Feminist

The thin, barely-there line of hair that made its way from one depression of the corner of your lip to the other, framing your closed smile; clung to your ivory-chocolate skin like fine moss to a marble wall.

The smattering of down on your exposed arms that you bare audaciously to a magazine world. This poster of rebellion against a parlour-beauty that you wore like an organic medal made me fall in love with your mind.

Dust

Exhausted listlessness

Stalks me through

The bush of the everyday.

Passionless 'how are you's

Old backpains

Listlessness of the day that stretches on for forever

Tired dust that swirls and dances in a ballet Under the spotlight of a beam of stray sunlight

Visible, then invisible. Visible. Invisible.

Incorrigible apathy of the hard bed

That seeps into the patterns in our skin, clenches tight

And holds on,

Till every morning we wake up exhausted.

Cut fingernails

Bits of paper that float in anarchy

Existing without a cause.

Stray droplets of sweat bead and coagulate

And fall, wordlessly.

Small apartments

The walls perpetually shrink

Contract

Squeeze

The life out of me.

Tired smiles

Of tired parents

Old undershirts

And sweaty meals

Served with a smile and the fervent hope

That happiness is well-cooked mutton.

Moisture hangs heavy

Over the dusking evening as

People hang onto their phones in loud

Desperation

And the ones who don't wait silently

Decayingly, for the ones who do.

Four tiny islands

Live under this yellow roof.

Insulated against each other's fire by

Old newspapers and TV and books

Cellphones and summerheat and money

And the internet and tired smiles

And old jokes and tired

Tired tired tired

Tired pursuit of money and/or happiness

Dusty filthy choking

Back empty words and empty jars

Of affection filled to the brim with

The dust of the Indian everyday

Days slip into weeks slip into months

And soon it is time for me to go back

And I have gained nothing, hung onto nothing

Nothing has penetrated my flesh and made home

Among the stars of my heart

Everything is blunted

By the dust of the Indian everyday.

Tired tired tired tired.

The exhaustion makes me want to burst out in tears

The anticipation was impotent

My love for these islands

Is anchoring me into quicksand

And I'm sinking, sinking

Into the exhausted everyday.

There is lead collecting in the pit

Of my stomach.

The abstracted notions of emotions

Connected to time and objects

Are draining like small rivulets into

This lake of churning metal.

The air is so heavy with moisture

That I'm trapped in it, wading through it

And I breathe the scent of old saliva

Every night as I lie on my bed

On my vagrant pillow

And toss frothily

Into the 'morrow. 

Didi

What shall I tell you of this loneliness? It forces its way into me when the sun goes down and the darkness strays impetuously into my silent room through the frosted windows. A half-cry rises in my breast, and I want to scream, but that would be unseemly and unmanly. After all, I chose this. It was my own choice. And the cross of making the right choice I bear with me every night into my bed, and sometimes my pillow is damp when I wake up

Debating

He and I have started agreeing too often and too much. The earlier mental friction that gave our dialogue its life-force is missing; it's been replaced by a presupposition of intellect, a deference and an a priori respect of the other's thought process. We've been correct together too often to realize that we were rarely correct discretely, individually. The whole coherence of thought has bowed down to the part-truths. The two streams of argument that flowed against each other recklessly and fought wildly, cutting each other's crests and filling each other troughs, until they finally flowed in an uneasy equilibrium together have been replaced by separate, distinct streams that do not clash.

Our problem is that we have become friends. It's no longer fun.

Absurdity

Life is Absurd, as defined by Camus and Sartre and Hesse and others before and after them. So then, how do we escape this absurdity? We have been given minds despite ourselves, without us wanting them - to what end? The only truth is Death. We all die, and nothing we do matters. Life goes on.

And perhaps that is how we escape absurdism. Through cheating Death. Through achieving immortality. Through Creation. Art, literature, music... And that most lasting and death-defying act of all: children. A child is the ultimate act of Artistic Creation. A creation wrought from the very cells of my body; what is more beautiful, more immortal, more expressive, more complete? Life perpetuates itself through Love, and Love is both the foundation and the fuel.

4

We used to have

A common well,

From which we used to draw

Several fertile liters every day, and the

Nights would be spent in sleepy

Shovelling, and even the extra inches

Would be wet the next day.

And so our well grew deeper.

Soon though

The summers started piling up, and

We started scraping the bottom.

No more midnight digging -

When the darkness played peekaboo and the night kissed the window panes and everything was doused with a sense of romantic magic for me, it was the caffeinated morning for you.

Soon,

We were reduced to

Trying ravenously

To scrape out a few drops, wring

Out the last vestiges of moisture, and

Then

In desperate thirst, we started supplanting fingertip whispers

For words and directionless passion for

Discourse, and soon every explosion

Started seeming increasingly

More flash than effect.

But

The well is so deep

That to dig another one

Would take another Four Years.

So we hang onto our well

And quench our thirsts at nomadic,

Beautiful, tactile oases.

I have my tiny kittens, for whom

I harden my shield and put on masks,

And say half-felt words, so as to tunnel to

Half-felt sighs, and you

Have your pretty, pretty boys

Whom you call friends.

And we grope in the darkness, through unchartered corridors and tumble through passageways and sleep in musty beds that squeak too much, and maybe we shall fall, finally, into our own parched Well, and smile sadly as they pour sand down onto our backs,

And because we're not donkeys,

Because we are after all honourable

Men and women, with

Pride and ego,

We shall accept our fate.

Elephant In The Room

There's an elephant in the room
And it's called Us.
It didn't come by easily;
It was born over years and years
And months and days
And moments spent listening to Band of Horses
While you gently swayed like a
Tree in my lap to the music.
While you ran to check if your father had
Left the house, and ran back to kiss me
While we helped each other discover each
Other, while you and I 
Spent the nights whispering in half-awake
Whispers, inching like two turtles, day after day, towards
That one fateful day when you could say
You loved me, without hesitating
Or wondering if you
Were more hopeful than truthful.

It's been days and days and
Months and years
Since that winter day, and now
We meet in unfamiliar drawing rooms
And the air is pregnant with a whole 
Litter of stillborn sentences 

There is an elephant in the room
And it is Us.
And it breathes down heavily down 
Our necks and we half-wish that
It would swing its trunk in impotent
Elephant-rage and destroy the room,
This too-small room,
And then spontaneously combust 
Into flames, and die. 
And we would heave maudlin sighs
And we would make a bonfire
And collect our vanities - our letters
And books and trinkets
And watch everything burn down
And maybe hold hands 
And smile melancholic
As we watch
Everything burn down.

But for now the elephant sits alone
In the corner and 
Watches us.
Through its beady black eyes
Watches us
As we talk in parallel streams.
And soon, after years and years
And months and days
And moments spent avoiding eye-contact
The elephant shall wither away
Die, silently.
Unmourned. Forgotten.

Until some day, you and I shall watch lonely clouds
Wander over our coffee mugs, and wonder
Why there is an elephant-shaped bump
In the rug.