Home Going

Today I was a crystal baby, ensconced in the white softness
Of frayed blankets, drunk with overuse, forming rivulets of white sand until I could
Only see black.

Mum came to me on the edges of her feet,
Dragging the weight of home-growing, home-making and home-shaping, and shook me awake
Physically, first, then spiritually, with
'It was easier when you were younger, you listened.'
'You were a quiet child, what happened now?'
Until I dragged her into testing the measure of crystal,
Asking her, for five minutes, to hold me before the ochre curtains
Were pulled away to the titters of a canary Sun.

The orange oven broke down a few years ago, and began gathering rust
... Actually, the rust was always there, in the basin of the thick au gratin,
But we put it off to taste, to having spent too long in the sun.
I like my au gratin like I like my boys- differently tasting, an odd kind of burnt:
Heat coming off from the basin as  symptoms of impending doom
The drum roll before the orchestra of baking death: fizz, crackle and boom.

I remember how heated and purple the evening skies were, flamingo pink from
The right angle.
The lone time I visited a circus, I expected the drama, opera, greek tragedies,
Unfurling into purple canvas.
I watched the clowns throw things, rise before plummeting, right before plummeting,
Turn the fear of the lion into laughter
Turn the fury of the bear into laughter
Turn the subsequent death of an emotion into laughter.
I thought trapeze artists were the hands of an overcharged clock,
Whirring to the haphazard music of circus tricks:
Fizz, crackle, boom.
I always imagined this drama unfurling in the backdrop of purple heat.
Instead, the light is ochre yellow in my room.

Today I was a crystal baby, shining up the dirty edges of rooms,
Asking for five more minutes in the soft measure of light,
Long after my Mum left, long after nobody was listening
Like I used to, when I was younger.

Today I was a crystal baby, sugar crystal peppering my mouth
When nobody was watching.

Gaps

I have been building light into the empty spaces
We do not impeach, like our intersecting umbras
Are strange light bulbs, not yellow ones;
Orange, red, blue.

I let all the light that fell on your face and transformed,
I let all the light that mimics your outline
Through the cream curtains,
Fall into the empty gaps for which
We don't have the ink to overwrite.

There is a war we're waging, between charge and stasis.
How long before we pull the negative space between us
And kill it?
How long before the negative space pushes away its edges
And kills us?

In my head last night, we were closing light,
Pulling the purse strings of our limbs tight,
Into each other
'Puzzle pieces,' I whispered,
Laughter, you responded, and I do not how to put it into quotations
-Even though that is more significant-
Because Laughter, an action is laughter, an action on paper
and how do I
Fill in the gap of its colour?

We need to find ourselves separate seas.

Remember the Atlas of our youth, who would carry
The Earth on his back?

Consult Atlas,
Consult the man anchored to the world.
Ask him about the Seas he carried, whose names he learnt
As Morse Code for escape.

Ask him the names of all the Seas,
have him tell you the names of the Seas
That new people named again and
And again
And again.

Ask Atlas whether it was an act of  conquering or conjuring,
That made the new people find new words for exploration
And casually cast it off into the sea.

Ask Atlas whether it was an act of movement or stasis
That made the new people say new words for
Desire, an emotion
Every time they were confronted by
The largest gap that they could find.

Gaia

In the larger picture, I'll always recommend sleep.

We were throwing rocks at cemented walls
Because that's what I felt like doing.
You asked me to leave my bag down, and pick up bricks
And throw them until one smashed loud enough
To make the buzzing in my head go out.

Back in 11th grade a boy I thought I liked pointed out the exact
Corner from the street he grew up in  
Where his friends and him were truly happy.  Sometimes I do not need you, I need your elbow, knees, bits of shirt
For the exact same reason.

We were hiding out, cops and robbers,
And going places you know and places I'm learning to know.
You knew them since you were younger and this was the edge of the street
As you knew it from your window
I know them since I'm older and I'm at the edge of the street
And long before I ever stood here
You looked out of the window to remember.

We were building stories, secret ones
'And if they ask'
'And should I tell'
'And does it really matter?'

I asked if I could buy lots of glass cups and smash them
And you said yes
I asked if you would stand in the sand and let
Ants walk over your feet for a photo you said yes
Yes I will yes I can no this isn't how you wanted it
I asked if it- if you know, I- really mattered
And you said yes.

Because she told me to not use qualifiers,
I imagined how to spell hate without making it sound so negative.
Miss, 'Yesterday, Thursday I thought of killing myself because
A. I wouldn't die
B. If I died, okay.
It's not that I don't appreciate that you value me
It's just that this is the wrong end of the equation,
I'm not trying to arrive at the x reasons you love me.
Miss, I'm just really trying to figure out y.'

Between two rocks, I asked you
What if okay meant I couldn't write again.
You told me writing was anything.
I told you in a flash, when the rock chipped the wall as a fullstop,
I thought of a poem:
'Sometimes, you need broken stones for the building.'
You smiled, knowing that isn't the poem.
I smiled because I knew you knew
That wasn't the poem.
The poem was the smash,
The deep breaths,
The sound of a bag being lifted off the pavement,
And hearing it break into rain.

I have a closet where everything is in place
And I have a key to the closet that I've lost twice in a row
One time my roommate told me it was under me
The second time it was where it was supposed to be
Only my roommate's gift of balloons was getting in the way.

Birdsong

Three days after I saw a passerine bird
I could not recognize
I sat frozen in the hot, hot floor
And watched the creases of my feet cave in
With three day old dust as proof
Of having spent time among the birds.

Today they asked me to spell green in the easiest way I know
So I built them an image:
'Imagine nothing.'
Today they asked me my favourite story from scripture
So I began with
'Imagine children.'
Today I typed passerine thrice and
All I know about the bird
Is dust.

How do you name birds
When all the words you know are borrowed?
How do you turn a sieve into
A container
If all you have taught it is to
Let go?
How do you name those  living interludes
That break against you too fast for you
To say more than a gasp and sputter
Before the next wave hits you and
You become a
Brown passerine bird with yellow beak
Cheek against sand,
Collecting dust.

In the hot, hot room where cats often come
To leave dusty paw prints,
I have learnt them by their paws and not their face
And sometimes the paws I call Nefertiti
Leaves drops of blood from a previous hunt
I wonder if I will know the passerine bird
If I see its blood.

I lie down on the floor,
Wondering that if dust can fly, can settle, can walk in
And take over everything you know,
If dust has learnt living.

Dust, can you hear me
Can you remember me
Would you know me
Would you want to know me from a
Passerine bird
Brown, yellow beaked. 

Gay Woman On the Opposite Seat

(For 12/6/2016)

Pink t shirt, boy cut, sunglasses on top 

Like fashion statements can sometimes overlap with
General sentiment
Like wearing pink is reinstating identity
And negating it
Like wearing pink is wearing white and wearing black
Which is to say is
good mourning.

The sunlight falls on your forearm in
Checkered patterns like it is reflecting
The physical bindings you are in
Like there is livewire around your wrist
Even when it isn't really
Like you are an animal trying to escape international borders
And the shadow of your past
Is the musky scent you can never rid get of

I've never been to a bar a pub a place
Never smelt the musky scent of hopeful sex
Heterosexual is kinda unsafe
I hope you know of seedy retreats
Train traveller on the street, The Street leading you to the sheets
After getting high on six shots of freedom and emancipation
And pink polo t-shirt coloured identity formation
I hope that tattoo peeking at me from beneath your sleeve
Develops eyes in safe homosexual company.

Men's watch, gold chain, are they family legacies?
Do your parents know?
If they shut you up in a pub
Would your parents know?
When your name comes in the papers tomorrow,
Is that the first time they'd know
That their daughter who kept low-key, shoved boys against the wall, looked at her breasts strangely
Died unhappy and gay?

Did you ever have to scream through shut doors
Creaking down with parental pressure
'Would you rather have me dead?'
Did you have to taste the floor more times than just that once
To keep your guts from spilling over?

Girl near the window seat,
You use the same shampoo as me
And have rough hands that carry its scent
Just like me.
Do you think when he was shooting them down
He could smell himself?

Ghost Towns

Walk around my room, my buildings of stacked away books

Don't trip and send the pile crashing
But if you do, the paperbacks will cushion you
Or if they don't at least
It wasn't sticks or stones
But words that broke your bones.

I'm laughing, right now
The coffee is hot, right now
It's in the kitchen, so it'll burn and spill before I reach out
But I'm surrounded by buildings
And I'm waiting for you to stand up so I can laugh and say,
'Godzilla'.

When we shut the lights and walk around
And watch our step to stop
Your Palahniuk from falling on my Ulysses
Your wrist reaching out for mine
Your car with its yellow pinprick eyes
Staring back even as we wish goodbye.

We're building ghost towns that no one outside us knows.

We have a secret language marked out in the nooks
Made by all the blocks of books
Tell me you're not a dancer and
We'll learn ballet
Tell me you don't walk barefoot
And I'll let your skin taste this marble valley.

Here is the blueprints on our palms
Of all the stories we've stolen from the buildings
Of how we built a world with words and
Then changed them in our head
And waited for when we're asleep, saying,
'They'll come back then.'

This is our ghost town
That we shelve out in half and half
For favourites, childhood-read,
Saving for our kids
Or when they invent technology for our dogs to read.

This is our ghost town
The one I'll pack and shut before anyone gets home
I'm not planning on leaving any evidence outside
The plans for what book is which brick
And which brick is for which building
And which one has love notes from a younger, older life
And which one is the one that's an allegory for you and I.

                                        

You Are Here/ Imaginary Homes

Turn right, after sunrise.
*
When I was a child I remember the blue walls
And all the faces that stared at me through glass
Whiskers, whispers, bubbles sent out to me in secret
I tapped the walls and there it was
That fish glancing to look at me.

You are here.

I liked getting pushed on swings
Until I realized no one could push me as hard as I wanted to rise
Seven year old rising into the sky
Seven year old wrapping leaves to make wounds run dry.

You are here.

This is how the sky shifts, pushing the clouds
Alongside
This is all you'll know of the sky- the patch from the window
This the story, and this is the pen,
You will always remain the child
Who danced in candlelight
And whose mother will never forget it
You are here

You will always know the almost-version of things
And push memory to move along, like a sullen pet
You are here

Memory is always a play involving Ghosts,
So that is how we were taught to understand fear.

You are
Nine, cycling in summer, with sunlight colouring you
And seeping into your laughter.
You know no other way.
You are
Eight, in a pink skirt and parka
Bending your head into a photograph,
You do not know it is the last for a few years.
You are
Seven and ill and playing Cinderella's evil stepmother
You remember how she was illustrated
And that that is how you were taught what 'ugly' means.
You are
Turning nineteen and you're dealing with being nine, eight, seven inside.
You are here.

When the room turned airy from sunlight and the air carried sunlight away
You are here
When the lights went out and you learned how to make crying lose voice
You are here
When you look into the mirror and lose sense of your fingers
You are here.

At some point you'll stop avoiding confronting the empty lot
Which has headless dolls, and scripts for the extras,
And you'll be able to build that castle you've been avoiding
And I hope it'll be tall enough to feel the air.

You are here
And you know imaginary homes need to breathe. 

Incense

I remember that even three days after you left me
I could smell you in the indents of my finger tips
I tried rubbing cumin to let you off,
But each time the pungent salt at the back of my tongue hit me
You filled me up like an aftertaste
My skin was several thousand oysters
Waiting to be beaten open with rocks
Until their shells split open to reveal beads of your
Incense.

When Mum and I were discussing
What colour I wanted my room
I told her I didn't need to see my room to know
I offered to sit surrounded by pails
Of fresh paint and dip my fingers thickly
Into blood and lavender and mint and feel them and see them
And smell that they smell all the same
I told her I needed to smell to know
So I asked her if my new room could be a rainbow.

I sometimes think of oysters being sold in markets and how
They carry their sea-smell with them
Laden inside the fish-smell, the blood-smell,
the smell of rust and sun and salt and iron as
Sediments in fate lines.
I am that oyster and every time I am offered for barter
I smell you and remember where I was most at home.

Smell is the strongest sense.
I could smell thunder before I could see it or hear it.
I remember smelling the heat come off of the barks of trees
And flooding away, blackening the water
The steam came off the rocky roads
And I shut the windows and opened my cupboard

I found a vial of perfume, unnamed and purpled with
Its own incense
I broke it out on my wrist and felt it slip into me like
My skin was bottling it up in tiny vials
And my wrists had learnt how to breathe
I called the vestiges of your number
I still remember and told the lady who insisted you did not exist,
'I have found the sea.'

Collective Poetry Reading

My mum cut up onions in the air-conditioned room in the morning
Because she said
it was too hot to cry alone
I was sitting in a corner, waiting for the poem to happen
Onions happened first.

After she left, the onion lingered
Entering crevices I wish were left uninterrupted and challenging me to split open
Like onion was mocking at my poetry.

The wounding is inevitable

I hope you remember that I was wearing a green t-shirt
And maroon tracks and they didn't synchronize
Which tells you what thought I put into my effortlessness.

Put down the phone when I read out self-authored autobiographies and diary entries
And create your own biography  of me and then when we trace
Lines back and forth to each other
Through crackling low connectivity,
I'll watch your name pop up on Google Documents, yellow halo-ed
Erasing my lines, replacing them with your version of mine.

I hope you are archiving this.

It shakes me up, this bracketing off of
Parts we love,
This common touch we have  learned to find in the same lines
The way we identify with a common sense of tearing- up
Tearing apart.

I heard of this play in Normandy
Where audiences pay to watch a woman
Turn on her stomach on a bed on a stage and they wait
Until she cries
The show runs full house and after a point
No one knows who is crying or why they are crying or if
Crying comes with purpose
Smiling comes best without purpose
I bet they leave, their top hats and gloves and walking sticks to match,
Wiping tears from the corners of their eyes.

Poetry reading is its own kind of poetry writing
The immortality isn't in the poet
It is in the flesh wound we carry in our hearts
And her binary fission.

Each time I have lain wounded in battle
Your battle wounds have synchronized to tear up in that very instance,
With the time difference of a text message
And two blue marks
What does it tell you about me, that I want to see you
Hurt how I was, where I was.
What does it tell you about you,
That you want to be hurt
How I was, where I was.

We finger books and leave them marked
In a wild attempt towards immortality
To hope the broken parts repeatedly break in history.
I like dog eared books because have some faith, goddamn you,
Have some faith that I'll loyally find you and
I'll patiently wait until you come back
And get excited when I see
That you have offered me a bone to pick,
Twin Crease Marks.

At some point, when you wait outside
I'll want to open the door and let you in and offer
Tea and cake like your mother used to.
I'll play out our inside joke inside because the doorknob will be broken
because the wind will want not let me
Open
Up
will you wait until I find a book thin enough to slide under the door?

We have lamented that books of poetry
are so expensive and so thin
they are the perfect size
to let you get in.

How It Was And Who We Were

When I did not know that you were sleeping
I imagined you breathing shallow dragon dust
Outside on the door.
Knock, I've told you,
Knock,
I'll let you in.

Here the gates are wrought of iron and
If we built this story a few centuries ago
The Dragon would have melted it And you would have walked over the hot, steaming, mess, triumphant.
You would have walked across two cities, ridden horseback
And they scars and welts that the journey gave you
Would be implied.
That would be your greatness, that is how our story would end.

Here, the gates are wrought of plastic curtains
And you need to blow to make them move,
You don't have to rap your fingers
Against the shadow dance it creates on the floor
But you are the dragon anyway.
You want to some things to catch fire
Anyway.

The hot steaming mess is implied
The scars and welts on your calves and thighs
And ring fingers are for me to find
But when I open you up against the desk
And attempt to find meaning in your
Sweet savage lines,
These are the parts I will bracket off
And mark in neat letters
'f-o-r-e-s-h-a-d-o-w-i-n-g'.

It will never matter how we lived
And how inwardly our dungeons are placed
Or that we do not need fences in this city
When it will be remembered,
The polite knocks will be written over
In a hot, steaming mess.

It's Not Even Been a Year. It Feels Like Forever.

Something about 10:30 PM,
Standing in a towel watching water dry off
The edges of pineapple eyed hair ,
Scrolling up and down, changing keywords asking Google
How does it feel?
How does it *feel*?
Lay the emphasis on any of those four words,
The keywords are the same.

How do I save the Tea Like Goldilocks Likes It
That created temporary testimonies:
The graffiti of our presence
In Khuranaji's mostly alone spaces?
How do I explain I like the irregularity of your teeth
Because I guess your parents got prescient enough
To see that teeth help make words and they
Didn't want to let your words muffle even temporarily.
You get your spirit from them.

How do I explain, with syntactic perfection, that
I only ever captured you laughing
Because I'd like you made permanent like that.
(Except do you see
the irony in capturing)

How do I explain we've built history on history when we've written word on word on word
In classes
And I never throw notebooks away
But I hope to make paper planes out of those pages
Because why must something so beautiful not see the light of the day?

That day, we wanted the twilight to remain.
Except it isn't really THAT day,
Because there have been so many of them.

Penumbra

You send me photos of irises enlarged
I see points of absences
And slipping light and
that is how I have learnt myself

The light has fallen in so many shapes
Father offering water to the sun

Practically naked

The light has split into fingers and lit
Up your skin marking all the
Off-limit places.

I wrote you little poems on postcards
In my head
I imagined little bullets
In your head
Either way I wanted
The same response anyway.

Practically naked

Reflections where our eyes meet, Recognising flecks of desperation
'Do you wear lenses
Your eyes reflect too much:

Practically naked'

Of course I broke glasses and pushed little cups off
China when no one else was looking
Of course I wanted light to shine
And break against my feet
Because no one was looking
Of course I made little ceremonies

Of Leaving blankets
Blanketed in mirror shards
Because that is how we will remain
Limb on limb,
Practically naked

And yes the light on the wall
Is the trophy I award myself
Because the only other time I ever see light splitting like that
Is in reverse,
Reflecting chain-link fences

And how do you unbecome?

I am trying to make
The last verse
The worst
Happen.

This is the moment
That we capture the sky
This is the moment
We will later eulogize:
sky
Fell into tatters put on a strip show maybe the sky isn't
All about light.

Mapping the Self: Three Points Around Which I Walked to Understand Myself Better

1. Graffiti, Zamrudpur (picture above)

Do you know what a quarter is? 

Currency, ek chauthai, part of a grapefruit 

-Mausumbi- 

Haan malum hai. 

Papa ke paan ke dokaan ke bagal mein raat mein bolte Hain 

'Quarter, quarter' 

Sniggers from four corners

This is a joke created out of the spaces 

Of why they would always sit opposite me, 

Not next to me. 

An eight year old learnt fractions with alcohol quantities

An eighteen year old spelled out

In the retreat of the evening

How he thought it was 

what he thought I was 

When I didn't know what they were talking about 

when they said knowingly,

Papa ke paan ke dokaan ke bagal mein raat mein bolte Hain 

'Quarter, quarter'. 

*

2. The Waxing Lady's Tale, GK1

She's seen her legs the way you wouldn't imagine them.

If you've crossed LSR in February there are flowers that fade 

Come April 

After the flower has been seen.

She is the gardener. 

Pull, tug, tear down, border off, landscape 

Limit wilderness to where you might find it beautiful enough to award it a token of appreciation:

A cup, for example. 

Drink her in slow, 

Because she spent three hours on achieving that glow 

That you're going to give a cursory glance to. 

She's doing it for a filter less selfie 

That she's going to drown in filter anyway 

(Even the golden honey instafair instaremoval nohairdontcare can says 

Valencia)

But just so you know 

She touched her there and there and went down south 

To strip down the Amazon basin

Before you even found your Brazil. 

The difference is, she stopped to question 

Why the basin had rivulets in red 

And knows enough about blades To say 

'Ma'am, aage se mat kariyega.

Yeh toh bada dark ho gaya.' 

*

3. Cosmetic Surgery, Amar Colony 

I bought Whisper 

She decided to stay free 

By choosing an alternative for (a) good foundation-

What you must skip on a menu card

But pause and consider in a cosmetics shop-

Soufflé. 

Each poster said natural, natural, natural 

I remember the ice cream company 

and vanilla and chocolate and 

Placing my arm on my friend's and 

Making chocolate and vanilla ice cream, naturally. 

Woman, subtle woman, smart woman, cool woman, 

saleswoman,

Considerate enough to stop and look from friend to me 

To consider skin colour before 

Choosing what was an appropriate foundation. 

Naturally. 

Vanilla soufflé on skin, 

mixing so perfectly that you

wouldn't even know it was there.

But it was. 

The foundation was always there. 

When asked what was better: 

a fair or a natural foundation, 

She said, 

'Natural, naturally. 

You have to make the foundation look natural.'

Two Days

(For 21/2/16)

Today was a really good day. I mean it. I went around the LSR Campus taking photos as an evidence of spring happening. Later, I explained spring happening to a friend of mine who can't see. Photographs aren't evidence enough, so I made her feel the flowers in the pictures- those whose names I knew. I also told her about my favourite flower, camellia. They break really easily.

Last year, after reading The Narrow Road To the Deep North before boards, a friend of mine and I had become obsessed with the flower. We had a camellia bush in school, which shed flowers everyday, as though to incentivize me to not leave. I gave a flower to everyone I loved then. They break really easily.

My friend promised me she'd tell me when the bush bloomed again.

I got this today.

So I wrote this:

Two Days.

30/3/15
When I offer you camellias,
Hold them like you would hold
yourself
When in the absolute fear of breaking.
Camellias break with touch,
And I give them to you as a metaphor for
Bigger Things
They will come apart, whorl by whorl
But on early mornings, in the middle of boards,
They are drops of blood scattered on
mirrors that ripple with a touch,
The ground rippling with the need
To hold something as delicate as a camellia,
Resorting to its oldest trick:
Gravity.

If impossible is an absolute
And it is impossible to preserve a camellia,
Tell me you'll love me absolutely.

21/2/16
How do you explain colours to someone who is blind?
You describe.
Draw shut your wrist, I'll colour it red with my fingers
Sketching circles with the pad of my thumbs
Can you feel it? My delicate camellia?
The sun looks like this, like my Palm opening into your Palm
The world may feel blue, but it is green,
Green as in you can walk uninhibited,
Green as in the earth opened its Palm into the Sun.
And that's a bougainvillea that I have put against your cheek
It feels like leaves, but I bet you haven't felt leaves
On your cheek at least.
Pinecones are prayer-shaped, like my prayer on top of yours
And the serrations of our fingers
Is what our prayers have to offer.

Think innocence for light,
Think fifteen and in love for the first time.
Think passion for deep,
Think fifteen and out of love for the first time.
Think light and dark heart-shaped drops
Which will come apart
Whorl by whorl.
Can you see it? My delicate camellia?

Made Up Stories/ A Rainy Valentine's Day in the Park/ (500) Days of Autumn

Every once in a while, I call your name
To make me believe it happened.
Autumn, Autumn happens.
In secluded corner of skin we carve
Seasons to explain wind and rain and that state of
Droplets heavy with hope.
I have washed over pages heavy with residual droplets
From three monsoons ago
With words like
Fall.

Add 'in love'
Before or after.

Some sort of laughter that drove us up against the wall
And out on the streets
Teenagers driven by some strange idea of
Invincibility, invisibility
Maybe I built a voodoo doll and stitched your name on it
And asked you to tear it apart when (if)
We separated
Because that is what I would have
Liked to do to you.

The trees here are growing old and bent
And I think their age is an invitation to be touched
Like when we made up love stories, we would
Like when we carved monuments in text, we would
We touched, we touched like
Lips and skin and a mutual dizziness
Ground pulled from beneath our feet
Aftershocks the rumbled down our throats into
Smoke in the pit of our stomach
The unpredictability shook us, the fingers, I remember the fingers
The shaken, beaten,
fingers we used to taste the
Carpet of grass that held water in a tight embrace
The fingers we used to break the electric tension of fragile love:
It was all a monsoon hangover anyway.

In a way, aren't we all the love police?
In a way, isn't love going to dismantle us?
In a way, haven't we fingered the past enough to
Blur dew and rain?

The choice was mine, you said
Where I wanted to damage pre-existing love stories
Where I wanted to write love the love that has never been written
Because it has never been created
Except in the impression we left on the grass.
In a way, didn't you tell me it was my choice to
Choose to be destroyed by love?

Every once in a while, I call your name.
A friend told me her boyfriend told her
Sikkim has autumns.
Fall.
In love.

Dining Hall Conversations

Sixteen.
There were always lines meant to discipline,
Meant to hold back,
Meant to extend the distance between
You and food.
There were fingerprints all over the plates,
Incriminating those who felt, who ate, who
Took up too much space.

Sixteen.
'My thighs/arms/wrist/clavicle
Gap/stomach/waist/cheek
Chin/back/butt/leg
Fat. So. Fat.'
Words were laid as memorials to the
Heavily drawn lines of how much, how little
We ate.

Nine.
Ten days of parental absence,
Chocolates bought for each inevitable tear,
Chocolates meant as survival strategy.

Thirteen.
Arms grew past the span of your index and thumb fingers
'But do you want to dress like that
But do you want to eat that
But you are two kilos too heavy
Take away the butter platter.'

Seventeen.
Tablet sized dream
Exploding in your stomach
Lines of blood in your thighs
Demarcating
Where battle scars need to become
Lines of Control
Hills on your wrists, collar,
Strategic advantages for luring rivals in
The inward crater in you that rumbles
Avalanches of hunger with every breath
The no-man's land between your thighs
To build a country for men.

Fourteen
'Lauki. Lauki is the answer to everything.'
If you have large eyes,
Add some desperation.
If you have a pouty mouth,
Add some traces of lips chewed clean.
If you have shiny black hair,
Starve until your skin shines as well.

Meanwhile your diagrammatic representation of perfection
Comprises parentheses,
Set against themselves.

Seventeen.
Chocolates discarded.
Oranges. Water. Daal.
Your body is 70% water and
The 27% of tears that it empties out can be replaced with your special secret:
Liquid diets.
You secretly fantasize fainting because at least
There will be some legitimacy to your brand of
Martyrdom.

Eighteen.
Classroom:
Tables facing Table
Tables questioning Table.
'But does being pretty amount to anything?
But female beauty standards are a patriarchal construct.'
But Skinny, tall, white, is an unnecessary ideal.
Give my back my freedom.'

Eighteen.
Phone Conversation with Mom:
Long distance that amplifies love
And blinds us to all that surrounds it.
'There is a lady downstairs ... she is quite healthy ... she is wearing trackpants and a t-shirt.'
'So what? You can wear it too.'
'Yeah, but ...'

Eighteen.
Contents in the wardrobe:
Some clothes; many earrings, shoes
Space, neatness
Sizes create inevitable spaces and blocks
Of clothes worn on endless repeat
Clothes whose fabric and cut spell 'If only'.

Eighteen.
Dining Hall:
Tables
Surrounded by people
Blemished by food
Squandered, divided, reduced,
Left unconsumed.
Amidst the echoed clatter of spoons tasted selectively
I hear the battle cry
We learnt with our baby food:
'I wish I was pretty.'

To Love, In Retrospect

The thing is
Something about the way we pronounce desire
Something that is born from the core of our bones
That grows disproportionately
to the extremities we've known
That grows till we begin spelling it with
In the chatter of our teeth
In the skin maimed by indents
In the way we swirl tea
Some call it charting a destiny.

"Build a map".
The cartographers' skill we used to mould
Shapes, like imagination can only bend in so many ways
Before it becomes a repetition.
"Build a dream."
Like the house my mother's mother made in pencil
And the home she makes everyday by the art of breathing.

Build a fire, a song, a whistle to create in empty corridors
The kind that makes the glass hallway shake.

There are so many kinds of incineration, and
Words that light up in the shadow of absences
-Like the cigarette butts you lit
But I burnt out into blindness-
Are my absolute favourite.

The Unfinished Capsicum

Maa ne kaha tha,
Shimla mirch ki sabzi nahi banate,
Bachpan mein
Bettiah mein
Shimla Mirch nahi milti thi,
Jab milti thi toh sabzi nahi banate.
Kam tha na.
Fridge mein Shimla Mirch rehene se
"Rich lagta hai."
Ghar mein aaoge toh,
Fridge mein shimla mirch katti hui milegi.
Puri shimla mirch aaj bhi nahi istemaal kar paati.
Rich lagta hai.
Marwar ki raeth mein,
(Oasis)

My language enters my mind in a flood
Alphabet soup
That drowns me out with possibility.
I have sat on the edge of the flood that is self-perpetuating.
Some say that a flood like that
is a lake
But I know the difference between a resource
And an inconvenience.
Ghar ki dalheez par khatam hota hai.

I walk home
having waded in the flood
having floated paper boats where wooden ones would break
Having seen/imagined the tadpoles
That swim past me and return, as I do,
Home.

I wipe my feet and dry my calves
And hear the sound of rain muffled by dryness
Roll down my jeans
And walk inside.

Maa kehti hai,
Tumhari poetry samajh nahi aati.
Kuch kehte ho,
usse sirf thora sa
hi samajh aata hai.

If you ever come home
You will always find
unfinished capsicum.

Something Other Than The Desperation/ The Morse of Understanding

How much time before we keep mouthing 'I love you, I love you, I love you'
Before we realize that the only parts we ever
Picked up and blew dust off
Were parts we could wear around ourselves.

Call it a disorder.
Call it an affinity.

You once told me night and day were conjoined twins
Ripped apart by sunlight's parentheses
I laughed and told you I could build a story around that sentence.

This is that story.

Can you keep that Chinese delivery bag where I wrote you a haiku?
Can you pretend you remember the first three sentences I ever told you?
Can you convince me that we have been Good Hindus
Because I don't, I don't want our flesh to singe this way
And believe there was no reason to.

Can you draw lines in the red plastic box
I left accidentally
When you begin to hate me?
Can you tear the pillow cover,
smash the last dredges of black in the kohl pot,
Break glassware into the wall till
You can absolutely erase
How I feel?
Can you love me enough
To absolutely hate me?

Call it extremities.
Call it existential need.

In retrospect,
All we will have is movement,
Light chose to settling
In between the crevasses of your hair.
Wind making twisted mountains of your shoulder,
Your laughter seeping into every 'Bend over'.
And silence.
Wafting in silently like the dust
like parentheses
In sunlight that made us
That tore us.
I will always remember the sunlight
Best.