Rain falls on my face

Droplets drip to my lip

Sweet like candy

I can taste the clouds

Travelling the distance

Above cities, grasses

In stillness and beyond

Scent of meadows

I taste it all

Rain falling, ambience

Music to my ears

Lightning and thunder

Electric skies

I watch as trees shudder

Vanilla skies turn velvet blue

Silky ground, mosses grow

The rain girl comes

With tea and books

Tears and smiles.

~figtreeblues

Maybe this is the India I am trying to take you to.

I grew up listening to stories about heroes. The ones that fought off their enemies, not through hate, but love. The heroes I found on the shelves of my nani’s house. The rani that died fighting. The “half-naked faqir” that became the biggest threat to British rule. The Red Fort trials. I remember my nani telling me about “Sehgal, Dhillon, Shahnawaz”. What could be more secular than that? Tricoloured, in life and in death.

As a child, I had an idea of India in my head. The country of hopes, dreams and colours. A land built on the backs of satyagrahis, freedom fighters who gave their lives to bring their vision of unity in diversity and a sovereign, independent Bharat. When I think of the vision of India I had in mind as a child, I think of women draped in beautiful coloured saris, diyas and lights alongside the river Ganga. I think of flowers on hills, dragonflies and daffodils. I think of Ghalib and Kabir. I think of a unique blend of languages, dialects, tabla beats and sitar strings.

The India that wanted development of not just technology, but of culture, conversation and thought. India that went ahead and declared herself democratic with less than two annas in hand. The India that was a safe place for ALL, not just cow lovers. The India that invited everyone to the table singing “atithi devo bhava”, without having a seat at the cool table herself.

The India that knew how to struggle against the odds. The India that said to everyone, out loud, I won’t pick the side of either bully. The India that trusted people and herself. The India that made a tryst with destiny. The India that was born in 1947. The India of Nehru, Azad and Atal.

The India that looked at the giants and said, “we will feed ourselves, even if we have to go hungry first”. Took big steps. With even bigger fucking audacity.

The India where every wall had a slogan, quote or value.

The land of ideals, movements and symbols.

The flag that stands for sacrifice and courage, truth and peace, growth and prosperity, all synchronous with the Dharma Chakra always watching over us.

I think of the dreams and aspirations of students in interviews given decades before I was born, their voices full of hope, sophistication, Azadi.

The India of Kishore Kumar, Satyajit Ray, Manna Dey.

The India of martyrs, not victims.

The India where people had the gall to speak, create, change and protest.

The India of love, ahimsa and shakti.

The India I fell in love with.

The one I knew as a child.

You grew up with me.

But I can’t even recognise you anymore.

What happened to you?

Where does she sleep? Where did she go?

Why are you quiet? Why don’t you speak up? Were you silenced?

What did it get you?

I used to think azadi meant freedom. Azadi is what Indians fought the goras for. Then why does asking for it now feel dangerous and scary? A word that was at the heart of the creation of a country now seems disingenuous and terrifying. A person asking for the annihilation of Pakistan is called a patriot, while a person demanding clean drinking water and a voice for change is called a terrorist.

How did a word that belongs to everyone become synonymous with treason?

Jailed for demanding what we were born with?

Azadi, cheated with pellet guns.

The men and women who died for it, who only lived for this country and died serving it… now treated as traitors? What did we do to their legacy? Why are we not fulfilling our end of the bargain? Were we what was promised to them?

They were cheated of their lives for us.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped dreaming. We decided we were better than that. The old grumps decided they knew how a country was run and that they didn’t want anyone else’s opinions on doing it. They played among themselves, dividing us from within. India was colonised again, but this time by grumps of the same colour, just bigger bellies and lesser hair.

They divided us into Hindus and Muslims; castes and sub-castes, and we let them. The country became synonymous with the patriarchs. India was sold to the highest bidder. Saffronised and gagged, but she never wanted to be. She wanted to remain azad, pluralistic and dignified.

India in the 1960s was an infant, then a child with big dreams. She grew into a rebellious teenager. She had goals and aspirations and was ready to struggle for them.

Full of fire. Full of courage.

But she never got to experience the gains of those hardships. She was silenced, misled and deceived. Her identity was stolen. Her dreams were bulldozed. She never got to realise her potential, find out who she really is.

Somewhere along the way, someone else began answering to her name.

They call her Vishwaguru now.

A guru without curiosity, accountability or the courage to be questioned.

What exactly is she a guru of?

That could never be my India.

My India loved soul-searching. She embraced change. She had a childlike wonder. She never claimed to know everything.

I want to find my India. Not the one of andh-bhakts, but the India of Shastri, Tagore and Bose. The India that celebrated culture, traditions and life.

What happened to the beautifully printed magazines, the motif bedsheets, the beautiful matchstick boxes?

What happened to our cinema? Our authors? Our poets? Our shayars?

Where do I find the India I keep searching for?

The streets that smelled of rose petals, ittar and Indian Coffee House. The strangers in Delhi arguing about politics and theatre around a cigarette. Houses with arches, porches and courtyards. Sweet incense drifting through open windows.

Why has our culture become so homogenised? So queasy? So stereotypical?

Where did all that particularity go?

What are we known for in the world now?

What are our relations with our neighbours like?

What is wrong with our education system?

They keep cutting down chapters in history books as if that would change the past. The dead do not care. Who really gains from this?

The India I want is the one of three colours.

That is what I was promised.

The India I imagine is my birthright, and I shall have it.

I want to fight.

Fight for my love.

This month was Independence Day, and I heard no one wish it. There was no commotion, no enthusiasm or love. It was hushed because somewhere we know we aren’t free at all. I thought about it several times. Saying it just hurt more, so I didn’t say it.

I left home and was at the intersection when I saw a boy. A boy of not more than ten, on a bicycle with a big Indian flag attached to it. I looked at him and he looked at me.

Then I felt myself smiling at him.

He smiled back.

We both knew what the smile was about.

In him, I saw her.

The India I long to see.

The song keeps playing…

This is only the beginning.

I want to keep writing about this India: its music, cinema, literature, aesthetics, politics, memories and the strange cultural inheritance I grew up with and am only now learning to reclaim.

If you want to come looking for her with me,

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I think to myself, I am literally so amazing and genuine, and yet when I am with a person I always embarrass myself. I act either like a child or a grumpy old woman. Sometimes I act like a maniac on crack. The point is that I embarrass myself and I cringe when I think of it.

But I also know that life is about embarrassing yourself over and over again. Getting knocked down and laughing at your own mistakes and stupidity. Choosing to get up and believing again. Deciding no matter what happens I will learn and I will grow, and endings will still come and I will embarrass myself because I am a human and I get to do so. I will walk with all of me even if it kills me.

So what if I am embarrassing sometimes. I am also incredibly talented. Extremely beautiful. Moderately humorous. Exceptionally witty. Fucking sexy. And always hot. And yet there have been people that have not liked me, and I don’t need them to like me because I like me. I love me. I love all of me, especially the embarrassing bits.

I can’t be the hero in everyone’s story. I can’t be the cool girl, nonchalant, the dream girl that they can’t ever let go of. If I was that to everyone, I would have a hundred lovers and end up staying with people that I really really shouldn’t be with. I don’t want everyone to like me. I have no need for universal approval. That’s called people pleasing. That shit’s whack.

Not everyone is meant for me, and I will probably scare the wrong ones off sooner than later because I am crazy and I love being crazy. I hope the people not meant for me run as fast as they can. I hope they wash me off their feet and block me. God, I hope they block me.

Life is too short and I want to spend it with the people that love my weird, groovy embarrassing parts. I am literally heaven on Earth, but I am also a messy fucking bitch and I choose to be both wild and holy. So God help you if you can’t handle me.

I went up to him and said hi. He was stretching and his head was bent towards his knees. He looked up at me and smiled, it formed a dimple. I think I saw a twinkle in his eye. His smile seemed familiar, as if i had met him before. I instantly knew I liked him. I asked him if he could help me with my stretching and he got up to do so. I explained i needed a push, so he asked if he could touch me. I smiled and said “yes, of course”. I felt his hands on my back and it burnt my skin, like fire grazing dry grass.

We barely exchanged a few words but i wanted to see him again. We saw each other in the hallway and waved and smiled. It was all very cordial but every time i saw him i wish he would linger just for another moment longer. he didn’t come to the gym for a couple of days and my eyes glanced across the room to search for traces of him.

On the fourth day i was stretching and saw him I waved assuming it would just be met with another wave back. I was so excited to see him make his way over to me and set up camp. He stayed, sat on the dirty floor while I stretched on the yoga mat talking for over thirty minutes.

There was none of “the weather is nice, bla bla” small talk. There was laughter, funny stories and an exchange of our lives. He asked me for my socials i told him i am not on any and then said “but i can give you my number” he accepted triumphantly.

Late night i got a text asking to go for a ride early morning, which usually i would decline. This time i said yes after negotiating and smirking. I agreed as long as i get my morning coffee.

The next morning it was raining heavily and i never quite liked getting soaked. I asked him “how are you going to come” he replied “Although I love it, I don't want to be drenched in it alone.” I told him to tell me if he wants to come. “Of course i want to come” he reassured. I teased “what’s stopping you?” And he said “yeah right. I am coming”

From a dynamic of fire and ice, tenderness grew. We talked about everything under the sun and it still felt too little. I had finally met my match.

One evening i quite distinctly remember i sat in my car while it was raining just like it did when we first met. I had just left his place and i didn’t feel like going back yet. There was a gush of thoughts and realisations and tears trickled down my eyes. I had to stop my car and sit for a while. I cried for almost an hour. I had realised I was falling in love. I was falling in love and I wasn’t scared at all.

I couldn’t stop thinking about him. He was the tangerine, beautiful and sweet. I basked in his sweet pulp and let myself absolve. I was afraid to squish him so i started restraining myself, sheltering him so nothing put a dent in my tangerine. That’s when trouble began. I got in my own head so much that my chest felt heavy. All i wanted to do was protect him. Adore him. Want him. I couldn’t help it. I think he knew.

The conversations turned heavy. Every conversation seemed to carry a hidden subtext I couldn’t read with only my eyes. It hurt. It hurt to see it all come apart. I felt like a deer in an open field and there was death lurking nearby. I hid in the bushes, bleating, sinking in my own pool of blood. I wasn’t shot but i was dying.

I closed my eyes, i prayed. Darkness engulfed me from all sides. There was no hope. Every move brought me closer to my maker. I couldn’t take it. I tried to fight, pushed my limbs, trying not to drown, trying to come up for air but it was of no use.

Suddenly, there was a hand pulling me out. A hope, a prayer answered. A call, a conversation. A chance to fight. To live another day. My lungs still hurt but the weight on my chest had been lifted. There was sweetness again.

There were more rains and laughter again. He sang on our calls again. Ah to hear him sing again. The way it melted my heart, seeing him smile and argue about everything. There was nectar in the moments where he fought with me. I could hear his heart beat. There were mornings of wonder, conversations and meaning. There was light at the end of the tunnel. A sigh of relief.

On a starry night, after it rained all day we went to the terrace again. The terrace we once kissed, embraced and danced about. We stood overlooking strangers pass by. I sat down in the dirt and asked him to as well. I put my head in his lap, like he had done countless times before. He stroked my head and played with my hair. The night was quiet, still and it felt like we were the only ones left in this world.

We looked up, to a galaxy of stars. I pointed to one and said “that must be the north star”. He said “No that’s an airplane” and pointed another and declared “That’s probably it” we both stared while both the airplanes went in different directions. We laughed and kissed.

I wish I could tell you that this is where the story ended.

That we found our way back to each other. That the shadows eventually disappeared. That the rain stopped being the weather in which I lost him and became the weather in which we learned to stay.

But that would be another story.

In ours, we never survived.

Knowing now how much it hurt, the pain, the agony.

To miss him for longer than i have known him.

Would I still walk upto him?

Would I still go to meet him that rainy morning?

Would I still sit in my car and let myself fall in love?

I think about that first morning sometimes.

When he looked up at me.

That dimple when he smiled.

I felt like I had already known him.

Somewhere behind me, an old man kept asking people if they could buy him a rusk. I ignored him a couple of times without meaning to.

Then he stood in front of me. His face was old and wrinkled. He looked kind.

“Gudiya, can you get me a rusk?”

I don’t know where it came from, but I heard myself say, “Take whatever you want. I’ll pay.”

It wasn’t generosity in any sense. The rusk cost five rupees.

He smiled, blessed me, asked if I had a job. I said yes(knowing my work doesn’t exactly come with a salary).

While I sat across the stall drinking my tea, he walked back through the crowd just to tell me, “Don’t pay for my chai. Just pay for the rusk. Someone else has already paid for the chai.”

“Just pay for the rusk.”

He didn’t have to tell me that.

There was something deeply dignified about it. Honest. sincere.

For five rupees, we exchanged something much rarer than charity. We exchanged integrity.

It reminded me of my third year in college, when I used to walk through the world believing every stranger carried a fragment of God. Somewhere along the way I forgot how to look at people like that.

Today, he reminded me of that part of me.

Maybe I’m just soft-hearted.

Or maybe the world really is a beautiful place when you look at it with love.

Long before I was rolled into paper, even before my body learned the shape of two fingers,

I was fire.

Humans have always idealised destruction, which is why fire was one of the first gods worshipped. Or maybe it was because you only worship what terrifies you.

You gathered around me for warmth, but warmth was never enough.

Soon you fed me forests. Then your dead. Then your gods.

Destruction without guilt? Trying to conquer everything under the sun? What’s more human than that?

For humans, fire was divine in every sense. It purified, it transformed.

Flesh into smoke.

Body into ash.

Anyone that touched flames never left unscathed.

I burnt the first city. I lit the first funeral pyre. I watched Alexandria burn.

A cigarette is perhaps the smallest altar of that sacred fire; a god between two fingers.

A cigarette burns at the lip, the collision of two worlds; the lips that tremble, spilling secrets, lies, confessions. What the tongue couldn’t utter, the cigarette knows.

You may not remember me being there, on that roof or that abandoned staircase, you may not remember how many times you pulled me out of that cardboard box but I, witnessed you, and unlike you, I never forget the faces of my many, many lovers.

I was there in that car, in the passenger seat passed from one pursed lip to another. Looks exchanged.

Puff. Puff. Pass.

One’s lips were softer, more delicate, the other’s coarse and hardened from years of being in my company.

Sharing something that touches your lips? There is a strange but profound intimacy to it.

Is it the beginning of a kiss?

Or some kind of cannibalism.

Not much was said but there was a longing in that silence. I listened closely.

The hearts beating. Mine or yours? Ours.

After years the lovers met again. She looked around with shameful, watchful eyes. The flame from the lighter, burned my end. She ended where i began.

In the smoke I heard that same heartbeat again. She was kissing me but thinking of him.

Behind the old church, in that dark alley I lingered in the hands of the old priest. A sinner and a saint. Roles reversed. The stage was set.

Leaning against the wall, as if ironically, he confessed to me. He wanted to be an actor, not a priest. All his life performing, reciting scripture instead of script. The crossroads of life brought him to my feet. His father too died holding me. I had claimed another life but i didn’t choose him. He chose me.

The stage lights went dark. The pulpit lit instead. He inhaled my filth, disgust and defeat. Tears rolled down his face. He let me fall back into the dirt.

Wet, bruised.

Crumpled beneath his feet, cold and lifeless.

I have witnessed countless wars. Long nights before dawn.

Boots sinking into wet earth.

Letters folded into breast pockets.

I rested between trembling fingers while soldiers whispered the names of wives, mothers, children, gods. They passed me around as though smoke could postpone morning.

Then the whistle blew.

Some came back for another cigarette.

Most never did.

Back in the city, I was sitting wrapped in my shiny silver box when I saw him coming towards me- Oh my addict, the prince of denial there you are, repeating your favourite words, I see “This is the last one, I swear”.

Oh! Sweet angel, your last one? As if I am that easy to forget.

You will find him in the dark, shady corners at odd hours of the night with guilt and shame in his eyes.

The quiet purchase.

The promise to quit.

But he always comes back for more.

I am the lover in his eyes, his vicious cycle, the devil in a red dress.

The pack I arrive in has the grim reaper written all over it and I still sell out within minutes.

A duet of life and death, the lover between your lips, killing you from the inside

You choke, while craving one more hit. Just one. more. hit.

You take the first drag of me and something inside you explodes.

For centuries I have been called a curse, an addiction, a habit, a vice, a disease.

They keep changing the excuse as if that makes getting over me any easier.

You can call me death if you want to. I know you will still come chasing after me.

Light. Inhale. Exhale.

Some of you look at me as defiance against the society. The good and bad neatly separated by veils. The sign says “NO SMOKING” and suddenly i become irresistible.

Funny. Tell a human not to touch fire and he instantly reaches for the match.

Your coworker hates the smell of smoke, it makes him sick. You blow smoke right in his face.

I have friends in high places you see. The more liberated, the more they love me. Tell me-

Is this rebellion?

Or just another form of obedience?

People live in categories. They see the world as black or white.

I can tell you that life is as grey as ash. Crumbling. Fleeting. One strong wind and it’s dust.

Consuming me only destroys you.

Yet you do it anyway.

Is it a refusal of self preservation? A bid against time?

The exhaustion of performing morality? Inhuman but holy?

You call it rebellion.

I have watched enough centuries to know better.

The cigarette leaves behind a trace, a scent on the fingers and breath. Something you can’t fully wash off. The lover’s breath, you kill me once and you instantly want me more.

Shaking hands, euphoric touch, words that tremble and a tongue that limps.

You are craving me already aren’t you?

Salivating at the mouth, fingers fidgeting, the urge to burn something?

I have watched humanity for a millennium.

I am Prometheus’ inheritance.

I have lived inside candles.

Oil lamps.

Bombs.

The cigarette is only my newest body.

But don’t mistake paper for frailty.

I have slept beside your darkest nights.

I have warmed the hands of executioners and lovers alike.

I know the smell of fear before you do.

I am not just nicotine speaking.

Every cigarette begins with fire and ends as ash.

The oldest story humans know.

The oldest one I have ever told.

Birth, brightness and decay.

If only this is how every story ended in real life. Women are raised to dream of this narrative over and over and over again. Every single princess movie ended with the prince choosing the damsel in distress. The girl who loved genuinely, talked to animals and had some sort of vision impairment for the amount of things she just happened to bump into.

We have been fed this idea of a prince coming to save us as our ultimate fantasy. The story where you meet someone by accident, you share an unparalleled spark and there are fireworks. Boy meets girl, girl falls in love with boy. Boy comes back to save her.

The entire epilogue depends on the heroine being chosen by a man. Women are taught to imagine themselves as the princess tired and burnt out, fallen like a dried leaf on the ground waiting for someone to come rushing to save her, lift her up and take her back home. Tell me honestly, how many times have you imagined exactly that fantasy?

Let me tell you, there is no one coming. If there ever is someone who comes to save you, its always going to be you.

Male gaze has paralysed women to objectify themselves. You don’t even need a man to do it. Women do it to themselves, other women all the time. I wonder how many industries would go out of market if women decided to just love themselves the way they are.

Society puts a price tag, an expiry date on a woman’s body. We put ourselves under the knife, expensive treatments, anti-aging bullshit to out-run something that is only natural. Refusing to grow old is what killed Dorian Gray. Aging is isn’t even half as scary as what’s happening to people who are trying to surpass it.

An entire economy built around the sacrifice and moral devaluation of women. “Get married at the right age or no one will want to marry you” or “Women have to adjust for a marriage to survive”. A woman brought up to wait for her one true love that takes her away on a silver horse, to a castle where she will serve her life away, washing and cleaning dirty laundry. She is a puppet, entirely lacking any moral agency in the eyes of the world built to make a man’s life easy. The stories around love are so conveniently designed by society to keep us at home.

Boys inherited different stories. They were told to build a life, a career. To have a purpose. Love was something that arrived along the way; it was not the thing that completed them. Their movies were about adventure, competition, friendship and usually cars. The hero didn’t wait to be chosen; he set out to conquer the world. Even when romance came into the story, it rewarded the hero instead of defining him.

Let’s take the Sleeping Beauty. We kept calling it romance. A man kissing an unconscious woman without her consent isn’t romance. It’s a fairy tale that didn’t even ask the princess if that’s what she wanted. By any modern standard, the guy that climbed into an abandoned tower, near a woman that can’t say no, is a creep.

As a young woman, I keep thinking about The Princess and the Pea. Everyone remembers the mattress. I remember the princess who refused to lie. She didn’t make herself smaller to appear agreeable. She didn’t mistake endurance for virtue.

There is a man in your head that is constantly watching you, wherever you go, whatever you do. His creepy eyes never leave you alone, no matter how crowded the room.

He tells you to smile.

He tells you to shrink yourself.

To look pretty all the time.

To apologise.

To stay young.

He tells you only then someone will choose you. That love is something to be earned, not shared.

The first step is to kill that man.

I was never really any good with people. Never could keep friendships, or relationships. I struggled keeping people in my life for more than a few months.

I never really had problems keeping objects, though. I remember them in vivid detail. Most survive for years. I can always trust that they will stay where i leave them.

All my life, i too have felt like a showpiece on the highest shelf, collecting dust. Looked at often, but never seen. A china doll that sits still and looks pretty. Delicate doll parts, out of reach.

All i have ever wanted to be is someone’s favourite cup. The cup they reach for every morning. When i break, i want someone to break with me.

I want to die knowing i was loved.

Bent tusks spiral toward my skull,

a prophecy carved in bone.

Each curve a sentence, each inch a curse

my body, my own tombstone.

No predator hunts, no hunter aims,

and yet, I perish slow.

Not by claw, nor sharpened blade,

but by the fangs that I grow.

What cruel god would shape me so,

to die by my own hand?

A beast whose bones pierce its flesh,

too weak to fight, to stand.

Let the jungle swallow me,

roots entwine my grave.

For I was born already dead

a life I could not save.

I once read something that stuck with me "ever since i fell in love i think about furniture more"  how does love elevate an ordinary chair to a place where someone sits and writes?

As humans we attach meaning to the most ordinary objects. It's no longer something inanimate, it's the thing that holds an imagined presence.

‘Oh, he loves to sit in that chair and read’

‘she lent me this pen the first time we met. I have kept it ever since’

Why does a feather on the windshield suddenly become something worth paying attention to? The feather never changed. Love only changed the eyes that were looking at it.

After the person is gone the object still holds a memory, an aftertaste of something bittersweet. It almost stops belonging to our own perception it belongs to the person who no longer sits in it. The object becomes sacred, something revered; the thought of someone else even being near it becomes revolting.

What is it about them that you cannot stop thinking about?

You think of the way they talk and you smile to yourself like an idiot. Suddenly, someone cleaning an ashtray because you asked them to, becomes something you can write essays about?

Why does the wind blowing across my face and the sweet droplets of rain remind me of a touch?

How does someone's voice play the heartstrings long after they become a distant memory?

Romantic suffering becomes religious, if you do it right.

Every act an act of devotion.

every word said, a prayer in the lover's eyes.

Somewhere between devotion and grief we commit an act of worship, sacrificing ourselves at the altar of the beloved. We say "i would have bled out if you told me you liked the colour red".

Love becomes synonymous with the mortal we paint in the image of a god. No longer human, their flaws also become scriptures and their gestures, liturgy. Their voice becomes a hymn, something so sacrosanct only the faithful can hear. We do not remember people as they were, our longing carves them in our skin, our memory rewrites the past into a discordant present. And when the god can no longer be reached it feels like doom.

Grief is strange that way, it's a blade that is sharp from both sides, either way you pull on it your palms are left bleeding. The past pulls you backwards while the future refuses to arrive. The chest aches as though someone drove a nail straight into the heart. Somewhere we stop thinking of love as the faith and mistake it for the person that inspires it. We forget that faith can't be seen, only held.

"I see the sun, and if i don't see the sun, i know it's still there. And there's a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there."

Why then can't a feeling remain even if the evidence of it is gone? Isn't grief proof that it was a love, worth having?

The cigarette smoke in the curtains. The faint scent of a memory that keeps burning after the fire runs out. The earring left in the shower kept all this time in hope that someone will come back to collect it and with it all the other unspoken things left behind.

A love unfulfilled. Promises unkept. The absence of the warmth that once burnt the village down.

Is the final act of love letting go?

is it grief? The heart suddenly heavy, a streak of blood and no wound in sight?

or is it the longing that one day hopefully they will return and take you with them. The heart doesn't want to stay in the body anymore, does it? it wants to be buried in the place that feels like home.

Is home a place or a feeling? Is it the way they did their hair and shrunk their nose? Is it the way they said your name, melancholically, like reading a lover's note.

Now they are gone and with them the clouds that made that rain, the scent of ash on their breath, that ring they wore as a pendant but never revealed why, the colour from the sky, the wind beneath your feet. Does a memory lose its meaning because the one person in it disappeared? Aren't those memories yours too? After all, we are a reflection of everything we once loved then why do we let love lose its power once it stops being reciprocated?

If you walk into a room and notice what is missing from it, it is still there isn't it?

Perhaps the act of trying to outrun love doesn't work because you can't outrun something that lives within you.

Love is not another person, it's you.

It's in the way you think.

In the things you pay attention to.

So what if your wings got torched while flying too close to the sun.

"Everyone forgets that icarus also flew. It's the same when love comes to an end".

maybe the final act of love after all is not letting it die but carrying it always. within you.

I am not the victim of your agony

or the prey of your devotion.

Nor am I the wolf with bloodlust,

hunting the scent of your musk

In the shadows,

In your house

Or your bed.

I am not the sacred animal you think me to be,

Not virginal nor pure.

Oh, think not that I am innocent.

My fingers shall confess:

I am not.

I am neither your lord nor saviour,

Nor do I seek the bounty on your head.

Oh, don't look at me with those deceitful eyes!

My heart knows neither sin nor dread.

I am not holy,

nor divine.

Wash that image from your head.

Seek neither salvation nor vengeance from me.

My mercy knows neither heaven nor hell.

We came down to the streets to demand war and annihilation of Pakistan, but when our own citizens suffer at the hand of an unaccountable government that hikes prices of fuel to protect private players and oil companies instead of the common citizen.

We stay silent and instead plead cooperation because Modi, the same man behind Gujarat riots is some divine prince whose degree in political science (fake or real) is supposed to save us from real-world issues?

Where are the Achche Din you voted for? Are they planning to arrive sometime this decade?

We agreed to cut down on oil, gold, and travel far more easily than we ever agreed to promote fraternity and respect toward other religions, values that have existed in our preamble for more than half a century.

When an Indian babu stands on an international stage and mocks the very act of questioning authority instead of confronting our failures, we cheer him on for it.

Have we simply accepted that we are the kind of people who, when stopped by the police, respond not with accountability but with: “Tujhe pata hai mera baap kaun hai?”

We worship authority in every form: the politician, the bureaucrat, the patriarch, the powerful caste. Questioning power is treated as insolence instead of civic responsibility.

Somewhere along the way, our democracy became less about participation and more about obedience dipped in colourful slogans, where nationalism is preached in place of patriotism.

We no longer love India itself; we love the ostentatious performance of loving it. We grow defensive whenever someone calls us out on our own failures, just pointing fingers everywhere except at ourselves.

Are we a country plagued by ego fetishism? Are we all, in some small way, tyrannical in our thinking, so unwilling to question authority that we ignore the obvious similarities between ourselves and the very fascists we claim to despise?

Have we as a country completely lost sight of what's important? Have we no shame? No dignity? Have we accepted our fates, resigned ourselves to doom?

I let a stranger lead me astray; a stranger that stole my light, my energy, my personality and my life— that's murder. He tried to annihilate my existence by replacing it with his own vision for me. Looking at those pictures used to make me feel sick, like I wanted to erase that version of myself completely but today, It's a reminder of how I fought for myself and got me back. I survived something that tried to disconnect me from myself.

It's a reminder of how kind and forgiving I am as a person. It tells a story of a woman that doesn't give up on people easily; it shows me how amazing my inner self is, but those photos are also another reminder now. A warning. The moment I start ignoring my intuition to keep someone else comfortable, I’m already losing myself. Never again.

The father who leaves his children to their fate and sells their roof for a pint of poison-laced liquor. The imbecile who holds his ego due to the fact that no sane person could knock a grain of sense into him. The shell of a human being who survives only because his saint of a wife puts food in his stomach.

Then there is the woman of the house, who breaks her back trying to feed every last child before she scrapes a morsel for herself. The 'god in human form' that the society celebrates only as the martyr who sacrificed her life, her career, her will to live just to keep the family together, the life-giver who never once put herself first.

They say that the only woman worth her salt is the one that has no desire, not a cent to her name, who breathes at the mercy of the men in her life. The smart woman is someone that knows when to give up her own self-respect to make her husband feel like a man. The woman who stays silent and lies like a corpse in bed so her husband can satisfy his lust to feel like the one in control, the king of the world that has no self-control.

Patriarchy dances on the palms of the women it made the biggest fools of. It consumed their lives, fed on their wombs, squeezed till their necks broke, then laughed repeating “you were only just a bloody woman”.