Onto the streets at night.

Sleep eludes me
For it too knows
That am destined to be orphaned at night.

A cacophony of his deep slumber
Lies unnoticed at the corner of the bed
Heaped as if to show its prowess
But when everything has deluded you
You no longer notice such wile ironies
That life casually assaults you with.

If the night was a book
I would be the ruffling of pages
In the tattered autumn wind
But I no longer
See such poetry.

For it doesn’t matter
Nothing does

When you await the for the night to end
So that your eyes can close
On the glory that morning shells out on you
Like the piety of giver
Onto a leper waiting to die in the streets.

Nothing matters when you realise
that your nights are cursed to be
Orphaned
Not by choice
But by existence.

I exist

Unused

Untouched

Unseen

My muse lies sulking in the corner
as I the artist had taken onto courtly robes
and march this facade of lies
that I webbed across my eyes to exist

I exist

But gone are the days
I knew how to live

gone are the days
I knew how i could.

If only
I decide to live

Eulogy

To the cemetery of kisses
I gave up my breath.

To a blind man's sight
I gave away all my beauty.

To the walls tonight
I speak.
For now its too late
to be.
For now its too late
to be me.

Pretensions do not last
For alas we see the light
But behold when we see ourselves
we can only see the fright.

The holes that penetrate your soul
pierce through my bosom.
Your pain is a resonance
of our entwined sorrow.

With time out of pace,
and us tired of the race.
Let the darkness draw nearer
For we no longer have time to fear
Let us waste out last laugh,
Let us die without a tear.

So hold me one last time
and breathe white lies
into my awaiting ear.

For when its my time,
It is your voice I ache to hear.

It is not difficult to be alone, It is difficult to be left alone.

“Normal” I heard her scream. “normal! I just need to be normal”
As her haggard hair scattered upon the deep brown of the sturdy old chair as she rocked on it nonchalantly. The arcs of the chair making her sway gently as he kept her eyes to the ceiling as if looking the spider webs that had been weaved upon her plantation style fan.

“Normal” she stuttered again. “ that’s what he wants! I know it.”

I heard her rant. But in my heart there was neither the sympathy nor the wrath for all she has seen, for both of us knew that if she was anything it that she wasn’t just normal.

Zaida had never been plain. She never could have. Even if she tried hard to like during school coyly hiding behind the braids but that sparkle of her eye never could hide. And her modesty just threw the spotlight on everything she wanted to hide. The silent twinkle of brilliance.

“Do you remember?” I would often ask her, “do you remember how we used to cycle to school again. The wheels turning round and round upon the dusty unwinding roads of our hometown? How mad your driver used to get when you told him to follow us on his own?” and she would laugh and talk more about her drivers excruciatingly long nose, while I swallowed the real words I wanted to say to her.

“ I need to loose all of this,” she said rocking more vigorously. “I need to become simple and quiet and docile. A good wife” she said biting her lip.

I looked at her now. Her grey hair tousling the rocking chair.

What would I not give to take her in my arms and tell her she was fine? But who was I to do it. Did I even deserve to see that forbidden spark in her eye? No, I was not. But nothing could ever stop me from being mesmerised by it even now.

Her dry lips cracked a droplet of blood smeared upon her once tender lips. She got out of the chair bundling her hair up like the housewives do, failing miserably as it kept falling out into flowing river of grey.

“Damn it. Look at me Sam, I can even get my hair right. May be if I do and I clean up this house,” she slipped into another hypnotic trance with her eyes locked onto the cobwebs. “may be then it will all work. Don’t you think so?”

I nodded, watching her foot as the walked up and down the dusty carpet. Her foot paced faster. I knew it was near but I knew there was nothing I could do about it. It was all done and it was for the good.

“May be I should have given up on make up long ago, may be never had worn it. And all those parties. I thought it made him happy I really did.” She chanted as she began walking in circles. The old room must have looked like blur of every shade of brown. It must have been a swamp of a colour at the rate she was walking around it.

“this isn’t right. This isn’t. I need to sit down” she said as she continued to walk. I wanted to get up and hold her hand and guide her to the chair, but I didn’t. She deserved better I thought.

When we climbed trees as children in old house she often used to help me up. I used to be so clumsy that I was almost sure I would bring her down with, and more often I did. With her gentle glass frame landing upon mine and her laughter as we did. “you are such a clumsy toad” she would say pointing at my spectacles that would be uncomfortably resting my ear and my head often cracked. Amused by the charm of my clumsiness I would blush to myself feeling her frame on my body as she ran away waiting to be chased by me.

Then she sat down on the rocking chair still murmering of all the things she could have done right.

I could no longer help myself. I walked up and sat down on the carpet next to her, pulled out my case and gave her what she deserved.

As her pupils shrunk and stopped moving. I held her cold hand and whispered into her deaf ear, “He wasn’t worth you zaida. He just wasn’t.”

Einmal ist Keinmal

Tears flowed upon a brown cheek. It dripped like raindrops from a tin roof onto her crumpled yellow kurta.

“Man or no man it doesn’t really matter” she muttered to herself. “ At the end of the day all we are all alone”, she mouthed remembering her widowed aunt who once said it just a few days before she hung herself from a yellow ceiling fan in her ancestral house. While her parents and grandparents remembered the tragedy of the suicide, she held on to the last words she heard her withered aunt say.

At the end of the day we are all alone.

She was eccentric, they would often say to her. Not good for a family life. But what a family or a life truly meant was a question she silently knew well enough not to ask her parents.

It did not matter to her if anyone cared for a long time. Being a neglected child does that to you. Makes you build an imaginary fortress for yourself where you can be safe and isolate yourself from love lest you should be forgotten sooner or later and left mourning for the loss which never existed.

May be some people are better off that way. May be she was too.

As she picked upon the things from the house she once called home, pictures stuck with fruit shaped magnets on the fridge, a lamp she made out of lace and a wire frame, a torn piece of her old uniform she used to wipe the kitchen top with, she stumbled upon it.

There it was among the broken vase and glass pieces, a crumpled picture of her perfect family which she drew when she was 8. In the altercation of the night before she had crumpled it and thrown it on his face. She dint open it. She just held it to herself as if accepting what it meant. She could no longer hold back. She closed her eyes, may be her eyelids too were tired.

There she was 8 again in art class where every child in the school drew pictures of their father and mother and them in between smiling and holding hands. She was stuck staring at the paper. Then risking the thought of her teacher spotting her idle she let her hands wander into the crayon box. Red, yellow, orange, black, her hands fumbled with the different colours as her mind fumbled with what she was to call a family. She straightened herself.

Wiping the tears off her cheek, she stretched the crumpled drawing however neat she could make it. Enough she cajoled herself. She taped it on top of her travel bag.

It was a scribble of a girl in blue all alone.

The travel bag rolled by. So did she.

A fortress was again built and in it she lived all alone.

All alone.

The breath after the rain.

In cruel times
Met by the lone ghost
Of solitude,
I firmly held your hand

In the rains of the future
It washed away to be just a shadow
I turn back,
I do not fear nor follow

For I know now what
The rain has washed away.

It is not you I have forgotten

Dreams have left me
So has the joy of a good nights sleep

And all that remains is just the
Cold suffering of erasing
Everything I was before

I am not a clean slate

I am not a naked new born

I just stained rag washed
Tad too many times

Waiting to be woken up
When sleep has deserted me.