Shame On You

Every now and then,

a question trickles in.

It never stops at the question, does it?

Before you know it,

questions pile up like worms,

crawling beneath the skin

and above the flesh,

looking for somewhere

to make themselves hurt.

It always starts innocently enough.

Something mundane.

Something frequent.

Something with just enough

existential crisis

to still be considered

a recreational drug.

Something like,

"What is this life I've been living?"

And before you can exhale,

your entire existence

comes rushing back at you.

Childhood.

Adolescence.

Adulthood.

Not the flashback

you imagined death would give you.

More like, 

an anthology of evidences on trial.

You want to remember

every memory that once made you happy,

every story you once told proudly,

even if only for a second.

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Everything that once made you happy

is either dead, broken, or extinct.

Everything you once took pride in

has been drowned by everything

you hoped you would one day take pride in,

but could only ever lose face over.

And that is what floods your hollowed-out insides now,

as though someone carefully removed every organ of your being

and kept only the shirt of your skin alive.

You look into the mirror

and before your reflection can look back at you,

you flinch.

Grainy lumps gather

around your epiglottis.

You swallow.

They stay.

You swallow again.

They stay.

You look away,

and still your peripheral vision

catches the shape of your anatomy.

You shudder from within.

The face isn't yours.

The dark circles aren't yours.

The wrinkles aren't yours.

The warts on your neck aren't yours.

The malformed torso isn't yours.

You can't tell whether your idea of you has failed you,

or whether you are the one who failed your becoming.

Then come the other lives.

The lives you secretly desired.

The lives you criticised

because admitting you wanted them

would have meant confessing

you were jealous.

You called them shallow. Pretentious. Lucky.

Anything that made envy sound like discernment.

Now they flash before you

like breaking news

on a channel bought and paid for by the throne.

Everything you've faltered at.

Everything they haven't.

Everything you could have had,

had it not been for you.

You have always been

your weakest tissue.

Your one true nemesis.

The only person you could never outrun,

because you kept taking yourself with you.

And somewhere

between the promise of a prodigy

and the frantic of a failure,

your life stopped hanging by a thread.

Instead, it hung itself with the thread.

You can't quite tell when.

If you could,

perhaps you could blame a particular year, month, week, day, hour, minute, second.

A decision. A person.

A door you didn't open.

A door you opened too late.

But there is no moment to blame.

Only the accumulation.

One compromise. One hesitation.

One morning you didn't get up.

One thing you never finished.

One thing you finished and wished you hadn't.

One version of yourself after another,

quietly becoming the person you promised you wouldn't be.

And no matter what you've done,

you know it isn't enough.

Because although

it broke every bone inside you

to become who you are today,

it isn't enough to be remembered, is it?

If you were gone

like a sudden southern wind,

if you dropped dead

in the middle of the day,

do you think

you could halt the traffic?

Would somebody step out of a cab

and gasp, "Shit!"

Would the city notice the absence of one more body?

Or would everyone simply go around you,

late for work, late for lunch,

late for something they would forget by evening?

If the world didn't stop to notice your life

and doesn't stop to witness your death,

what exactly were you doing here?

The temperature inside your body changes.

Your neck stiffens.

Your head feels giddy.

Flashes of scorching heat

trade places across your skin.

It is a pleasant night outside,

and yet you are sweating

like a smouldering afternoon.

You wish wishes were true,

so you could have a disappearing wish,

if not a death wish,

because apparently even wishing death

has been another thing you've managed to fail at.

You've spent a life trying not to be ashamed.

Trying to outrun

the things you've done, the things you haven't done,

the person you became, the person you didn't.

Trying to hide from every mirror, 

every memory, every comparison,

every version of yourself

that knew exactly what you had failed to become.

What a shame.

You've spent a life trying not to get caught

in its game of hide-and-seek,

when shame has been breathing

the same air your shadow's been

all along.

Mumbles Of Meaning

We have decided

the butterfly means something.

Of course we have.

Give a human being

anything that exists

without requiring our permission

and within minutes

we will put a metaphor on it.

The butterfly must mean transformation.

The bee must mean perseverance.

The lotus must mean purity.

The crow must mean death.

A crow! 

It was just looking for breakfast.

We decided it must be an omen.

This is what we do.

We cannot leave anything

alone long enough

to remain itself.

A flower cannot simply be a flower.

It must represent innocence

before we pluck it,

put it in a vase, watch it die,

and call the arrangement beautiful.

A tree cannot simply grow.

It must represent resilience.

Especially if it is growing

through concrete,

because apparently

photosynthesis becomes inspirational

the moment civilisation tries to kill it.

We adore resilience.

It makes oppression look like character development.

The butterfly is particularly useful.

It crawls into a disgusting little sack

of its own dissolved organs

and emerges with wings,

so naturally we decided 

suffering is the admission fee for becoming beautiful.

The butterfly has no idea.

It is busy looking for nectar.

It has never heard of your healing journey.

It did not emerge from the cocoon

to become the person you were always meant to be.

It emerged because that is what butterflies do.

Honestly, the arrogance! 

Imagine being a butterfly and discovering 

that some bald ape has written twelve thousand words

about what your metamorphosis taught him about himself.

You were eating.

He was having a breakthrough.

The bee is worse.

We have made tattle tales out of it.

Hardworking.

Disciplined.

Selfless.

Productive.

In short, everything your parents wanted you to be and your paychecks needed you to be.

The bee has no fucking idea

it is the poster child

for adulting and corporate resilience.

It is simply collecting pollen.

It will die doing it.

We call that dedication.

If a human does the same thing

we call it burnout

and sell him a wellness retreat.

The flower doesn't care either.

It doesn't care that poets

have compared it to women.

It doesn't care that painters

spent centuries trying

to get its colour right. 

It doesn't care that somebody

once received a bouquet

and finally understood

what love was.

The flower was trying to reproduce.

You were trying to get laid.

Only one of you needed the metaphor.

Then there is the sunset.

Holy shit!

We have done terrible things to the sunset.

We have made it hope.

Closure.

New beginnings.

Goodbyes.

Second chances.

A reminder that even endings can be beautiful.

The sun, meanwhile,

is undergoing a nuclear reaction.

It is not saying goodbye.

It is not forgiving you.

It is not closing a chapter.

It is burning.

It has been burning for billions of years.

Without a single fucking opinion about your breakup.

And yet,

we stand beneath it

with tears in our eyes

and have the ravishing audacity to say,

"Maybe everything happens for a reason."

No.

Maybe the sun is just a ball of violently collapsing plasma.

Maybe the bird is just hungry.

Maybe the tree is just ageing.

Maybe the river is just going downhill.

Maybe the butterfly is just trying to find a flower.

Maybe the flower is just trying to fuck.

Maybe the bee is just trying not to die.

Maybe none of them are trying to tell you anything.

Maybe they don't even know you exist.

And that should be the most liberating thing we have ever heard.

But we can't have that.

Because 

if the butterfly doesn't mean transformation,

then what does your transformation mean?

If the river

isn't teaching you to let go,

then who exactly

is going to validate your letting go?

If the dead bird isn't a sign,

perhaps death doesn't need to teach you anything.

And if the sunset isn't beautiful

because it reminds you of something,

then perhaps beauty was never the point.

Perhaps the universe has never been speaking to us.

Perhaps it has been doing something far more insulting.

It has been existing.

Without symbolism.

Without sentiment.

Without a fucking audience.

And we,

unable to bear the possibility

that something can exist without needing us,

have spent thousands of years

turning everything around us into a mirror.

Then we looked into the mirror,

saw ourselves,

and called it God.

Dare I Question The Patron Saints

How dare you question a dead woman?

Have some decency.

She's already dead.

Can't you see she has suffered enough?

Besides, we've finished improving her.

The woman was complicated.

Disgusting, really.

She had contradictions.

Existential dysfunctionalities.

Barometric fluctuations of headspace pulled at the poles between serotonin and cortisol.

Children.

She had children.

A kitchen.

And, a life that refused to behave like a feminist literature seminar.

So naturally, we killed the woman and kept the name.

That's just so much easier.

The corpse doesn't ask for royalties.

The corpse doesn't say, "actually, that's not what I meant".

The corpse doesn't object when you put a flag where the diagnosis used to be.

And suddenly,

miracle of miracles, 

suicide becomes empowerment.

Despair becomes resistance.

A breakdown becomes a declaration of rebellion.

A tragedy gets an inspiring backstory.

A nervous system gets a political affiliation.

The dead are very progressive that way.

They never contradict the people speaking on their behalf.

But there were children. Two infants. In another room.

And this is where the poetry gets awkward.

Because if the gas had spread,

if the fire had started,

if the accident had become what accidents occasionally become, 

the literary canon might have had two additional corpses to turn into metaphors.

What a relief that literature got lucky.

Apparently luck is now a feminist virtue.

Don't misunderstand me. Or actually do. 

But don't miss the fishbone in the throat.

The poems can be brilliant.

In fact, let them be brilliant.

That's the fucking point.

I don't need the poet to be a saint to read a poem.

I don't need Shakespeare's moral clearance before reading Shakespeare.

I don't need a poet's childhood, marriage, politics, sins, saints, sins against saints, or parking history

stapled to the back of every metaphor.

A poem isn't a character reference.

A metaphor doesn't inherit its mother's criminal record. Or its father's.

Art is not a family court.

But apparently

we've decided the artist and the art must be Siamese twins.

So when the artist does something you in your deluded godliness deem unforgivable, 

cut the poem in half.

When the artist is clinically insane, 

medicate the metaphor.

When the artist is politically inconvenient, 

ban the stanza, because burning was never enough.

When the artist is useful to your politics, 

quick, somebody laminate the corpse.

This is not criticism.

This is taxidermy with a reading list.

And feminism, 

dear God, 

feminism has become

the world's most convenient laundering service.

Put anything through it long enough

and apparently it comes out empowered.

Victimhood? Empowered.

Despair? Empowered.

Self-destruction? Empowered.

Abandoning infants while constructing a potentially lethal environment?

Careful.

That's not a sentence we like in the brochure.

Please say “act of rebellion” and keep walking.

The really delicious part is that 

you cannot question any of this.

Because she is dead.

Which apparently means

she has been promoted

from human being to constitutional amendment.

You may not dissent.

You may interpret.

You may adore.

You may write three thousand words about her courage.

But question?

Absolutely not.

How dare you question a dead woman?

She cannot defend herself.

Which is precisely why everyone has decided to use her like mascara:

apply when politically convenient, 

wipe off when the argument ends.

We do this constantly.

We find a dead person who suffered beautifully and immediately ask:

What can we make this suffering mean?

Not, 

what happened

to this person?

Not,

what was wrong?

Not,

what could we have

understood?

No.

Meaning first.

Human being later.

We don't want the corpse to teach us about human dysfunctionalities.

We want the corpse to teach us about our imagined brilliance.

Much more flattering.

So here's my heresy:

perhaps a woman can be brilliant and broken.

Perhaps a poet can write masterpieces and commit acts sanity cannot forgive.

Perhaps damage is not automatically empowerment just because the patient wrote beautifully about it.

Perhaps feminism doesn't require a woman to become a saint, and a man, a sinner.

Perhaps the dead don't become morally immaculate simply because their funerals are over.

And perhaps, 

brace yourselves, 

a poem can survive its poet.

Apparently this is now radical politics.

So bury the woman if you must.

Canonise her. Weaponise her.

Turn her into a feminist warrior, a tragic heroine, 

a patron saint of every argument that needs a dead woman to stop answering back.

But leave the poems alone.

They did nothing.

And if you insist that the poet's sins must contaminate the poetry,

fine.

Be consistent.

Start burning the entire canon.

I'll bring matches.

You bring the hypocrisy.

Martyrs Make Memorable Merchandise

In a country that never stopped learning

the ethics of slavery,

we call what was once survival

ambition.

There is more opinion than education,

and yet we wonder

why governments keep failing us.

We wail about a dying democracy

because it no longer benefits us

befittingly enough,

and for the self-proclaimed elites,

the crème de la crème,

that is apparently worth waging wars over.

We work for people

who work for people

who work for people,

for a monthly allowance

we dare to call financial freedom,

then scream our lungs out

in dim-lit bars

about equality being our birthright

and hierarchy

a capitalist conspiracy.

We live capitalist lives

while preaching everything but capitalism,

and depending on which side

of the fallacy you're standing on:

religion as an act of faith

or intellect as its currency, 

you're either the right

or the left.

However much you plead otherwise,

the choice was made

before you arrived.

The left insists on being called intellectual

while abhorring labels,

identities, definitions,

and every other grammar

that becomes inconvenient that day.

The right is rather keener

on taking your food,

your land,

your tongue,

your faith,

and eventually

your definition of a life worth living.

The difference is simple:

the right is united

in its uncouthness,

its barbarism,

its certainty;

the left 

can never seem to agree

on what is left

and what is not.

And yet,

for the better part of the last half-decade,

both have had

a common currency.

Umar Khalid.

The left pulls him out of the hat

like a rabbit

whenever it needs to win an argument

against the left.

I know you were expecting

left against right,

but the right doesn't believe

in conversations

that aren't monologues.

The right reserves him

for another purpose:

a cautionary tale

for anyone who mistakes

a democracy

for permission to question the government.

I'm not going to waste words

cataloguing the right's failures:

the ever falling rupee,

the whenever falling bridges,

and the never-falling appetite

for trading people

for cheaper than cows.

But then, mothers have always sold

greater stakes than children

in this country,

haven't they?

But Umar Khalid

isn't really about Umar Khalid.

The left uses him

the way Umar Khalid wishes

he could use a get-out-of-jail card:

whenever,

wherever,

against whosoever.

It lays siege to his name

as though it owns him,

then comes out wearing his face

on fabric,

linen,

paper,

plastic.

But 

Umar Khalid refuses

to remain symbolic.

Because how long

can you defend an idea

without knowing

the skin of it?

So the argument moves.

From him

to Kashmir.

From Kashmir

to Gaza.

From Gaza

to Jews.

And the farther it travels

from the country

that produced the argument,

the louder the confidence becomes.

Because opinions are important.

Context is negotiable.

And staying out of jail

is non-negotiable.

Perhaps that is the great joke

of our politics:

the right turns people

into warnings,

the left turns them

into arguments,

and both forget

that people are neither.

If intellect were currency,

the left would have Umar Khalid

on the rupee.

Because that is the only way

we seem to know

how to value a revolution:

by printing them

on the side

we have already chosen.

Escape Velocity

They thought I would be an easy kill;

break my bones, leave me for dead,

let time do the rest,

and I’d become one more of their hunting tales.

When I stood back up,

they went into hiding, mistook escape for safe passage.

They thought this was a hiccup they were over with.

They’re about to realise it was harakiri.

It won’t end in death; death is mercy.

It’ll end with them

becoming a story nobody remembers telling.

Muscle Memory

My father stopped shouting when I was seventeen.

Not gradually, like he stopped smoking. No.

One day, the house simply became quiet.

No slammed doors.

No footsteps approaching like a verdict.

No voice turning my name into something I had to survive.

For years afterward, I thought I was fine.

I became good at reading rooms.

A pause meant anger.

A sigh meant disappointment.

A door closing meant someone was leaving.

I called it awareness.

People called it maturity.

Then, one evening, the woman I loved said,

“Can we talk?”

Three harmless words.

My body heard something else.

My jaw tightened.

My heart accelerated.

I began explaining myself before she had accused me of anything.

She hadn't even finished sitting down.

She stared at me, “What are you doing?”

I didn't know.

So I went home and looked it up.

There is a word in physics: hysteresis.

It describes what happens

when a system changes because of a force,

and keeps behaving differently

even after the force ceases to exist.

The system remembers what happened to it.

I read that again.

Then again.

Because my father hadn't shouted at me in years.

He wasn't in the room.

He hadn't even been the subject of the conversation.

And still, some part of me was bracing for him.

I had not carried my father's anger into adulthood.

I had carried the version of myself his anger required.

The child who listened for footsteps.

The teenager who rehearsed every sentence before speaking.

The adult who left first so nobody could leave him.

I had mistaken adaptation for identity.

I called myself cautious because fear had made me careful.

I called myself independent because needing people had once been dangerous.

I called silence peace because I had forgotten

how to hear it without waiting for what came next.

And maybe that is the cruelest thing about surviving something:

survival doesn't always know when the predicament ends.

The danger leaves. The body doesn't.

The person disappears. The reflex stays.

Years can pass

and some old version of you

can still be standing at the door,

waiting for footsteps.

So I called her.

I told her, “I wasn't answering you.

I was answering someone who isn't here.”

She was quiet.

For once, I didn't mistake the silence for danger.

I just stayed.

My father stopped shouting when I was seventeen.

It took me years to understand that the hardest part wasn't surviving the noise.

It was learning that quiet wasn't waiting to become loud.

The Birth Of An Optical Illusion

Imagine this.

There’s a woman somewhere,

a woman you know.

Imagine her going about her day

when a man meddles,

decides they should have a conversation,

and she obliges

in the way her parents taught her

was respectable.

The man says he loves conversation.

He doesn't.

He loves monologue

with an audience.

Anything beyond agreement

is noise,

unless it arrives

as submitted obedience

to his extravagant opinions.

He doesn't like questions.

Questions about his opinions.

Questions about his lived experience.

Questions about the roads

he travelled

to arrive at his conclusions.

He doesn't like them.

Not one bit.

So every time there is a question,

he misdirects.

The woman,

meanwhile,

had grown up learning

to respect herself

and her sanity.

Obedience wasn't her bread.

Submission wasn't her breadcrumb.

So she did

what any rational person,

any objectively sane person,

might do.

She disagreed.

Respectfully.

And left.

The man had a fragile ego.

And what kind of world is it

where a man finally has to make peace

with an injured narcissism?

So he ganged up.

He brought his brothers.

A brotherhood of men

with no jobs,

only jabs.

And boy,

did they swing.

They ripped through her dress,

her skin,

her flesh,

her bonework,

but never touched her.

They weren't uncivilised savages,

you see.

They did it all with words.

Wild accusations.

Filthy rumours.

Rotten verdicts.

All because

she had decided

she could afford

an opinion of her own.

They called everyone who knew her.

Everyone they could.

And they didn't stop

until voices began

hollowing into echoes.

They came at her

day and night,

through monsoon,

winter,

summer,

for months,

until months became a year,

and a year became more,

until there was nothing left

of the bricks in her name.

She was alive.

And yet

buried six feet under.

Then one day,

when she had had enough,

she dragged them all

into a courtroom.

And the men cried

like a pack of sheep

in front of a wolf

whose shepherd had gone.

People gathered.

Watched the circus.

Then returned to their lives,

leaving behind

the usual unsolicited opinions:

“She’s making a mountain

out of a molehill.”

“She’s equally to blame.”

“Why couldn't she just apologise

for hurting their feelings

and move on?”

Does it infuriate you?

The audacity

of unscrupulous people

peddling justice

like pocket change.

Now imagine

the woman were a man.

And the men

were women.

Does it still infuriate you?

If it does,

good.

If it doesn't,

then perhaps

what you called justice

was only projection.

And what you called feminism

was only loyalty

to the side you recognised yourself on.

You can sit there

with tense anuses

and worked-up sinuses

beneath those stoic faces.

Remember,

I can see you.

Every one of you.

And you,

you are why

justice so often

begins to feel like vendetta.

You are no feminist.

You aren't even humanitarian.

You're as much a feminist

as Genghis Khan

was a prophet of peace.