little frog, big city

fresh, real rain and old music that belongs to someone else's heart and someone else's back

waiting to write is like waiting for rain like this. you want it and can smell it but it isn't here yet and won't come until the clothes are hung out to dry and then dada's lawn is keechad and you have to jump and slide to avoid the frogs.

little frog. I hate living in a city that made me scared of them, hopping in my bedroom. throat bobbing. then the chuha, little beady eyes looking up at me both of us stunned and waiting for the other to squeak

akira doesn't know what to do with the chuha in my room. she prefers socks and jhaarans that don't run away she doesn't walk enough i hate roads she loves mud it doesn't work.

noni and akira lick bite roll over each other the whole day- are 2 year olds supposed to be this smart?

but i still love the rain, everywhere. in my tropical home I tried to explain to my bemused class the rhythm of my bones: as goosebumps erupted in time to thunder and lightning. they didn't get it, they slip and fall I skip more alive then ever. driving in time to weird music slippery slippery roads and slippery thoughts . its scary I don't hear horns i just see your angry faces and want to laugh and i do. i love driving welcome me to your entitled spaces, carved out on roads that we defend so righteously.

car = fast i have to be somewhere now. entitled where ever you are. in a car you're angry and hidden outside you're wet and slippery and the horns are so loud . the metro is crowded like in Jharkhand, rolling slowing, sweaty mass moving as one. my hair gets stuck in a fierce lady's hairclip . i clambered onto a bus forgotten how much i love it but then its just the day you love everyone today. then there's the pretty girl you'd love anyway she catches your eye you smile because it feels good to be beautiful in an ugly city.

lady tramp woman
man how easily we inure ourselves to names like boxes how easily words I didn't know i knew come to me

finger cramps.

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.