cardboard living

I'm trying it out: life in a cardboard house.
Lines of shoes, clusters of joss sticks and your cold faces with paint-on eyebrows separate us from each other. Just light, no warmth, if I can take that startlingly beautiful thought out of context. I stand at the window naked and wonder which one of you will pick up phone to tell the police men that you saw my small breasts. Would they come to get me, line up below my window in their ill fitting blue flannel and their awkward hats?
I can't see you, my vision is blurry. But I am told you have gilded doors and that you eroticize your machines. But to inferior ends, I like to think. Not like the furtive love I make to mine: to produce this, our ugly love child.
The walls are paper thin but I don't hear you, just you me and then complain. But not to me. Insidiously. Into the orange light of the nights. Into the smells of the bathroom, which are all stacked one over another, leaking smells and visions of soap running off wrinkled skin. No purifying mud to wash off. Into the vomit-stained lift doors which creak accusingly and heave open. Into the mosaic benches with old men who look through me, through my invisible brown skin.
My hair goes wilder and wilder. The shop lights call to me they make my bones ache. It's the smells more than the sounds, the smell and the blinding light and stacks and stacks of everything you could want to have, like the man-your-man-could-smell-like.
The gloomy days lift my spirit. Rain always exhilarates me, I can't help it it's in my bones and nipples and teeth to hurt with happiness when that smell fills you of water on dust. I even washed my bathroom in Delhi to smell that smell.