May Live, May Not Survive

I may or may not

have memories from before I was born.

Mostly administrative footage.

Ceiling fans.

Doctors.

Rubber gloves.

Someone saying,

“Congratulations.”

My soul visibly trying to leave the room.

I may or may not

be a reliable narrator.

Memory is just gossip

the brain spreads about itself.

Every year,

my childhood changes details

like politicians changing ideologies

before elections.

At this point,

even my trauma

contains factual inaccuracies.

I may or may not

have a personality anymore.

After years of survival,

all my opinions feel like hostages

developing Stockholm syndrome.

You call it maturity.

I call it

the slow extinction

of original thought

under fluorescent lighting.

I may or may not

be hallucinating adulthood.

Everyone explains taxes to me

with the exhausted confidence

of prisoners describing weather.

“Bro, this is just how life is.”

Which is historically

what people say

right before revolutions,

murders,

economic collapse,

or arranged marriages.

I may or may not

have been in love.

Hard to tell honestly.

Loneliness is incredibly talented

at voice acting.

Sometimes the heart

doesn’t miss people.

It misses

who it became

when someone was watching.

I may or may not

believe in honesty anymore.

Every conversation now feels like

mutual advertising

disguised as intimacy.

Authenticity itself

has become a marketing strategy.

Even spirituality arrives

with podcast microphones,

thumbnail expressions,

and early-access discount codes.

Enlightenment, apparently,

is available at 30% off.

I may or may not

be mentally ill.

The problem is,

once self-awareness

becomes performance,

even breakdowns start feeling rehearsed.

I once cried genuinely

and immediately thought,

“This metaphor could work in a poem.”

That’s not healing.

That’s capitalism

occupying the nervous system.

I may or may not

hate civilization.

But I do find it suspicious

that we created skyscrapers,

satellites,

quantum physics,

and biryani,

yet still lose arguments

to men whose display pictures

contain sunglasses inside cars.

Evolution clearly

has loopholes.

I may or may not

fear death.

What scares me more

is surviving long enough

to become motivational.

Imagine suffering for decades

only to end up posting:

“Good things take time.”

That phrase alone

should disqualify people

from having political opinions.

I may or may not

want children someday.

Not out of love.

Mostly curiosity.

I just want to watch

a smaller human being

stare at existence

with the same betrayed expression

I currently reserve

for salary slips.

That’s not parenting.

That’s intergenerational field research.

I may or may not

be losing my mind.

But the world keeps behaving

like a group project

where nobody read the instructions

and the dumbest person somehow

became team leader.

Wars.

Riots.

Algorithms deciding relevance.

Teenagers learning confidence

from airbrushed existences

that look AI-generated

even in real life.

Every day now feels like

God accidentally sitting

on the remote control of reality.

Channels changing mid-sentence.

Natural disasters between advertisements.

Genocide sponsored by children’s charities and wellness campaigns.

I may or may not

have written this poem.

Maybe insomnia did.

Maybe accumulated disappointment.

Maybe thirty years

of overhearing adults

confidently explaining things

they clearly never understood.

Or maybe consciousness itself

is just the universe

developing anxiety

after becoming self-aware.

Who knows.

At this point,

even humans feel less like an actuality

and more like

a conspiracy theory

with excellent marketing

and no measurable proof of intelligence.

C-Section

They say Caesareans are painful,

mine hurt a bit more than hurt.

The kind of hurt you feel

when something is taken out of nothing,

breathing bones, trembling flesh

hollowed out of my emptiness.

It was the most beautiful something

that could possibly be born out of what I’d have liked to forget as nothing.

Would I go back and undo it all, if I could?

I don’t know. I can’t quite tell.

Has it ever happened to you —

your worst regret and your best reason to wake up

have cohabited?

Mine is thirteen years old today.

And as he prepares for a lifetime of grown-up feelings and adult aspirations,

I make sure he doesn’t become the dreaded half of his becoming.

I need him to know that desire doesn’t knock before it changes intent,

that love is not an insurance for the distorted notions of a perverted mind.

I need him to know monsters don’t live under the bed,

but within the sheets;

breathing down your neck, warm and sweaty,

in cold air that smells like resigned fear.

I want him to know monsters need not beget monsters,

that he could become what his mother had hoped his father would be.

That his mother’s vanity and valour were inheritance,

just as much as his father’s ego-battered testosterone

and his broken ideas of what a man is supposed to be.

That a marriage certificate is not a permission slip for ownership,

that love is made; not demanded,

not grabbed, not extorted.

I want him to know, 

Caesareans hurt a little less

when there is something left inside

to empty out from.

Scripture For The Godless

If I believed in gods,

I’d revere you

like the last believer alive;

like you were both

the gods and the temples.

If my faith belonged to Satan,

I’d worship you

like a religious heretic;

like you were hell itself

and the antichrist waiting inside it.

I’m an anti-theist, you see,

averse to worship,

to kneeling before clay feet

mistaken for divinity.

But for you,

I’d become an atheist

just so I could still worship you

outside the etiquettes of scripture,

beyond the imagined divides of a gospel.

Because religions collapse eventually.

Gods die.

Prophets rot into quotations.

Faith decays into ritual

and ritual into inheritance.

But obsession, 

obsession survives its own ruin.

I want to be a narcissist,

so I could mistake you for myself

and never have to stop worshipping.

So every mirror becomes a shrine.

Every vein, a pilgrimage route.

Every breath,

proof that devotion

does not require heaven to exist.

And if loving you is blasphemy,

then let disbelief become my religion.

Because I have seen enough of gods

to know this much:

none of them

have ever felt as real

as you.

The Malignancy Called Muslim

If Islam vanished from the world tomorrow,

if mosques turned to ash,

if the azaan were buried in the graveyard of history,

the Muslim would still survive in this country.

Because here,

the Muslim was never about faith.

It is a necessity.

A state-sponsored villain.

A scarecrow soaked in petrol

every starving empire drags through the streets

to distract from the smell of its own decay.

Whenever power needs fresh blood,

it simply manufactures a new Muslim.

Sometimes a Christian. Sometimes a Sikh.

Sometimes a Dalit. Sometimes an Adivasi.

Sometimes just a spine reckless enough to ask:

“If the nation is truly this great, why is it so terrified?”

Chicken Broth At The End Of The World

When the world is burning:

flesh peeling from bone

like charred meat forgotten on a barbecue;

you keep writing poems

about your ruptured romance.

Or worse:

about hope.

About light at the end of tunnels.

About humanity prevailing.

About flowers growing through concrete

as if metaphor can resurrect the dead.

As if a child buried beneath rubble

needs a beacon.

As if a lynched man’s mother

is waiting for a softer sentence

to survive the weight of what happened.

The cities are coughing blood.

Rivers carry ash like scripture.

Names decide who gets buried faster.

Entire neighbourhoods learning

that smoke has dialects.

And you, 

safe in distance,

soft in comfort,

protected by the privilege

of not being inside the fire, 

sit under warm café light

manufacturing optimism

like a counterfeit drug.

Because privilege is not only wealth.

Sometimes it is distance that looks like wisdom.

So you tell the dying, 

darkness ends.

Storms pass.

Humanity heals.

Tell that

to mass graves.

Tell that

to children who recognise drones

before constellations.

Tell that

to countries rotting inward

while poetry sprinkles glitter on gangrene

and calls it resilience.

And the romantics are no better.

They excavate private heartbreaks

while public reality is dismembered in daylight.

As if bullet holes in walls

can be patched later, 

but feelings demand ceremony now.

But bodies do not wait for metaphor.

Collapse does not pause for phrasing.

And still, poetry arrives.

Late. Polished. Harmless.

As if naming it

was the same as stopping it.

Some poems perfume the wound. 

Others force it open.

One tells you the cost of surviving the catastrophe.

The other refuses to let catastrophe become scenery.

And maybe neither changes a thing.

Maybe cities still burn. 

Maybe children still vanish beneath concrete. 

Maybe blood continues its ancient argument with soil.

But honest language, at the very least, interrupts comfort.

It stains the hands of people 

trying to consume suffering 

without touching consequence.

Because there is a difference 

between holding a mirror to fire 

and painting sunsets above it.

Neither may save the world.

But only one is willing to have a conversation.

That is the first failure:

confusing witness with intervention.

The second is worse:

confusing language with escape.

Because language prefers escape.

It can turn anything into distance.

It can make fire look like imagery.

It can make death sound like meaning.

It can turn catastrophe

into something discussable

instead of something that refuses discussion.

And when everything is burning,

you should at least write what you see, 

what your ashen world actually feels like, 

instead of cooking fiction

like chicken broth in a clean kitchen

while the stove outside is rubble.

Because even that softness

is a form of violence.

And still, when your own country burns, 

you continue writing hope

as if hope is proof of resistance.

But it is often just refusal

to stay inside reality long enough

for it to finish speaking.

Another matchstick

explaining fire.

Another poem

confusing distance with morality.

But perhaps this poem is no exception either.

Another man arranging collapse into sentences,

mistaking articulation

for resistance.

Because what is outrage

if not grief

trying to survive its own volume?

What is poetry

except language

trying to justify its own survival

inside a world that no longer requires explanation?

Fire does not respond to description.

The dead do not translate.

And maybe that is the final humiliation, 

that all poets:

the hopeful,

the romantic,

the furious, 

are not opposites.

Just different ways

of refusing silence

in a world that has already finished speaking

in irreversible events.

Some will call it hope.

Some will call it truth.

Some will call it grief.

Because naming things

is cheaper than holding them.

And one of them will still keep writing

as if language is action

and action is still available.

Not because it saves anything.

Not because it changes anything.

But because even collapse

has its own habit of expression.

Some failures arrive dressed like comfort.

Some arrive dressed like clarity.

One is pornography.

The other is poetry.

And don’t be fooled, 

both are performances.

One admits it is selling flesh.

The other insists it is selling light.

And the audience applauds

whichever one hurts less to recognise.

Because nobody wants truth.

They want arrangement.

They want damage

but only as an evening snack.

They want blood

filtered through language

so it doesn’t stain their hands

while they read it.

And poets oblige.

We always do.

We reduce reality

until it becomes survivable.

Like chicken broth made in a clean kitchen

while the stove outside is still rubble.

And even that metaphor

is just another way

of making catastrophe polite.

So yes, 

you can call it awareness.

You can call it witnessing.

You can call it courage

if it helps the sentence stand upright.

But it does not change the outcome.

Nothing here is being saved.

And when everything becomes language competing with silence,

you begin to notice the simplest truth:

silence is winning

in every direction that matters.

So perhaps

your poetry and mine alike, 

our trembling little sermons

about hope,

or heartbreak,

or horror, 

are not resistance at all.

Just noise

trying to pass itself off as meaning

while reality continues

without translation.

And in the end,

it all collapses into the same final equation:

what we call insight

what we call art

what we call truth

doesn’t even rise to tragedy.

It just sits there:

warm, uninvited, and irrelevant

like the piss

of a pregnant toad.

Pride & Purity: An Anatomy Of Cleansing

They say it starts with clarity.

A clean sentence.

A moral diagram drawn like someone trying to flatten God into something explicable.

“They are the problem.”

Simple.

Comforting.

Like switching off a light in a room you refuse to look at properly.

And the mind relaxes.

Because the mind prefers reduction over responsibility, even when reduction includes itself.

They say it’s not hatred.

Hatred is too crude, too visible, too honest to pass inspection.

So it is rephrased.

Cleanliness.

Hygiene.

Maintenance.

“Sorting things out.”

Because words, when washed often enough, forget what blood tastes like.

First, there are Muslims.

Too visible.

Too loud.

Too incompatible with the parts of imagination never trained to hold difference without translating it into threat.

“They must be the reason.”

For noise.

For decay.

For everything that refuses to behave.

And purity arrives like a polite administrator.

Stamp.

File.

Remove.

It works.

Because systems always feel like progress when they are allowed to define what counts as absence.

No Muslims.

Silence, neatly packaged.

The world briefly behaving like a well-trained metaphor.

And for a moment, it feels like peace.

The kind of peace a locked room feels after it has finished pretending nothing was inside it.

But silence has memory.

It doesn’t forget what it was asked to erase.

So the question shifts.

Because it always does.

Now it is Christians.

Then Sikhs.

Then Parsis.

Then whoever still remains outside the current boundary of resemblance.

Because purity is not a belief.

It is a narrowing mechanism.

And narrowing does not stop.

It refines its criteria.

At some point, the mirror stops reflecting enemies

and starts reflecting variations of proximity.

And then the argument does what it was always going to do:

it turns inward.

Because a logic built on removal

does not recognise arrival points.

Only remaining inventory.

So now it is not “them.”

It is “not us.”

First, the Dalits.

Then the rest.

Then the subdivisions of the rest.

Each removal feels like correction.

Each correction feels like progress.

Each progress quietly erases the memory of what progress was correcting.

Until there are no strangers left.

Only degrees of suspicion within proximity.

Not difference anymore.

Just calibrated versions of “not pure enough.”

And someone, somewhere, still insists:

“This is not hatred.”

“This is order.”

“This is necessary.”

But order, left alone long enough,

stops describing reality

and begins editing the memory of it.

And purity,

that beautiful original excuse,

finally completes its arithmetic.

It was never about others.

It was about reduction.

Not difference removed.

Difference as an idea, subtracted.

And when nothing remains that qualifies as “other,”

the system does not collapse.

It stabilises.

It reruns.

Because systems like this do not end in victory.

They end in exhaustion disguised as completion.

So yes, it begins with enemies.

It always does.

But it does not end with enemies.

It ends with recognition failing its own definitions;

inside a closed loop of certainty

that has forgotten

how to recognise anything

that isn’t already scheduled for removal.

And somewhere inside that loop,

something finally stops pretending this is metaphor.

This was never cleansing.

Not order.

Not even belief.

Just cannibalism

learning how to sound like reason

so it can continue uninterrupted.

I Love My India

I love how Indians think of India;

how they inherit it like mythology,

fully formed,

umbilical cord still tied to the Indus Valley Civilization,

as if geography were a womb

and not an accident.

How history, conveniently,

begins where kingdoms do, 

as if land needed a crown

to exist.

Not discovered, 

just an immaculate conception, 

like its hundred thousand gods.

Because “discovery” would imply

it was already there,

indifferent,

unbaptized by ambition.

So no, 

not discovery.

Invention.

A retrospective authorship

signed in the names of kings

who never signed the same map.

I love how convenient ignorance

nonchalantly looks aside

when it comes to truths, 

like how

India became India

only when the East India Company

needed a word

large enough

to invoice an entire subcontinent.

Before that, 

all it ever was —

fragments with egos:

Marathas,

Rajputs,

Sultanates;

kingdoms that fought each other

with more consistency

than they ever fought an “invader.”

Too many sovereignties

to be reduced

into a single pronoun.

And yet, 

we speak of unity

in hindsight,

like historians

with editing privileges.

I love how invasions are narrated

as theological disagreements.

As if the Mughal Empire,

the Portuguese,

the French,

and every other flag

arrived here

to correct how we kneel.

Not to extract.

Not to own.

Just overwrite faith.

I love how kingdoms and countries,

dynasties and democracies,

are shuffled together

like synonyms, 

as if power doesn’t change

just because its costume does.

I love how patriotism

arrives before the nation, 

how loyalty is demanded

retroactively,

like tax.

How blindfolds are branded

as culture.

How obedience is renamed

as pride.

How slavery,

with enough rephrasing,

earns itself a flag.

And I love, 

more than anything, 

how the idea of India,

to an Indian,

isn’t memory,

or history,

or even delusion, 

but a carefully curated hallucination

where contradictions don’t conflict;

they pass for truth, 

because nobody insists

on noticing the difference.

The silence

in the gouged out eyes of disagreement, 

it’s easy to call that unity.

And united we are,

as siblings in a family crime;

not because we agree,

but because we’ve learned

disagreement

is bad for inheritance.

Now, repeat after me,

“India is my country

and all Indians are my brothers and sisters.”

Say it slowly.

Feel how easily

belonging

settles into your mouth

like something rehearsed.

And notice, 

how it survives

by making disagreement

feel like betrayal.