One. Zero. Zero. One. One.

We spend our entire lives 

trying to escape the wrong side of a hyphen.

A success, instead of a failure.

A winner, instead of a loser.

Somebody, instead of nobody.

As though existence 

were a ballot with two boxes,

and a lifetime to shade one in.

We resent the little categories 

the world keeps our names in,

then spend entire lives trying to qualify for one.

We demand 

that our own contradictions 

be granted daily conveniences.

We want our failures 

read with radioactive precautions,

our mistakes handled with white gloves,

our crimes considered in carefully crafted context.

We want the whole messy sum of us admitted as evidence.

But look at what we do with the evidence of others.

We take a single disagreement and sharpen it into a blade.

A hesitation becomes a betrayal.

A reservation, an act of war.

A question mark, a raised fist.

You may stand with me, or you may stand against me.

There is no longer a square inch of ground

for standing beside me,

and looking at a horizon I cannot see.

A hundred per cent total submission is the entry fee.

Anything less, and the conversation draws blood.

We have built a hate economy 

where outrage is legal tender,

allegiance earns compound interest,

and the benefit of the doubt is an inflation-ruined currency.

We don’t merely disagree anymore.

If we do not worship, we must loathe.

If we do not subscribe, we must abhor.

We delete, we cancel, we blacklist, we un-person.

We turn living people into flat positions,

and then punish them 

for not being human enough to fit inside them.

Perhaps this is why we have become so fond of machines.

We built code 

to separate the things we like 

from the things we don’t.

Yes and no. 

Accept and reject. 

Relevant and irrelevant.

We fed the machines our preferences,

until they returned our prejudices 

wearing the plastic face of prediction.

Then we gave them intelligence and called it artificial.

As though the artificial part were the intelligence,

and not the act of flattening entire existences to meagre data points.

We complain 

that algorithms cannot comprehend the human condition,

while we actively teach them to recognize us

solely by the things we click, 

the things we buy, 

the things we love, 

the things we hate.

We have outsourced our judgments to a system

that never has to lie awake at night

with the consequences of being wrong.

We want our binaries read with nuance,

and everyone else read literally.

We have made nuance a privilege of proximity.

The closer someone is to us, 

the more beautifully complex their reasons become.

The further away they stand, 

the fewer words we need to condemn them.

In a world that doesn't experience but processes, 

difference is death, 

and sooner or later,

everyone becomes a stranger.

Everyone becomes far away.

Everyone defaults to a zero.

We want to be the exception 

without ever questioning the rule.

We mistake choosing a side for having a mind.

And somewhere 

between the person we hope to become

and the person we refuse to understand,

the spectrum vanishes, the walls close in.

There are truths that can live in the same room.

A person can be loved and be entirely wrong.

A cause can be urgent and its methods indefensible.

A thought can be worth considering without being worth believing.

But we have become too impatient 

for anything that refuses to arrive at a verdict.

The ultimate tragedy of the modern human

is not that we have built machines 

that think in ones and zeroes.

It is that we are training ourselves to match them.

We wanted to be the exception.

Now everybody is just another data point.

Pixels in a Polaroid

playing Russian roulette,

with bullets shaped like photocopied beliefs.

Crimson Curry

It was a sultry afternoon,

usual for Januaries in Calcutta.

A restless boy of eight 

and a newly adolescent girl of thirteen 

had sat for lunch

with their parents, 

when the four heard a tire explode

over steamed rice and fish curry;

usual for Januaries to Decembers in Calcutta to Calicut.

The doors were bolted 

because civilisation had discovered 

building a home wasn't enough to keep it one. 

The windows were shut

because the rooms needed to be 

just cold enough for a quilt-laden sleep. 

A tire exploding is usual enough

that on nine out of ten days, 

not one of the four would have bothered 

to move anything but their jaws, 

crushing those fish bones.

But the boy of eight had wheels for legs.

Or his mother often remarked, 

he had poppy seeds under his feet;

proverbs aside, he was a cat on a hot tin roof, 

metaphors aside, he was always on the edge.

And, a cat on a hot tin roof doesn't walk, doesn't run;

it sprints before you can get a good look at it.

Before the others could react, 

he had slowly opened a window ever so slightly, 

and before they could speak a word, 

he was back on the chair assigned to him.

"Someone's spilled organs on the road, baba!" he exclaimed, 

"Shhhhhhhhhh.. keep your voice down" baba told him with measured caution, 

and a dismissive look that said 

it didn't quite approve of his unhinged imagination.

A couple of hours later, the police arrived. 

The one with a gun latched on to his belt told them, 

a man had been murdered;

shot point blank, with a silencer-fitted gun.

The man's skull had cracked open, 

spilling his brains out like gills of a fish.

There was blood 

splattered across the front wall of their house,

and that's the day an eight-year-old learnt:

blood is never blood red, it's dark crimson;

it stains quick and smells of fishes, 

and that a human head splits open 

to the same tune a tire explodes.

The wall has been broken, rebuilt, and painted five different shades of a pastel box,

and the boy is old enough to have had an eight-year-old of his own, 

and yet every time he sees the wall, he can't unsee the blood on it, 

and yet every time he sees the street, he can't unsee the scattered brain matter on the dusty concrete.

I pray, someday the boy finally lets go of the man. 

I pray, someday I can finally stop being eight.

Bombay Sandwich

Not so long ago, 

I was in Mumbai, 

and I realised something

that often misses the mark by more than a few miles:

the city still looks like Bombay 

but with an amputated tongue speaking Mumbai somehow.

On the way from Colaba to Marine Drive, 

I had time to spare, 

so I decided to stop by the place 

everyone from Mumbai tells you, 

you must visit

to etch shreds of the Mumbai chromosome in you, 

just enough to not be just another tourist, 

yet somehow well short of having lived the city.

Colaba Causeway is an unruly, thumping sea.

It is a marketplace of survival,

where aggressive negotiation collides 

with the agreeable roar of black-and-yellow taxis,

and the air is thick 

with the competing aromas of roasting corn, cheap incense, and sea salt.

Humanity moves in a dense, sweating swarm:

a chaotic symphony of street hawkers shouting negotiable "fixed prices" like gospel,

tourists stepping over cracked pavements,

and the relentless honking of a city that refuses to wait for its own breath.

Right in the heart of this cacophony 

sits an ancient, quaint cafe: 

archaic architecture buried in fresh coats of wall paint.

A hasty stitch on a pair of torn pants,

holding just enough to keep the city moving.

The whole of Mumbai is ancient and quaint really, 

so this building doesn't quite stand out; 

it’s so lost in plain sight, you’d miss it in a blink if you didn't know where to look.

Leopold Cafe.

A century-old relic 

that has seen five generations 

while away the years. 

Small heads and long blades, 

on rods long enough to be iron giraffe necks, 

brood down from the overreaching ceilings. 

Wood has weathered 

from a bright, varnished brown 

to a damp burnt sienna, 

carrying the clatter of conversations 

as old as civilisation itself.

As I sat at a table, 

ordering a coffee and a Bombay sandwich, 

my eyes hit a square metre of the wall 

right next to the elderly man seated diagonally opposite. 

There it was: a crevice in the wall, 

like someone a long time ago 

had pierced a nail through its heart.

Except, it was a gaping hole. 

A gaping bullet hole.

My eyes almost instinctively moved sideways, 

tracing trajectories along the white paint, 

and thirty seconds later, 

I had stumbled upon another four.

Five bullet holes. Out of the thirty-something.

From an ordinary Mumbai night, eighteen years ago.

They looked so ordinary,

one could almost never tell 

they once smelled of smoke, gunpowder, fresh blood, pierced flesh, and torn tissue.

My coffee was getting cold. 

My Bombay sandwich lay numb on the plate, 

a cold assembly of bread and vegetables

rapidly losing its purpose,

and all I could think of 

was an ordinary Mumbai night, eighteen years ago. 

As I watched fifty odd people,

mostly Indians, a Korean couple, a British family of four, and half a dozen Americans,

I couldn't help but imagine the hundred on that night 

who had walked in for a chicken stroganoff, a mutton keema pav, or just coffee, 

and suddenly found themselves 

at the sweltering end of a pair of smoking AK-47s 

as their only way back home.

I couldn't help but imagine

their faces at the bottom of a fear

they had never needed to know existed.

The cold sweat. The swallowed screams.

The desperate arithmetic of bodies

looking for somewhere the bullets wouldn't.

The gunpowder settling into the walls,

the grenades splitting the room open,

the blood turning a quiet dinner into a butcher’s block of human flesh.

I couldn't not imagine faces I had never met 

and lives I had never crossed, 

and the fifteen minutes of that Mumbai night eighteen years ago, 

that time has spent eighteen years failing to forfeit, 

that is still happening behind the fresh paint.

They say eighteen is the onset of adulthood, 

and yet here, time is a milk tooth rinsed in blood.

Summoning The Selfish

Selfish.

The word for a life that has stopped taking dictation.

We arrive without consent

and spend the rest of our lives

being charged for the privilege.

A name.

A home.

Nine months of somebody's body.

Then years of being reminded what existence cost.

The account changes hands.

The balance doesn't.

"I gave you everything."

How quickly a gift learns to speak in the imperative.

You can spend thirty years

being somebody's answered prayer

and never once be asked what you were praying for.

We inherit lives like family silver:

too old to question,

too polished to use,

too precious to put down without being asked who we think we are.

Selfish.

The accusation arrives

when the plot someone wrote for you

loses its ending.

We learn to interrupt ourselves

before anyone else has to.

The dream crossed out

before it can become a quarrel.

The truth swallowed

until the throat forgets the shape of its refusal.

Years spent keeping peace

in rooms where nobody has thought to ask whose peace it is.

We keep the receipts.

In the pause before a favour.

In the little afterlife of 

"after all I've done for you".

In the gift that arrives open-handed

and leaves you holding the obligation.

We wanted to be good.

Then necessary.

Then so necessary

that leaving us would look like cruelty.

We made ourselves too good to abandon.

And called it love when they stayed out of guilt.

We became landlords of lives we never had to live.

Collected rent in obedience.

Called it heartbreak when the tenants left.

Imagine a world of selfish people.

People too occupied with the work of becoming

to supervise what others become.

People who could watch someone rise

without mistaking the height for an insult.

Who could lose

without needing someone else to lose more.

Who could be ordinary

without making a failure of somebody else's extraordinary.

That there was work enough in becoming themselves.

That someone else's becoming took nothing from their own.

Not people without tenderness.

People who knew 

that being loved did not 

make them the owner of the wound they healed.

People who could give

without making the gift a future tense.

Who could love someone

without putting their lives under oath.

Imagine how many lives might have escaped

the punishment of being made responsible

for somebody else's inadequacy.

And no, not every sacrifice is a trap.

Sometimes the last piece of bread is given away.

Sometimes a hand stays through the hours that offer nothing back.

No witness.

No secret hope

that the hand will be held

in the same way when its turn comes.

The hand opens.

That is all.

We keep asking

how much someone would surrender for us.

We rarely ask

when their surrender became our entitlement.

Selfish.

The word we reach for

when a person stops being the answer 

to a question we never had the right to ask.

Can Coupons Really Be Redeemed?

Who doesn't like coupons to go with lunches and dinners?

What's not to like about dinner and dessert at the price of just dinner?

Take away the coupon, and suddenly the appetite for dessert dies down dry, dehydrated.

Is food only as good as its coupons? 

Are coupons only as good as the food they come holding hands with?

If the former were true, 

capitalism would have been a starving boy 

begging for what you and I save in coupons, for lunch and dinner.

Some people are like coupons;

the only time they're worth a grain of salt

is when they come nested in substance.

They have no currency of their own,

so they attach themselves to things that do,

mistaking proximity for possession,

and the reflected light of another's existence

for evidence that they, too, have a sun.

They mimic the behaviour of moss:

find something sturdy, overwhelm it,

and call the infestation a relationship.

They contribute nothing to the architecture,

but once they've covered enough of it,

they begin speaking as though they laid the foundation.

Their greatest talent is not creation,

but the careful cultivation of appearances.

They learn the vocabulary of the accomplished,

borrow the convictions of the courageous,

wear the scars of battles they watched from a distance,

and rehearse the biographies of people

whose actual lives would expose them as frauds.

They are all packaging, no product; hollow bone, no marrow.

And if you think

this is just empty calories

sold as a vital nutrient,

give it time,

for the diet gets a whole lot funnier.

They eventually forget they were ever pretending.

The borrowed opinions become convictions.

The borrowed vocabulary becomes a personality.

The borrowed prestige becomes a résumé.

The parasite begins introducing itself

as part of the organism.

Delusion is a funny little thing. 

Call it home long enough, 

and it winds up on a wrought iron bed 

in a dingy asylum smelling of altered carbons.

Strip away the names they invoke,

the institutions they flaunt,

the accomplished people they orbit,

the borrowed language they deploy like credentials,

and what remains?

Just a coupon.

Nothing to offer with.

No one to offer it to. 

Nothing left to redeem it against.

No redemption. No resurrection.

Even Christ had to break bread, turn water into wine,

and give the world a body to hang its faith upon.

Coupons, on their best days, are crucifixes before the crucifixion:

promises of salvation that mistake the price for the sacrifice.

Sons Of Surnames (Alternative Version)

A sixth of my life I've spent

never speaking a word to my mother.

Or my father.

They are not dead.

Dead silences are awkwardly honest;

it's the ones with breath in them that haunt.

Half my life I've whiled away

trying to be a son to parents

who razed two-thirds of it

questioning the anatomy of inheritance,

then spent the remaining third

issuing corrigendums on how to prove I was one.

Two-thirds of a lifetime,

assuming the past will let me call it mine.

The remaining third I've tried to outlive,

hoping to wake up someday

without the yesterdays

I've buried, still answering to their names.

You must unbecome inheritance to let your lungs inherit you.

But unbecoming is a violent subtraction:

pulling their surnames from beneath my fingernails,

scraping the shape of their jawlines off my own face,

refusing to let their history dictate the geometry of my spine.

How many fractions remain

when you divide a ghost from the bone?

Zero. And still, the lungs.

Sons Of Surnames

A sixth of my life I've spent

never speaking a word to my mother.

Or my father.

They are not dead.

Dead silences are awkwardly honest;

it's the ones with breath in them that haunt.

Half my life I've whiled away

trying to be a son to parents

who razed two-thirds of it

questioning the anatomy of inheritance,

then spent the remaining third

issuing corrigendums on how to prove I was one.

That's two-thirds of what one might call a lifetime,

if I were to transcend from present tense to past.

The remaining third I've tried to outlive,

hoping to wake up someday

without the ghosts of yesterdays

I've buried but couldn't exorcise myself of.

You must unbecome inheritance to let your lungs inherit you.

But unbecoming is a violent subtraction:

pulling their surnames from beneath my fingernails,

scraping the shape of their jawlines off my own face,

refusing to let their history dictate the geometry of my spine.

How many fractions remain

when you divide a ghost from the bone?

Just the zero it takes to breathe.