yahaan

Here he is, the thin man I know
he says he is of constant
Sorrow but I disagree he is here
Inside my head he buzzes something like the shadow Ma had to look for
When I saw it crawl up the stairs something like the sunlight
In your eyes when you have to squint
To see me dancing like I’m being hung
Upside down zero gravity trying to unhook my toes from
The mossy ceiling no
don’t look at my velcroed toenails that will make me flop

but then again the post man says he’ll be here soon so I sit
at the gate under the gate it is yellow this gate but then so am I so
maybe he cannot see me? They tell me that the beauty of the postoffice it is my duty
but I stole their stamp so they do not like me now, no

Here we are this is a green room. Why always this particular shade of pistachio?
My parents first car too was this anemic vomit but then here a girl danc
es in what is truly only a desultory manner
wriggling her hips and spinning on her toes waggling and my feet
now look like feet, curling at the edges because the girl I thought was a prostitute was just dressed to look like the sun.

here I am curled up on a window sill and I remember an apple being bartered for love, a vicarious love punctuated with winter sunshine and swirls of smoky hindi songs or am thinking of the mornings?


"unhone socha ki vahaan pe swarg jaise hoga"

St. Kitts

WHY DO YOU LOOK AT ME THIS WAY?

I must carry my anger infront of me like a shield, and yet my body flinches everytime your shadow touches me. I slip into Pinky's skin and now I see the withered black genitals of my friendly neighbour-uncle "tujhe kuchh dikhaon?" blood churns curdles under my skin.
SEX? Is this it? Penile fucking penetration? This is what drives you like a wild ape on crack? Like a rabid dog on heat? Is this then where it comes from? Your drool. Hand up my skirt. Blood shot eyes flicking leering gaping. Rotten breath panting huffing breathing down my back my neck my thigh anywhere you can get to . Decrepit skin brushing holding flicking against mine. Your finger snaking it's way inside my track bottoms.
THIS IS WHAT IMPELS YOU?

I see the allure in Pinkys cold prepubescence. A ten year old orphan. What more could I want. Fly in my web.

This.. this can't possibly be anger. No: nothing can describe this rage
and yet when I see you on the stairs I can not shoot you. I cannot rip out your eyeballs to make you pop them between your teeth (away from the stairwell because we can't get blood not your filthy blood on the stairwell) I cannot hurt you like the hurt you planned with your filthy hands and filthy eyes I cannot make you scream in agony
NO I will... I will
.. hold back my smile!
This is my gun.

Thank you no: I DON'T WANT TO BE YOUR FRIEND

I just want to watch your brain paint the walls of your house

drive straight

don't stop

my hair falls into your soup you churn it

 my hair

you spin it into candy floss pluck at

the soldiers on my arms I think of seeing hair- 

golden brown sentinels- lining your back and I felt 

like you were human too.

--

Liquid sunshine mango juice dribbling across her shoulders it is nice always nice to see

the happier one explode

--

deterministic / probabilistic

lunch with  a stranger who spelt out his name- 

not a stranger at all then?

and he ate and I thought about the fine balance of two nose pins and an unbroachable unbreachable divide 

and he ate and I talked about macro discourses and my uneasiness

and he ate and I wasn't hungry at all

and he ate and I left and this is it a lunch with a stranger where I did not eat at all.

La révolution de Copernicus

A re-centering of the human being the thinking animal. An explanation is always sought, this is our life's greatest and most wasteful endeavour. Years of backward turning thinking yearning, now you realise your life has not been lived, not yet, not now.

First the man who put the sun in the middle; he did not lie and we wept in awe. The fiery ball was there in the centre,
the all encompassing light. and we fought darkness.

Then a quieter man walking in his garden I can see the fuzz the mist around him or is it around my eyes because he can see clearly now, always

he perched the glasses firmly on my nose I saw the lines the strings my eyes are the puppet master my brain grey mass my rationality that I held before my forehead like my sun, it was the grand master the puppet puller puppeteer I do believe

and now this spun candy turning insides to mulch disbelief and goosepimples at faith acceptance desire blank want but most of all

this grey cube around my ears: here I am, centre of my universe, and I am alone, I can not see you now, my eyes don't see clearly at all

but you have recentred me now I do not know where I shall fall

Fragments of my night:

I'm waiting here for the dawn to curl into the edges of this purple night. You are far away, your night has barely set in. Someone has stolen your salt, I crouch in the corner of my kitchen, croaking into a borrowed-stolen phone, in urgent hushed tones, my bad throat cracking at an ungainly high pitch. Savouring the sound of your voice. You play to the house (am I your house) Gandhi ne kya sikhaya madarchodh 

You speak of betrayal. Like I have spilt blood I cannot see, cannot touch. You are thinner than when you left and I think of your ribs stacked in line under your striped cardigan. How can I explain my love? I can't. There is just this rush of blood, to the head to the toes to my itchy cold nose.  

I bartered my body to numb my mind, my insidiously out of proportion body. 

But it's so small! How could you share it with someone else?

--

The man I told you about came online and told me about death threats, but I could not switch between my world and his so I turned invisible.

--

He returned with a green light in the sky: I have dreamt about capturing the sky like this but Akira did not like his whizzing bit of flashing thermacol.  

--

Ma is here, and like always she wakes to check on us. She walks out of her room wildeyed and frowning at the light., she is the queen of the ominous undertone.

--

I sat with Mary by a river (remind me to tell you how names are but eerie premonitions of our lives to come. Will you fall in love with a Mary? I said, then a Mary fell in love with me) and she spread her arms wildly to show me how she felt caged. I will not forget this river this time I have spent with you. Her eyes were wide with the weight of her words, hair flying in a otherworldy breeze.  

I shrank away from the heat of her anger because they did not let us walk home

She followed a frog with the light of a torch, while I rubbed sand on my feet. We watched the ripples, the reflected moonlight. I battled insects for her and wondered how exactly I would go about not betraying her outpouring of love. I have a tenuous hold on confidences. 

--

 

for us this, city.

This city we live in, it is a city for us. 

This anger insolence violence

and the khushhh of khhwaish, how does this all fit together? 

I walked with a girl down winding lanes of green silk and gold tinsel lit with yellow light bulbs once and a man stopped to lick his lips infront of her face, thrusting his groin up at her. And all I could summon up was tameez badtameez! intoxicated with the sound of the words. Then his brotherfromanothermother, the one eyed man with a clubfoot fanned us for two rupees as we sat down to drown in coarse singing erupting out of paan stained mouths. Then a white tourist behind me told me to shut up, I'm trying to listen here! His female companion had not covered her head. 

Today a dazzlingly beautiful girl with black black black hair and eyebrows, she and I counted down a hundred steps to a dried up sulphurous baoli. This was our arena. Twenty men surrounded us and banged their dholaks, celebrating the power they held over the incongruous white skin of my compatriots and the fragile vaginas in our nylon pants.  

Akbar killed his stepbrother because he had killed his stepfather. But they were not step anything at all, just all linked by anonymous breastmilk. The bodies of the poor are sold cold, easily bartered. 

Preeti wants to get her cords cut. I sit outside her house, unlacing my obscene Pumas while her children play with my hair, passing their lice onto me. Pappu tries on my cheap sunglasses, snot bubbling as he cackles with amusement. We sit sipping lal chai, my hair tingles as a rat runs past. 

My territory has been marked, I peed in the dark 

white bum flashed at the men behind me. She said it did not matter. 

While I was sitting on the jaali bench I saw a woman squatting infront of her house, coughing coughing, rasping, vomiting vomiting vomiting. Her name is also Preeti, she has no children. 

Vikas,

  6 years old, squint eyed with a bloodcurdling propensity for violence (he hits his mother on her breasts, she is strong and capable and looks me in the eye but she does not blink just a shark inatke of breath that we both ignore)

tells me she vomits everynight, I hear the glee in his voice, I look away. 

 He waves his mothers pink nailpolish at me, he has painted his large toenail and now he wants to paint mine. I point at my shoes. 

Preeti walks by me in the dark, carrying two plastic buckets they used to hold paint now they hold water I take one from her the woman behind me whoop with laughter, naukar rakh liya? I say phir tankha dena padega, atleast I am equally awkward in every language I try to live in

atleast Preeti lets me sit on her bed while she breastfeeds her nameless baby 

 

She asks me to ask my mother if the operation hurts  

The nights smell of raat ki raani, there is this choking haze, it makes our vision blurry.  

Akira has eaten her bed, now she wants to sleep on mine. I push her off. She pees in protest and curls up on the cold tiled floor. 

High Drama: or the 5th of No-verm-ber.

"Remember, remember
the 5th of November
the gunpowder treason and plot
I can think of no reason
why the gunpowder treason
should ever be forgot."

Don't think.
There is a solemn man on TV he has mad.e fat tears roll down my face, the packaging, c'est impeccable.

Now the grandiose shambles of my life: I have wrapped around me my treacherous gunpowder plot in a thin red shawl. This is the first shawl of the winter. This is going to be a cold winter.

we are last in line
for the cabaret
we drink red wine at the cabaret
we talk of treachery
and I watch
tongues roll to
the wobble of your head

your big head wobbles; I am sandwiched

I think of nightrides to a holiday house, a route I'd compulsively take to smell that delhi smell. I want to smell a here smell so I can tell you about it, then maybe you will think of here, a here with a me.

How we are to remember
the 5th of November
How to forget? How do we kill a soul watch it: soulfly
How do I think bitterly cold feet
mattress bitters, a bitter cold, a head split
into two bi-
polar two
a ramble two
to too to a river
to a song a quiver a thin sliver of light pierces my brow your lap dance was no good your smile has faded my ghostly brother you are not here your beard has grown are you sadder? taller? you do not talk as much. I think I see your eyes shine.