Amber

In the enormity of lived experiences, there must exist unexplored, tempting timelines. Timelines where I don't have to do the things I do daily to stay bright, bright, bright. Places where my poetry isn't repetition, isn't a revulsion towards my current identities. I fear confronting myself through a medium as public as the poems I create. Somehow, that particular expression feels tainted, as if there exists a disparity between emotion, audience, erudition. For, I confess, my writing is necessarily to someone; it demands an audience, singular or otherwise. Maybe that's why I increasingly gravitate towards prose- it is easier to hide hurt amidst a jargon of ideas I tried so hard to combine. My mind is unsupportive- it moves on train tracks of numbing singularity: the same path traced over and over, tirelessly. But here, in this form, I throw together the four disparate tracks that the engine painstakingly chugs over, confident that in the search of meaning, they'll gain contexts and intersectionalities that I did not put there.

I love the word "over". Catastrophic and absolute and yet so, so repetitive. It builds and builds layers upon itself; a glorified pile up of the same things, tortured and maimed into new interpretations.

I remember beginning a poem- my one true "grand epic"- about women who saw people as colours, not humans. It was a struggle, for how could I convince the "viewer" to believe, to believe, that the colours and their connotations were never meant to be the expected, the probable, the predictable; they were meant to be subjective experiences for the one colouring people into compartments. For I'd caved in to presumptive tendencies myself. My character in the narrative, I had surmised, would be the only one that would always be yellow. Yellow's a good, happy thing to align myself with.

And in a perverse way, I still do align with its forms. The story is long forgotten and dismissed, the writer too assured in the symbolic significance given by popular perception to ever see it any other way. So she- so I- still rage glaringly yellow. Murky in spots, even; splattered by the desire to appropriate the lived experiences of others for myself. There are pieces that have torn napkins and photographs and tickets and bookmarks decoupaged onto them; they do a petty job at camouflaging the bilious, nauseating yellow underneath. I feel poetic, though, so maybe I'll call it a bright amber, instead.

Unboxing Her/You

They wouldn’t let me flaunt you 
In front of the neighbors,
You know. 
Like a childhood painting brimming
With unabashed love, 
You were far too intimate to exist
Within the ordered symmetry of our home.
They said they got you, despite everything,
Of course. 
You were an extension of me, however unfamiliar,
And
They said they did try to understand you, 
They were supposed to understand you, after all.
(Ignoring you is almost as good as understanding you, right?)
I did the best I could, too-
I schooled myself into creating 
What they thought my happiness ought to look like. 
But I couldn’t quite forget you, either.
You sifted through the curtains after midnight,
Drifted cheekily along with the broken strains of a distant melody.
You snuck into brush strokes,
Into words,
Into conversations, sometimes. 
This one time, I thought I’d bring you over
To the dinner table. 
They’d never really met you properly before, you
Were a discarded memory
Haphazardly shoved into my closet, after all.

It wasn’t your fault, 
It was never your fault.
I’m sure they would’ve tried to welcome you,
If they’d known how to,
But you were a bouquet of carnations
I’d picked somewhere, you didn’t quite belong;
They told me to put you away-
So I did.
I pretended you weren’t
The letters I unfolded and folded each night,
That you weren’t
The photographs that smiled back at me,
As I stood staring, for hours.

I got you a box of your own, you know:
Partly because I wanted
To be able to turn you into something manageable
That I could shove into forgotten corners;
And partly because I could not bear
To let them see
Portraits of you clinging
To everything
They thought I was. 

It’s been some years now,
They don’t really think about you these days,
They probably believe that you got lost
Along the way, somewhere,
In the last eighteen years. 
I think they’re too distant to really care. 
If I brought you up with them, 
They’d probably
Laugh you off to the past.
Maybe it is a good thing, after all, 
That they’re too far away to know 
About you, anymore. 
They cannot, they will not
See you,
See us,
Anyway. 

But that's okay. 

At least we get to dance along
To the songs you hum gracelessly, tunelessly.
We get to wake up to each other,
To laugh, to cry,
To talk across the dinner table,
To pull out each crumpled drawing
Of us holding hands
That we’d shoved and pushed
Into boxes
Labelled ‘her’/’you’.
I’m glad I can unbox you now, 
It must’ve been stifling in there.
Welcome home, it’s been lonely without you. 

(prompt response to a college competition)

To The Flowers On My Bedside Table

It's spring time-
Summer, if you go by
The unacknowledged absence 
Of lingering, lethargic transitions 
Within Delhi's calculated, metropolitan movements
(or, the temperature).
You're amidst a clutter-
Sturdy white legs and
A smooth turquoise surface 
That support the imprints 
Of my everyday existence. 
You're the only intruder there,
Flippantly flamboyant in your transient brilliance.
Sometimes I wonder whether you're really meant 
To be here; I move you to the window sill. 
A breath of fresh air
To your stagnant beauty. 
The heavy branches of morose city trees
Pity you. 
I bring you back to the corner-
You look on contemptuously 
As postcards, paper, poetry 
Slither onto the table
And consume the flickering importance
Of your dropping blossoms.

It's been a week since mother threw you out. 
Left to me, you'd still be spilling
Withered, withering glances
Upon the evidences of my daily routine. 
But it's better this way. 
I can imagine that you never crowded 
Over the coffee stains and loose-leafed books
That stayed behind. 
Now, if only I could pluck away
The delicate petals of you
That drifted into the unexplored crevices and folds
Of this room. 
Happy memories devoid 
Of the oppressive summer heat 
That they grew out of;
Impossible to dust away. 

An Open Letter To A Dream/Mirage

There’s an atmosphere of purpose, of multiplicity across Old Delhi. Stories interwoven into each other peek out through the cries of the shopkeepers and the snippets of conversations that float dreamily, incessantly across its bustling streets. Like the buildings of this place, people and emotions and memories pile over and over and over each other in a desperate run for acknowledgement. It’s funny how things gain a bland uniformity this way; the sheer juxtaposition of a multitude of eras, narratives, and people gives a singular face to this place.

If Old Delhi were a character, it’d constantly be running. Running from its past, running to its past, stumbling and pushing and forcing its way to an unknown destination. The quietude of your place always got on your nerves; you’d try to fill it constantly with sound, noise, laughter. Silence always felt too inert to you, as if it enveloped all activity like a lullaby, compelling everything to stop, breathe, and rest. I’d constantly reach out for your hand as your fingers would attempt to carry off beat after beat on the table, in a desperate attempt to remind you that stillness can also be compelling.

I never really got your need for movement back then. You’d walk out, walk in, pace about- circle, circle, just circle around- as if every motion added purpose to the placidity of our being. You liked to walk around the bazaar, grasping my hand tightly, as if fearing that the air of exchange would engulf us too. There was so much to give, so much to take; you worried that we’d end up bartering ourselves for a shiny, silver cage, “Thirty rupees only, miss.”

Leaving is a tune-less dance, so quick and unquestioning in its permanence. I never expected it to be so hurried, so very devoid of backward-glances and loosening grips. I cannot stand movement, I cannot get rhythm.

Last evening, I tried to stand still in the middle of a by-lane in the old city, in a desperate bid to conjure you back to life. In retrospect, I cannot fathom why I thought that would work- it screamed solitude in the midst of alluring animateness, and you would’ve hated that. Countless, countless hands brushed uncomfortably against mine, and a procession of insistent shoulders had to push, push, push, before I realized that there was no synchronicity left between you and my memory of you. You would never concede to becoming a memory colorized in tranquil waves of green, grey, blue.

Goodbye.

________.

Stilted growth/ A Fear of Endings

An accumulation of faltering beginnings-

A drawer full of inked pages,

Torn and ripped and torn again.

A methodical preservation

Of the scattered relics

Of a past hastily buried

Into the comforting haze

Of far too many interminable summers.

Could they ever last long enough?

An incomplete, gnawing desire

To revisit a memory no longer haunting

The place it belonged to.

Memories wiped clean so meticulously,

That they can barely be heard whispering over balconies

On odd, sunny days.

‘Can you hear me now?’

A name, a name, just a name.

Can plaster and paint and a series

Of indifferent portraits, faces blurring into one,

Cover the forgotten caresses of your fingerprints?

Can all these expansive catalogues

Of the things you loved,

Of the things you would’ve grown to love

Resurrect you?

Tattered sheets glued down

To form a jigsaw puzzle of ‘maybe’s.

A desperate inversion of conclusive endings,

And a need for self preservation

Through you.