away the desire for a heavenly reconciliation, and instead, I will open my eyes to the dry reality of the present instance and accept the seething silence I'm served, and will answer it with my vitality. May the terror in my veins hold still just long enough for hope to return and breath life into me again, over and over again.

xx

6 Aug

August is a month of damp, holy fertility, where the earth bleeds ambrosia. A hefty, wet mucus of white light and water splashed over the city concrete, as I emerged wrapped in calculated blue like a ridiculous lady with two legs too short. I donned a blue vest, blue pants, and blue ballet flats. I had a blue umbrella sweating against the withering meat of my palms. There I felt inert suffocation, with a soggy breath let out very second, and it became tiring to be.

My ride was blue today and the scarf the driver wore was blue, but the sky was ashy grey and on the ground there was muddy brown. The scent in the air was sickly sweet like the scent of wet asphalt and its bruised petals being crushed beneath the moving silver rims, malignant like the smell of annihilation. I fell death-bed stuck to the rubber seat with a crawling cold running up my spine like bugs, and then there was a swelling, an expansion of the flesh, so intense that it felt innocent and sensual. I felt like an angel with two eyes with worms inside my veins. It is the tragedy of my physiology that i am never more aware of my own capacity for life than when I feel entirely sickened by it. I didn't understand my disease, I didn't know the cure.

When the bronze gates of the university pushed me inside, the silence was absolute. I climbed the stone stairs to the second floor, my wet jeans clinging to my thighs like sodden, peeling bark, my shoes wept grey matter with every step. Inside the hollow room, stuffed with plenty chairs and desks, I was a solitary pistil in a vacant greenhouse. The room was burning with fire and a stagnant humid heat knocked me over. A hundred baby buds were rotting inside my chest, their soft embryonic stems liquefying in the static air, an incubator. The long tall windows, filmed over in cool, choking blue, filtered the afternoon light until it resembled the pale breath of a struggling infant.

I sat with my legs wide apart like a full man on the chair in front a standing fan. It whirred with the desperate, hollow hum of a dying bee, flinging scarce threads of air against my icy, glistening skin. My hair hung down my spine like waterlogged roots pulled from the earth and left to dry in the sun. The wetness seeped into the wood beneath me as I sat there rubbing my palms and thought of my friends. The rest of my company was hiding from the rain inside their burrows somewhere. When I am alone, I am pathetic.

My heart burned against my ribs, heavy and swollen, until I felt my neck snap with the fragility of a spring stem snapped at the node. A violent urge rose in my throat and it was the desire to stick a finger deep into my mouth and disgorge my internal weather all over my lap and to unclutter the organs, to set them free from this agony. I never once hated this place but I hate being this way. The self I discover in that vacuum is hideous and entirely natural. Am I the closest I have ever been to being who I truly am? I am, I am, I am, when I'm completely alone but I hate her sickness, her desperation, her hideous, unadorned honesty.

xx

Do not ask me what time it is, I have nowhere to be. I cannot move, I am pinned beneath a heavy, humid blanket. Look at this structure, this syntax, I'm like an overfed dog lying limp with a clogged heart pulsing too hard. By the end of this singular breath, I will be incorporeal.

I have so much of myself today. So much of hard flesh, so much of failing heart. This body has become unbearable in its sickening abundance. I exist entirely in this rare hour, the rare hour reeks of raw sugar. Yet I feel a deep, abiding disgust for the fact that simply being who i am demands so much life, so many gallons of blank, meaningless time. But today I have all of myself except the chipped tooth, the bruise on my shin, the dishevelled hair, the certainty, the age-old discontentment, the faithful fallibility. I grow accustomed to this containment.

Clunk, I stopped this lifetime five years ago. This body is mannerless. I have the ego of a tall child, of an incomplete adult. Haste, I slip outside of every place I have known. I am still there, but I am not at all, and I haven't been here since all died. Little pale velvet moths sticking to the soft and mushy bones of the ribs. All was poisoned, all was desecrated, none remained, and the softer things died.

I touch the lowest of skies with spit on my finger, the winds don't go where I am to go. There is this snob of a sea into which I sink my heel, but the salt burns my skin, I am not theirs. There is unbelonging in everything and everything is transient, all this glory, all this displacement. My home is not in the sky, nor it is under. I am no one’s everything, and no one belongs to me. I belong to the cracks of earth, under trees, under dry wells, under this long stretched blue tapestry hanging violently over the head like a noose.

The architecture of the cosmos is dental. I have seen God. It looked like the gold tooth shining in the dark back-mouth of my grandfather. I have seen hell. It looked like his tobacco-stained, brown, ruined molar. And that is the theological spectrum. That is the only distinction for it in my eyes, that's how I see what is and what is not, what is sacred and what is profane.

xx

too young to be singing the blues

Look at me, I am an improvised song. I am writing you in a state of fever. I am writing to you from the hot, pulsing center of being. I do not want to explain this to you, to explain is to tame, and I refuse to tame what beats so wild in me.

I am horrified at the sight of how my heart inflates, how the translucent cartilage of my ear turns red with the sudden, violent rush of blood, how the eyes are always twin, bloodshot.

Listen, with your skin next to mine, close enough to feel the heat from my bone. I cannot preserve what's not there, or speak of what i never saw as myself. To speak of the pit is already to be outside of it, but I am in it at all times, i carry it like a bastard child.

There is a pit, boundless, in the dark of the chest. It has a dream unlived, unwanted, now repulsed. There lives suspended in its own embryo, a dangling chandelier, a throbbing spectacle with rose golden chains and blush jewels, refracting an enflamed trail of thought.

I am infinitely complex and conscious, but at my center there is only a raw, pulsing it, a neutral life force. I cannot touch it but I can smell it, and when I do so, I smell lilacs, fresh under morning dew, as enigmatic as a shy bud, as youthful as a burgeoning one.

Unpreserved and tactile, morose and corroded stays it. It is needy. Until you push flowers down your throat, flowers of blue and red, and feel your insides bleed purple, until then you'll glance outside the window with nothing but a velvet void behind the socket of your eyes and a destitute tongue falling short on words.

To cut open yourself is to reveal what is ugly, reveal the squirming truth that breeds inside. The stains on your face and the scars on your fingers only show themselves in times of vanity.

Cut out the small, timid self that wants to be safe. Destroy the pit, and what is left? A scarcity? A hollowed-out shell, dry and whistling in the wind like an empty reed? A quiet, respectable death while still breathing?

Or do you embrace the eternity of it? Fill the abyss until it overflows, until it drowns you, until it buries you beneath an unbearable, magnificent abundance that crushes your bones with the sheer, terrifying weight of existing right now, in this unrepeatable second.

I choose the abundance. I choose to bleed. I am writing to you from the exact middle of things, worst of times, on the verge of surmounting to nothing.

an engine made of dew,

a wet stone singing in the dark.

no name, no mother, no tomorrow —

only the thick, red shock

of blooming.

i am the lilac

and the mouth that eats it.

i am the bruise

before the skin is hit.

[Nothing, only because I'm everything]

There were fireflies— succulent bellies hemorrhaging holy light. There was a plagued field beneath them aching with darkness. There was wilderness and there was I, uprooted. And then there was the scandal of you. The glacial profile.

Miles and miles of trail between us had chosen you as its patron saint. The burning gaze of your eye, the ice-cold silhouette. There was you at the end of the long tunnel. You weren't implied in destiny. You weren't the beginning of the end. You weren't the forbidden fruit of all things sweet and plump. You looked like some foreign horror struck your face. Singular as a cypress and bright as a dime rusting away in a fountain. Fox-like in the old sense of the word, that's how it goes— elusive enough to make intelligence seem almost animal. And, for reasons beyond theology, remarkably embarrassed by your own existence.

You. You standing under the big sky. Grinning. All red.

You possessed chastity like the air that surrounds you— a peculiar sanctity. Your pallor belonged to unfinished marble, to driftwood bleached by indifferent tides, to pages flipped so often they end up ruining themselves. I wanted to name you with extravagance, to overdress you. Word of ambrosia. Child of pagan gods.

You're pale and sick like a wooden plank carved out of the tree of knowledge. You're dreamy and scorching bright like puny angels of gluttony in paradise. Exhausted dignity. Mystical awareness. Arithmetic symmetry. I swore off wishes, I abandoned desire. Desire is a tax levied upon the hopeful. Now you're the only object I am undeserving of. Now you become more than love. You metamorphose into life itself. But I die too much everyday to ever dare to call you mine, to transcend mid-air as a deliberate procession of orchestral divinity.

Hallelujah. Hallelujah says the fallen angel, the disregarded, and the last sheep.

Love is illegitimate and provincial, it is collecting flaws of the object with the greed of an archivist. The rarer the defect, the more convinced it becomes that no one else could have held this object correctly. A torn sleeve forever slipping past the wrist, the almost imperceptible fracture in a front tooth. These become illuminated manuscripts copied by hand across the inward walls of memory. Perfection is admired publicly. Flaws inherit the private estate. I— a martyr dying for nobody, a tyrant ruling out every faltering match of scarce hope. I— as oblivious as a nationalist, as forgiving as god, and in love like a mother.

You feel false like the cursed faith that betrayed me. You are as home as it gets. I won't ever trust myself with this.

The moon reflected in a pothole is an expensive illusion. Nevertheless, the still water carries it with impeccable conviction. I have begun to suspect that beauty is an affliction— feverish mist upon all ordinary things until they become unbearable to behold. A chipped teacup of porcelain, wet pavement after vespers, the translucent ear of a child held against a breast under afternoon sunlight. The face has very little to do with it. Beauty ratifies itself elsewhere.

I don't need you, Sweet. Do i deserve you? Will i deserve you when i have you?

But does goodness only belong to the deserving? Or pure bliss only for those who fought for it, killed for it, were cruel enough to demand it? Moss upholsters gravestones with the same vivacity it grants abandoned wells. Creation has always squandered itself on the unqualified. Why, then, should affection behave more economically than god?

So i will cross the tunnel with my head held high. So i will live. I might meet you once at the end of it.

The fireflies had long extinguished themselves. Now they're dead. Their little bodies went silent, then the light lingered. I have noticed this about nearly everything worthy of reverence, the illumination outliving its vessel. You, I think, will leave me in precisely that order. With that aftertaste. With the after-glow.

Potential companion.

-The fool

xx

Subscribe

Summer

I. [lunch at the dinner table] she prepped food that left garlic on my tongue and then tipped fridge-cold chocolate milk in a dirty glass cup ringed with finished lemonade. it tasted like shit, like citrus and cocoa curdling against each other. they scoffed as they gorged on teeny morsels of the food and that is what they do. i was aware of my teeth and it made me uncomfortable. we were like flushed domesticated piggies.

II. [bed time in rags] they cut off our power in the middle of summer nights and then we stuff ourselves in one giant room. i curl myself in a foetal position on the cold floor and i can hear sweat drip. he looks outside the window facing the dark street lamp and she looks down to seeing people lament. we were like cave bugs in a dungeon.

III. [corner of the bed] tingling gel on my foot, draped in her dupatta, the swelling never subsides. a green vein is popping out and my thumb twitches. i am to burn my skin with the gel constantly soaking under my skin. i am to be corrosive. like an exquisite dragon with acid green skin, my family is the solid rocks i've burnt. one day they'll all be ashes.

IV. [my brother's room] he's almost as tall as our father but he looks stupid small to me. they won't notice how he doesn't lift his head to look at me standing there and limping. i don't know why we are so big now, bigger than the whole world. i remember when we were insignificant but were kings. now he has a black beard. now he's taller than me. we were mountain peaks. we are different rivers of an ocean now.

V. [plastic water bottle] the bottle had coke once. softened edges, a ripped sticker, and its base is all chewed up. it creeks as i squeeze it. the water tastes of yesterday's lunch. no matter how many times i refill it, or how many times i drink myself to an ache, it won't satisfy this thirst. i am endless, i am a void full of crap.

VI. [fingers tapping on the phone] she won't text me. none of them would. i think i prefer it this way. i haven't spoken aloud about myself in so long and i'm getting used to it. if i don't speak about it then i don't even know how to feel. nobody has asked me a question in years. i am like a fragment of modern art they resent.

VII. [bathroom mirror] the tube light buzzes in my face. the surgical air reeks of sweet cough syrups and pain killers stored in the drawer. there are new bruise-colored half-moons beneath my eyes. i lean closer until my breath clouds the glass. how much do i need to lose to love all of myself? how much of it needs to be fixed? i am a leech sucking out my blood. there used to be love under my skin now there's tar.

VIII. [tv room] there's only one tv at house. it can only play movies from another language. my mother fidgets with the remote. she can watch anything. she must watch everything. not a bigger cinephile exists for she loves every film she sees and she watches atleast one everyday. she's neon at midnight when her face reflects the fluoroscence. i am a bystander.

IX. [white kitchen slab] he cuts a single mango in three and caresses it in his palm like a pale baby. the juices stain the corners of his mouth and slide onto his neck. he devours mangos like an animal. he licks his hands clean till they dry. and grabs another mango sinking in the water bucket. he is always hungry. he only talks about food. he is like hanuman reaching for the sun.

X. [balcony railing] i wake up to hearing the sound of a pigeon. i want to let them make a nest over the ac unit. they bob their heads and I cannot hear why. their feathers leave grey dust where they stand. they know my house better than i do. we are furniture to them. i was like a cracked tulsi pot left outside.

XI. [the freezer] the ice tray fused to the shelf again. i pull until my fingers go numb. the cubes scatter like pearls from a broken thread. they are perfectly shaped for only a few seconds. then every edge seeks to cut. it's like a shards in plain slight. i'm too eager to step on it.

XII. [in my body] I feel dead like a tree. I feel alive like a fossil. this xray is also a photograph of me. these sheets are also clothes for me. I don't know anything but that everything returns here.

xx

Kiss me, I'd be damned. I tell myself there are easier ways to lose a soul, but none so inefficient. I wish the thought of you didn't linger. I wish you weren't so cruel, and I wish that you were decent. I wish you were immediate as you peeled me apart with your bare fingers. Your cuts were never clean, you've left me with a slower execution, deprived of grief, i am all hope now. But alive enough to imagine another ending, another life, another version of you which I could choose.

Fate has a vulgar sense of humour. It is the hellish distance between us, but I'm out of luck for this life. Have I passed by and lost you or will we always be so and so miles apart? We're condemned like that. Lover from another life, you're so bloody unattainable that I think you might be impossible. If there is another life after this one, I hope they run out of jokes before we meet again. I hope, for once, they grow tired of making me miss you before I've even had the chance to know you.

I never want to speak about you again except every day and the day after that. I don't want to show you anything I've written except sometimes I want to read them to you as you sleep and dream of me. Tell me you have dreamt of a lover whose face you couldn't remember but whose absence spoiled all your mornings. Tell me that was me.

A rosy-cheeked Cupid sits on a fence somewhere, kicking his heels, laughing into both hands and he mocks us because we don't deserve this love. And we will never. So it goes.

Blue bruised half moons under my eye when I'm inside this body. I fear you're dead and that you're a blue heron mid-flight. My beautiful bird, I think you lived before me. You exhausted every human sorrow you were allotted, folded your bones inwards, and escaped. My beautiful free bird, you're all that I wish I was, all that I was scared to dream of.

Love is hanging by a string, baby, I dare you to walk on it. I dare you to become. I dare you to remember me. I dare you to come back, take birth again, cheat death. Find me because it's prophecy. Find me because I refuse to believe all this yearning was for nothing. Find me because I am still here, knowing you are not, knowing I cannot desire you into existence.

The Ballad

Kiss me, and let the sentence stand,
No gentler doom have saints confessed.
There are swifter roads by which the damned
May squander soul or squander rest.
Yet none so lavish in its waste,
Nor slow as longing's solemn art,
Which drinks eternity by taste
And gnaws in silence at the heart.

I prayed your shadow would depart,
As winter quits an emptied nave.
Yet every wish became a dart
Returned unto the hand that gave.
I begged you cruel, begged you kind,
For mercy wears your face as well.
The blade that lingered in my mind
Could neither wholly spare nor kill.

Your fingers knew no butcher's grace,
They parted my flesh as priests bread,
Leaving no godly place
Where grief might bury all its dead.
Thus hope became my punishment,
A relic none would dare destroy.
I lived upon its sacrament,
Half fed by anguish, half by joy.

For fate delights in vulgar sport,
A jester crowned with holy fire,
Who measures love by leagues too short
To quench, too vast to cross desire.
What mile divided us from then?
What age? What birth? What nameless sea?
Did I once lose you among men,
Or were you never meant for me?

O traveller from another dawn,
Whose face the Gods still conceal,
You haunt the hour before it's born
More fiercely than the gifts made real.
If death should grant another earth,
Another century to begin,
May Heaven tire of wit and mirth
Before it plays this jest again.

I swear I'll never speak your name
Then spend each morning in that sin,
Each page I write renews the flame
I vowed would never burn again.
I'd read them where your breathing lies,
Soft captive of a dreamless deep,
Until memory touched your eyes
Before remembrance woke your sleep.

Say once you loved a hidden face,
A voice erased by waking light.
Say every dawn became disgrace
Because one absence spoiled it quite.
Say there was mourning before delight,
As though your soul, though left untold,
Had lost a stranger through the night
Whose hand it grew used to hold.

See Cupid perched on weathered stone,
His rosy laughter split with scorn.
He counts the lovers left alone,
The vows abandoned before born.
His arrows are not tipped with gold,
But sharpened from the ribs of chance.
He wounds the faithful and the bold,
Then calls it providence, his romance.

So goes the tale. The saints look down.
The angels never interfere.
The stars inherit every crown
That never found its sovereign here.
And I, blue-shadowed, scarcely wake,
Bearing the moons beneath my eyes,
Wear night as martyrs wear the stake,
Too proud for death, too tired for lies.

Perhaps you're dead. Or freed instead.
A blue heron beyond our air,
Who folded every human thread
And left no mortal ache to wear.
White prophet of the silent fen,
With river-light upon your wing,
You spent the sum of sorrow then
And fled beyond remembering.

O beautiful impossible bird,
First exile from the house of bone,
You are the prayer I never heard,
The country I have never known.
You are the life I feared to choose,
The door my trembling never tried,
I learned too late what I must lose
To stand where you once learned to fly.

Yet love hangs by a single thread
Across the gulf where worlds divide.
Come, place your living upon it,
Though all the stars forbid the stride.
Become. Remember. Cheat the dust.
Undo the prophecy written first.
Teach death at last to break its trust;
Teach heaven how to quench this thirst.

Find me, because the prophets lied
If all this hunger bore no seed.
Find me where unborn children hide,
Where names are fashioned out of need.
Take flesh again. Betray the grave.
Return through ash, through rain, through flame.
For if the dead cannot be brave,
Then let the living earn your name.

And should we fail through every age,
Still let this attorney not be done,
That somewhere past the final page,
Beyond the jurisdiction of the sun,
Two souls whom distance could not cure,
Nor death persuade, nor time estrange,
Kept faith with one impossible future
Until eternity would change.

My love, who breathed and died before me, come back when I'm alive again.

There was a man with winter hair who lived beyond the sea. And before I knew the shape of my soul, he left a dress for me. Pearl-white, the colour of old bones in riverbeds, the colour of paper. I wore it when I was 3 and knew nothing of the man who had chosen it.

A decade later, my father told me about him, of the old poet in Canada who watched the years pass through a frost-coated window and was pinned against the weight of a body barred from returning. Doctors nailed him to a foreign country.

And while he sat there, an old man among books, I was growing into the very thing he had spent his life loving. The same strange affliction, the same strange sickness, the collecting of books, the worship of pauses, the belief that language could raise the dead and soothe my aching soul.

All the yearning for his homeland had hollowed him into a bell. Every winter wind that crossed the Atlantic rang through him. The homesick poet wanted someone in the family to love literature as he did. He did not know he had already chosen me with the pearly white dress. Like two wolves calling through different forests, we spent years answering each other without hearing the sound.

My proud father mailed him my poems. Across countries, he read pages touched by my hands. I imagine him reading them under a lamp's yellow wound. I imagine his white head bent low. I imagine him smiling but I stop because the dead are dangerous. I grinned at his texts like a child being fed sweets for dinner, I was his extraordinary child, I was supposed to be a prodigy. English was the dream we shared. It slept in different houses, fed from different hands, but knew the same path through the dark.

I wanted to interview him for my final year project work at school. I wanted to speak with him myself. I wanted to ask what homesickness looked like after a lifetime. Whether exile ever hardens into something bearable, whether it ever calcifies. Whether the places we leave behind eventually leave us too. I was a month too late, tangled up choking on science that never made sense to me, miles apart from my poems. He died before i could hear him speak. And maybe i left science because i owed it to him, to follow what was in my heart. And maybe i never miss a day of college because I'm grateful for that choice, I'm grateful to know what he knew too.

His absence has become an organ. It hangs somewhere behind my ribs, pale and glistening. I keep discovering new veins attached to it. A book I love, a line I mark, the life I choose. Tug one thread and there he is again, buried in the tissue.

Now he exists only in a white dress, a stack of books, a voice carried secondhand through my father. My copy of Gitanjali is unread in a cardboard box, and I've lost all his messages from my digital archive. The ocean between us was glass. I spent years pressing my palm against the opposite side.

And yet I know him. I know the colour of his eyes not the sound of his laughter. The corridor of his mind but not the depths of his heart. The animal that lived inside him and fed on stories, not the man who ached till he died.

When I am writing, if I think too hard, I feel him looking from over my shoulder. And there is a feeling of being recognized by someone who no longer exists. It's futile because you know someone could've saved you by simply seeing you but they're no longer here and no matter how hard you try you can never speak to them again.

I didn't make it to his funeral, nor did I see his huge library. I think of all the books he touched, thousands of pages turned by his fingers that have collapsed back into the earth. The skin is gone, the nails are gone, the thoughts remain, like mould moving through a wall, like weed growing on graves. Sometimes I imagine his library dismantled shelf by shelf. The books carried away in cardboard boxes. A slow scavenging. His marginalia separated from his body. His books were donated to a library. I ached to read his diary with the greed of an archaeologist. I wanted the rough drafts, the shopping lists, the crossed-out lines.

An Indian immigrant dies in Canada prompting a girl of his mother land to change her degree because she is done cheating herself. Sometimes I think I'm destined to become like him, that I am him, but I don't know. The cruelest thing is not that he died, it is that we almost met.

My great-grandfather's brother was an ocean away from me and is now nearest he has ever been. The poet with eyes like marble and white hair was my soulmate, but my soulmate is dead.

Shipbound like a seedling,

afraid I'll bloom elsewhere and

rot facing homeward.

Ps. There is nothing I wouldn't give just to speak to you once. I don't know what I would say. Perhaps, I would like to thank you for nudging me to choose the right path, the path which was right for my heart. I wish I could tell you what I was studying so you could feel the shared joy again. I met you once and never again, I would tell you how i loved the white dress too much and wore it to its rags. You didn't know me, but you knew my writing, and I knew yours, and maybe that is all there is to know.

A shape between twin trees, a trick of light on old bark, she was wretched like an unholy shrine. Her pale face was white as bone and her eyes were black like bitter coffee. The dusty rose on her cheekbones was artificial like cheap rouges. She was as beautiful as the topaz moon caught in winter branches and as sorrowful as a house after the mourners have left. I could've held her like a blue baby in my jittery arms, or I could've rested my head on her crooked shoulder and cry against her skin.

Mine was the dead bride they forgot to bury. Fresh rainwater gathered in the hollow of her throat and birds pecked her to suck it out. Her embroidered red dress had turned black as burnt coal at the hems. The garland of plump flowers woven into her hair had become brittle nests. She stirs something grave in the cavity within my ribs, she's still waiting for her life to begin. Even in this destitute life after death, she's waiting for her dreams to take shape. I don't know if i should pity her or blame her for pushing me to my lowest.

When I see her, i stoop to her level and I straighten the veil from her face, tuck her dry hair behind her ear, and ask why she left me with all this fear of being difficult, the tiring habit of apologizing, the hunger that is cursed to never be satisfied. But dead brides rarely do answer.

The gold, for which her father's house was sold, spirals around her throat, in little moons of resentment. Dainty lace sleeves unravel into cobwebs around her emaciated arms. Every year another piece of her withers away, and yet the room she occupies grows larger.

The dead bride is a house of her own, growing like moss does. The world itself emerges from her navel. Every leaf I crush beneath my feet rustles like wedding silk. Every love I have ever touched has smelled faintly of her funeral flowers. And the longer you sit next to her, the more difficult it becomes to determine whether you are looking at a mirror or only at your mother from the other side of the bed.

Sometimes, when I dare enough, I climb into the pyre beside her and pretend I am the daughter she always wanted. Sometimes I become the mother she needed to save herself. We hold each other there in the dark, two parasites performing an act of tenderness neither of us learned well enough. Her hand reaches out for mine, i remember the count of thin veins visible from her skin.

I pressed my ear to her chest and heard that she carried her mother inside her, and her mother carried another. If I cut her open, I think I would find a procession of virtuous women who destroyed themselves and their daughters.

Beneath her is another bride. Then another. Then another. With silver threaded through the hair, bangles fused to bone, broken teeth clenched, and the same morbid face. They lay under the soil in layers like tree rings.

They could've had it all. She could've been so much more if she were loved. She would've made me so much more if she understood that what she lacked was what i needed. Her voice is loud and poisonous in my ears but it's not as bitter as that of the woman who carried her in the womb. We suffer at each other's expense.

My mother lives inside me like a dead bride.

Mother, am I dead,

or are you, or the woman

who bore you?

xx

As adamant as a child's dreams or as ephemeral as one?

For my lover, friends, sorrow, and dead dreams.

I lie static on my back, arguing with myself whether the feelings i had for you were as unwavering as a child's dream or as fleeting as one. When I had it, it seemed impossible that it could ever disappear but now there is not a single trace of what once felt so real. Like all other things which let go of me, chopped the umbilical cord from my navel, hacked the rope tied around my neck, you too pierced yourself outside of my thin skin.

I don't know what to do with a feeling that threatens me with stability, that attempts to build a house inside me, or suck my blood like a leech. But am I not meant for what they call peace? Am I not also God’s child? Is all this hope that i carry only stitched together from my desperate need to have something forever? If I push away everything, I would at least like hope to stay.

Hope is something that will not slip free from my grasp or force itself from beneath my skin. Something that will not need to be caged, embalmed, worshipped, or mourned. I do not know if such a thing exists. Perhaps it is another childish dream born out of the blue bruises on my knees. But if everything else abandons me, I would like to keep that child. I would like to wait for impossible things.

The friends I swore I would grow old beside have become people I regret every night, for leaving me, belittling me, making me believe that i was loved if only for a while. The ugly sorrow that once seemed vast enough to swallow me now struggles to co-exist with all this love that I have in my heart, love for all the beautiful things i’ll do and love for the life i want. Even you, who occupied my thoughts with the devotion of a religion, the magnanimity of teenage love, I have begun to resent you. Sometimes I wake up and discover I can no longer remember why I loved you at all.

I have outlived every forever I was ever given and every forever I promised to myself. The forever of friendship, grief, your name, each bitter inside my mouth. And from all of these dead corpses, i expect none to return. I search for them occassionally with numbness and cold feet.

I feel the dry air of June fever hot on my skin. It's going to rain again. But I don't know for how long.

Beneath the monsoon,

Sturdy skeletons of possibilities

drink the falling rain.

xx

Turn back, but don't fret. Behind you stands a malformed woodland creature with damp and ragged wings standing firm on the ground, rooted to the earth like an ancient stump struck by lightning. Two swollen, blood-bright eyes bulge from its face and roll from your right shoulder to your left, searching you the way the wolf searches a flock, like the king looks at the hidden treasure. Its fingers are violet with old bruises, clenched so tightly around a pair of rusting garden shears that the metal has bitten crescents into its flesh. What happens to the shears so old that they cease to be ordained for fresh roses?

It has come to cut you open, to carve your shoulder blades apart and free the wings buried beneath your skin. Its belly is a hollow cavity like an abandoned well. Its lungs throb visibly beneath parchment flesh. Slimy ropes of gut roll inside a ribcage that grows green algae, and every joint upon its body is a round knotted lump of mass. You shaped it from wet clay. Its face has no mouth, no canine teeth, no sloppy tongue so why do you hear its scream deafen you? Don't think about what you did wrong, think about what you didn't do. Did you take too long to come outside the burning warmth of your house? Did you let the smoke breed inside and choke you or were there no windows in your room?

When were you supposed to learn how to fly? At seventeen? Eighteen? Nineteen? When will you become what you wanted all your life? When will you choose yourself again? Why do you still run so slow? Have you not been running all your life already? Were you too good for your age? The woods are full of children who climbed trees and returned home with dirt beneath their nails, but you got busy cleaning lanterns instead. No wonder your feet drag. No wonder you're short on breath. You burned through so much of yourself becoming tomorrow that there was very little left for today. You fed every hunger but yours. Not a soul cares about what ever you could've been, the corpse of your potential is yours to bury. And what a heavy corpse it is. It fills your pockets with stones. It sleeps beneath your blanket. It is the only God, if God exists.

And while you stumble forward, exhausted and breathless, the thing behind you continues at its teasing pace, carrying its terrible tools through the dark. Sooner or later, you'll grow tired of running too. Sooner or later, your knees will buckle beneath the weight of all the years you spent standing still. When that moment comes, it will lay a bruised hand between your shoulders and carve you open just enough for the wings to emerge.

You are late and forced growth is unnatural. The wounds will be surgical. The flight will be ugly. But the wings will come all the same.

Shh, you're allowed to be angry.

I could crawl on my knees and confess that even if I pressed every nerve into someone else’s palms, even if I let them count each tremor and pulse one by one, they would still walk away carrying only an imitation of me. An ill-fitted brocade or a crooked paper cut out. My silhouette pinned against a wall.

Not one person will know me the way I know myself. Not a soul can perceive me the way I want to be perceived. Nobody will witness the entire catastrophe at once. Nobody will see the grotesque machinery underneath the velvet curtains. And that is a curse because I can only ever yearn for reciprocation and never be gratified.

I can throw myself endlessly toward the world like a message in a bottle hurled into black seawater, but the ocean is gluttonous and vain. I will keep on searching for proof as it eats away all evidence. A sign that I am tossing myself out into the universe and being caught. But there is a hand around my wrist before I disappear beneath the waterline. There has to be warmth inside the pit. There is a bottom to the eternal fall.

The fall that feels like a balmy winter night and my clipped wings as I fall, a burnt maple leaf to the ground. There are fresh wet blades of grass and rosy mud against the curves of my body when I crash, and I can hear ants budge near my ear like tiny fairies. I am Gulliver tied to the ground against my wish. The fall that feels like sorcery today, the fall that is destined will not end like this.

My descent is not from heaven so I will on no occasion reminiscence. I sink in the scale yet I will not be desecrated. I am not kicked out of the gardens of Eden so I will not be damned. My fall will not turn me towards God with clasped hands or rosary beads.

There is a better way to tell you of how my agony will end. I could paint a beautiful canvas and demonstrate it to you where I will be towards the end of the tunnel but it is not enough. Art is just a miserable substitute. It is not enough to use my best colours and stain the corners of my shirt with relentless brush strokes. It is not enough to dip my fingers knuckle-deep inside bottles of acrylics and create with this blinded vision, this frantic and rabid need to externalize what claws at me from the inside. And it is rather brutish to think I can.

The mouth fails the mind. The hand fails the mouth. The canvas fails the hand. It is coarse and crude, how I picture myself cross legged on the groaning wooden planks with my back turned against the burning sun coming through from the smashed glass. I mix my paints on the broken shards near my thigh. I prick myself to get a flawless scarlet that will rot, turn moss green, and will smell like death. There are splinters on my knees and I move the hair out of my face, smudging the dehydrated browns with an imprudent colour.

I could spend years trying to tell how it exactly felt but people will tilt their heads before my canvas while entirely missing the carrion stench beneath it. I will let them hang my agony in well-lit rooms with book shelves and flower vases but they will never understand how humiliating it is to bleed only for them to compliment the colour.

Despite the conviction inside the twin hollows of my eyes, it is a treacherous thought to breed, that I can possibly make you understand how I want to end up, where I want to fall. I do not dream of salvation like holy people do. Neither do I dream of pearly white gates. But sometimes I dream of the distance between the interior and the exterior, I dream of it collapsing. And perhaps that is the cruellest part of all, that even now, I am trying to explain everything to you. All the while telling you this, I’m still trying to tell you exactly how it feels.

xx

Salmons have a baffling sensory arrangement and nerves and whatnot. They give birth and succumb in the act. And then they drive their exhausted grown bodies, with whatever scarce energy remains, back to the lowly waters that first held them. Their bodies out grow their home. Did you know salmons swim all the way back to their birthplace to die? They spawn, they empty themselves, they lose their purpose of life, and in that depletion they complete the cycle like obedient, god-fearing creatures. Stuck in the matrix, so you would say.

I am not god-fearing, Aadu, but I remember the taste of the waters I came from. It has coarse salt sticking to the roof inside my mouth like the hard boiled eggs we would have on winter mornings. It has sand grains housing between my teeth. It tastes like a naked wire conducting electricity. To you, it should taste like an amalgamation of all your favourite Indian sweets and a gulp of warm honey sliding down an aching throat. I was never heavy on sweetness, you know that. I think about all the roads that lead to our place, still, even after the bitter aftertaste it leaves me with. Though it feels rather unnatural to me.

But coming back home should feel instinctive like a pilgrimage scripted into the marrow. If we’re animalistic like fishes, turtles, and moths, then we’re also destined for homecoming. This would mean that you and I too might meet again, perhaps, in our mother’s womb, but for that she’ll have to swallow us whole. I promise you we’ll be menaces in afterlife, we’ll be like the sickness inside her skin, she’ll have to stick a finger inside her throat to spit us out again. Then you wont have to be the naughty seed alone; I’ll get in trouble along with you. We'll be two stubborn remnants, clenched like something sour on her tongue. Like power bites collected with her four fingers. Or we might meet in the hospital where we were conceived three years apart, the same room, the same bed, the same gynae will push us to hug it out when we will be standing startled at the sight of each other. But I will not see you there soon enough, I refuse to see you again so soon, I want to wait for you for fifty years, until you grow a hunchback and are old enough to shrink to my height and old enough to tell me the tales you told your grandchildren. I will wait until you are old enough to forgive me, or at least tired enough to try.

Are you lonely there, Aadu? I wrote to tell you that I am not going to swim back like salmons. But I am concerned about the hollows inside your cheeks; they’re starting to match mine. I swim in these backwaters now. It’s nice here. It’s starting to grow on me. You would know it if you were here. Though it’s very selfish of me. Would you hate me if I said that the water here would only worsen your acne? It’s okay. You’re a beautiful baby and the constellations on your face can’t take that away from you. You know, papa is right, you’ll outgrow the scars on your face and it won’t hurt as much. Nobody will make fun of you, ever again.

These backwaters make me feel like I can go anywhere I want. Lying here makes me feel the looseness of it all. I can skitter down alien places, slip between unacquainted streets like a loose thread, let the world hush-hum, hush-hum around me. I can dissolve into places that do not know my name, let them take me in without question, like a mouth  not bothering to chew. If it's freedom then it's slick and glimmering like a plate full of warm pasta you used to make for dinner. If it's homelessness, then I'm too tired to feel it ache. It's the way rainwater gathers at the edge of a blade before it falls, sometimes I feel so close to hearing my heart break.

Anywhere else feels soft in its indifference. Doors open. Windows look at sunsets. I can press my palms against walls and feel nothing press back. I can laugh and hear my voice. The world outside is all drip-drop and tick-tick. It's all music, Aadu. It's all like our favourite music. It makes me sick because I feel like I could’ve been free all this time.

Home will only ever suffocate me. Home will suck the blood out of my head and mock me as it'll burn my bones to my last ashes. Home will fill itself with people i don't know how to understand. Anyways, home ceased to exist when they took down all the pink walls. That place now reeks of old socks, wet wood, burnt rice, and Sunday alcohol. The thought of it fills my body with a blood rush, a palpitating heart.

Do you worry about me like I worry about you? But don’t worry like mum does. Her worries are allegorical. I must make her worries mean something more to me if I want to be happy. Like when she would want me to marry because she does not want me to be lonely and paralyzed. Like she would want me to bear children because she wants me to feel the joy of creation. Like she would want me to return because good girls don’t go so far. I so badly want her worries to mean more than they seem. I want them to feel like love. But I don’t want you to worry about whatever happens to us. I won’t be like our uncle, Aadu. I won’t go so far only to beg to come back home. Beg for a moment of familiarity. I won’t let doctors from another country to stop me from visiting my own. I won’t let my health keep me away from you. And I won’t be like grandmother’s black dog who went deep into the woods to die alone. I dream of his body sometimes and how scared he might have felt. Somedays I wish I could be like them. If I could choose like they did. I don’t have it in me to want more, neither do I have the hunger running in my veins.

We’re oblivious machines. We don’t know what will become of us. Aadu, the most dangerous animal on the planet is the one that loves you. And I love you very much.

If you don’t know where to find me at thirty, and if the need to see me becomes unbearable, then look for me in the trees that grew beside the road leading to our home, in the sun rising above your head before you have decided what the day will mean, and in the migratory birds — flappers that leave, return, and leave again.

And one day, if you truly believe I’ve died, look behind our house.

Yours

From too far

I don’t remember if I had a mother. I remember I was 5’4” at 16. I remember all sorts of trivialities. Like I cannot recall my age but I know that on my 11th birthday I wore a hideous blue suit with polka dots and a tacky green neckline to school.

Twin-sized and emaciated, I inspect the ghastly figure in your shaving mirror, I wish to tell her that I want to drink the disease from her cheeks and I want to fetch back the blood to her blue lips. Is she sickly because she knows more than I do or is she sickly because I know more? Does she know our name? Does the thought of being called something plague her just as much? Does she feel a dearth of substance like she is disremembering something vital or does she feel nothing at all? Does nonbeing bother her like it eats my intestines and throws up on the blood? Or is she spared that?

The man who lives above my kitchen insists that I must have a mother, that all of us do. I don’t know if I am a part of the ‘us’ he talks about so defensively, I don’t know why he wants to know why he wants to be a part of it so bad. It’s like one of those godless cults from your college, the ones you would tell me about. He’s like Satan probing me to sell my soul. He told me that his mama was 6ft but shorter than his father. I don’t discern the word mama very well either. I don’t know what I would name her if I met her, that is to say if she exits, that is if I wasn’t just damnably put on this lateral of the earth, that is if I ever lived within a foetus. Dear, this side of the earth is not unlike hell, for people here know more than I do and they keep speaking of things that I must know. People like the man often talk about my association to you. I don’t know what to tell them. You are the only object I remember and refuse to talk about.

But don’t mind him, I will tell him about you if you wish to be known like this, to this sick man who assumes that I have a mother, this eccentric man who wants me to join his cult of ‘us’. I would tell him how I met you for the first time and how the sun looked that day and how the wind blew across my face. Do you remember how I had been drudging in my crook of the house for years, sitting naked on the floor, sipping my coffee at the same hour. I had not thought of that corner as anything but functional until the day you were designed to turn up. I remember dressing up for you in lilacs. When I unbolted the door, you were there, your hair moist from the rain, carrying the dampness inside with you. I brought you inside and made you coffee, served it in the one cup I had avoided using. I let you gaze at the canvases on the walls, looked at you take them in. You broke into speech then. You recited something about portraits from Dorian Gray. You called me primed and I remember wondering if my assiduousness had always been so visible. You sipped your coffee black. I remember that detail lucidly, though I am not sure why it feels of great consequence. You took the weight off your feet on the balcony flooring, spoke about shifting things I had never considered changing. The lining paper, the barrenness of the porch, the absence of softness. You uttered that you would put in flowers there, that you would make alterations for this space as though it were already yours to tend.

And then you dropped the cup from your grip.

The crash of it dying a death felt disparate to the instant. The stain spread sluggishly transversely over the rug, wary, irrevocable. You made an apology straight away, but I told you it did not matter, that the rug was unimportant. You cried your eyes out anyway, your face bloomed in a way that startled me with its passion. I remember thinking, ridiculously, that I wanted to safeguard that colour, with my paints, with my palms cupping your cheeks. You talked more than I did that day. You spoke as though speech had been withheld from you elsewhere, as though every sentence was recouping something forbidden. I pinned my ears back, not because I had nothing to say, but because it felt like if I interjected, something indispensable would close itself again.

Later, you told me you knew I had been economical with the truth about the rug. That it carried weight more than I stated. I did not refute it then. I only positioned my hand over yours, uncertain if the motion was meant to comfort you or to check that you were still there. You reacted to that small contact as though it carried more meaning than I had intended, your face turning that same shade I wanted to safeguard again. I hark back to you asking me about my work, about the paints I used, the way I chose my colours. I remember retorting in fragments. It was the first time I felt that this bend of the house, this fixed and dreary space, could extend beyond itself, that I could feel right in it without being curbed by it. We kissed before you left. I remember that with a precision that makes the rest of this suspect. I could talk about the way the colour from your face seemed to transfer to mine, as though it had passed between us, an act that could not be undone.

After that, the whole thing rehabilitated with no trouble. There was a new settee, the flowers you had sworn appeared on the porch, the walls lost their sombre. There were more bits and pieces. But the rug stayed as it was, smeared, we had both agreed that some things should not be reestablished. You being there began to distribute itself across the house in slighter ways. Traces of colour where you had touched surfaces, articles left in places, your books beside the bed, your clothes among mine. It became difficult to distinguish between what had always been mine and what had become yours. I remember telling you that you could break as many cups as you wanted here, that you would not have to apologize anymore. I remember telling you that you lived here now.

And then maybe I would tell him how I remember sitting on the train with you, the world moving in long, uninterrupted stretches outside the window while we remained suspended inside it. The sunlight fell across the floor in slow, honeyed drips, pooling at our feet, filtering through the tall trees we passed. I know that your favourite is mahogany. I asked you then if you recalled the photograph I had once shown you from one of your older books, the one with the pink lilies. I had told you, almost offhandedly, that they were my favourite flower, though I had never seen them in real life. On my birthday, you brought me a bouquet of lilies, dressed with orchids and threaded with artificial beads that caught the light too brightly. It was the first time I had seen my favourite flower outside of a page.

You told me later that you smirked every time you looked at them sitting on our table, on the trifling, unsymmetrical table we had built together in the garage during the summer we liked to call our escape. You thought the flowers used to shine there, that there was something about them that made the room feel less momentary. I chuckled when you said it, not because I didn’t believe you, but because you always found a way to make things luminous. I told you that of course they glowed. You were my poet. You used to stay wide-awake reading long after I had turned away from the light, and you would tell me the poems spoke back to you, that they carried something of us within them. I would whine, half-serious, just to make you switch off the lamp, just so you would come closer and rest your hand against my back, tracing absent-minded circles until I fell asleep. In those flashes, when the room dissolved into darkness, I would dream of us somewhere else entirely, surrounded by fields of pink lilies, living inside something that felt more than this.

On that train, we spoke in turns, though it never felt like taking turns. You would talk, and I would listen as though there was nothing else to do, and then I would speak, and you would listen with the same consideration. It felt composed in a way. At some point, you rested your hand over mine and said that we were two halves. I did not question my wholeness. Perhaps it was the way you held your book, turning each page. Or the way I kept touching the petals of the lily in my lap, still not entirely convinced it belonged to me. Or maybe it was simply because we both knew, without saying it outright, that the world outside would never rearrange itself for us. It never had. And yet, in that moving train, for a brief and contained stretch of time, it almost felt like it had. We were halves only then. We’ve been whole ever since.

6 months left for September and my hair is falling with twice as speed. Some days I shed so much on the tiles that I spend hours frantically feeling my scalp for a harrowing bald spot. I remember I counted 73 strands of brown hair on the bathroom tiles and lost count at 49 yesterday. There is more today. I have started writing things down because I am afraid that I will forget the order in which things happen. I am afraid that if I do not write them, they will happen again, and I will not be able to tell which version was the first.

I don’t want to borrow the slope of a stranger’s shoulder or the cadence of a voice passing me on the street. I don’t want to stitch these things together and name it you. I don’t want you coming apart at the seams. I am afraid I will grieve you while you are standing in front of me. That is why all my postcards are pictures of us.

They told me that you would come back in September, that the gunpowder they put inside you is like toxic waste and that they’ve injected your veins with a cure that is a miracle of medical science. When you come back, I will make you a big bowl filled with warm meaty soup made out of cornflower. But you mustn’t take so long. You must come back before I forget that I am waiting.

Muse[1],

Your silhouette came to me in an unfinished dream where I was paralysed and saliva traced itself down my chin. You had two distinct wings with ragged feathers and thin flesh underneath but no bones. Your face was sharp as the shard I turned inside myself, and slender cheeks bore an oceanic blue, with three slit-like eyes similar to that of an enlightened orange fox. I laid bare like a baby as you pressed your parted lips against my temple, twice, once on each side. I hadn’t asked for an eternal gift, or my magnum opus, you knew what I had asked you. Where did I go?

When you began to speak aloud it sounded like a sigh and then a song I had last heard in my aunt’s car as we drove to Dehradun. And because I was so paralysed, I couldn’t crawl closer to your unwavering band of light like a fractured moth destined to punishable devotion or consecrated slavery. Come back to me like the water rising to my knees when I am as awake as a cat and find me. Find me, don’t save me.

I don’t know where I went but where I am feels nice.

Fuss :

Before writing anything else, here is an account of what I like and what I hate because disliking is dishonest like diplomacy and loving is painfully ephemeral, and I am a conceited thinking machine[2].

I like oranges when they’re smothered with pink salt and served cold on a bright day. I like the smell of the puny white flowers which fall from the tree in front of my house[3]. I like going to the mall to have the same cheap burger every time. I like sitting with my naked legs on the cold floor when it’s raining at midnight. I like music so loud I cannot listen to myself singing along. I like hiding inside the college library and watching my phone ring. I like stuffing my mouth with ripe strawberries and chewing on the seeds. I like the jhumke I cannot wear because my ears aren’t pierced. Blue eyeshadow. Midsummer dreams. Kohl smeared eyes. Stickers on wallet. Colours on receipts. Papa’s music. Scratched CDs. Arms folded. Legs crossed. First bench. Pats on the back. Hugs. Kisses.

I hate forgetting the songs from last summer. I hate the rings I cannot wear because of my fat fingers. I hate ants crawling up my leg when I’m playing dead. I hate eating something then having to puke. I hate clenching my teeth in sleep. I hate looking at my old pictures like she’s someone dead. I hate losing my favourite people over godawful petty things. I hate constantly fearing being morbidly average. I hate thinking about all the things I’ll never be. Stained glass dreams. Rusted iron potential. False words. Love letters. Torn roses. Fingers pricked by thorns. Smell of blood. Bruised knees. Worshipping a ghost. Futile tries. Falling to my face. Dying until am no longer left alive.

Recollection, in tranquillity :

Here is some art I saw this week for the first time and what it looked like to me in my heart// An amateur’s guide to over consumption of media and over-analysis of the miniscule and still somehow missing the entire point.

1. I wonder about the lady on the white horse

When I looked at The Circus for the first time I wanted nothing but to replicate it on the page of my diary with the set of wax crayons I hate. Even though the yellow persistent in this piece is the most beautiful thing I saw this week, I know that the stage is left blue. Like the figures on stage I want to float, bend, and dissolve into thin air, in my shades of blue. I want to dissect my body into the different isolated artists on stage. Maybe there is no melancholy inherently attached to The Circus, maybe joy repulses me these days, but i don’t want to look at the circus anymore, i want to slip inside it.

2. I wonder about the white flesh of the dead child

I was sad when I first looked at Les Saltimbanques. I was sad the second or the third time I looked at it. It felt like an aftermath to The Circus which reaffirmed the dreadful melancholy I had previously hesitantly attached to the painting. The colours weren’t loud, almost thinned-out, dusty and pale. Nobody and nothing touches the other except the dead boy lying over his mother’s chest. Each body is grounded here unlike Chagall’s defiance of gravity. The man in the horrid outfit and the woman draped in the big blue have tears in their eyes. There are cards on the ground. I hate the owl. I don’t know what to make of the dogs. The dead baby with white teeth and tint over his face will walk the tightrope in my dreams.

3. I wonder about the hot white sun

I want the sharp rays to cut through me and leave me warm. The sun in this looks like a corn cob cut in half or smallest slice of a pineapple and the colours that spill outwards look like the colours of eternity. I think about the summer from my childhood. I think about summer from Dehradun. The back of our white house looked at two dwarf mountains and the front of it looked at a broken mountain left severed after a landslide. The sun used to die out between the mountains every evening and I only took notice of the act during my last time there. It looked similar to this painting except I’ve never seen the sea, except i spent each summer at my Nani’s place.

4. I wonder about the white thigh so close to warmth yet so far

A falling golden angel. The shadows make it look yellow and all the other ladies are white like a pearl, white like the foam that lathers near a waterfall. I don’t know if they’re moving upwards to catch it or waiting for it to fall on them, to consume them. Everything inside this frame is erupting, slipping like molten gold. My golden angel is the sun and it takes all of those white bodies down with itself, devouring their flesh and the blue that swims like jellyfishes, and flows like organza. Is this collective grief? The blue draws my mind towards the idea of loss and frenzy. My golden boy is burning these soft breasts left free in their habitat. Their bodies blur together and their arms are wide apart. I think about a poem I wrote. Apollo mourned Icarus, knowing all he loved, he loved to death.

5. I wonder about the white pearl hanging from her earlobe

The first thing that i was drawn to wasn’t her head but the branch lying dead below the deer, and the sight of bare trees with no leaves. I don’t want to feel uncomfortable but it’s piercing like those arrows digging inside the animal’s body. I know that the face fastened onto the stag is Frida’s. I think about the ribs taut under the skin, and the surgical stable frame, no tremors. Nine arrows and the most blood dripping from the neck. The thin legs are caught mid-motion. There is the beautiful blue sea behind the scene. There are trees all around. Why is there a broken branch? I don’t know. I don’t want to be inside this picture. I don’t want to be her.

6. I wonder about the white face in the rearview mirror

This reeks like a life I miss. I want to be inside a car. I want my attention splitting into a hundred small, glowing things. I want to hold the steering wheel and cling to the city I was born in. I think about how I’m not incapable of driving but I’m so scared to. I remember my father sitting behind me on the scooter trying to teach me how to move ahead and him failing so miserably. I told him i could drive all day on an empty wide road. There’s just too many people, it makes me want to throw up. I remember sleeping on the backseat of our golden honda and i remember us eating chaap inside the car every weekend. I remember me and my brother sitting on our knees and looking at all the cars that were behind us. I miss being inside a car but none smell like my honda.

7. There is no white left to wonder about

It took me minute to spot the scarecrow. I thought the woman was supposed to be transforming into one with all the tatters behind her like a trail of smoke. But then i saw it. I saw the figure we’re calling the scarecrow. Then i saw the woman running, or rather escaping. I don’t know if the scarecrow is chasing her or if she’s about to become one herself. I’m scared. I think of our farms in Dehradun where the tigers come and my mother’s cousin they ate.

Exeunt :

Summer is scorching bright these days and my skin is burnt. I keep to myself like worms making their way inside the earth. In a world far away from mine, there are cherry blossoms blooming and they will fall like they're supposed to. There is a new life on the shore, next in line, after the one that came before was snatched away from my claws. This time I want to drink the salt from all the seas, and I want to fly like those angels in the sky that look like dust to human eye. I want to sing like what the harps in their hands sound like and I want to breathe in a different colour in my lungs.

There are soft oil pastels stubborn under my nails and white acrylic dried on the last brush[4] I have left. I don’t want to write about Art. I don’t want to write about God. I don’t want to write about Passion[5]. I want to write about ordinary things.

[1] Nine sisters in Greek mythology. Inspiration as a form of divine madness (Socrates and Plato)

[2] Breakfast of champions: Kilgore Trout wrote that only you have free will and all others are machines made by the creator of universe. Creator of the universe is a sadist obsessed with human reactions.

[3] Creative liberty to steal someone else’s house. Five houses away from mine lives the flowering tree.

[4] My father thinks that all brushes are made from a squirrel’s tail. I don’t know if it’s true, I love squirrels.

[5] We did a poem which had a reference to the passion of Christ. I had been thinking about the theological definition of passion as suffering.

S.G. looks at me hyperventilating on the second stair upwards in front of the seminar hall, she doesn't look at me, she looks past me, she doesn't know me, she is the fucking principal of this college. I am no one she needs to see. I have nothing inside my stomach and I feel like I must throw up this nothingness to make room for something else, something fuller, something that threatens me with the possibility of feeling. "Let's just leave, it's 2:47 anyways and there no point to this at all," obviously G.B. wouldn't leave before the clock hits 4:30, obviously G.B. talks just like me because i wouldn't leave either.

For two long hours we talked about death. I told her what i had lost and then she would tell me what she had left behind. It was not a conversation so much as an excavation. G.B. and i had our fists closed tight until today and we opened it with fingers wide apart to show each other the shells we had picked up from the beach, one could say that there were no shells at all, one could say that because we were both plagued by death at 2:47 on an April Friday. G.B.'s cheeks flared up in a startled red and her ears were warm and she would blink as fast as how those tiny flies flap their holographic twin wings near ponds in summer. My voice fractured before i could finish my story so A.C. tried to row the boat sidewards and it was okay because i didn't want to circle around death anymore.

We have grape flavoured slushies everyday under the sun. We laugh on our way to the metro with our faces against the wind and all kinds of bullshit creeping its way inside our mouths. 10 for a ride to the metro. 20 if we want to stop in the middle to eat from the sweet corner on the opposite side of the church. G.B. bows her head when she passes the temple beside it. I have never asked why. A.C. does not like God.

i hate it when they leave and i have to the other way. I don't listen to music these days because I'm too lazy to get the earphones outside my bag and then i get scared that they'll fall to the ground and split open like a watermelon by the shore, a carcass of e waste. I wish i had words to speak but i don't even have words to write these days. Last time i wrote something was yesterday at 9 am in the morning. This time i thought i was going to write a focused piece on death, that i would tell the world what death meant to me. I was drawn because N.S. taught us 'small town and the river' in the previous lecture on Wednesday and i had been thinking about it for too long. It felt like how Milton called rhyme suffocating but then wrote a sonnet on his blindness. I wrote an assignment last semester where i said that some of Milton's personal and best writing came out of his blindness. I thought that the most personal is the best and that is why i hated this new piece i was writing. Death was vicarious, notorious, knocked a few too many times but never met me eye to eye.

10am on the April Thursday i had stopped writing about death, the ending of life. If i could tell you that i knew what was going to happen to me at exactly 9:45pm, if i could, i would've lied. I didn't know what would happen. It's been a week and i tell myself that i should've known. Death looked at me eye to eye and had left without taking anything. It had mocked me like Satan and Beelzebub. It had assaulted me like fire.

That morning, I tried to write about death and by night, it had played its cards. It still felt like death had happened. The loss of everything, again. The loss of something that still lives. This grief I cannot trace back to anything, I cannot attribute it to anything, I haven't lost anything. It is the moment when someone trusts you with their not-dying, and then they still almost die. It is the horror of realizing you believed them. No burials. Only the death of blue hearts.

Here's the draft i had written Thursday morning.

Death

When someone dies, people who knew them tend to cry. They don't have to love them to cry for them, and it's peculiar how sometimes they are crying for themselves. The thought of death, the concept, is so morose that sometimes you don't even have to know the corpse enough to weep. You simply have to feel the heart beat no longer. This vicarious reaction to the cessation of life, even for a stranger, speaks to a fundamental human empathy. The tears might be for the potential, the dreams, or simply the abrupt end of a story that, however brief, was once alive. Vulnerability that transcends personal connection.

Across cultures, death has rarely been allowed to remain abstract. Death has a face, a profession, and a temperament. In some places, as a collector, a ferryman guiding souls across a dark river. Elsewhere, a clerk recording names in a ledger. Death as an ugly skeletal figure with a scythe, harvesting lives without malice. Death as a woman who sits beside the dying and loosens their breath with surgical hands or as a god who opens a door rather than closes it, rather than throwing you out of Eden, or stealing your fire, or wiping off the entire population. By giving death a tangible form, we attempt to understand its nature, and if it may come to that then even bargain with it. This act of personification is a testament to humanity's enduring need to find meaning and order in the face of the most profound mystery known.

Death from the foetus of Pandora's box, or from the wake of the fall of Man. There is so much life poured into myths believing that death did not exist and life went on and on, you never die, you only live wherever you end up. Here, where I am from, death is not an end, it is a change. On a better day, I think I’d be able to explain it more clearly. What I believe about coming back, about lives not really ending, just continuing in little ways.

I die a little more everyday I wake up. We're all people waiting to die and hoping for it to last. The deer chases not only the scent that arises from its naval, rather the taste of permanence. And we look at someone who is so near to us, known to us, or even public, and we don't know that we might be next in line.

Before dying out completely like a burning candle on a desk, life will play out its last joke on you, it will kill you when you don't expect it to, or when you no longer want to die. You may have been seeking an escape from survival all your life, but the insect will not kiss you yet. It will kiss you and sting you the sweetest poison only when the breath coming out of your mouth was starting to feel like it was yours.

When I think about how death will come to me, I think about it tiptoeing on its multiple insect-like feet, knocking against the floor to tell me that there is some ungodly place under the floor I can fall back on. At the brilliant age that I will be, I imagine myself having accidentally conjured up this insect from the deep sown graves, i fancy myself as Faust and my insect, my sickness, my calling as Mephostophilis. So these little bee-like devils or God herself will poke a stick through my skull to break it open and then they'll ignite me on fire and when sulphur is the smell which comes out of my burnt blood I will turn to ashes which are ordinary grey. If I have someone next to me when i die, someone I know who will carry out my banal wishes despite the religious obligation tying us two together, i will tell him to bury my ashes in the soft wet soil 6 feet below so I'm with maggots and new bones of poor dead babies. I hope they understand I don't want to be alone at the time of departure, I hope they believe I'll depart the next morning when the sun rises with the red glow of dawn.

And when I think of death coming to me, I think of it coming to me in my old age when my golden years are long gone and life has worn me out, and when I have deep smile lines and wrinkles between my two eyes from times when we cut brithday cakes every month of the year. I want 12 people in my family, each of whom I'll love dearly, by the time i turn cranky and horrid so I can have cakes every month, and then we can put up balloons, banners, and arts n crafts glitter on the walls and between the gaps of the couch.

If death must come, and if it may find me on my brightest day, it will find me not empty. Brimming, like ripe fruit just beginning to split, sweetness dripping, holding more life than the body can keep.

I tried to cope. I tried to journal. But 9:45 had changed me.

Diary Entries

10:13pm. 31 minutes ago H.M. called me and asked me if I knew. I said I did because i thought she meant the larger picture. Then she told me that he was stable now and that they've kept him in an ICU. My mouth agape and heart dropped and fingers shook harder than they ever did. What the fuck. What the fuck had happened. I thought she had called me to discuss him, but not this, not in the wake of this new situation. I had no words coming out of my mouth so I told her to take care and keep me updated and thanked her because I felt indebted that she thought of calling me about it.

7:34pm. My last text to him. Sleep, that's what I had said and he had reacted with a thumbs up. I should've known. I should've sensed it. A thumbs up wasn't his go-to usual blue heart. I thought he was sleeping because he told me that he was contemplating it but that he wouldn't do it. He told me not to call anyone up, not his parents, our school mates, or his friends in hostel. He told me he wouldn't do it and i believed it. It's all my fault. It's my fault that I didn't care enough to call someone, anyone, everyone up. Sometime around 9pm. I suppose he overdosed on his antidepressants. He did what he told me he wouldn't do. H.M. told me and it registered to me how stupid I had been, how i should've been the one to call her up first and tell her to go check on him.

10:25pm. I talked to S. about it because I had no one to speak to and nobody knew how much I loved him and I had his voice echoing in my mind and his texts flashing in front of my eyes. I tried looking for concrete signs that he would do something like that despite convincing me that he won't. I felt like a terrible friend. I felt like if she called me up to tell me that he had died I would climb up the stairs of my 4 storey house and jump. And I was thinking of the poem I wrote for him. And i thought of how stupid it was that I didn't share it with him and posted it online instead. I had thought he would think it's in poor taste and corny and it would make him feel even worse.

10:48pm. I cannot stop reading his texts. I keep scrolling and thinking about his words. I keep thinking about he would send me pictures of his nailpaint and times when his girlfriends would do his makeup. How we would talk about hazbin hotel. How we would talk about everything. I think about his face. My best friend. So many miles away from me. Chennai sucked the life out of him. Chennai was his dream. I can't believe that chennai had already taken a childhood bestfriend away from me and now it was going to take another. And it all circles back to how terrible excuse of a friend I've been. I did not want to lose him.

11:00pm. I am talking cricket with my father because I can't get my best friend who is in the ICU out of my head, I don't want to get him out of my head. I regret not asking H.M. about when and how it had happened and what had he said and how everything had rolled out but I didn't know how to talk to her. She would hate me if she knew that I was convinced by his lies about how he won't do it, about how he was only thinking about it, how he was going to sleep.

11:38pm. I tell H.M. that I'm grateful for her and that I feel like an idiot. I will never be able to live with this. It will haunt me like everything else that has ever happened to me haunts me. I have never moved on from anything. I will never be at peace.

Geeta looks at me baffled like we look at dogs mating in the middle of the street, it is akin to the disgruntled look on my face whenever they tell me that a ghost will possess my mind, body, and soul if i comb my hair out in the dark which is frankly, an underwhelming threat. I remember being young and knowing the science behind why my eyes could see her, who was mopping the floor right next to me, while I could also simultaneously be staring at the ugliest white wall, which was in front of me, all that without once blinking. And because I've thought about it for seven minutes in a row, I'm very much bothered by the panoramic vision I am forced to see everyday and all the time. Because why should I, a perfectly ordinary someone with no known superpowers or no known passions, be cursed with the ability to see too much? No off switch, no dimmer. There is only everything, everywhere, all at once, except none of it is important. Geeta continues mopping outside the living room tiles. The floor is already clean. It has been clean for the past eleven minutes, but she persists with the moral conviction of a woman who believes dirt is a state of mind rather than a physical presence. I cannot help but respect it but also resent it. Geeta glances at me again, the last time before she leaves, and I can't tell if she thinks I am thinking something inappropriate or if she's about to call my mum and let her know that years of combing my hair out in dark is finally catching up to me. I move my head towards her without losing the grasp I have on the white wall, I am thinking about how the human eye can process multiple visual planes simultaneously which feels absolutely unnecessary, like I’ve been unwillingly enrolled into a low-budget experiment on binocular vision and depth perception, except there is no clipboard, no lab coat, no one to conclude anything useful from it. Lovely and nosy Geeta retires, undefeated, into whatever dimension people who mop already clean floors disappear into.

Now I'm graciously abandoned alone with the surgically clean floor beneath my bare and dirty feet and with the living or dead dust that collects itself inside my open mouth. A brilliant state of mind is achieved where I can look down to my notebook which is open wide like an alligator's jaw. The empty page which I can fill with fishes made out of bright oil pastels and adorn them with a bunch of stars, spirals, and spirals inside the stars. The tips of my fingers are smudged with the colour grey because at four i came to this conclusion that all the colours mixed in whatever proportion leave behind grey with the hue of any colour of choice which was present in maximum quantity in the pre-mix. The fish want to become better fish. The word wants to become a sentence. The sentence, if allowed to live long enough, will inevitably develop ambition and attempt to become meaning. And meaning, from what I have observed, is a very unstable career choice. I think fishes are most interesting when they're not grey and so is everything else. I can fall in love with a grey that has remnants of blue, I can tolerate a grey with remnants of green, but i rebuke the greys that speak so highly of black. Which is why I avoid mixing things in general because everything eventually becomes a negotiable grey, and I have neither the patience nor the diplomacy required for negotiation. Maybe that's why I never even hesitate while stealing toffees from that dented steel dabba in the kitchen. Maybe it's because I don't care. My mother bought them for her younger students, aggressively cheerful toffees that are meant to reward academic effort or at the very least the illusion of it. There are many. Too many. It would be irresponsible not to reduce the quantity. So i suck the sweetness out of the sugar and i bite into it with my canine only for it to escape and stick to my teeth.

I sit on the floor with my back arched like a crooked fish hook. I kiss my left knee because i rarley meet her. I look at my right heel. Oh. Right. I scathed a dried wound fresh today. The cream floor is stained black with blood that dripped down my heel, an undoing of whatever fragile healing had begun. Nothing I do can ever seem to clean this wound I’ve been infested with over this past week. My heel will forever stay bruised, I think, and I fear it will forever drip like this. Persistently, it has something left to say that I refuse to hear. I dab a bail of cotton in a clear bottle half full of saffron antiseptic and i move it with slight pressure over my skin because it doesn't hurt, it just wouldn't heal. I trace my fingertips along the edges of the dried blood because it itches more than it ever hurt and the swirls on top of it soothe this ungodly itch for the time being.

I severed my heel last Sunday when i walked barefoot in all of Connaught place but by the time i had reached there i had already felt the skin being torn apart because of my mother's brown sandals which dug into my Achilles tendon with a brutish force and with its rough edges, it cut through the thick double tape i had prepped myself up with before leaving home. I looked at it when my skin peeled off in thin sheets and a red blush revealed itself underneath. I had been crying for twelve metro stations already and the seams of my dress were ready to fall apart and crumble into pile of crap. If it weren't for the woman who stared at me on the way, i would've covered my pendant in loads of rust with all this nervous sweat forming over my chest and the salty tears falling from one of my cheek.

I think its ought to have hurt me more back then because i had lost a friend and the thought of going back home wearing a dress and my sandals fixed between my fingers put me to shame more than anything else. I remember the look on Gunjan's face when we got off on this station with blacked out men lying half naked under the sun, and when i almost bumped into a static body lying with its leg up straight pointed towards my belly. I remember that when we got out, it was absolutely numbing to not see a soul around us. I saw such horror on her face that day and it almost translated into mine but more of my energy was being invested in thinking how i'd apologise to this above said friend who we were headed to at this point of time. This friend who is so angry at me and who will never talk to me again. For three days i mourned a friendship that i lost to apathy and the lack of communication and the following days didn't make much sense apart from constantly trying too hard to keep my shit together and fix the things which had been left broken. I felt like a dog trying to dig up bones or a man stuck underneath a sheet of immoveable ice. Even though this act i was stuck in the midst of was nothing compared to the grandeur of dying in an avalanche but i felt my heart sink more and more with every breath i led out too loud, we convinced each other that she'll never talk to us again with momentarily believing it in our hearts that things are fixable and that i just need to tell her that what i had faced was unavoidable and that a man had grabbed my ass and i almost bumped into someone kicking me and that the location she sent us was wrong and we were stranded thirty minutes too far, thirty minutes too close.

But when nothing helped at all, i suppose i decided to let things go on the fourth day though i felt Gunjan gave up much earlier. I remember the touch of her hand and her eyes when she felt so helpless and perplexed. I don't want to recall anything else from that day, nothing more, nothing less. the horror, the burning hot wound, the orange dress that almost was. Today marks almost a week from when i lost a friend. While we shot a short film in college today and i edited it back home, i thought of how terrible i felt all these days and how meaningless life had become because of someone who refused to even look at me. But today nothing of that sorts hurt me. Even though the dried up wound started bleeding again, the loss didn't hurt me today, not once. I told myself i can breathe out easy now. And i remind myself I'm not as young as 16, i don't have to beg someone to stay in my life for longer than they intended to, and when i look back to last week i will only remember the petty reason. The reason why. I will not remember the leaving but rather how little it took. Which, I think, is far more insulting and therefore, far more honest.

Honesty is a cure to a lot of things you can count on your fingers, which is convenient because you’ll need the rest of your body to deal with everything it doesn’t fix. It is sinful to redirect your guilt to God, so you must perish it with honesty. You see, most people you meet desire an honest love from an honest partner, though it will not fix their life. Honesty will not make people kinder or memories hurt less or wounds close properly. I suppose in that sense honesty is a small cure, a local one. It enables you to realise and speak what is already true. That is its only job, which is when you think about it, not a job at all. It is helpful in the same way a mirror is helpful, see, you may not like what you see, but at least you are no longer negotiating with it or worse, you're no longer oblivious.

But don't mistake it for meaning. Be intoxicated with possibilities but meaning is a god-awful stupid phenomenon. Think of all these things we think of as options. Maybe the meaning of life is to have friends who are happy for you. Maybe the meaning of life is to have something you want to work hard for. Maybe the meaning of life is to feel loved and love without needing to have someone around. Maybe the meaning of life is to continue playing your cards even after knowing that there is so meaning to life. All this contemplation which could only be attributed to a young heart, and one Wednesday you'll realise that even if your life had a meaning and that even if you were suddenly blessed with a divine purpose, it wouldn't affect your will to live. At thirteen you thought that knowing what you're put on earth for will enable you to enjoy your time here and continue surviving with a burning passion but now you fear that maybe meaning is not enough to keep you going. Maybe knowing what it means is only so overwhelmingly underwhelming that all you can do is stare at a white wall or bang your head against it.

And it was never about Geeta or the floor or the wound that refuses the dignity of closure, but about this peculiar accumulation of everything that insists on being noticed all at once. The stupid white wall that does not end, the sweetness of stolen forbidden toffees dissolving into a stickiness that outlasts the pleasure, the friend who leaves not with a storm but with a shrug so small it feels like an insult to grief itself. It all gathers, doesn’t it, into this quiet, unreasonable surplus of seeing and knowing and not quite feeling enough in the places where feeling is expected, as though the world misplaced its emphasis while assembling me, turned the volume up on observation and forgot to calibrate meaning. And so I am left here, negotiating with greys I claim to despise, tending to wounds, trusting honesty. There is no resolution to be extracted from this, no moral that can be held without slipping, only this continuous, low-grade miracle of being able to sit inside it all, the clean floor, the unclean thoughts, the unfinished sentences and still, for reasons that feel both insufficient and entirely necessary, choose to draw another fish, to invent another elsewhere, to remain, stubbornly and without conclusion, a participant in this unremarkable, excessive, and strangely luminous act of being alive.

This ends here. There is no climax, no resolution, no satisfying arc that can be pointed at and called structure. It simply extends itself. I sit there, surrounded by clean floors, three fishes (because three is a crowd), incompatible words, and a moving fan that will outlive my attention span. We're all passing time anyways. You must be always a little elsewhere. That is the only trick worth learning. And to that I say, when the world divided us at the beginning, it must have been distracted, half-listening, half-dreaming. Perhaps it was a minor miscalculation, a cosmic version of the butterfly effect, one small distraction that split things unevenly and called it fate. It is a strange thing, to wait for something to hurt and find that it simply doesn’t. It is also strange to dream of being a fish elsewhere. There is no result to this buildup except maybe here's a poem I wrote after falling sick to my stomach comparing myself to all these people who are much older to me.

the child in me loves the child in you/ sticky-fingered, sugar-dusted crew/ with pockets full of funny pebbles, silly ants, and lies/ and the big ol' orion etched inside our eyes// what care we for the world’s grave, measured tone/ its iron hours, its reason carved in stone?/ we trade instead in glances, swift and sly/ and build vast empires where our fancies lie// we crown dead beetles the kings of thrones/ build castles from chalk and chicken bones/ declare wars on dark spirits near the wall/ then trip on nothing, laugh, and end it all// we sip from cups of rain and call it wine/ draw crooked suns that must always shine/ and keep some of the forbidden brew/ for the wild, absurd, the tender, and the true// when curls of thought in careless clusters fall/ and tiny tempests rise from nothing’s call/ our laughter rings like crystal, light and bright/ disturbing all the solemn rules of right// so let the world be polished, neat, askew/ we’ll keep it strange, and slightly wrong, and more importantly entirely blue/ for the magic lives in things we never outgrew/ the child in me loves the child in you.

Ps. My love, you must create without fearing the echo of your own voice. For the world can never learn too many names. Throw your name outside the window and whisper it to the winds. Nothing that has ever existed has done it quite the way you will.

xx

Mami's silver pressure cooker would whistle from the tiny box which served as the kitchen across the short gallery. Mama would always be watching cricket on his tele, wearing his white banyan and lungi, and chacha, who was closer to our age, would retire to his room to show us the new games he had on his playstation back then. My mother would either help Mami setting up the plates on the table or meticulously braid great-grandmother's handful of hair. And because I wasn't interested in either of these things, and rather none of them being carried out felt welcoming to me, i would escape to the big balcony. The balcony was bigger than the living room, or so my little proportions thought, it overlooked the PVR cinema and more closely a series of bougainvillea outside, too close to make out entire structures and botanical anatomy but too far to pluck and tuck them behind my ear.

The house would smell like coconut oil, chai and namak paare, and rust laiden iron trunks from my great-grandfather's time serving the Indian armed forces. It also sometimes smelled like rugs and sweat but none of it seemed to bother anyone for the door to the balcony was always left wide open and the leaves which would pile up on the floor were overall a better sight to consume. I didn’t know I was watching things fade already from my memory. I didn’t know that one day, I would try to remember the exact shade of her room, and fail. If I stepped out of her room, I stepped into everything else. Into the smell of frying onions and jeera, settling into the pleats of my khaadi skirt. Every single minute I spent at this place had an uncanny resemblance to every time the lights would go out back at our place and mummy would light candles in the kitchen to make dinner. Sometimes when light would go out for longer hours, we would lie down on balcony floor and she would fan us throughout the night. Our balcony was also bigger than the rooms inside and overlooked not bougainvillea but a tall ashok tree.

The ashok tree was taller than our house and all of the other houses in our gully but it isn't anymore. Houses have grown so much over the past few years and now they all look terribly similar with the same huge glass windows with no prospect of opening them, severely tiny balconies in which only one could sleep, white and cream marble tiles, different shades of same wooden planks, and a strong door which would only open with the click of a switch. Our house used to be the lightest shade of pink, similar to peach or strawberry ice cream. It bothers me that it isn't so anymore. And even the ashok tree is now going bald every summer. Our neighbours give him a bad haircut because they religiously hate the leaves that fall inside and infront their house and that migratory birds make nests over their AC unit.

Summer of 2018, when we were living at our neighbour's place on rent while our house was being made again from scratch, that's when they took out all the pink. I remember shifting and leaving the house that built me over the ages, the house whose smell I can never recreate and nor forget. the house which was to me, the goblin's forbidden fruit. I was the last one to leave our house because I had to pee so bad and I had never peed anywhere outside my home. It's still very absurd to me how the last thing I did in the house I praise so much was piss. And that's when I parted from my home until we came back into a completely different place, different in soul, and different in smell. This new place on the same pious land smelled like fresh paint and flowers in a vase. The all-white walls and tall ceilings felt like a lab, and the size of the balcony made me itch my head, but the toilet was my favourite. On my first day here, I thought that the bathroom was the only thing which was significantly better than our pink house. To recompensate the pink we had left behind, they gave me neon pink lights in my new room.

Nothing seemed to fill the void because I was still mourning the loss of the green bird I had befriended at my neighbour's place. The foreign green couple built a nest right in front of where we lived. I had no idea where they came from or what land they had fled and where they were headed. All I knew about them was that they weren't parrots yet they were all green and big enough birds. They had the most beautiful eyes and it hurts me so much that I cannot recall the colour on their beaks. They left Delhi a week before I was about to shift back to my place. Papa and I used to wait on them every morning but whatever land they had gone to was warmer than ours, I suppose. Sometimes I would think they met Janhavi in Chennai, and took my word forward maybe, but Janhavi had left Chennai and i didn't know any better, not anything about a friend that used to be and neither about those pretty migratory birds, and somehow both i had managed to lose.

The feeling of now having to live in a new place eventually settled in as most things do. We still talk about how we lost the good half of our toys during the shifting process and we search the entire house twice over every year in silly hopes of finding the toys that once lured all of the gully kids inside our pink house. Mummy tells us that He gives more than he takes from His children. And we believe none of it, moreover it does nothing but set us up for a petty trap, and it pisses us off so bad, false Gods and hope pisses us off so bad.

For now the hands will remain plump, those walls will remain pink only in my memory, that ashok tree will always remain taller than atleast us. Loss is an event. The day we left the house. The morning the birds didn’t return. The way my mother washed my dead great-grandmother's body for the last time. But it isn’t. Loss is slow and domestic, in the corners of rooms that no longer exist, in smells I cannot recreate, in colours I almost remember. It is in the way I try to hold onto details, the exact green of those birds, the exact pink of the walls, the exact shade of her room and fail, each time just a little more. Loss lingers in the way we still compare balconies, in the way I still wait for my birds, in the way I still believe my house can have a soul. There was a life that didn’t know it was already becoming memory. My dream is to be on the brink of dying and finding out that I had been alive the whole time. A realisation that the hollow on my face was plump flesh all along and that I'd been shivering because of the icy blood going down my body through a map of veins. To have life and then to lose it, knowing that atleast you had it once. The greatest thing I’ve lost is the version of me who didn’t know i was losing anything at all.

"सब कुछ तो है क्या ढूँडती रहती हैं निगाहें, क्या बात है मैं वक़्त पे घर क्यूँ नहीं जाता" — Nida Fazli

“We should learn languages because language is the only thing worth knowing even poorly.”— Kató Lomb

Some languages I was born into and they were placed inside my mouth, on the tip of my tongue, before I knew how to shape sound, before I knew what it meant to belong. Others I borrowed like ill-fitted clothes, tugging at their sleeves, smoothing their edges, and I tried to make them look like they were mine. Some languages cling to me like a second skin, damp and inseparable, smelling faintly of home and sweat. Others sit on me like borrowed ornaments— polished but always slightly heavy, always aware of the body beneath them.

There are some languages that taste of pure iron and dust, that spill out of the lips like a fruit half-bitten, half-swallowed. Languages that carry the aftertaste of teachers pausing mid-sentence, eyebrows raised, the class laughing at the curl of a vowel that didn’t quite land where it should have. Then there are words I learned with my jaw clenched, and teeth pressing into syllables until they came out perfectly right. There are others I never dared to say out loud again.

Some languages mock me cruelly, persistently. They expose the potential gaps in me, the procrastination, the places where fluency frays. They remind me that I am always, in some way, arriving late or bailing last minute. Some others challenge me, demand that I rise to meet them in the sky, to earn them, to deserve the ease with which others already seem to inhabit them. They stretch me paper thin, pull at the edges of who I am, ask me to become more precise. To become more than I am.

And then there are the languages that do not ask anything at all and simply take. They take my accent and sand it down. They take my instinct to reach for a word and replace it with something colder. They take intimacy out of address, the weight out of apology. They might make me efficient. They might even make me understood. But sometimes, they make me less of myself.

In the spaces between these fleeting tongues, I feel it most, the criminal violence of translation. The way a feeling almost always arrives whole but leaves in vague fragments. The way something tender like flesh becomes clinical, something sacred becomes casual. And I have watched my own thoughts become figuratively smaller as I force them through the narrow holes of a language that does not quite understand how I tend to mean things.

And yet, each one whether it has held me gently or bruised me into shape has carved out a home inside me. Like shabby rooms built one over the other, like walls trying to hold straight, creating a house that should not stand and yet somehow does.

In a big country like ours, language is more than just a subject. Because it is proof that you have survived somewhere, belonged somewhere, been held by someone dear. We speak languages and we carry them hanging in the middle our throats, in the backs of our mouths, and lastly in the pauses between words. They reveal themselves in the way we greet a stranger, the way we bargain, the way we call out to our mothers from another room.

Every tongue is a doorway, and when even slightly opened, it leads to somewhere lived-in. Like a kitchen thick with the smell of strong tadka, where a grandmother tells stories full of proverbs and myths that make no sense outside those walls. A small town temple where a child memorises his first prayer. A crowded street where abuses fly faster and higher than spirits. A boxy train compartment where people switch languages mid-sentence, adjusting themselves to one another, negotiating familiarity in real time.

In one home, love sounds like “khana kha liya?” have you eaten? In another, it is “bhalo acho?” are you well? Somewhere else, it is loud, unfiltered Punjabi laughter spilling into the street, or the soft, measured cadence of Tamil spoken at the dining table. Even silence has a language here, the silence of a father who never says “I love you” but asks if you reached safely, the silence of a mother who switches to her mother tongue when she is most tired, most herself.

And outside our homes, language becomes something else too. It becomes a marker, a quick judgment. Your English decides whether you are “educated.” Your Hindi decides whether you are “local enough.” Your accent is weighed, measured, sometimes mocked. You learn quickly which language to use where, which version of yourself is acceptable in which room. You learn to soften certain words, hide others, translate yourself constantly until the lines blur.

But still, beneath all that shifting and adjusting, something remains. Because every language we carry is not just a tool, it is a memory of being known or the peculiar desire of being understood and not having to explain.

So when I'm talking to you and you respond in your language which was given to you even before you were given your name, you are representing not just your region but also the people who came before you. Years will pass until you realise the way you pronounce a certain word is because of your mother, or the way you use another word casually is because of your father and just like we are mosaics of all the people we've met and loved, we also embody the imprints these seemingly little things leave upon us.

My mother tongue wasn’t the first language I wrote essays in. That honour went to English— clean, proper, grammatically correct. But my first feeling came in from my mother’s voice and the lullabies she passed onto both me and my brother. It came in the sweetness of my mother’s voice, in her jokes that did not transcend. There exists a version of me that can only live in that language.

And what if I think in English, fight in Hindi, cry in a more obscure dialect, and dream in a language I only half-know? It’s strange, isn’t it? How we become a slightly different person in every tongue. Sophisticated in one, funnier in another. And how we lose entire versions of ourselves when we stop speaking them. Our identity.

It was April, the commencement of my twelfth-grade year, the final year of school. The textbooks opened to the first chapter, ironically titled "The Last Lesson". And a wave of bittersweet humour rippled through the classroom as my classmates, myself included, found amusement in the inherent irony. As the academic year progressed and the pages of "The Last Lesson" turned, a profound realization dawned upon me and it was the significance of cherishing and preserving one's native language. This awareness became increasingly acute as we neared the end of school years, the entry into a much more "real" world. Throughout the entire year being free from the supposed burden of studying one more subject, Hindi, it felt foreign and wrong being deprived of that language and its rich literature. But i can't say that I cared as much as I should've because the majority of my hours were already actively being invested in science and math. The finality of our school experience underscored the importance of holding steadfast to our linguistic heritage, our mother tongue, the very essence of our cultural identity.

Beyond the pragmatic advantage of being the simplest chapter by far to prepare for examinations, "The Last Lesson" imparted a crucial insight, one that resonated deeply precisely because it arrived at the cusp of our transition into adulthood. Language, and what is language if not art and science? Language, in all its essence, is a tapestry woven from the threads of human communication, and cultural heritage. It serves as a vehicle for unique artistic expression, allowing us to convey emotions, paint vivid imagery, and craft compelling narratives.

John Keating from the Dead Poets Society said, "We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race, and the human race is filled with passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for." Simultaneously, language operates within a scientific framework, governed by rules of grammar, and syntax, enabling us to structure our thoughts. Even though i personally believe that the correctness of a sentence does not affect the meaning most times and to understand someone language is not the most important thing, empathy is. Even Javed Akhtar once remarked on our complicated relationship with Hindi, our relationship which is beginning to falter, that we often hesitate to embrace it fully, treating it as something secondary in our own country, while celebrating English as a marker of sophistication. His observation lingers because it feels uncomfortably true. Post colonial India is still severed.

The last lesson, therefore, was not merely a chapter in a textbook, it was supposed to be a profound awakening to the power and significance of language in shaping our individual and collective experiences. It was a reminder to embrace the richness of our linguistic heritage and to wield the tool of language with both artistry and precision as we navigated the uncharted territories of the future. Language as a weapon.

Languages like ancestral jewellery are passed down. When we refuse to speak our native tongues, we don’t just lose words, we lose metaphors. We lose those lullabies and stories. The word “dil” doesn’t quite mean the same as “heart” to me. “maafi” feels heavier than “sorry" sometimes. English for prestige or clarity or universality. Hindi and Urdu for something personal. The rest get dismissed as a neighbour's accents, dialects, local flavour.

I often think about my parents' language, the languages I never learnt. The ones I know only through overheard phone calls or through blur childhood memory. Garhwali which was taught to me by a mausi of mine in Dehradun over summer break and Punjabi which I never understood because our family moved to Delhi way before my birth. I grieve them, sometimes. But I also smile when a forgotten word comes back like a ghost, a comforting ghost which feels like home.

English is pretty in all its glory but Urdu has those metaphors that ache, those lyrics that can still move me. Tamil carries culture and legacy of a thousand centuries and familial values. Punjabi flows from the heart, not too loud but just loud enough to be heard and loved and played as music all around the world. Bengali is just as sweet as the sweets of Bengal, words that flow like honey and drip from the tips of tongues. Sanskrit gave birth to more things and feelings than we'll ever realize. And there are more such languages to think about, multiple belonging to India itself.

Imagine a group of students sharing proverbs and tales of different languages. One speaks of a river that never forgot its path, another of seasonal rain that always returns to the soil, another of a seed that waits in darkness before it dares to grow. Different images, same stories. We don’t need to flatten out diversity to achieve unity; we only need to listen long enough to recognise ourselves in each other’s words. A sense of camaraderie.

Let our children write poetry in Urdu that aches with longing, stage plays in Assamese that carry the rhythms of the Brahmaputra, joke in Tamil with a wit that refuses transcending, rap in Marathi knowing well enough that their language enables them to express themselves best. Yet no language is supreme. But let them stumble, mix languages mid-sentence, invent new ones out of the old. Let them inherit not just fluency, but freedom. Let them show us who they are in every language they carry unapologetically, imperfectly, fully.

Because a language does not die all at once. First, it is spoken less at home. Then, it is replaced in classrooms. Then, it survives only in festivals, in songs half-remembered, in elders who repeat stories no one quite understands anymore. And one day, it exists only in archives, studied, not lived. Preserved, but no longer breathing. We cannot afford that kind of silence.

To protect a language is not just to preserve words, but to protect a way of seeing the world. It is to keep alive the particular tenderness of a lullaby or a folktale, the sharpness of a joke, the weight of an apology that cannot be translated. It is to remember that identity is not singular, it is layered, shifting, and deeply rooted in the sounds we grew up hearing.

So speak them. Even if they come out broken. Even if they feel out of place. Speak them at home, in classrooms, on stages, in poems and conversations and everyday trivialities. Teach them not as obligations. Wear them not as burdens. Because when we keep our languages alive, we are not just holding onto the past, we are making sure the future has something real to return to.

xx

My stockings are burnt towards the ankle from the time i hid a lighter inside my shoe. I smell of something burnt long after the flame is gone. I press my foot flat against the ground, feeling that roughened patch where the fabric had once curled and singed. The train jerks forward. And I'm in the bloody metro again. But this time I'm crying. Because I think i just lost my dignity, my friend, and myself. And all I can feel breathe in the blood which warms my chest is deep sadness, one which can only be achieved after a sense of prominent loss.

There’s a coherence to it that joy rarely offers. Because the more you write it, the more it begins to feel like the only language you have. The more it convinces you that this— this heaviness, this ache is the truest version of you. And so you return to it, again and again, not just because it’s easy, but because it feels real. I wipe my face with the back of my hand. The metallic tang of tears on my lips is a bitter communion, a sacrament of sorrow. I am a vessel overflowing with grief, a broken chalice spilling its contents onto the unforgiving floor of this moving tomb.

Now the science of it, maybe. Sadness which is chemical. A choreography of neurotransmitters misfiring or withholding themselves. A dip in serotonin, a hesitancy of dopamine, a sinking heart. It’s almost humiliating, to think of something so vast being reduced to molecules passing messages through synapses. But sadness is not beautiful and it is not art. And if all I create is because of this sadness, does that truly constitute as art? And if i am so stained with what happened then can i possibly attempt creating something which will gratify my creative desires?

Meaning no longer adheres to what is central, but to what is peripheral. My mother tongue wasn’t the first language I wrote myself out in. That honour went to English. But my first feeling came in the form of my mother’s voice and the lullabies she passed onto both me and my brother. Her jokes that didn’t translate. There is a version of myself that only exists in that language.

And what if I think in English, fight in Hindi, cry in a more obscure dialect, and dream in a language I only half-know? But sadness remains legible in all of them. Its strange how we become a slightly different person in every tongue. Sophisticated in one, funnier in another. And how we lose entire versions of ourselves when we stop speaking them.

Ever since life began, all I did was wonder about death so much so I was plagued by it. And to me developing conscience and a belief system meant realising that I had never existed and even if I did, i didn't deserved to. It felt that I had been living a borrowed life and that too on life support which was fueled by temporary escalation of joys and pain. Tumultuous feelings, and other destructive episodes were what made me feel alive, like I had blood pumping in my veins, like there was fresh air accumulating beneath my breasts.

The thought of any meaning at all disgusted me. The thought of someone out there hating me repulsed me. All I ever wanted was to be loved in a manner that would liberate me. That's where the larger parts of it went completely, absolutely wrong. With the kind of plagued heart I carried, all love would do is weigh me down. Platonic love, romantic love, familial love, all of it suffocated me in a way that made me want to rip out my flesh. It made sense that i hated the idea of being hated but i never could draw out much sense of why i hated the idea of being loved.

And because I didn't know any better, I kept dying and dying. Until death felt like it was here already and that it had been with me all this time like the moles on my back. Even when it’s just a Sunday evening in a metro, and nothing particularly tragic has happened, except everything, and it feels slightly off-center, and completely uninhabitable.

going to post without completing anything or thinking too hard from now on

xx