A Reclaiming

Like all colonisers, I am desperate
despite my power and obvious good will.

I wouldn't ask for too much; all I want
is a little control, some moderate demands fulfilled.
Do let me know. My army is tired. I can fight
if need be, but peaceful compromise and bargain
works just as well for me. Perhaps better.

To be honest, my army
is somewhere else. My army
is resting. Is asleep. Has forgotten.

But I have maps. I have plans. I have
the good old tried-and-tested friend and foe
called Fate on my side. This is a war
I will win, because I have no choice.

My mirror smirks at me, and I am forced
to smirk back. I do not feel like smirking.
I feel tired.

It is a simple operation. Requires no navy.
No toothbrush factories. No war photographers.

If I must be candid for the media, I will tell them
all I want is a rightful right. A returning. A recovery.
All I want, I will tell them with straight face, is to

reclaim my life. Name my cities my own.
Tell my various people to unite under me.
Organise filing cabinets, judicial offices.

I have been lost for so long. Somebody
dethroned me, but it was only me. I have been
wandering deserts, travelling like one who has
no home. Perhaps I have no home. This loss
smells like the sea, and leaves me breathless
and wanting.

A reclaiming would be heavenly. A reclaiming
would be wonderful. I could feel less like a stranger
in the cities of my hometown, the countries of my skin.

This is a war
I don't know how to fight.
This is a war
where fate has predicted every outcome.
To be honest, I was lying earlier. Like every
good coloniser. This is a war I might never win.
This is a war that will never begin. Perhaps this is
not even my war. Perhaps I should move to a quieter suburb.
Perhaps deserts are all that are left, and I can name my desire
Thirst, and be done with it. This is a war and a lifetime
where struggle is always too soon and too late, never any use.
Perhaps I wasn't lying all the way. This is not a war. This is a
reclaiming. I will never win. My desire will skim the horizon
and I will always be left behind. Just by a few steps. Just a few.
This is the kind of conflict that settles in hair and smells of smoke
and is always newly born. I could not lose this if I tried. I could not
lose. Could not erase the past. Could not recreate the past. Could not.
Could not. Could not. Could be good. Would be left, dry desert,
mirthless thirst, a fragment, a wildness, a lonely piece of driftwood.

everything numbs

to be honest
the fire in my fingertips is getting harder to find

and days go by without me remembering
that i am alive.
perhaps it's age and perhaps it isn't

either way,
it's all going numb.
i want to have the idealism i did at 18,
the self confidence, the joy too large
for me to contain. to be honest,
i want to feel the same kind of heartbreak
i did at 14. it blew me up, blossomed like
wild roses and firecrackers, left me weeping
and so alive. nothing feels that way
anymore. nothing hurts too much to bear;

except this itself, this numbness, this
sense of falling, this city of ruins
that was once gloriously my own.

perhaps it's age. perhaps time.
like metal rusts, perhaps i rust too.
everything numbs. nothing feels like
life. only like clockwork. the colours
dim, like in the movies, and stay there.

i will go on because that is the only way
and nobody asked me when they decided.
perhaps it's inevitable, that the tremble in my belly
would die down and leave only ashes, only damp pillows.
too many people have said too much and for the first time
i have nothing to say. nothing to hear. only a little ache

for birdsong, and the sound of wind rushing through trees,
and the sound of my heart billowing out into the sky and
calling out to airplanes, to broken hearts, to forgotten books.
i am an airplane. a broken heart
forgetting itself. a forgotten book.
nothing is calling out to me. i hide.
these words mean nothing. there is only

a slow squandering of time. only scrolling.
only smoking. only music that lets you forget.
only sad news. only more books. only a future
that asks you to care. only a roomful of people
who love you. only so many notebooks you filled
and forgot. only words. only void. only falling.

only ever sin

“the nature of desire is such”, said a well-meaning

philosophy professor, “that it is never ending”. 

i test the phrase on my eager tongue.

“the nature of desire”, i say. gently.

the earthy word settles like dust

on the sensual sound of ‘desire’. 

i lie back in my field of gold sunsets

and fashion rhetoric from my angst.

there is so much desire. so much need

to possess, so much wild yearning.

i languish in these fragments. i ache.

somewhere i told myself i could gather

the world in the palms of my hands

if only i could know it

; god knows i desire it. god knows,

if he knows anything at all.

knowledge, i said. if instinct doesn’t work.

eager, i bit into the apple. it was all illicit seed 
and white flesh ensconced in skin.

little did i know

it was only ever sin.

eventually, all the pathways

lead the same way. there is

despair. there are gold sunsets.

there is fleeting joy. an essential

misunderstanding.

it is all half lives.

it is all unknowable.

infinitely desirable.

infinitely unreachable. 

the world laughs at my pains

and tells me it's been waiting

in my palms all along. i try to smile

; my mouth is bloody with apple skins and ache.

all the tears that have filled me up to the brim

are hurting me. i cannot untie them from my eyes

because they are not mine. i will never own

the important things. i will never know

eventually there is a hopeless hope:

words that whisper to my spine and tremble

under my ribs and come to rest, nestled under 

my neck, like newborn moons meeting darkness

for the very first time.

To B-Ma

Is it time to begin writing about you yet?
Will it ever be time to begin writing about you?
I feel like I can only think about you in fragments. You’re still a raw wound. It is painful to dwell too long on the contours of your face, the sound of your voice, on your laughter and ease. I think about you in snatches, as the light flits across metro floors in Delhi. Mostly, though, it is underground and darkness. A strangely easy forgetting that I have seen death from uncomfortably close. A general sort of numbness.
It is hard to understand death. In the wake of death, it is hard to understand life.
It is a series of interconnected crises culminating in my head. There is a profound and painful sense that nothing matters. I have seen death. Death exists. Death will come, slowly or swiftly, to us all, no matter what we dream or fight or attempt to achieve in our absurd lifetimes. That knowledge has shifted insidiously from an intellectual fact to a deep awareness. It is a dangerous thing to have a deep awareness of. I hope I am able to forget it soon.
Along with the despair comes something unexpected; all of a sudden, it seems, I am not able to make as much sense of the world as I could two months ago. Death is terrifying not only because of it’s inevitability, but also because of it’s deep incomprehensibility. What does it mean for someone to die? I have never been religious. My beliefs and my intellectually reasoned stances have always magically corresponded. I never needed God, and I never needed a heaven or a hell or a soul that would remain behind when the corporeal body passed into gentle ruin. When I walked into that room and saw - there is really no other word for it - your corpse, there were no misconceptions. I did not expect anything but a void in the place that you left behind. There is a clear darkness. An empty chair. I saw your body burnt on a pyre. Nothing remains. What does that mean?
All of a sudden, there is discontinuity in my understanding of the world. I am not able to wrap my head across something as vast and ordinary as this. You are dead. You are no more. You do not exist. It is as though you were never there. Is it?
All of a sudden, my ideas of what it means to “be there” or “be here” are complicated and shaken. What does it mean at all to live, to grow, to feel pain and love and joy, to sing, to bathe, to sleep, if at the end of everything there is only gentle ruin and an unapologetic void? I did not sign up for this. I don’t think anybody did. Fear before death is a fear born out of ignorance. Fear after death (of course, not your own), seems to be a much more intelligent, insidious thing. That is, if you really let yourself feel it. If you really let yourself think some of these ideas through. It is so much easier to lock it up in a corner of your mind and continue living, for goodness sake, continue breathing and eating and walking and reading and pretending as though you have an eternity in which to do these mindless things.
I am sorry I am writing so much about myself, and the ruins you have left behind in my mind. I am apologising to the reader, whoever she or he may be, especially if she is a later version of myself who will read this and be ashamed, dissatisfied. I am not apologising to you who I am writing to, really, because you are an abstract idea in my head, a memory, a feeling, a breath of wind that smells of cold cream and perfume. You are not a reality anymore, simply a passive idea, mine to understand or misunderstand as I will. “All reality is iconoclastic”, writes C.S. Lewis in A Grief Observed. “The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to, you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead”. But Mr. Lewis, that is the hardest thing, is it not? To love the unexpected and independent reality of the Other, even when they are alive. When somebody passes away, it is the easiest thing to hang up a stagnant image of her in our scheming minds, and tell ourselves that this, this particular arrangement of light and shadow on her jaw, this orange scarf, this background of leaves and this vacant smile, this was all she was. This is what I must love now.
I did this too when you were alive, B-ma. Every time I left home, I carried images of you all in my bag, in my mind. I stuck them on my wall. My favourite is one with Savera cutting her birthday cake, with mom and dad and both sets of grandparents. The light is warm and lovely, and the faces leak happiness. I still have this on my board. It is a painful stab to realise that this is the last of its kind. My family has been pruned a little at the edges. It will never be complete again. Even when it was, I carried this image of you all - healthy, happy, together - wherever I went, and pretended that just because I wasn’t home, nothing would change. For the most part, nothing did. For months we would not talk. It is awkward on the phone. I am unused to it. I am more used to your presence, your voice that travels up the stairs and leaves me smiling. That’s the thing, isn’t it? The difference, the real concrete difference between life and death. When you were alive, you would knock me back straight whenever I came home. You existed, independent of me, in all your glory and unexpectedness and vibrance. You existed whether or not I thought of you, called you, or came downstairs for dinner. Death is stagnation, in essence. Nothing will ever change now. You will never find a new friend, or a new hobby, or a new restaurant. You are an idea that exists as long as we, the leftovers, are persistent about it. When we get tired of feeling grief, you will slip away like a leaf in the wind. It will be the hardest thing to remember your resistances, your faults, your foursquare and independent reality. We will only have pictures, faded with sun and time.

description of difficulty

life leads me
here; to a flickering screen,
lilting music, an unmade bed
and it's almost noon.

it is hard to forgive myself
for the days i cannot move.

it is hard to remember
death, and not skirt around it
like an awkward edge, a raw wound.

it is hard not to scroll.
not to smoke. not to sleep.
far too much.

it is particularly difficult, also,
to allow myself to not understand.
it is a physical yearning in my bones
to be able to assign meaning, find
answers, organise thoughts, write.
(it is hard, so hard, to not be writing these days.
it is also too hard to write. too fucking difficult.)
i am trying to keep hope alive
like a tender plant. i am afraid
to water too much or not enough.
i do not understand.
i do not understand.
life seems like an insane carnival,
and the bags under my eyes threaten
to give me away. i am an observer here.
i am a lost traveller. i have nowhere to go.
everything seems absurd. in the mornings,
i am disoriented. all day, it doesn't leave.
poetry follows me like an unwanted spectre
reminding me that i do not understand.
i am like the sea, i am rising and falling
and reaching nowhere. even the sandcastles
that seemed stable are now collapsing under
sheer weight of water. everything is ruins.

if i call these scary feelings
Art, perhaps it will not be worrying.

my bones are made of lead these days.
occasionally they lighten up, and i can float
to the surface, make a joke, do my laundry.
too often, i am submerged too deep to emerge.
and the thing is, underwater - undersadness -
it is hard to breathe