What takes over a daughter to abuse a father? What woman curses family? Afterall, white hairs grow on respect. And open hair invites wrenching. Why was she angry when she could have been sad? That way she could be held or cradled. That way she would be not hard to look at. That way she might have made some sense. Anything but heard. Now, apologies sound sweet. And reckoning sweeter. The die was cast amongst men. No virtues gambled. No retrospection indebted. A man’s kin insulted must inherit some reaping for once. We’re only raised right if we’re never wrong. Her words eclipse reason like they once did grace. Her questions are for the sky. It doesn’t matter: Whose was she to be wagered? Whose was she to be won? Her father’s burden? Her husbands’ loss? Her foe’s exploit? What is the cost of pawned will? What does a woman mean? It only matters: she’s here and we’re here and pity’s too rich for us.

Sorries seldom set examples. Crowds know better than one. Men have gathered to watch. King lacks words for reason. Blind before the sounds of his boys laughing. Indifferent to his queen’s reticence. Arbiters of justice don’t meddle with damnation. Cowards look down to pose with scorn. Clamoring’s too intimate for public. No protests for a woman howling. Just as long as it’s not at men. Or their mothers. Or fathers. What must men do to cleanse our daughters? What must men do to then teach our sons? What must men do then for their mother’s innocence? What must men do then for their father’s ashes? What must men do then for the temples of their gods? Let’s disrobe her now.

In my experience, everyone’s been a victim taking charge of their life each moment and failing every other. I step out of my mind when I talk to people now. Telling the seventieth person how niche their music is gets tedious after listening to the same four songs. They’re not moved by the sound of their music as much as its curation. After a point, I stopped browsing through the girls’ bookshelves in their rooms. I know the covers that are going to be there. Patti Smith and Hanya Yanagihara probably know each other by now. All those guys with their wired earphones trying to be ironic. Everyone has the same hair. The same clothes. And of course, the same 4 directors making a cinephile out of everyone who wasn’t good at sports. Sure, you love Korean cinema and hate Korean dramas, and I can’t tell the difference. I’m constantly on the verge of throwing up. I don’t think I’m better than any person I talk to. I just think I’m done talking. We learnt about tension in 11^th grade physics. There’s a breaking point to each material. I think I reached mine pretty early. All this disillusionment groans like a stretched string does before breaking. Man, I miss tuning my guitar.

Monsoons came late to India this summer. Maybe it’s because my room doesn’t have an AC. I don’t believe in an interventionist god. Maybe an asshole one. It’s too hot to have beliefs anyway. Sometimes the water goes out. Sometimes so does the electricity. A lot of the time, phone signals disappear. Sometimes all three happen. My cup of black coffee is the only thing that tastes like peace. My room is the size of my fist. I should feel so lucky to have this opportunity. I do. It’s just what it is. And it has been for a while.

It’s weird to hate yourself in public. In a loud bar, I felt distanced by others’ fun. I went in out of pure impulse and started hating it the moment I stepped in. Two pints in, standing in a corner humming Linkin Park, a guy asked me if I was alone. He was very obviously gay. That didn’t bother me. Probably would’ve made my hometown friends shudder. I just told him I was and he asked me why. Elaichi in your biryani is actually just the taste of someone trying to be nice to you when you don’t want them to. I asked him about his life in Mizoram and if he missed it. He told me no. He said he’d never felt as sure of himself as he did until he got out of his home. I understood what he meant. I wanted to go back for the very same reason. I made sure he knew I was straight and much taller than him when he started leaning on me too much. As I worked my way through another pint, trying to get used to the loud songs — the DJ started playing REM. A minute later, I was belting out Losing My Religion with guys my dad’s age and their wives. Music mixes in alcohol with the intentions of a teenager. I forgot to hate myself for a while. A girl tapped me on the shoulder and asked for a lighter. As I helped her with a smoke, she asked me how I knew such old songs. It’s a weird way to come to terms with who you are in a stranger’s flat in a strange city. I don’t think we ever even exchanged numbers.

There’s a Chandni Chowk in Pune. It’s not made of stuffy romanticised lanes. And there are no leering boys trying to sell you things or touch without consent. This Chandni Chowk is called CC and it’s wrapped in flyovers. I didn’t know this before I rushed myself here on a bike to get away from the cops abusing in Marathi on theirs. Is it really public indecency if you’re under a tarp? The ethics of good conduct often depends on how you’re dressed — and an undone shirt and a crop top on fishnets wasn’t helping any of us. So, you just get on your bike while the one person who does speak Marathi uses words like dada and kaka to engender some forgiveness in old minds for expiring youth — and as the motor revs, you just yell sorry and ride on as fast as you can. This entire city closes down at 11, so to see a famous tea stall still crowded with youngsters with a half-closed shutter at 3 in the morning seemed like a good place to get lost. I don’t mind the callous apathy of a big city. It’s much easier being yourself when you don’t waste time trying not to hurt others. You don’t see girls on the back of bikes wrapped in dupattas because someone might know their dad. The sweetest thing about a city with tall buildings, wide roads and loud pubs is that no one cares about you. No one wastes the effort to know. And with everyone who’s come here spending their youth to be someone they’re not — you can’t hurt something’s that’s broken. So, you drink chai with the girl who smokes 3 packs a day as she tells you how tough her life’s been and how twenty years of blaming it on her parents is still not enough. You say nothing because silence has always been more convenient. And opinions might cost you the rest of the night.

The appeal of a late night show to a B-grade horror movie is never the plot, it’s the seats. Getting corner seats to a movie that you can just talk your way through and people won’t mind should be prescribed for a long week. It’d be perfect if only there weren’t shared armrests. Actually, I’m glad it’s not that perfect. So, what is a refuge for (I don’t know what to call what we had) us when that movie ends in the middle of a desolate street guarded by rows of sleepy houses? Some place where the pubs are still open — and music flows with restraint as police bikes patrol, looking to levy heavy fines or cheap bribes. KP is five kilometers away and both the phones are dead. The thing about Vimaan Nagar, though, you can always just walk on the wide roads that are too pretty to be littered. At least under the moonlight they are. As much as I romanticize my bike, walking will always be more intimate. Bumping into each other as cars zoom in and out. Tripping over trying to figure out how close is too close by grazing fingers.

We walked down her college’s road towards Koregaon Park. Sure, five kilometers is a long way to go but isn’t that the point when the moon is out? As we wandered through deserted footpaths towards Kalyani Nagar avoiding cars in lieu of just being reduced to another news headline, all we saw were students our age trying to sneak in a little bit of the night at the morning’s expense. There was laughing and some clumsy attempts at eye contact, but who minds a little stupidity under a thousand stars? She was telling me about how her dad made her return the cat she adopted from the street when suddenly I saw what looked like a sack heaped across the side of the road. It was a dead horse. Someone was obviously driving too fast to notice. His eyes were open. It jarred me so much because they sleep standing up, so when you see a horse completely lay on its side — it’s like seeing a different animal. This one’s not as beautiful or majestic. It just hurts your gut.

Growing up near horses, my immediate thought was how lucky the horse had been. I love horses, almost as much as our farmhouse’s caretaker. Ever since I was a boy, I can remember just swimming on hot afternoons and then Raju bhaiya helping me on a horse just so I can pretend to be cavalry. I loved the history of it. Pretending to be some soldier on his way to fight for his homeland on a horse with glow in dark swords and plastic armor. Obviously, discovering Clint Eastwood as growing up made galloping a little nuanced. Pretending to be a man with no name, running away from something I didn’t realize existed. Raju bhaiya would tell me all kinds of facts about horses. Maybe he found a kinship in my romanticism. Maybe, my reluctance towards all things fancy only to indulge his stories about village hauntings made him feel important. We had cows, dogs, and sometimes even peacocks rolled in. Nothing looked as beautiful as a grey mare though. And that’s why the first thing I thought when I saw a horse carcass by the side of the road near Ballr is how better off the horse was gone than to have lived with a lame leg. Raju bhaiya often used to tell me that we shoot horses with lame legs because if a horse can’t run, play or do what he wants — you put him down or else he will just get depressed and stop eating and die a slow painful death. Leaving sports in middle school, foregoing the notion that I might be intelligent in high school, and giving up all hopes to be something creative in college — what do you do with me then? Am I even walking through life anymore or just dragging my feet. I wouldn’t want someone to shoot me in the head though, unless they do it from behind.

I’ve never been good at hiding how I feel, just well versed at not talking about it. So, when seeing a dead horse made my face drop, I knew it couldn’t have gone unnoticed. I didn’t talk about Raju Bhaiya. Or my childhood. Talking about my actual life might make me real. I just talked about how sad it was to see rats nibble on such a beautiful creature. I get told that’s the way of life by a law student who’s writing her paper on environmental law. The way of life does suck though; I get told by the girl holding my hand. I love being anonymous in a place for once. I was born in a city where even the lanes call me by the nickname my parents gave me as a baby. School was hard to not stand out in as well. I thought things would be different with college but now I have to high five folks with no names to their faces. So, to walk around a city where no one knows me has been like making friends with clouds. At least you can share taste with someone on the side of the Agakhan bridge as the moonlight reflects like little crystals on the Mula Mutha bends. No one to notice. No one to judge. Only a cool wind that weaves through your hair, or maybe those are fingers.

“Is this a good place to chug these cans?” she asks outside the KP Police Station. It wasn’t her fault. The red-brick building looked like a fancy elementary school. The thana had modernist architecture and ambient floodlights, looking like the only middle class kid in school trying to keep up appearances at parties. It would have been a little funny to have chugged those cans under the willow leaning against the station. We decided to look for another spot. The whole time we walked through the cool lanes of KP, she was obsessed with showing me how big the gates to each of those mansions are. She insisted it was some ingrained phobia that the bourgeoisie have of the proletariat, so their walls actually manifest themselves physically too. I didn’t understand much of that. All I saw was the evidence that privilege couldn’t buy taste. As we walked beside the Poonawala mansion, which had brighter lampposts inside their walls than the road did outside, I noticed that the guard quarters were actually bigger than my PG room. It didn’t make me sad or insecure — just empty.

“Hmm, the Jewish Cemetery looks pretty chill.” Fenced by rusted metal frames and a brown board that just read Jewish Cemetery, we found a good place to get tipsy in the middle of the night. The door creaked like an angry cat as we slipped in. There were patches of overgrown grass with shrubs that were wet from the rain earlier in the day. My baggy jeans scraping against the wet soil made me queasier than any ghost ever could. A tree bent under the weight of its own crooked branches seemed a good camouflage. As I sat on one of the graves that had both Hebrew and Marathi engravings, she scolded my insensitivity. She was a lapsed catholic but her atheism hadn’t washed over years of conditioning yet. Desecrating a grave or even just insulting it is sacrilege to humans if nothing else. I asked her shouldn’t it be okay since Jews killed Jesus? She said no one buried should be made fun of. That was that. I leaned against the husk of the tree by the grave as she did on my chest and each of us downed two cans. But we toasted it to the dead first for their very open-minded company. When we walked out the same gate that let us in, a girl jogging past us almost had a heart attack. She walked away with a smirk after remarking that I had lipstick on my face. I could only nod in response. At least the moon’s curtained by clouds now.

As we tumbled on empty stomachs and 660 mL in our systems, we noticed a lot of people running through the streets. Maybe rich people need to seek adrenaline in the middle of the night. I saw a young couple walk hand in hand across the road when she mentioned to me how the air feels cooler here than all of Pune. She tells me how the elite keep their sanctuaries nestled in green shades away from the cacophony of development while digging the rest of the city to pieces. She explained how money actually buys people breathing privileges too. I ask her if she wants to bum a cigarette to that. She refused. I could only see the young guy walk past me with his girlfriend and wonder how different a different life could’ve been. I grew up trying to impress people against my gut. They’re still racing motorcycles by the barrages. Probably still mistaking harassment for compliments. If only I had this — a house coddled in a quiet corner away from commotion; I could just have been without trying to be. Now, I look at the girl wrapped around me and I’m afraid I’ll never be happy. That part of me fell somewhere. I may have lost it playing football with the boys some random hot afternoon in a Kanpur gali I now only visit for holidays. Sometimes, I don’t even remember it well enough to miss it. Grieving feels uneasy because I know something will go very wrong the moment my chest gets lighter. My heart’s a nuisance to my mind when I’m idle. Hell is just a long Sunday. But I won’t tell that to the lapsed Catholic leaning on me. She might remember I’m not her crutch.

We did stumble into some pub. I requested them to play some Goo Goo Dolls as Jimmy Page was getting really loud. I remember using the washroom where two janitors were fighting. The young one was a year older than me; I remember him telling me. He asked me to advocate for him against the old guy forcing him to get married. Something about getting married at 21 so one doesn’t have to worry about finding a wife all their career. I remember hugging the old janitor and telling him that was already the last of my concerns. Then I don’t remember much until closing time. It was pouring when we stepped out. I remember the pattering of the rain on the shed above our head. I remember the cold I felt as the wind blew over my drenched clothes. I remember asking her if she wants coffee from a stall nearby. They were giving out filter coffee in brass cups and glasses, and using walkie talkies in case the police came unexpectedly. I remember rushing across the road to get two. I remember the hot glass against my trembling fingers. I remember her telling me she felt like throwing up all of a sudden. And I remember her doing that. I left Pune the next day.

My weariness was washed into the rippling gutters in that rain. Raindrops dripping off my eyelids spared me from being a trouble to myself for a moment. Standing outside a curfewed stall, now unable to tell wet from dry, I realized everyone’s in love or sad or in love with being sad or sad of being in love or just plain lonely and here I was with 4 pints in me, on a footpath, holding back the hair of a girl I just met as she pukes on the road — not too shabby. After picking food from her hair and shirt, as we sipped on the hot glass Gatti Anna had provided — the coffee tasted like it’s going to be alright.

this song fits the vibe i was trying to capture walking through old and new poona streets

Kicking the rock down your empty street in dark, 
the moon looked more than just inviting tonight.
And scrambling up the drainpipe to that moon,
I just end up in your lonesome window light. 

Now, my tricks and jokes tied up in the locks of your hair,
and all the queen's conviction loose feet in the face of art.
The promises we share die when they fall flat on my chest,
and for our time babe, I’ll only rue it when we’re apart.

For all the words I stole worn my hands too red to wash,
when they tried tabbing bills to the duke's rain and thunder.
So tomorrow I’ll be air in the foggy ruins of night,
slipping outta memory into undressed lanes of wonder.

Let your claws slip now out of my back babe,
for I’ve been running outta smiles to borrow.
And all the things you so want today,
I’ll prob’ly  only settle for tomorrow.

‘til then I dull days playing cards with quasimodo
and nights I busy with don juan on the mula-mutha bends .
So, when you say you wanna keep talking darling,
I’d talk baby but I’m just too spent to be friends.

For that I need to make amends,
and to make amends, I’ll need some time
and to stay with you any longer babe, 
I’ll have to stay behind.
But my feet are fast and far too restless,
so I guess I’ll just be keeping you on my mind. 

PM said don’t buy gold

as the gold is bought in dollars,
and so is oil,
and we barely have dollars for one.

my fields can manage without oil
as my wife made do with brass,
and trading hopes for subsidies

suddenly made patriots of us all.

if only the oil rained from clouds,
and the grain was bought in dollars —

lutyen's delhi would know

how reluctant patriots indulge.

but rotis will always cost rupees
and so will the fees for school
and tomorrow my daughter will work the farm

as we barely have rupees for one 

“Where?” I asked, too invested in the novel I was reading.

“What do you mean where? Are you dumb? On Insta, WhatsApp — everywhere man!” He shoved his screen into my face. I could see an Instagram User who’d shared some reels with Kanishq earlier in the day. “Look man, Pranav’s not available. They’ve left the group as well! Please check.”

Reluctantly putting down my book on an unfinished chapter, I picked up my phone to confirm Kanishq’s suspicions. I was, indeed, blocked everywhere. We’re in third year now. These were the first friends I had made in college — now just faceless Instagram Users.

Almost immediately, I knew what had happened.

“Looks like they know about the marriage invite bro.”

“Yeah, no shit!” Kanishq said, still refreshing his Instagram as if it’d make a difference. Both of us were aware of Einstein’s definition of stupidity. Ironically, that had always been the extent of our intelligence.

I lay on my bed that day as I do all day everyday these days. Wasting away like food that wasn’t tasty enough to be edible. Now stashed in a corner cast to rot until it reeks too much. Melting into the wall against my bed, reading Stoner, it was dawning on me that I was relegated to be a well-versed cliché even if I’d subscribed to my romantic notions of misguided passion. This fad of optional opportunity does come with potential cash influx though, opposed to chasing dreams and hating LinkedIn. The only good that comes with being an engineering student in a faraway land is living in a boys hostel. The famous quote about this lifestyle is that either boys hostel was the best time of your life, or you lived in a PG. Between labs, lectures, presentations, quizzes, evaluations, and exams; every day’s Verdun, every night Sommes. All of us die a little everyday with the meek realizations that we’re not as smart as our schoolteachers or JEE percentile led us to believe. There’s something about embracing the shame imposed on us so shamelessly though. The self-awareness of all the wasted potential makes the humiliation almost cathartic — don’t worry, we already knew that sir, we still won’t come to class. My friends wake me up every morning to drag me through the same parasitic rituals of labs and lectures. We spend odd hours in library to entertain some make-believe notions of productivity only to leer at girls and cuss out their boyfriends. And after wasting all day with the rigor it takes to kill a dream, we shuffle on back to the hostel where everyone’s our friend — kind of. Honestly, if it weren’t for guys from different corners of the nation laughing together at situations which can only be solved by jumping off a terrace, I’m not sure if I would’ve been able to hold off on jumping off a terrace for so long. Well, that and drugs.

“Bro, Raman’s really shook up,” Kanishq said to make me feel something.

“What happened?” I enquired with absolutely no interest other than to end the conversation.

“You know how close he is with Pranav and guys and them blocking him was kind of big deal man!”

“Ah, it’ll sort itself out like it always does.” I knew it would. It’d been three years and far too many forgotten fights amongst us now. How long could it possibly hold?

“It’s not like that man,” Kanishq sighed. “He went to their room in the afternoon, you know, to apologise. And Pranav told him that if he doesn’t get out, he’ll call the warden on him.”

“What!” This can’t be that serious.

“Man, he’s been in his room all day. You don’t even know! I heard him talking on the phone to his family and he might be going back home!”

“The finals are in a week, plus there’s lab evaluations and shit! He can’t leave now!”

“That’s what I’m saying! You think I give a flying fuck about those vegetarian morons blocking us? It’s just, we can’t abandon Raman bro. He’ll screw up his studies, and we’ve got placements next sem!”

“You’re right,” I said, getting up. “Let’s go talk to him!”

The first time I did heroin, I was in my third semester. I’d been a teetotaler up till that point as most people who come to my college are — much dissimilar to most people who leave my college. I’d read Naked Lunch in high school though. And if I couldn’t be a writer shuffling across the carpet laden stone streets of Tangiers; an immunity to any judgement towards the most depraved forms of degeneracy will do. I remember the night, and not just because I’d shot up a syringe in the hostel for the first time.

I’d known Manan for over a year. He used to play table tennis with me in the lobby, fatal topspin on his serve — almost impossible to chop. So when I heard he’d tried to kill himself, I felt like I did often during his service — helpless. Just how much did he not want to live to have downed two bottles of cough syrup before slitting his wrists with a 4-rupee dot pen. This really didn’t jar me though. It wasn’t even the fact that we couldn’t find a wheelchair in time to rush him to the infirmary, so we had to carry his semi-conscious body on our backs. It wasn’t even that the college refused to take him to the hospital for avoiding media coverage and FIRs. Or when the prof still refused to pass him because they’d be setting a precedent where every kid with a bad grade will just attempt to kill themselves, it didn’t affect me as much. It didn’t even bother me that this was the second time in 3 months that someone attempted to end their life in our hostel. It didn’t anger me that there are so many people online pretending to be suicidal out of boredom who’d never understand Manan. Or have the guts he did to do something about it. What really broke me was the fact that I had a quiz the next day, so no one could afford to care for more than a couple of hours. When I went to Pranav’s room to assess what had happened, he was still studying. He could only spare a couple of “Oh shit”s. The prof was not going to postpone everyone’s evaluation over this, he’d said. So, I went up to the fifth floor.

My nerves really couldn’t afford a bong hit at the time, I didn’t want to think. So, I decided to swim in a different river — just hoping to quietly drown for a while. I didn’t want to numb myself of the pain. Of the helplessness. Or sedate the guilt. I just didn’t want to be so mechanical in my thought anymore. The economics of critical thinking had ripped humanity off me. I just wanted to be weak and fragile to feel some of it back. As Jay, who’d been doping since the first sem, was prepping the syringe; he told me that I’m a perfect fit because the nerves in my arm weren’t hard to locate. If only Manan had been as lucky, I thought before surrendering myself to the floor of a stranger’s room.

Last month, Kanishq asked me to come to his sister’s wedding. He was my oldest friend in college and I’m always ready for an open distraction, so the answer was an immediate yes. Considering the inordinate expense of orchestrating an Indian wedding, especially when you’re ladki vaale, Kanishq could only spare two invites. Knowing that half the people in our wing would be studying and the other half should be, Kanishq only invited Raman and me with the pretext of keeping it quiet — something I hold an expertise in and Raman, reservations. Raman wanted me to indulge in his ethical dilemma about truth and subjectivity when we went kurta shopping, I was mostly preoccupied with how good I looked in pink. I could see it from Raman’s point of view though, he was more tightly knit with Pranav, Sujal and all. They were the vegetarian gang. They used to go to temples for outings. Their wild nights were doing double features of IMDB’s top 100. When we went to Abdul’s housewarming party, Raman really wanted to come but he didn’t because Pranav and the others didn’t. They could not eat from the kitchen of a house where non-veg was also cooked (I wished they’d told this to us before Abdul’s mom cooked a fully vegetarian dinner for us — the vegetarians took my kebabs). So, naturally, leaving college in the context of fake emergencies; Raman was a little torn about the entire affair, I was just high.

The first time I did heroin, I decided I’ll do it forever. Even if the comedown feels like all lights are trying to burn out my eyelids, every sound was staggering my brain matter, and each sentence coming to me after the next one has been spoken; there’s still nothing better to satiate a long day. And since all I have are long days, longer nights are harder to manage. It soothes like a parent does before one becomes a person. I never used to escape some kind of abstract melancholy, I’m doing engineering — there’s no time left to spare for rumination. I use because it’s fun. I abuse when it stops being fun.

Really liking something, and I’m not talking about addiction because I’m not addicted, isn’t destructive until you start romanticizing it in your head. All my friends who’ve given their life up to substances aren’t using it for fun anymore. They were too romantic about it. It’s exactly like all my friends who ruined their future for a few months with someone who loved them in lieu of being miserable together. Every time Jay spikes a needle in his brown veins, he’s not having fun chasing his first high. He wants to feel like he did the first time he infused his veins with the brown tar. Just like people want to be in love the exact way they fell. You think smack’s just extreme — go talk to a stoner or a pack a day smoker, there’s never a pack a day amount of tension. People just want to feel the first time they did when the smoke caressed the back of their throat. There might be an allegory here about flying too close to the sun everytime we shoot up and the wax we used to heat the wings burning us out one day in chasing the lulls of fading away but Greek mythology is for posers who spend too much time online, so I’ll refrain. When I was in high school, I broke up to focus on studies and now I’m single to just doze off against walls. It’s easier to schedule your day when you don’t have to barter your leisure for scoring love. The only time I spend with people these days is the small talk I’m coerced into each time I have to score some from the student body dealers. They mostly talk about football and old girlfriends. It’s the only time I consider quitting heroin — when I’m forced to hang out with people who actually have it.

Kanishq and I went to Raman’s room. We really wanted to know how the others found out. Raman told me he had lent his laptop to Aman before going to the lecture, Aman’s didn’t have Omnet. Out of curiosity, just fucking around, Aman discovered the pictures from the wedding. He didn’t waste any time in letting everyone know. When he came back from the lecture, Raman just found his laptop lying on his bed, and himself — blocked.

“Who’s the one really at fault here man?” I asked Raman. “What is he, your fucking girlfriend going through your messages like that? What did he expect to find?”

“I don’t know man,” Raman couldn’t manage an entire sentence. He was silently weeping. I’ve lived as somewhat of a man for over two decades and I still don’t know how you deal with a crying one. Do you just hug them — because I don’t think I’ve ever unironically hugged someone besides girlfriends. There’s no point in trying to console when all you’ve got in your vocabulary are quips and cusses. I just patted Raman on the shoulder whilst counting the tiles in his room. As an attempt to steer away from the awkward hush of the room, I asked Raman if he’d tried to explain himself to the others.

“They’re not even letting me in,” he scoffed.

I could never figure out how people manage to care so much that they surrender all qualms with hurting the one person who cares back. Maybe all love does boil down to who you can break.

One of my friends is dating a good woman. This girl firmly believes that women who work after marriage just don’t care about their family. When asked about why she’s studied so hard to get into this college and why’s she pursuing such a grueling degree — she claims it’s better for dowry negotiations for a girl to be well educated. Something about social credit. I know the guy. I know how hard his single mom worked to get him here. When I ask him why’s he still with her — which I do daily — he just shrugs and says it’s better than having no one. My friend says she’s better than most girls who fuck around. At least she’s wholesome, he says. I’m not wholesome. There’s a pernicious undercurrent in being wholesome that steers one towards being a loser when they’re a man and a hypocrite when they’re a woman.

What’s a wholesome man? It’s someone who talks to their mom everyday, someone who’s not hateful of others, someone who’s respectful of all and naive to everything. If I hide my drugs and politics, and my preference in women — I’m a perfectly wholesome man.

What’s a wholesome woman though? Is it someone who doesn’t speak against marital rape, or doesn’t talk about politics, or dresses to hide? Is it a good woman? Or is it a dead one? I don’t know. I just know she won’t approve of me.

I’ve never been the problematic guy who objects when guys are leering at women. Or just staring long enough into making them feel at fault. It’s not because I’m for it but because I dread to be at the ends of dismay of people who’re “just having a good time” “they’re not doing anything wrong per se” “they’re not raping”. If one can notice, one notices that the bar’s pretty low for being the good man and when one sees that bar as more of a hurdle, one just finds it easier to shoot smack up their veins.

My friend’s girl fervently despises people who eat non-veg so I don’t even want to know what she’d think of casual dope fiends. Her only political stance that my friend’s seemingly bothered by is her take on the importance of chastity, especially before marriage.

“Ah, she’ll come around”, he says.

I don’t think heroin’s that bad.

When we stepped inside Pranav’s room, he began storming out. I held him by the shoulders and asked him to give us a chance to explain ourselves. We spelled out the constraints of the invite.

“Why wasn’t one of them me then?” Pranav stiffly asked Kanishq.

“So, it’s just about that then?” Kanishq said, now exasperated.

“You’re damn right,” he spat out. “You’ve got room for a smackie who’s entire purpose is just scoring a fix. And that lowballing loser who’s never done one thing right in his life — do you think they’re good enough and I’m not?”

“I don’t think it’s about th—,” I tried explaining.

“Oh shut up,” Pranav waved me off. “I don’t even wanna talk to you, you fucking loser! You don’t study. You only get good grades because I help you cheat in exams and this is how you repay me?”

“Oh, fuck off!” Kanishq said as I pressed his arm tightly, we were here for Raman. I said nothing. Pranav was absolutely right, maybe he could’ve phrased it better. But then who am to be offended by a man’s candor?

“Man, this isn’t about me. It’s about Raman, he’s really hurti—”, I began before Pranav cut me off again.

“Raman’s a fucking dog man! He gets kicked out of everywhere he’s been. We befriended him out of pity. I don’t expect anything from you but that two-faced rat I’m the maddest at! Sneaking around behind my back like he’s better than me? He’s nothing! He’s less than nothing actually! I can’t think of any cuss words because he’s worse than all of them!”

Kanishq stormed out of the room and this time I couldn’t stop. I wanted to beat the life out of Pranav. I even knew I could, no matter how high I was. Suddenly, Raman’s crying face dawned on me. And how small Manan had looked in the infirmary bed. I looked at Pranav and Sujal and Aman and I pleaded them to reconsider.

“Man, you know it’s not his fault. We told him to stay shush. He was forced to choose. He was gonna get creamed one way. Maybe he thought you’d understand him better but I guess he misjudged that”, I explained.

“Oh fuck that,” Sujal said. “Don’t try to sound smart. He’s a fucking adult. He can make his own decisions!” Sujal spat in my face.

“I know you guys are angry right now but you’re bullying the one guy who cares about you I don’t care about being blocked. Neither does Kanishq. But Raman’s really hurting. We don’t want him taking any wrong steps now, do we?”

“I don’t care if that moron dies, just as long as our names are not on any note,” Sujal shouted in my face.

“Please just talk to him once,” I begged. “Cut him off, or shout at him — I don’t care. Just talk once, give him some peace.”

They looked tired from shouting. I was trying to figure out who would be swayed most easily by a desperate eye-contact when Aman spoke up.

“Alright,” Aman said. “Send him once.”

Getting out of their room, my conscience weighed heavier than anger. I didn’t know whether to tell Raman all the things said about him before sending him in. I began wondering how’d he react if he knew. I was afraid he’d still apologize to them and ask to be let in. The sight of Raman foregoing all his self-esteem to mend what never was hurt me more than all the words put together. If he chose to be in this after knowing all the truth, I don’t know if I’d ever make eye contact with the guy. If I knew for certain all the ways that the dope’s killing me, would I still let the needle break skin? If I knew exactly the damage it did to my body, would I still think it’s fun? I don’t want to know because I don’t know. I don’t know if I’d stop and that’s the saddest thing about it. If I knew for certain exactly all the ways I’m dying and continue still — what excuse would I then give to continue living? So, I decided not to tell Raman what had happened. I didn’t want to hate another friend. Engineering’s too hard to go through without relying on some kinds of co-dependence. Afterall, in the land of the crippled — who can really afford to ban crutches?

अशोक वाटिका आग लगी है 
जल गये माँ बेटे 
बाप ने दो कोल्हाल सुनी 
तीसरी पे प्राण दे बैठे

चिता पे रोटी सिकती,
चूले की होवे ठेकेदारी|
यहाँ रोज़ जवानी बिकती,
बूढ़ी हो गई आस दिहाड़ी॥
मद्धम आँच पे पकता,
जीवन मर्ज़-ए-मजबूरी है|
नसीब रहे उसका पुख़्ता,
जिसकी मरघट पे मशहूरी है॥

अशोक वाटिका आग लगी है 
कुकी बाप ने मेयतेई माँ खोयी 
बेटा जो माँ संग जल गया 
अब जलावे बचो ना कोई 

ज़िंदा है वो काफिर, 
जेहो कोसे ख़ातिर घर ना है|
झुटलाते सारे साहिल,
गंगा में डूबे तरना है॥
कपटी तेरा काजल,
कर्म की कालिक पोते मिलके|
बिने बीज बरसाती,
बिसराएँ भुलों के छिलके॥

अशोक वाटिका आग लगी है 
नर-नारी जनसंघार है 
जो रामदूत अमरीका जाए
ऐसा भक्त बेकार है 

सूनी हो गई सड़कें,
संद गई गलियाँ, खून की नाली|
परकट ये आज़ादी लड़के,
सोन समझकर घर में पाली॥
क्यों वानरसेना हमें बचाए,
बदजात की बू जो ठहरे|
अरे अपने सपने कहाँ सजाये,
धूल जमी चौखट पे तेरे॥

अशोक वाटिका आग लगी है 
मन की बात ना बोलो प्यारे 
भैरों की जो आँख लगी है 
चुग लो खेत खलियान तुम सारे 

लहू से सीचे खेत जो खिलते,
मिट्टी पत्थर बन जाती हैं।
इस मिट्टी से दिल जो सिलते,
वो हर जुलूस बराती हैं॥
सत्ता सुलघती बहकावे में संदल की आग, 
सेज हमे बताकर मरणासन बिछाये है।
राख को तिलक करे वो इंक़लाबी का दाग, 
हर अमर की शहीदी पे रोती लाख माँए हैं॥

अशोक वाटिका आग लगी है 
दबता जनतंत्र का गाला
ऐसे रामभक्तों से तो 
रावण ही था भला

the narration’s done by a cousin of mine who really forced me to put this online, thanks pandey

Step 1:
for a beak so little on its face,
you hear it chirping too loud
bearing the entire era its witness.
that shouldn't be,
that can't be.
you see it strutting its flight for the field below
flaunting its wings for all who walk
for you
below?
is sky an acceptable fence
for a sparrow from a good nest?
what respectable sparrow leaves its nest
to wander strange skies, strange fields anyway?
surely this shouldn't be?
surely you mustn't let it.

Step 2:
so you cage the little thing
from behind your fingers to gilded bars.
how is it so wrong still —
to feed, to care, to revere?
afterall, to own is to love
and to love is to stay.
horizon reflects in the lines of her face,
as pendulous eyelids spill regrets.
how could you have loved it in the sky above,
flying over a thousand men,
flying over to a thousand more?
singing for the trees and grass,
singing to sleep a stranger's child.
now, you have it
all yours to love.
surely, this must be it.

Step 3:
when it won't shut up still,
banging its head against your will —
launching off with nowhere to fly
then falling short,
against your fate — cursing its own.
shrugging off all your concern with tears,
unmoved by all your attention,
when all your attention is just it.
surely this can't be,
surely you don't let it.
so you clip its wings,
and with a click and shriek
all its long flights now cut down to hops.
hopping away or flying with limp,
on its own accord 
but hopping still in your sight
so it doesn't fall prey
to some savage's hunger.
surely you can't let it die,
surely you can always kill it.

Step 4:
but it hops still,
drowning your pride in its insolence.
and when it won't stop chirping to the sky afar,
you suddenly understand why dogs cry at night.
it needles the air around you,
burning the air in your lungs —
that it had once taken away.
melting you to oceans,
for a handful of sky.
so when you feed it still,
you feed the dreams to fly,
dreams to escape what nurtures,
dreams to abscond that protects,
from the wolves and sheep,
and other men that breathe.
but it chirps still,
to the tune of you never measuring up,
surely this can't be.

Step 5:
so you kill
what you couldn't control.
silence howls now for once.
as you hear it gasp for breath,
as you see it free at last —
the cage doesn't seem too bad now.
as your mouth waters 
you know that blood is red, 
and insides white — yum.
at last it lets you touch, 
if only it had let you touch.
as day merges with its end, 
you move into yours.
and there’s no hesitation, no protests
just silence humming in your sweet embrace.
and you keep at it,
till it starts to reek 
and maggots share your love for rations.
so you move on
and get away.
and now, to get away —
you just get away.
in a shallow grave,
in a wheat field,
silent.
and if someone happens upon it?
there's always naked sparrows,
fertilizing the fields they so wished to flee.
one of many,
absolutely no one at all.
surely, this is it.

APPENDIX
and if the silence gets too quiet,
so long as the sky's blue,
and the air flows —
there must be sparrows,
and there must be gold chains behind velvet bars,
and there must be shallow graves in wheat fields.

inspired by margins from a local paper

Damocles and

his newly elected cabinet of old

I write to you from Reasi, where pilgrims were slaughtered because they believed in the wrong God — I don’t know if the killers were talking about temples or the parliament. I don’t believe in God for I’ve seen babies adorned in qafans dolled up on pyres. Rarely, if ever, were their ashes tricoloured. I write to you a story from UP, with a handful of love and a fistful of rage.

I just hope you don’t read as well as you care.

- Proud Indian

and a somewhat human being

Less than a month ago today, I had to go to one of my cousin’s for Eid. Being back from college doesn’t mean anything until your family, and those around ‘em, ask you if there’s a food shortage in the college mess. So, I was off to chase my familiarity in the salty aftertaste of aunty’s noon chai. My brother’s house stands in a neighborhood too full of people for the metro to reach. With the rickshaw drivers now beaten to the scummy parts of town, my only option was an Ola Auto; at least India is growing in some ways. The screen said — Iqbal Ahmed: arriving in 5 minutes. The fact that I’d procrastinated my travel till sundown didn’t really spare me any time to cancel the auto in lieu of booking a safer sounding name. I learnt that the boundaries of my liberalism only extend till eating biryani at my brother’s house. Maybe it’s an aftermath of growing up in a secular country. The apprehension may be a consequence of being grown up in a different one. It also didn’t help that Ashar lived in Chamanganj — the locality which was nicknamed Chhota Pakistan during the Babri Riots. The neighbourhood was reprimanded for that christening by having its electricity cut-off and water supply turned off until every house had a white flag, often vests and dhotis, hanging from their chhajja. During lockdown, I couldn’t talk to Ashar because the internet had been turned off there on account of the stone-pelting protests of CAA. My own eyes remember seeing a little kid put in cage as his house was bulldozed for throwing bricks at the police with the adults. It was, however, too late; and my getting there too important for me to be thinking about old news.

I stepped into the auto. It wasn’t lit up with cute signs and neon lights the way Indian influencers would like you to believe. There was no song playing, just the gurgling of a machine that’s been used way too long but it works. Maybe there’s something to say about the preservation of the auto which I would’ve noticed had it not been smelling like piss. Iqbal bhai asked me where I wished to go. My brother lived in an obscure building on a cliché of a street. Knowing he wouldn’t understand anyway, I just told him the locality and the name of the building, Al-Noor, it was called — while phoning my brother to explain the route better. Asking Ashar for local landmarks to navigate the way, the driver turned and asked if the building was next to a specific chaat-stall. I asked Ashar and he shouted yes. I, relieved with the fact that I wouldn’t have to bear the shame of not knowing my own town, informed Iqbal that it was. With a proud modesty, Iqbal bhai informed me that he’s been driving an auto around the city since autos first started coming in. I think Iqbal was old, not ancient. I guess there’s a limit to which you can trust old-town folk, regardless of the opiate they consume.

Through dark and dingy roads and through cheerful butcheries that turned my Pandit stomach — we reached Ashar’s home. I got off and asked Iqbal to share his QR with me — another sign that India was growing in ways that mattered. I saw him, for the first time since I boarded the auto, unsure. In this old man’s confusion, I noticed vulnerability. The lines of his face, the same ones which made Iqbal righteous whilst abusing children doing stunts on bike, now cast him fragile when confronted with something that seemed out of his leap.

I was suddenly remembering an old tortoise I once saw in Pattaya.

“He’s old now. So, he is burdened under the shell which he used for protection. That’s why he doesn’t go in deep water anymore — he mightn’t be able to swim. So, he just drags himself out on the sand”, the guide had told me in broken English. Now, in the wrinkles that riddled Iqbal’s face, I saw that hundred-year-old tortoise again.

Maybe standing on corpses is actual growth.

Iqbal told me that he didn’t use net-banking because it seemed too complicated. The shortcuts this man used to get me here — duality of veterans, I guess. I called my brother to ask if he can come down with some cash. I was irritated because who carries cash anymore? Well, except people who use phones with buttons. Iqbal told me that I could go upstairs and he’ll wait for the cash for I look like I come from a good home. I told him that I couldn’t leave him hanging like that. He took out a bundle of beedis from his front pocket and lit one up as we waited under a flickering streetlight. I asked him for a drag — he refused saying I wouldn’t like it. As we brooded around in class-based silence, I noticed Iqbal’s auto was covered in BJP stickers with Pro-Modi slogans and promises for Indian middle-class. The dichotomy of UP politics and Ashar taking an hour to find some change made me curious, so I asked Mr. Ahmed if he gets this work done himself or if party workers force him into it.

“Neither,” he replied. “It is cheap, that’s all that matters to me,” the driver said.

“If I had gone to a normal shop to get it done, they would’ve charged me at least a thousand bucks; but at crossroads, these party workers do it for free — and sometimes they even give water bottles or juice!” I nodded at the simplicity of the circumstance.

“But son, cheap cost will always return cheaper results,” Mr. Ahmed said. “These covers only last until elections, after that they give out and start stinking.” He sighed and continued, “but at least we’ve got something till then — however bad it is, at least it was free”

I asked him why doesn’t he feel conflicted about all this, especially after what Modi said in his recent speeches.

“The May sun doesn’t see Hindu — Musalman son, only potential pickles. And after all, the climate is making us Hindu as well,” Mr. Ahmed said this to a guy who could only blink in response.

“Well, we’re all burning up beta, look at the temperature! No one gets buried anymore!” He said and laughed.

I chuckled too — why was the change taking so long? Finally, Ashar came and I gave Iqbal bhai the fair, all in coins. I waved Iqbal Ahmed good bye and wished him Eid Mubarak. I didn’t say goodnight because I knew it makes no difference to him. The auto driver said nothing as he drove away, he had another ride to pick.

March is the harshest month, forcing
bougainvilleas through thin cracks.
Winter coddled us — dead and wrapped
and summer stalled the earth in her axis;
longing a shower — like Ganga — oozing sweat.
Pink, white and yellow slither down picket fences
as the sun, reluctant, commits to arson.
Days old slumbers now broken into blaring birdsongs,
those dreams drowned in infant grassbeds (fenced only by blue).

When my mother and I walked to the clinic,
she said: "Beta, don't be afraid." I flinched
on seeing the looming hunched trees inviting me
to hang (and fallen leaves scorched) in shades of orange.
With a doctor's words for a bargain gone sour,
and my mother's arm for a lack of crutch;
I shuffled back home on pain and footsteps,
unthinkingly swimming through regret and time.
She stopped for thieving a withering succulent,
to nurse life back in another dying child.

Our balcony is littered with life in transit
to manure. Quenched soil wafts rain scent while
the sun bleeds to black in my coffee; these habits
I inherit with the gardener's eyes. Parched or
drowned, all look the same (at the hands of ebbing clocks).
Dirt in nails wanes with promise, and weeds grow
faster than bark. Caring was all the gardener ever taught,
the rest I learnt from being her eldest.
I left my home for profits — trading all nostalgia for dread;
my mother raised a gardener, and all her plants are now dead.

शीत लहर में कोहरे को शॉल सा ओढ़े अपने शहर को छोड़ते समय मैंने इस हकीकत के साथ समझौता किया कि मैं अब बड़ा हो गया हूँ। बचपन को याद करना अब किसी तालाबी शीशे में झाँकने जैसा लगता है, जिसमे एक विकृत प्रतिबिम्ब में मुझे अक्सर अपना चेहरा ढूँढना पड़ता है। पुरानी यादों में खो जाना टूटे काँच को हाथ से बटोरने सा है — ख़ून भी आ जाएगा और सारे बितरे साफ़ भी होने से रहे। टूटे काँच को नजरंदाज करने में भी कई नुक़सान हैं; आए दिन ख़ुद ही के तलवे में घुसेगा। खाल पिरोद के मास में दफ़्न हो जाएगा। इन्हीं कारणोंवश मैं अक्सर शीशें तोड़ने के बाद उस कमरे पे ताला मार देता हूँ — जगह भले ही कम बचे परंतु कम से कम चुभने के डर और बटोरने की ज़िम्मेदारी से तो मैं अपने हाथ साफ़ कर सकता हूँ।

31 दिसम्बर को रात के 11:50 बजे मेरा फ़ोन ऐसे बजा कि मानों उन्हीं बंद कमरों में से किसी एक का किवाड़ कोई अंदर से कूट रहा हो। फ़ोन उठाने के कुछ पल बाद मुझे एक और यादगार सीख मिली — आदमी हमेशा एक सा सिसकता है, भले ही वह रो रहा हो या हस रहा हो। शायद इसी कश्मकश से उभरने के लिए इंसानों को बात करते समय कान और मुंह के अलावा आँखें भी बख़्शी गई हैं। किसी से आँखे मिलाकर बात करने पर कल्पना के लिए बहुत कम गुंजाइश रह जाती है। पर अब उन्नति और उत्पादिकता ने सारी बात-चीयत को सिर्फ़ कान और मुंह के हवाले छोड़ दिया है — हर व्याख्यान की सारी इंसानियत मानो किसी संवाद में सिमट गई है।

जब दिल्ली यूनिवर्सिटी की परीक्षाओं के बीच अली ने मुझे बताया कि वह नया साल मनाने अपने दोस्तों के घर जा रहा है तो मैं काफ़ी ख़ुश था | मेरे मिलनसार दोस्त को अपने नए साल का आगमन सिर्फ़ चार दीवारों के साथ नहीं करना पड़ेगा ।अली अक्सर लोगों को अपनी ओर रिझाने में काफ़ी माहिर रहा है — उसके हर दोस्त को लगता है कि अली ही उसका सबसे करीबी यार है। कभी-कभी उसकी इसी विशेषता से मुझे काफ़ी तकलीफ़ भी होती थी — अगर अली सब ही के साथ पानी सा घुल-मिल लेता तो फिर किसी चार दिन पुरानी यारी और हमारी बचपन से कबूली रिश्तेदारी में क्या फ़र्क़? पर जब उसने नया साल का सबसे पहला फ़ोन अपने सबसे पुराने मित्र को लगाया — सिसकते हुए — माफ़ी माँगते कि वह इस साल हमसे मिल ना सका; तो मुझे यकीन हो गया कि मैं वाक़ई में उसकी असल यारी का हकदार हूँ। हस्ते हुए तो आप ज़माने को चेहरा दिखा सकते, पर टूटकर रोते हुए कोई आदमी भला किस से ही बात कर सकता? मुझे नही लगता कि मैं कभी किसी के सामने इतनी शिद्धत से बिखर पाऊँगा । लेकिन मैं खुशनसीब हूँ की मेरे दोस्त मुझे इतना सुलझा समझते हैं कि उन्हें मेरे सामने कमजोर होने से कोई शिखवें नहीं हैं।

छुट्टियों से कुछ महीने पहले, नौकरी लग जाने का जश्न मनाने मैं चार दोस्तों संग दिल्ली गया था। अली हमारी खातिरदारी का ज़िम्मा किसी रिश्ते सा निभाने की आस में हमसे भी ज़्यादा ख़ुश था। स्टेशन पर उतरने से मेट्रो में बैठके और फिर 2.5 मील चलके मुझे दिल्ली की कुछ समझ महसूस होने लगी। दिल्ली के लोगों के रवैया को मैं उसी शहर की ठुसी हुई अतिप्रजन गलियों के दर्पण में फिर भांपने सा लगा। एक गलियारा जहाँ चलने की सहूलियत नहीं, वहीं कई पुश्ते पल जाती हैं और एक ही किराने की दुकान को अपनी ख़ानदानी धरोहर बनाये उस किराए की रईसी पे भी इतराती हैं। और अगर हम एक शहर और उसके वासियों को एक धारणा में समेट सकें तो काफ़ी साफ़ रूप से झलकता है कि हमारे इस महान देश की राजधानी का नाम दिल्ली क्यों है। यहाँ बसी हर अंतड़ी-ग्रंथि अपने आप को हृदय सा महत्वपूर्ण आंकती हैं — जब तक उनका संक्रमण रोकने के लिए उन्हें शरीर से नोचकर इंसानियत से निजात ना कर दिया जाये।

शादीपुर में मेट्रो खम्बा न० 30 के सामने एक गली कटती है जिसमे रणजीत नाम के आदमी ने अपना पूरा घर कॉलेज के बच्चों को छोटे कमरे महंगे किराए पर देने के लिए उठा दिया है। अली उसे डैडी रणजीत कहता है क्यूंकि वह अक्सर ही किसी बहाने अपने किरायेदारों से लड़ने आ जाता है। मकान में घुसते ही एक माला उतरकर तहख़ाने में एक 10X10 का कमरा है जिसमे अली को अपने 4 साल की डिग्री पूरी करनी है। इस कमरे में एक छोटी सी रसोई और बाथरूम भी जुड़े हैं। और इधर मैं अपने चार दोस्त लेके रुकने आया था — शुभावसर पे अली ने भी अपना एक दोस्त बुला लिया था। बगल के एक टेंटहाउस से मैं और मेरा दोस्त 4 गद्दे किराए पर ले आए। जब मैं पैसे देकर अकेला लौट रहा था तब एक स्मैकिया मुझसे रगड़कर चलने लगा। उसकी चोरी की फ़िराक़ समझने में मुझे उतना ही समय लगा जितना भाग के वापस अपने दोस्त के घर जाने में। लौट के आने पर अली हमसे बार-बार पूछ रहा था कि हमे ज़मीन पर सोने से कोई दिक्कत तो नहीं — हमने उसे समझाया कि हम एक इंजीनियरिंग कॉलेज में लड़को के हॉस्टल में रहने वाले छात्र थे तो हमें ज़मीन पर सोने से ज़्यादा अजीब उसकी फ़िक्र लग रही थी।

बहार जाते समय अली ने हमे समझाया कि हमारी वेश-भूषा एक भारतीय इंजीनियरिंग छात्र का मानवीकरण कर रही थी जो की एक बी०कॉम० छात्र का तरीका था हमे जाहिल बोलने का। अली ने हमे बहार पहनने के लिए अपने कपड़े और जूते दिए। फिर सजाकर मानो किसी बड़े की तरह वह हमे दिल्ली घुमाने ले गया। जामा बाज़ार में एक घंटे में 6 जगह खाने के बाद — हमे बहुत लोगों ने चोरों सा घूरा, सीधे मौत के गाने सुनते हुए हम आगे एक रिक्शा में रवाना हुए। जामिया में ग़ज़ब के स्मैश बर्गर और फ्राइज़ खाने के बाद अली ने हमें और आगे के लिए पूछा। अगले दिन जब हम मजनू के टीले पर बेकन-सीज़र सलाद खा रहे थे, तो अली ने मुझसे पूछा कि छोटे में उसको क़ुरान पढाने जो मौलाना साब आते थे वह अभी क्या कहते। मैंने अली को याद दिलाया कि मौलाना साब को पढाने से ज़्यादा रुचि हमारे साथ क्रिकेट खेलने में थी। यह सुनकर अली हसा और बोला कि अगर मौलाना साब हमारे साथ दिल्ली घूम रहे होते तो वह हौज-ख़ास पे लड़कियों का सजदा करने में मशरूफ़ हो जाते। ना कोई इल्म किताबें पढ़ी, ना मक्के जाकर हज करा — अली ने सिर्फ़ यारों को राज़ी करना ही मज़हबी रूप से निभाया है। शुक्र है भगवान का।

खाने को हलक तक भरके अली हम सबको अपनी पसंदीदा जगह दिखाने ले गया। रात के बारह बजे जब दिल्ली के पतझड़ की सर्द हवाएं मेरे बालों को एक प्यारी लड़की की तरह सहला रहीं थीं तब मुझे समझ में आया कि यह मामूली सा फुटपाथ अली की मनपसंद जगह क्यों है। एक पराये शहर में क्यों इस एक जगह पे वो अपने घर से ज़्यादा हक़ झाड़ रहा था। मेरे दायें ओर था हमारे देश की संसद और बायें ओर इंडिया गेट। अली मेरी तरफ़ मुड़ता और बोलता कि सोचो कितने बड़े मुकाम हमारे देश ने हासिल किए हैं जो इसी सड़क के ऊपर से गुज़रें हैं। मैंने इस बारे में सोचा। फिर सोचा कि कैसे अब वो देश खंडित हो रहा है, उसकी जगह एक नया राष्ट्र बन रहा है। इस नए राष्ट्र में एक नई संसद भी होगी। एक नई संसद की स्थापना को हमारी सरकार ने एक नया सवेरा बताया है — सरकार तो सही ही बोलती है पर मैं नहीं मानता कि इससे पहले हमारे देश में कभी सूरज ही नहीं निकला। माना कि इमारत अंग्रेज़ी है किंतु क्या आज़ादी के बाद से अभी तक अँधेरा ही था? क्या नेहरू, पटेल, गांधी, कलाम, वाजपेयी — क्या ये सब चमगादढ़ थे जो एक स्याह मुल्क को विदेशी चूलों पर परोस रहे थे? क्या इस बात की संतुष्टि को ही सुबह कहते हैं कि अब जिस भट्टी में ये देश सुलघ रहा है उसपे “मेड इन इंडिया” की मोहर लगी होगी? चलों शायद इसी वाक्य को लालटेन बतायें कि अब कम से कम इस देश के टुकड़े करने और बेचने वाले नहीं परंतु ख़रीदने वाले भी सौ-फ़ीसदी हिंदुस्तानी हैं। अली को ये सब बातें फ़िज़ूल लगती — या फिर वो मेरी तरह एक पंडित घर में ना पैदा होने के कारण ऐसा दिखता। वह सिर्फ़ खड़े हुए इंडिया गेट को निहारे जा रहा था। एक दम से मेरी ओर मुड़ा और बोला: भाई कितने मूर्ख होते होंगे ना वो लोग जो पढ़ने बाहर जाते हैं। मैं सिर्फ़ मुस्कुराया।

लौटते समय मुझे वापिस किसी स्मैकिये से मुठभेड़ का ख्याल खाये जा रहा था। मैंने अली से पूछा कि उसने अपने कॉलेज के पास ही कोई जगह क्यों नहीं ले ली। उसने हस्ते हुए मुझे सूचित किया कि अच्छे मुहल्लों में मुसलमानों को बुरा किराएदार मानते हैं। मेरे चेहरे पे आशंका पढ़ने के बाद वह ख़ुद ही आगे से बोला कि सही भी है — अगर वो हिंदू होता तो उसे भी दिक्कत होती, भरोसा नहीं कर सकते। मैंने कभी सोचा भी नहीं कि मेरे उपनाम से किसी को इस कद्र दख़्ल हो कि वह मुझसे पैसे लेकर भी मुझे रुकने की जगह ना दे। क्या मैं इतना खुदगर्ज़ था कि ख़ुद के अधिकारों से भी अनजान था या फिर दूसरों के हालातों से अपरिचित रहना भी मेरा इस देश में एक जन्मसिद्ध अधिकार बन गया है। मैं नीचे देखने लगा और अली के दोस्त से पूछा उसका कितनी दफा ऐसे ही अली के साथ रुकना होता है। वह मुझसे बोलता कि भैया मैं हर हफ़्ते ही घरवालों से झूट बोलकर आ जाया करता हूँ। मैंने पूछा अगर वह पढ़ाई के कारण घर पे झूट बोला करता है। उसने बताया कि उसके घर वालों को उसके अंकों से कोई दिक्कत नहीं परंतु एक मुसलमान के साथ रहने से है। उसके घरवालों को पता है वो पढ़ता नहीं तो अंकों का क्या ही करेंगे पर एक मुसलमान के साथ रहते-रहते अगर खतना हो गया तो ज़्यादा मुसीबतें आन पड़ेंगी। ऐसे ही हस्ते हस्ते हम लोग वापिस अली के घर आ गए।

घर में कदम रखते ही मुझे सूझा की अली के कमरे में कोई खिड़की नहीं है। बिना घड़ी के आप अली के कमरे में यह भी नहीं बता सकते थे कि चार सुबह के बज रहे थे या शाम के। शायद इसलिए वह अक्सर बेवक्त मुझे फ़ोन करा करता है, और कोसता है जब मैं ना उठाऊँ। मुझे उसकी जीवावस्था किसी पीड़क-जंतु सी लगी जो बिना सूरज के ज़मीन के नीचे रहता, सोता और खाता है। और देखने पर मुझे इस बात का भी कष्ट हुआ कि सलाह करने के लिए अली पे कोई जानमाज़ भी नहीं है। जब मैंने उससे इस बारे में पूछा तो हस्ते हुए मुझसे बोलता कि भाई मैं बुरा मुसलमान हूँ, मैं ये सब नहीं करता। मैं भी क्या ही कहता? भला मैंने कौन से बहुत पंडित धर्म निभायें हैं जो किसी और की श्रद्धा पे टिपड़ी करूँ। परंतु, ख़ुद के नास्तिक होने की बावजूद भी जब कोई ऐसा व्यक्ति मुझे मिलता हो जिसका भक्ति भाव से मन उठ गया है तो मुझे दुख बहुत होता है। शायद किसी सूफी कवाली में सुना था कि जो गाना गाता है वो दो बार पूजा करता है — काश मुझे भी गाना आता क्यूंकि प्रभु पूजे तो अरसे बीत गए हैं। पर अली में इतनी नैतिकता तो है कि उसे समझ में आ जाए कि संविधानिक दृष्टिकोण से वो बुरा नहीं बल्कि अच्छा मुसलमान है। हमारे देश में एक अच्छा मुसलमान होने कि क्या हाजतें हैं? एक अच्छा हिंदुस्तानी मुसलमान सजदा नहीं करता, उसे झटके और हलाल में कोई फ़र्क़ नहीं, वह बिना किसी आपत्ति की जय श्री राम बोल सकता है, जिसके ज़्यादातर दोस्त हिंदू हैं, देशभक्ति के ऊपर बनी पिक्चरों को देखकर उसकी धार्मिक भावनाओं को क्षति नहीं पहुँचती, उसे सरकार से कोई शिकायतें नहीं, जो पाकिस्तान को गाली दे, जिसे दारू पीने से कुछ ख़ास ऐतराज़ ना हो, जो औरतों के चरित्र पे सवाल ज़रूर उठाये पर बुरखे और तीन तलाक में ना माने, जो वक़्फ़ की ज़मीनों के लिए कोई हक़ ना जमाए, जिसे टूटे मस्जिदों से कोई दिक्कत ना हो, जो नए मंदिरों की ईंट लगाये, जिसे भजन आते हों और जिसपे अपने हिंदुस्तानी होने का काग़ज़ी समूद हो। हमारे धर्मनिरपेक्ष देश में एक अच्छा मुसलमान वही है जो रत्ती भर भी धार्मिक हो ही ना। तो इन्ही मायनों के तहत, मुझे अली को बताना है की वह एक अच्छा मुसलमान है। उसके नाम को छोड़के इस देश को उसके अस्तित्व से कोई ख़ौफ़ नहीं है। काश एक अच्छा हिंदू होना भी इतना आसान होता तो मुझे भी बिना टीका लगाए और दूसरों को धमकाए एक अच्छे ब्राह्मण का सर्टिफिकेट मिल जाता। अगले दिन जब ऑटो में बीटल्स के गाने सुनते हुए हम स्टेशन कि ओर वापिस जा रहे थे तो मैंने अली की नम पलकों को देखा। मैंने हम दोनों की मर्दानगी के खातिर कुछ बोला नही। बस अपने उन्हीं यादों के कमरे के एक महफ़ूज़ हाशियों में उस दृश्य को भी हिफ़ाज़त कर दिया।

जब कॉलेज आने के बाद अली बी मुझे ऋषिकेश से वीडियो कॉल किया तब मैं बहुत ख़ुश था कि अब ये अपनी रुआसी से इस कद्र उभर गया है कि पहाड़ों कि सैर लगाने निकल गया। मेरे फ़ोन उठाते ही बोलता कि भाई सोचा तुम्हें गंगा आरती लाइव दिखादूँ। मैं ज्यादा कुछ देख नही पा रहा था तो मेरी खामोशी टोक के कहता कि भाई फ़ोन पे भले ही ना दिख रहा हो पर ये उसके जीवन के सबसे तर कर जाने वाले लम्हों में ये एक है। मैंने उसे जब बताया कि मैं भी लैण्डोर गया था घूमने तो मैंने भी ऐसे कई दृश्य देखे तो मुझे टोक के बोलता कि भाई लैण्डोर में मुझे अंग्रेज़ों की धरोहर पे धूप सेकनी पड़ी थी, पर ऋषिकेश में वह भारतीय संस्कृति में डुबकीयाँ लगा रहा था। जब मैंने पूछा कि उसने और क्या-क्या किया तो मुझे बताता कितने अन्य मंदिर घूम के आया। और जब वह नंदी जी के कान में अपनी इच्छा सच करवाने गया तो नंदी जी स्वयं उसे बोले कि “अबे तुम तो इंपोस्टर हो!” मैंने हस्ते हस्ते उससे पूछा कि भाई मांगा क्या यह भी बता दो तब मुझे कहता है कि भाई ऐसे सच थोड़ी ना होगा।

मुझे एक राष्ट्रीय चुनाव अभियान के समय बड़ा होते हुए ऐसे ही एक दिन पता चला था कि अली मुसलमान है। मेरी ज़िंदगी में इससे कुछ ख़ास असर नहीं आया। पर अली की शायद बदल सी गई। मैं ख़ुद को ग्यारह वर्ष की उमर में इतना आगाह ना होने दोषी नहीं ठहराता — पर मैं अगर अब भी सुखद रूप से अंधा घूमता रहा तो ज़रूर एक बुरा दोस्त होने का कसूरवार रह जाऊँगा। आजकल जो भाषा और नामों पे लड़ते हैं उन्हें यह तक नहीं पता जलने और दफ़्न होन से मंज़िलें नहीं बदलती और शाब्दिक उस रास्ते में रह जाती है सिर्फ़ एक चुप्पी। मैं भगवान में नहीं मानता पर दोस्ती के ख़ातिर मैं नंदी जी के कान में सिर्फ़ यह बोलूँगा कि प्रभु ,मैं एक ऐसे देश में पैदा हुआ जहाँ मेरा भाई अली है — आपका बहुत-बहुत धन्यवाद।

someday down the line
when people are memories, 
and age has numbed me further:
I'll attempt this in Hindi.

where I come from
names have meanings

you can't just erase contacts then
for even if every person with that name goes
the name might not
it may stay 
in gods you stopped believing in, 
and prayers you can't forget 

you can cast it forgotten
until you hear someone describe a sunset 
and you understand why dogs cry at night

no utterance is meaningless
when it's the only way you know to describe 
the color of your scab,
the dressing of bruised knees,
the leaders you didn't elect,
the aroma of your city's food or
the smell from old sweatshirts you didn't want to find.

when you weren't versed with broken heart semantics
prone to be under cheap influences — 
you confused their names for 
each expression of love, 
all things of beauty 
now, a few slipped words  in bouts of emotion
draw blood from the scar you thought you'd forgotten.

so what must you do then — 
if you could do anything:
be some colorblind heathen deaf to laughing children?
or some mute monk who never opens his eyes?

some of you might accuse this is all about one girl,
in vain attempts to veil its sappiness
but that still won't answer the question — 
just how do you go on forgetting a girl called happiness. 

A mile from the post-mortem house and a mile to kindergarten, he lives mostly in his flat overlooking the streets he’s been calling home for most of his life. Today, when he walked to the local bakery, he was pleased with the sight of the store manager dressed as Santa. Ten days into being back from college and ten days before he goes back — this was the first time he felt at home. The local Santa, however, just stood scrolling his phone when he walked in asking for two large packets of white bread. Discarding the blandness of the interaction to just plain lack of manners, he stepped out to head back home. Two steps from the bakery’s door, he heard the Santa cheer Ho-Ho-Ho and ring his bell too joyfully to be sarcastic. Two steps from the bakery, a girl just stood elated wrapping her mom’s hand with little fingers while accepting Santa’s sweets with the other one. Walking back home, with two bags of bread and no sweets, he could only think about being back at his wretched school again.

The teachers of class 4 had organized an inter-section competition for the best decorated section. Even though he deemed it pointless, his mother had forced too many Christmas decorations in his bag to ignore. Kavya had asked him to help her decorate the board outside class. She’d come up with the clever scheme to pin up students’ artwork along with the decorations to make the entire aesthetic come more to a realistic life than just a glittery Frankenstein’s monster. The first zero-period was for decoration and the last half an hour of the day for judging the best class. As much as he hated to admit it, looking at the artworks of his classmates made him glad to be involved. He liked being of use and spying on the other section to report back on the nemesis’ progress. To be more than just a passive involvement, he tried to do his part in the break period. Instead of eating, he drew a comic strip where he claimed Santa was actually disguised Satan. He was reading too much Captain Underpants and Goosebumps in fourth grade for his own good. He showed it to Kavya, who found it hilarious. She showed it to her friends, who found it obtuse. She even showed it to their English teacher who was quite impressed by the effort. The Geography teacher, however, was very Catholic and offended. He didn’t care about any of it.

In the last zero period, Nidhi ma’am came in with a girl from her section. The girl pointed at him. Nidhi ma’am walked up to him, slapped him and asked him where he’d hidden it. When he told her he had no clue what she was on about — she slapped him again. Nidhi ma’am then told Pooja ma’am, his class teacher, that her class’s Christmas tree was stolen and she knew who it was. When Pooja ma’am began asking him — Nidhi ma’am just cut her off saying obviously he’d lie. You know the kid, she said — he’s always up to something. Nidhi ma’am slapped him again and asked where he’d hidden the tree. He kept swearing he had no clue. With his head still down and ears red, he suddenly heard Kavya protest. She promised he’d been with her all day and she didn’t see him do anything. Nidhi ma’am called Kavya a liar but most of the class backed her. After deeming a group of 10 year olds co-conspirators, Nidhi ma’am rushed out with her student and slammed the door. He hated half these people. He had used every opportunity to make fun or not talk. It wasn’t like they were his biggest fan either. More than half the class loathed his inflection as well. They stuck together though. When he was being slapped repeatedly by a teacher, his classmates felt wronged.

As he walked out of the classroom following the breakdown of neighboring section’s class teacher, and a cancelled decoration contest; he looked back at the class board one last time. His comic strip was pinned up in a corner.

Now, walking back home on the streets all his schoolmates had outgrown, he could not remember if he’d actually stolen the Christmas tree or not — he could only think: he’d never have the kind of friends he did back in school ever again.

Ma sent me out to buy the sweets for Chhoti Diwali, as she has ritualised ever since a white Activah joined our little family. Diwali’s a weird festival once you strip away all that’s pretty. My street’s dressed like a bride. Fall will follow the wedding. Dead leaves. Children left for college. Dogs whom no one feeds — yet they breed. No existentialists on the footpath. No anti-natalism in poverty. Too much hope at stake. Is all evolution just driven by the persistence of hope? The nights bleed a happiness that’s been put on like makeup. You can hear the sky wail all night long. It’s poetic that a festival that symbolises homecoming is the time everyone’s packing their bags. I drove to the local confectionery. There’s a sweet stench masking hours of unpaid overtime and meagre bonuses. The owner has seen me grow up, as he tells all his customers each time I visit. My mother calls him a thief. Go tell Mendel that cynicism’s the dominant trait — right alongside generational wealth. I placed my order.

School’s hard. Teachers use my nature as an excuse to vent their frustrations. With teenage eclipsing all remnants of innocence — everyone’s turning prettier or taller. I’ve been spared from those kinds of experiences. Being funny’s easier than bullying or being bullied. The performance does get tiring, though. Swimming was fun; the instructor should’ve been less. Gymnastics was hard till ecstatic; the administration changed and a spare garage was more productive than any monkey bars or mattresses. Writing’s far too reclusive to matter — nothing to show about that. So, animation’s cool. You get to hang out in the computer lab during zero periods. You get to make posters for events. You get to have some semblance of an oeuvre. I’ve even won a state competition now — trophies definitely validate passion.

Five minutes of nothing happening prompted me to ask Uncle to pack the boxes again. Uncle asked Dubey Ji to pack the boxes and bill them out for beta ji (that’s me, I’m beta ji). Dubey ji, a violently ancient man, struggled against the tape cutter with callused quivering hands. He put the tape in wrong first and almost split his thumb. Dubey Ji figured out the tape cutter like Archimedes did buoyancy. His eureka moment was going back to his desk and taking a comb out of his pocket. After using this comb in a way that really makes a comb look useless, Dubey Ji proceeded to call his wife and melt into a chair. I had no right to interrupt that. On my right was a couple that was simultaneously demonstrating all the pros and cons of an arranged marriage. At least the arranged aspect formalised the negotiation. Good for that dude, I guess.

Animation’s also fun because the instructor really cares (not in the way the swim coach did). Naman sir has taught us not just the tools but what they mean — why they’re used. I’ve never been so fond of a guy who looks like Humpty Dumpty. People think he favours me because I’m funny. The only reason he likes me is because I’m good. The only reason I’m good is because I’ve got nothing else going on. Making something isn’t just another stone you forget to turn while chasing wild geese and meaning. It’s a rock that marks your name. The one you roll up a hill. And if you’re good, others roll yours up too — claiming it their own. It’s also because Naman sir’s seen Hostel and Hills Have Eyes and Saw. It’s more about the fact that he doesn’t think it was wrong of me to have done the same. He’s organised workshops. Called experts to teach us about industry standards. He devotes whatever breathes of his spare time to freelance projects. Have you ever seen a true priest at work — even an atheist would blush. There’s a standard here — a standard to not really care about rules. A standard that imposes on us only caring. Caring about the work we do over anything else. Dogma kills. Conformity asphyxiates. Make nothing over making something mediocre, Naman sir tells us. A lot of my friends find it offensive — but I get it. Shoot me if I’m ever a cliché. Creation is a distillation of humanity. It’s parasocial — not just in shared scars and smiles. A reverence of sacrilege might be a bad way to start your day but great one to live your life. I’ve felt a soul — I can will one into existence if I’m ever having a bad day. A katputtli artist over a banker anyday. Any effing day.

Waiting is the cruellest torture. Pushing a boulder up a hill for all of eternity at least has you doing something. Just watching Sisyphus for five minutes exhausting futility in his pathetic attempts to the top would even make a politician suicidal. Dubey Ji was my Sisyphus. I didn’t kill myself. Who did that make me then? God? Anything that pays is fine. From the corner of my eye, I saw a man leave, smelling more of vague familiarity than sweets. Dubey Ji was bound to exhaust my life before his talk-time so I followed the man down unkempt stairs — to his black Pulsar. The story would be as purposeless as its characters if it were anyone other than Naman sir. I was hesitant about being right. Would’ve been sure if I were wrong. Obesity’s a lot more common now than it was back then, anyway. This could be any fat guy for all I remember. I don’t remember much. I asked the man if he ever taught animation to a bunch of 6th graders. He said yes. I could judge his eyes trying to figure me out. I told him my name. “Alekshindra,” he said. I’ve never corrected him so far — and outside a sweet shop on a festival was no time to start. He told me that I look a lot different now. I’m not sure if the estrangement was flattery or an indictment. He asked me what am I doing these days — and where. I told him about the B.Tech and Jaipur. He looked proud. I wasn’t —of either of those things. I asked him if he’s still at the old school. No, he told me briskly. Trying to validate the prospects of a man twice my age, I agreed the administration had gone berserk. I asked him where was he teaching then. “Actually, I’ve changed that line of work,” he modestly said. Have you ever uttered meekness in response — Naman sir did. Could never see the cool teacher out of teaching. “I’ve got a pharmacy now, in Kakadeo.” Ah, nice sir. I don’t think I said that. He said alright and waved me all the goodbyes and good lucks for the future. It was just the one. He may have sniffed my resignation. That stench and the one of newly packed sweets was my cue to check on Dubey Ji. I could only hope he was done.

when ancient crops leave your farms depleted
consumption renders homeland defeated 
cut, you must, what farmers cannot uproot 
and let it dry if none were left to fruit
then burn the husks that left your fields fallow
this monsoon will wash o’er all that’s shallow
from barren ashes you’ll enrich the earth
and death will surpass what their life was worth
charred ancestors shall purge your land of pest
so, you can start anew with all the rest

aunty has just recently stopped to pray
for her daughter’s now resting cold in may
her man fertilizes the fields he ploughed 
but that pallu ne’er faltered for her baby’s shroud 

sequester the spark or piss on the fire
we’ll warm our hands with the parliament’s pyre

i wrote this poem when my friend/proofreader asked me to write a poem in iambic pentameter, the RG Kar incident had just taken place and i was very angry — i feel almost validated like nostradamus after seeing what happened in nepal
so here’s an old one, unedited

inquilab zindabaad

in a language forced upon me
     by invaders and class,
          through Macaulay and Mahatmas
suffer means to submit to or be forced to endure

but the words I inherited
     from my mother’s womb
          and father’s tongue
said safar (صفر, safr) meant a journey

so, as I grow up, I grow conflicted
     with privilege yet foreign to
          ironic and unoriginal 
pawning the raj (राज, raaj) off my diction for rags

writing in words given by pirates
     that broke what they couldn’t bend
          made my amma insecure when failed to make her sad
now, i'm confused if the loot (लूट, lut) was ever ours to begin with

then, now, when the right word seeps into mind —
     does it tread on wearing a trousseau?
          or stride in burning a crimson saree?
for the bazaar (بازار, bazar) is left just a graveyard of pyres.


my teachers were too busy teaching to learn —
if they did, I’d ask them:

if being forced to endure 
                                        is a journey in itself	

for I don’t know which is which 

Maybe it’s the sun bleeding into night on old parts of town,
or perhaps the barrage rapids dressed in your inviting frown,
or maybe it’s the husk in my chest that leaks too much to fill,
or knowing that my luck with girls only works in letting down.
None of that explains though why — baby I think about you still.  

I can’t drink my water neat nor spare no scowl for scorning 
or forego all pandit's doubt without some kind of warning,
as I look at the greying sky now bleeding mist at my windowsill, 
I don’t even care now whose bed you’ll share tomorrow morning. 
I just know one thing baby, I been thinking about you still.

The kids these days, they tell me, real loving is in letting go, 
but the tragedy of youth is that they never got to know 
to be consumed by a laugh that bore no brunt to kill, 
and choosing to act funny in chasing highs of getting low —
don’t laugh though when you get to know — babe I do think about you still.

I heard you sold your soul for reputation when you moved to the city; 
hated your government for apathy and despised your parent’s pity,
now when your hair’s grayer and strangers who use you lose their thrill —
I just pray to the stars above that you will see yourself as pretty 
as someone who does keep you in his thoughts still.

Don't go back to your home no more, your old man has lost his sway;
the brother that once judged your strut has gambled his pride and say.
But when your mom accepts that she can't cure the love that made you ill,  
don't bother me when the bottle finally drowns your shame away;
for once and for all my love, I'm done thinking 'bout you still.

in coorg, i took a walk and sneaked into an abandoned park —
this picture is taken on a misty madikeri morning in july

I rush inside to get my mom. I have been doing so since I learned to walk. I drag her to the balcony. Her coffee’s inside. She doesn’t like it too hot. We’re different that way — her and I. She smiles at the sight of my amusement, a little at the weather too. “You know, in my village, when clear skies and rain would coincide, they used to say that a jackal’s getting married somewhere in the jungle.” I suppose the rainbow must be dowry. She goes inside. To sip on her lukewarm coffee. To watch the Hindi dub of a Turkish serial that she’s not really watching anyway. I finish my coffee. The rain finishes itself. A rainbow blooms in mourning. Now that’s an epitaph.

Washing my cup I ask her: Why jackal? And why wedding? She looks puzzled. There’s no patter of rain anymore. A filtered sunlight from the kitchen window showers the temple in the prayer room. “Beta, it was a small village. We didn’t have tigers or elephants in our forest. Those are far too royal to be there. No foreigners on safaris near Mirzapur. So, the extent of our fauna ranged from nilgais to jackals. Seeing a jackal, to us, was the closest thing to witnessing the spectacle of wildlife. Now, seeing a jackal’s wedding would be about the kookiest thing we could think of. Just about as kooky as getting wet under the scorching sun. The latter seemed to happen sometimes — so we just correlated it with the former. Villages didn’t have a lot of entertainment.” Simple.

I live in a town that was settled by folk to live near the riverbank. The city’s furthered itself away from the bank. Now those banks hold only huts to live in and ghats to burn. Neither of those things concern me for I was born in an expensive hospital. I speak in a language that was beaten into my ancestors for enslavement. The anchor gives me gravitas. Those people speak in a language I used to pretend not to understand because no rapper from Compton would talk that way. Recently (every year), the monsoon that my friends romanticise flooded the banks. The houses that were built from wood, bamboo, mud or straw couldn’t survive the flow of the river. The floods turned homesteads upside down. Straw ceilings were now floorboards to wave at helicopters from. Thank God Minster Sanjay Nishad visited the flood hit areas. A woman who’s life drowned in an instant was told by our respected elected official that “Ganga maiyya (mother ganga) had come to cleanse your feet and take you to heaven.” Oh, that’s why. Since guests are god, and politicians above them, the Kanpur woman offered Minister Saab to take the blessing for him and his family first. I wish I could correlate such an instance with a jackal’s wedding. Maybe, if I was from Mumbai or Delhi — I could’ve. To people on the margins of interesting cities though, being relegated to cross the rainbow bridge alone is more common than seeing a jackal — forget about one’s wedding.

I wrote the following lines in five minutes, in a language that I grew up hearing and years ignoring. My mother is now the psychology department head at a government college in Kanpur University. She finished her doctorate at 27 from one of the top institutes in the country. She then qualified the National Eligibility Test. With no financial burdens to force compliance, she worked still. With personal problems, medical issues, surgeries and having a really particular brand of children as sons — she showed up everyday. With all this achieved, she still fondly remembers the little village near Mirzapur. The quirks, the syllogisms, the people. My mother remembers who she is, is where she’s from. We’re the same that way — my mother and I. Anchors have a way of drowning too. And if I had to drown anywhere in the world, Ganga Bairaaj doesn’t sound that bad.

सियार की शादी

गंगा हमरे घर रोह खागी
जे अब पालवे बचे ना पूत
जो बोल्वे आशीर्वाद लेई लियो
रे कहुरा पैर छुए जे अछूत?

हर हर गंगे,
घर घर गंगे

गैया चरे जो कचरा सबका
तैब हम भी गैया होएँ
दूध तो दुहाये लिए सबरे खातिर
पर हमरे मारवे लड़े ना कोएँ

हर हर गंगे,
हर घर गंगे

जब बैराज हमारा आँगन हुईले
ऑउर जे बिस्तरा बने शमशान
लो भैरो बाबा भी नाप लियें सरसैया
और जे पाथर बचे मकान

हर हर गंगे,
घर हर गंगे

ना कोन योगी हमरा,
ना कोन गांधी रहवे साथ
ना भूखा पेट भलाई का गहना
ना जेवर जड़े भोलेनाथ

हर हर गंगे,
घर घर गंगे

मुहाफ़ज़े ब्याहे विधवाओं ने लखपति
और संसद करे इश्तहार
भूख का कहाँ पतो चले
जब खिलावे बचो ना परिवार

हर हर गंगे,
हर हर गंगे

The fog scantily clads the morning
and wraps my ma in shawl.
Naked trees now stand in mourning
when like cats and dogs, leaves fall.
My watchman burns the dead to warm a house of three,
such fires my fortress won’t allow.
This teacher of mine saw something special in me,
even he’s long dead now.
So, the ragman auctions his daughter and eats his son for grain,
and I’m going back to college with the Cawnpore Blues again.

घर तरक़्क़ी तले दफ़्न सबका होता; 
जहाँ बड़े हुए वो तो मकान ही रह जाना है।
आओ गंगा किनारे लगाएँ एक गोता; 
जो थक गये सो गंगा में ही बह जाना है।

सपनों में नाप रहे जो तुम रईसी; 
तो मेरी कंगाली के क़िस्से मशहूर हों।
मर्ज़-ए-जान की दारू महँगी ऐसी; 
लो हम शिवालय जाके ही मसरूर हों।

Streets shimmer with youth when dusk dawns on judgement, 
this distance makes love a bearable scar.
Now they wanna tear the mills down as they did people back then, 
I’ll be new to living alone — newer to living afar.
Children and beggars, I shoot in temples and in clubs,
for vagabonds can latch only unto past.
My friends pack their ashes in a Starbucks cup,
their names spelled right at last.
Now Premchand mends his shoes to woo students with his brain, 
and I’m leaving my home for cobbling with the Cawnpore Blues again.

इस्मत की नुमाइशें देख सजी;
जुनून ख़रीदने सराफ़े दिल गया।
सोने के बाज़ार में बस रात सगी;
फ़र्ज़-लाद मैं नसीब पिरोने मिल गया।

तनहाई भी अकेली कहाँ बेहाल हो ,
दोस्तों ने जो बोझ-ए-मनहूसियत ढोया है।
घिस-घिस के चमड़ा कर दिया खाल को, 
जन्नत वो ढूँढे जो कभी भूखे पेट सोया है!

I fell in love with a girl called Misery,
traded in insecurities for time. 
Clouds hang now on every memory, 
was she ever a true love of mine?
She grabbed my hand in the English cemetery,
and said “To love is but to coax!”
Returned me a French poet from the 20th century, 
for both me and Rimbaud displeased her folks.
Now she studies medicine for play and swallows stranger’s pride in vain,
and I waste away for a living with the Cawnpore Blues again.

शब को शौक़ इत्र-ए-फ़रेब का; 
कसक छिड़क कर निखरती है।
शहर साँझ तक मोअत्तर उस सा; 
शामें हिज्र ज़ैर असर बिखरतीं हैं।

महबूब मेरी जैसे धुंधला किनारा; 
धुएँ का नोष जो फ़रमाया करे। 
ज़माने को बनाया रक़ीब हमारा; 
हमारी रक़ाबत ये ग़ज्ल पराया करे।

Once necked a mathematician in Delhi, 
now she’s a shrink for the colonists. 
She said: “ Remember love, poverty is smelly,  
but Palestinian suffering - honest.” 
Massacre Ghat dressed in Gulal for Holi, 
where freedom’s blood ran a little amiss. 
If my lover puts out for a sum too lowly 
the Company Garden’s noose I’d gladly kiss. 
London’s still looting for slaves with paper ball and chain, 
and I’m going to the pink city with the Cawnpore Blues again.

जिसे राम अश्व भी लाँग ना पाया;
वहाँ काफिर क्या आस लगाते हैं?
गोरे खून से जहाँ बक़रीद मनाया;
वहाँ आज होली मेला सजाते हैं! 

आँच-ए-इंक़लाब में भी क्या ठहरा उबाल, 
जो उम्र का पतझड़ हर पाएगा। 
जो फ़र्ज़-ए-नमक ने मिट्टी पे उठाया सवाल, 
तो यहाँ रामभक्त भी घात खाएगा।

Littered with yellow blossoms and dead leaves,
and pups that no one seems to mind. 
Dead is Mini Manchester but stories still weaved, 
where nothing’s very good but all very kind.
My home I share with family and angst, 
this illness cures what medicines betray.
Dead gods owe neat temples their thanks, 
as a fast breaks all shame away.
My home becomes a house like a handkerchief in hurricane, 
and I’m going now to end my life with the Cawnpore Blues again.

होश सम्भलते ही सुलघी थी तलब-ए-मौत; 
ख़ुशी में भी गुज़र जाने की चाहत थी। 
गहरा निकला ये ज़ख़्म-ए-इश्क़ बहुत; 
दिल्लगी ही सही, होश खो जाने की राहत थी।

सूरज लहू लोहान कर चला फ़लक को; 
सूखे खून की अब स्याही छायेगी। 
अश्क़ बरसें और रूठी पलक हो; 
अंधेर बहुत तो झेल ज़रा, कल फिर सुबह हो जाएगी।

Within me I drown oceans, 
that drown me back on nights alone. 
Life lulls away all romantic notions
as moss makes love to a rolling stone.
With damned tears and angel lust
burn me at my ghat.
I will become Ganga and dust
and you may call it art.
Coffee tastes sweet where flooded homesteads romanticise their rain,
and I always brew mine black with some Cawnpore Blues (again).

Whether 'tis nobler for the sack to suffer

The stings and sorrows of microscopic bladder,

Or to take yawns against a sea of slumber

And by opposing kill her. To hold—to sleep,

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The prick-ache and its mortal macabre masks

That nuts are heir to: 'tis a contraception

Devoutly to be fuck'd. To die, to sleep;

To sleep, perchance to piss—ay, there's the rub:

For in that sleep of death what piss may cum,

When we have shuffled our balls’ rotten rug,

Must thrust our cause—there's the asshole

That makes but pussies out of us short dicks.

For who would tread the halls on tits of time,

Th'urgency's blind, the deaf man's symphony,

The scent of unwashed cunt, the yeast’s filet,

The skid-marks in basins, and the stink

That pent-up morons of th'unworthy smear,

When they themselves may their martyr make

With a bare needle? Whose farts fables bear,

To shit and sweat on this whorish cancer,

But(t) squish the angst of li’l logs in the fart,

The unparallel’d cuntry, from whose breasts

No motorboats emerge, cajoles the cock,

And leaves us to abhor those sluts we lov’d

Than crawl to bitches that we know not of?

Thus courtship doth make rapists of us all,

And thus the naive rue of schadenfreude

Is sicklier than the pale penis’ thought,

And premonitions of nightfall and decay

With this forego their highways burning

And lose the name of alex.

artwork credit: pintrest and (& just little touched up by little old me uwu)