The Sunset on August 5th, 2020

The sun’s decline is both

a spectacle and a proposal
for us to decide over, to veto the power

of the strongest-

since ignorance of the masses

cannot be an excuse always-

"The sun set on the British Empire",

they announced on the loudspeakers

"And shone on the hands

of a few good Chitpavani Brahmins",

they sniggered under their breaths.

The tea shop below our house

stopped selling milk because of the Sun,

its movement making Bappa ji hysterical

at times, while Morya threw away

the spoilt milk,

(instead of making chhena)

The landlords complained of

direct sun rays giving them headaches

but only on alternative days of the week.

They performed Surya Namaskar 8 times

on those days, offered water to the Sun

from the lota on the terrace,

worshipped the Sun-facing Tulsi

and performed parikramas around it

Yet till this very day,

the moment the ache dins

and takes control of their minds

a little red light glows on their foreheads

They start swearing the Sun

left, right and center

for its unmitigated tyranny on their bodies

for getting inside their neural network

and making their fingers

tap on unrecognized keys

on WhatsApp, on Facebook,

on Twitter and on EVMs

until they find themselves in the middle

of an unrecognised disaster.

"Was it a sudden, unannounced earthquake

Or a slowly brewing gas leak?",

They ask on the news at night

"It was as imminent as the sun rise",

They snigger under their breaths.

On Love

My lonely arms wait

not for someone else, but for you

On the balcony with cracked concrete 

in a run down suburb,

I stood with you, my entire heart

overflowing with love, 

inversely proportionate 

to the deficit in our water tank

directly proportionate 

to the energy it took

to fill it up

Love that I hadn't known, 

that which wasn't

felt before, 

love that was mine to keep 

for however long I need

And that freedom is enticing, 

 

that power is glorious 

till the moment you can see love

become an image before you

but love, like life, is no thing really

It doesn't exist without the other,

without body or form

it is, like life, an organisation of molecules,

letting your brain function in some direction

by exerting forces inside the body

Love, like life, is an emergent property

And so it doesn't show up while you're at

the same wine shop buying whiskey

for four days straight,

it doesn't call on you when you're flushing down

Biryani 

with Sprite like a true Hyderabadi

heck, it doesn't even knock

when you're in someone else's bed

after a dinner of peanuts and alcohol

trying to find your release and fall

Love only emerges from something,

and don't ask me what, I have learnt nothing

but I speculate that in the deeps of

my heart, and yours,

we knew what was emerging

how the molecules inside were

forming a bond,

a bond that may be as strong as

a double helix 

held together by something other than hydrogen,

a bond that could perhaps emerge out of

what Neitzsche had called the will to power

and the will to power can only emerge

alongside the will to know

Love, my dear, maybe only what we know

It is what we know happened when the molecules

formed the bonds tightly held,

not between us like an invisible string

but inside you, inside me,

separately.

Denial

You don't need to read a Murakami story 
to judge if women make good drivers,

revive me from my passivity 
and I'll tell you the answer

Tell me, what'll make you listen?

I have called forth the hurricane inside

and cried "Poseidon!"

to save all the plasma and red blood cells

drop by and say hi, protector of seafarers

Give them a hand to stay afloat 
in this ocean of flesh and bones,

the heat is rising, the ice melting, pick up a scale 
and measure the rhythm of my palpitation

Sample it and replay, until

you find the two right notes and a power chord,

make me a song, cry me a river, break me again 

and put it on repeat 

I had already mastered the art of losing, and faster

now I'm learning how to write it like a disaster

while I steam my lungs clean and make them pure
to consume Afghani hashish re-mixed 
in the streets of Delhi

(we take their drugs while they take our wheat)

every relationship is a relationship of exchange
but I think I'm done, 
I don't need your cure 
anymore.   

For Araku

(A valley that falls on the Eastern Ghats of India, located in the Vishakhapatnam district of Andhra Pradesh)

I haven't seen your crests or felt your air hitting my face
neither have I walked past the greenness reproduced in my head

I have circled around you
in breaks, but like a good falcon,
gone back to my abode when needs reckon

Yet I have inhaled the scent of your earth

in dusty whiffs of a good spliff, I have tasted 
your soil that is thought to be only as good 
as the tons of bauxite 
it produces for industries and governments

I have redistributed the control of your fertility
in my small drags of resistance.

I haven't been sheltered by your deep enticing caves
or met the eleven species of owls that you house in your thick forests,

But in palm-length buds and slender stems,
I have consumed the sweet scent of your creation
like a plant-worshipping pagan, I too have teleported to places
other than the Deccan.

And when the time comes, I will have met your people
who can launch a thousand spears against any Naidu or Adani,
and refuse to mine aluminium in place of the most aromatic coffee

Araku, I will pull myself asunder to see you
for one stimulant doesn't seem enough to be. 

Your Skin

Wondered how thinking about your skin
can make me crave, salivate
swallow the juices produced inside my painful mouth
(with sores on the tongue pricking from all sides)
that rests on too much salt
sticking on the edges of the weirdest muscle of the body
(the tongue is transgressive; both inside and outside)
like your skin that shivers, before our bodies
take hold of each other’s-
that process which I found out is called ‘horripilation’
and which further makes me wonder
why the language of pleasure shares itself with that of horror,

is this why Dracula is the cultural icon of the seductive monster?

All bodies are grotesque
but not all are salty,
I have tasted bitter hearts and cold lemons before
that did not make my tongue sore
but I want to consume you
because thinking of your skin can bring me tears

(and I always liked consuming my own tears)
Salt, salt, salt that can touch my tongue again, sore it again
bring my mouth to pain even when the tongue isn’t a prisoner
of either pleasure, pain or horror
it is the weirdest muscle that can feel your skin best,
and maybe ‘horripilation’ breaks down in meaning
when the salivating tip of my tongue touches you

maybe it tickles, raises the thin hair on your back
but the violence of pleasure is a different kind of violence;
it is neither horror nor pillage
(nor anything entirely external to the body)

Maybe it is time to stop iconising the Dracula,
Maybe it is time for the tongue to sore with too much salt.

'the imperfect is our paradise'

The staircase is endless now,
and the window is an opening
stretched elastic by mosquitos in need.
But you and I,
we haven’t grown more different
from each other than how we were
in the beginning,
or have we?
Does living together
also mean growing apart?
But distance may not follow difference,
we could’ve been clones and yet been
repellent to each other,
yet not found closeness in smelly mattresses
and half-torn bedsheets
yet not fallen asleep together

But we did,
and who promised that it would be painless?
who swore that you wouldn’t be looking for me
when I was right there?

Presence changes
As people change

Maybe my presence smells like the plants
we killed together
leaving them beside a light bulb for too long.
Maybe that’s why you smell of musk
and not minted ice anymore
and that is what perhaps dogs sense better than us,
perhaps that's why they don’t need an epiphany
or a breakthrough
because we are so hopelessly experiential,
tied down with a leash to our living conditions
so momentarily sad-happy-existential-sexual,
always looking to complete the whole that
we think we deserve to become,
sooner or later

that we dive right in
when the opening feels like an elastic peephole.
Yet, maybe in the January of 2015,
the mosquitos in need found what they were looking for
rolling along with Maynard’s passivity,
lost again
but a better lost

You and I, my love, are imperfectly evil predators

and this is our paradise.

20

the time you turn 20, your throat will be a thorn
more like a cactus,
filled with lonely thorns standing apart
or perhaps double-edged nails
dancing along the slim skin around the tonsils
remember that it's an acidic reminder
for all things lost,
for all things gained,
for the similar acidity you felt
before the good things in life played

your heart will be pounding
for reasons bettter left to the chemical
cluster of the body
palpitation was your old friend
but now as your stomach punches itself,
forces the insides of the body to scream
and scratch against the double-edged nails,
you remember,

remember the time when your father told you the story of 

his father's friend, 

who always fainted on hearing Begum Akhtar sing

 Ae Mohabbat Tere Anjaam Pe Rona Aaya

 
how he was widower, 

a soul lost in the remnants of love like all of us, 

and you imagine all the things that might've been 

floating inside his head transmitting through his body,
how this pale, thick gurgle of cough 

binds you and him together for seeking remembrance
how love is but a reaction to a song passing by.

my feet do not know,
when mud and dirt is slung on them,
which way to go

there is only that one where water is clogged
uptill the knees
and i feel like i can swim across an ocean with you

in the midst of cigarette butts dancing in puddles,
my feet want to imitate their movement
but i am stuck in the swamp

of my mind, which surpasses the assurance
of cemented roads
always almost touching the skin of my feet

the closer to the ground i get,
the more scared i am of losing it
perhaps the reason you hold still is that you wear boots

the shedding skin of my feet tries hard
to renew, rebuild the hold
while i only end up feeling vulnerable

like the snake whose newly exposed scales shine
with all the dirt nicely seeped into it,
so when you tell me that you'll make it all go away

touch my skin and stop the shedding
i believe you, i believe you with all my heart
but my selfish feet ask for more

I cannot click photographs

Every time I try, the image slips away from me
It’s not that hard to understand, really

because if you imagine yourself waiting
for hours
as time becomes redundant
like an insipid advertisement
to catch your fish and end up missing it
just at the moment of pulling the reel,
you will know what I mean.

But you try, and mostly you succeed
you tell me to look for lines
or doors and windows,
something to focus,
to set an angle

to turn the image into a photograph

And I am not quite sure of how to do that
there are oceans everywhere for me,
an excess of existence that is always slipping away
words are always too many to be writing selectively,

images most often blur into each other
the fish cause a chaos over crumbs of bread
the reel entangles itself with my cotton shirt
until that one moment passes off,
full of scorn,

a drunkard’s shaming.

Excesses

My cramps are my needle pricks

needed as much as I need you,

as much as I need you to feel that need

and as much as the rush I get

slapping myself

hard

for feeling that need,

because it is my body that feels

not my brain

-however much hormonal secretion

is the source of it-

It is my body which feels like my heart has been

pulled out forcibly and banged against the wall

with the wiring still plugged through my rib-cage

so its reverberations are felt,

and heard,

playing a requiem.

It is my body which feels not only the force

or detachment

but the utter shock of it

as if someone had told me that the plants I watered

for years had been plastic.

Lies and silences are just different

seasons for the same garden,

But this isn’t the Bard’s garden of love;

this isn’t a midsummer night’s magic trick either.

This is my body being reactionary to the force

slipping words out of sick hands

which promise you nothing,

puking particles from my stomach

which feels inexorably similar

during cramps of menstruation

and in the throes of orgasm.

What I Wrote Was Always Incomplete

We’ll spend our lives in ellipses,

And you won’t even get to know

My snores

                       In breaks

Try to reach somewhere

Break

And resume again,

You said,

Like there’s a voice inside

Wanting to

Like your sleep

It has no cycle, 

                       Only        

               a

                                            maze

and you and I focus to find

our routes

underthetress

ontherocks

insidedreams

with your sinuses and medication,

my sad nothings and

commas in clouds

                                      or were they birds?

We reach the end,

The start

Dices in our hands

                       
                               We created this maze ourselves

                         On ellipses

Now the Train is here

Our platforms different

But

Our dreams

Won’t be

You aren’t lovers in Delhi

if you haven’t been to the bylanes

of Connaught Place together,

seen the broken balcony

above the chai-wallah shack

and shared the vision

of standing entwined on such a one

to encase the sun setting

into the abysmal cemented

terraces

but shared it in the space

between two separate heads

that which is better left unarticulated

and indistinct in shape

like the smoke released from

two separate cigarettes 

making love in the air,

 exalted.

Without-Another

(Inspired by Eunice De Souza’s ‘Another Way to Die’)

I would have imprinted my name

in the space between your ribs,

if only I liked my name enough,

and carbonated the eight letters so that

they may be clung to your skin

when your body is nothing more than fossil

And those eight letters would be

as dysfunctional as I am,

breaking into funny patterns

when you’re all alone in the dark,

when your brain shuts down

and only senses remain

because you don’t see maggots  

suffocating you to death,

or yellow bulls floating in the air

with blood dripping from their horns

-your blood-

only to realize that there is no

cosmic carousel,

nor a fantastic marvel

to your self-loathing.

Only being called out is enough to

make me realize that it isn’t your voice,

only touching my finger to someone else’s

is enough to remind me that it isn’t

your body next to mine.

Writing through Peepholes

What have I got to write about

when experience falls short of the metaphor

and those sailors of the sea use and abuse the nausea and sickness  

for all the poetry in the world

and those soldiers, friends of the soldiers,

friends of friends of the soldiers have their grim realities to themselves-

struggle, life, strife, achieve and lose- all in the same moment

which sounds more hysterical than grim

--so you know how they package their syllabus,

those English departments of the world, defining Sassoon’s poetry

as a moment via the experience of shell shock

and you know that we’ll never get rid of categories, but you also know

that engagement with categories is essential--

all too familiar to me when, with no sense of realization,

I have to shit and piss and bleed in the same moment

to get rid of the undesirable category of pretension

some name-dropping guy puts me in,

but you have all too many selves to keep track of  which one

is thrown inside the court to fill the numbers because

man, you’re too scared of the ball hitting your head

all that you can do is run around and prevent coming in anyone’s way

--but the point is that the ‘I’ remembers a time when

I wore that guy like a pair of jeans

and you know how they package pairs of jeans

with all your ‘Curve’ and ‘Diva’ collections

but that doesn’t prevent you from buying them either

it just makes you feel like living in exile,

the scale of which is set by comparisons between

a Malyali and a Kashmiri living in Delhi,

an Assamese and a Mumbaikar studying in Ghalib's city

--because when I say that you know how everything is packaged

I’m talking about staring into the sun teary-eyed and seeing a personal rainbow

but don’t believe ‘em saying that to add colour in your life

is the best way to live--

yet even this is'nt something that I have got to write about. 

Circle

There’s always a circle

which no theory talks about

it doesn’t disrupt my

everyday functioning

for I’m still gliding through to do

what I have to do

like an unworn skate

on a slant surface

of both pleasure and pain

and if I glide through for long

the dose of regularity will

prevent all my palpitations,

I know,

except in that accidental moment

when those half-internalised tunes 

flow in the background 

carrying the scent of 

Urbino’s bitter almonds,

I become aware of the circle

and palpitations resurface

I am an empty flat in some

suburban part of town

where noises are always heard

from the unfamiliar outside

while a nauseating silence lingers inside

compressing the air too hard to bare

I want to shit out memories

Do you see now?

sounds, smell and shit

always in a circle

revealing the lie of

gliding like a skate

but even if I know that you see it

there’s hardly any solace in this state.

                  

From The Inside

At the finishing point of a book

chosen insecurely from the pile
that should rather be read

before anything else,

hours spent in the makeshift spot on

the mattress that has made a pit

hugging my ass like it was never to let go

of a favourite tenant,

like it had never known any other before

and the ass and I diving right into

the only habitat that would accept

us without anything asked for in return.

My sister,

she’s been on four phone calls

since the last few hours,

Four long intense conversations with

friends from the old days from the old cities,

while I’ve been twitching around in my pit

making an aspirational hollow

and measuring my irregular hair strands

with the words on the page

a message from the boy I fell for

a message from the boy I slept with

and the unmoving I stuck in the pit carrying

all my weight

for it would never complain about it

or anything else,

for it would never ask for a response

from she who mastered the fucking

art of unresponsiveness  

like the hermit who but for their ideals

desire sociality, except that weighing

down deep in the pit was never

my ideal.