The Sanctity Of Appetite

When you hold a headless chicken in your hand,

its body spitting blood all over,

desperately hoping to undo the last two minutes of its life,

you don't look at the chicken and flinch,

you look at it as though this were simply how things are.

You don't think murder.

You think lunch. And dinner.

Breasts. Legs. Wings.

Sometimes, the chicken isn't chicken.

Sometimes, it's a man, a woman, a child.

Sometimes, the faith isn't food.

Sometimes, faith is a necrophiliac, 

dressing death up as devotion.

What you once called a meal, you now call a just cause.

Blood on the hands. Blood on the teeth.

An anaemic appetite that keeps gnawing for more.

Suicide bombers and serial killers

have thought themselves noble.

As have honourable men and women

slaughtering, in acts of faith.

Blood In My Kahwa (Alternative Version)

At the stroke of midnight,

in the humid August of 1947,

India woke up independent.

Kashmir woke up

inside somebody else’s argument.

The British left behind two countries,

hundreds of princely states,

and enough unfinished business

to keep generations of children

inheriting the consequences

of decisions made by men

who would never have to inherit them.

Jammu and Kashmir was one such state.

A Muslim-majority population.

A Hindu Maharaja.

A subcontinent being torn apart

by men who had mistaken

religion for geography

and geography for destiny.

Then came the accession,

the war,

the borders,

the competing claims,

the maps with their little coloured certainties.

India. Pakistan. China.

Three countries with arguments

about a place

where people had to wake up the next morning

and somehow continue being people.

Kashmir.

Ice-capades and lush valleys.

Kahwa-dipped afternoons.

Ghazals curling around bonfires.

Mountains so beautiful

you could almost forgive the world

for looking at them

instead of at the people beneath them.

Almost.

Because paradise, apparently,

is what we call a place

when we can afford to ignore

what it costs its inhabitants to live there.

Kashmir was cut through its spine and ribs.

Head separate.

Limbs separate.

The rest, 

whatever remained

after the men with flags

had finished deciding

what the body was called.

And the world kept its vocabulary.

Territory.

Sovereignty.

Accession.

Integration.

Dispute.

Beautiful, bloodless words.

Words that can sit in a sentence without having to wash their hands.

Tell me:

if your home becomes a question

that powerful people keep asking each other,

if your dead become numbers

that strangers use to win arguments,

if your future is negotiated

in rooms where your absence

is not even considered a logistical problem, 

what exactly

are you supposed to pledge allegiance to?

The flag?

The border?

The man on television explaining your own life to you?

Would you give a fuck about governments

that remember your existence

whenever your existence becomes bartering currency?

And before you start with your neatly laminated answers,

understand something.

People are not a referendum on your patriotism.

Their suffering is not a loyalty test.

Their silence is not your evidence.

And their existence is not a fucking group project

in which every stranger with an opinion gets to mark the answers.

Children of conflict learn things 

the rest of us get to learn metaphorically.

That fear can become so ordinary it stops announcing itself.

That the future can arrive looking exactly like the thing

your parents spent their lives praying you would escape.

Their history is not yours.

Yours may begin with a headline,

a classroom debate,

a breaking-news notification,

a holiday booked months in advance.

Theirs may begin with a door kicked open.

A name called into the dark.

A father who does not return.

A mother learning to recognise footsteps without lifting her eyes.

You get to close the article when it becomes too much.

They have to live in the paragraph you abandoned.

And still, you claim to understand Kashmir.

You have smelled the pine.

Have you smelled the gunpowder?

You have held the warm cup.

Have you felt what it means

to have your grief examined

by people who have already decided what it is allowed to mean?

You have seen the valley.

Have you seen what happens

when the world falls so deeply in love with a place

that it forgets the place is full of people?

When paradise becomes a product,

its inhabitants are reduced to features to optimize user experience.

And if you think

you can reduce every complicated existence

to two flags,

two religions,

two sides,

two columns in a schoolbook,

as though a human being

were a labelled diagram

in a ninth-grade biology textbook, 

you have mistaken classification for comprehension.

And you are a dumbfuck of the highest order.

Not because you know too little.

Ignorance is survivable.

It is the moment you peddle

your ignorance for authority

that other people begin paying for it.

Because now your certainty has a flag.

Your certainty has a microphone.

Your certainty has an audience

and a thousand convenient ways

to make somebody else's pain

sound like an inconvenience to your worldview.

And suddenly,

the people who have lived the history

must prove it to the people

who have merely inherited an opinion.

Fuck that.

Kashmir does not owe you

a version of itself

that fits inside your head.

Its dead do not owe you a useful lesson.

Its living do not owe you a performance of suffering

convincing enough to survive your next argument.

And its children do not owe you a future 

that makes your certainties look prophetic.

You want to understand Kashmir?

Start by admitting

that the place is larger than your understanding of it.

That its people are not props

in the grand theatre of your nationhood.

That a mountain does not become yours

because you love its photograph.

That a border does not become innocent

because you have learned to draw it neatly.

That the word peace does not become meaningful

merely because the people saying it are no longer the ones bleeding.

Kashmir is not your fucking metaphor.

It is not your classroom debate.

It is not your patriotic reflex.

It is not your holiday photograph

with the inconvenient parts cropped out.

It is a place full of lives

that were already happening before you formed an opinion.

And will continue happening long after 

your opinion has become another piece of history

somebody else's children are forced to inherit.

Damn Dissent

If batons and bullets

and sticks and stones

and gas and grenades

could rid the world

of every spine

that dared to stand up and ask why,

or worse, say no,

revolution would be a museum artifact,

behind glass,

with a little plaque explaining

how humanity once mistook obedience for peace.

The ones who belong in museums

keep finding crowns,

mistaking the present for their kingdom

and the past for an inheritance.

The guillotine, too,

was once a government instrument.

Concrete Copulation

A fish develops legs, 

crawls onto land, 

invents a mortgage, 

and spends the next several millennia 

trying to get back indoors.

We call this civilisation.

We spend millions of years evolving on the earth, 

billions of dollars extracting things from it, 

and the rest of our lives trying to get as far away from it as possible.

Eventually, we discover concrete.

Sand. Stone. Water. Cement.

The earth, after a brief and involuntary career in geology, gets promoted to real estate.

Mountains become raw materials.

Rivers become supply chains.

Beaches become investment opportunities.

And the species responsible for the arrangement 

starts advertising harmony with nature 

in brochures featuring infinity pools.

The infinity pool is particularly inspired.

We have managed to make water look infinite 

by putting it in a rectangle 

beside a planet running out of it.

Civilisation is full of these little triumphs.

We excavate mountains to build skyscrapers, 

then stand on the forty-seventh floor and admire the view.

We put fences around land 

that existed before the concept of a fence. 

Draw borders across geological formations 

that have never heard of countries. 

Print deeds establishing ownership of a planet 

that has been operating quite comfortably without a legal department 

for four and a half billion years.

Somewhere, a tectonic plate is moving a few centimetres a year, 

entirely unaware that it has violated somebody's property line.

We are the only species 

that can stand on borrowed ground 

and demand the owner produce identification.

And then there's sand.

Sand is what happens 

when a mountain spends a few million years breaking itself down.

We looked at this and thought:

Excellent. Construction material.

Not every grain of sand is suitable for concrete, of course. 

Its usefulness depends on where it came from, 

how it was shaped, and what it can do. 

River sand, desert sand, crushed rock. 

Geology has its specifications.

Even the earth has a quality-control department.

We have a procurement team.

And our procurement team has been having a spectacular century.

We dredge rivers until their beds begin to collapse.

Strip coastlines of what protects them,

then commission studies to determine why they are collapsing.

This is what we call progress: 

making a problem expensive enough 

that the people who created it can build careers solving it.

We will destroy a wetland

to build a luxury housing complex,

install artificial landscaping,

and advertise the development as an escape into nature.

The trees are ornamental.

The lake is a feature.

The birds are a bonus.

The entire ecosystem has been reduced to amenities.

Nature has finally found employment in the service industry.

It is not permitted to unionise, though.

We paved the earth against the rain,

then built drainage systems

to make the water someone else's problem.

The sky kept its appointments.

The soil could no longer keep them.

But the city looks beautiful at night.

This is important.

The city must look beautiful at night.

Otherwise, somebody might notice what it took to make it.

Every civilisation has its preferred method of concealing a crime from itself.

Ours uses architectural lighting.

Glass facades. Illuminated towers. Landscaped terraces. 

A marketing department that can make the excavation of a mountain sound like a lifestyle upgrade.

Luxury redefined.

Usually by the square foot.

We have even managed to make impermanence aspirational.

Buy a home, they say. 

Build equity. 

Leave something behind for your children.

Leave them what, exactly?

A thirty-year repayment schedule? 

A shrinking coastline? 

A river converted into a municipal problem? 

A city where the temperature is rising, 

the groundwater is falling, 

and the air purifier needs a replacement filter 

that costs more than an entire village's monthly water bill?

Our ancestors left us rivers, forests, coastlines, and soil.

We are leaving our descendants the invoice.

And concrete. So much concrete.

Concrete is humanity's favourite love letter to permanence, 

which is a little like writing a love letter to a corpse 

because you appreciate its commitment to staying in one place.

We have spent thousands of years 

building things that promise to outlast us, 

and naming them after places we are busy destroying.

We are not the landlords of this planet.

We are an unusually destructive tenant 

with a god complex, a construction loan, 

and a remarkable talent for blaming the building when the plumbing fails.

The lease was never signed.

The deposit was never paid.

The landlord has never once acknowledged our existence.

And still, we keep renovating.

Because what else would we do with the time we have?

Sit on the ground? 

Feel the sand between our fingers? 

Look at a mountain without calculating its commercial potential? 

Allow a river to be a river, a forest to be a forest, 

a coastline to exist without somebody submitting a proposal?

That would be absurd.

We are civilised.

We have paperwork.

We have cranes.

We have an entire species dedicated to converting the things it cannot create into things it can sell.

And the fish?

The fish left the water,

crawled onto land,

invented a mortgage,

and spent several millennia trying to get back indoors. 

And when it finally did,

it found the water waiting for it.

In a rectangle.

Plausible Deniability

Earlier this morning, something incredible happened:

I was rejected by a machine that insisted nobody had taught it how to discriminate.

I asked who was responsible.

The representative said the algorithm.

I asked who had built it.

The engineer said management had specified the requirements.

Management said legal had approved the process.

Legal said the decision was consistent with policy.

I asked who had written the policy.

They sent me a link.

I read it.

The policy stated

that all decisions were made in accordance with applicable criteria.

I asked who had chosen the criteria.

They sent me another link.

This one explained how the system applied them.

I began to suspect

I was being fucked by a committee

that had outsourced the fucking

and retained the right to deny there had been any fucking at all.

I asked for a human being.

They said a human being was not required at this stage.

I asked when one would be required.

They said if I wished to appeal.

I appealed.

The appeal was reviewed

by the same system that had rejected me.

The appeal was rejected.

The system had considered my case from every possible angle.

Except the one from which I was a person.

I asked to speak to someone

who could overrule the decision.

They said no such person was available.

Not that the decision was irreversible.

Not that nobody had the authority.

Only that the person with the authority was unavailable.

I pictured them at lunch.

A sandwich in one hand.

My future in the other.

Both entirely disposable.

I asked when they would return.

The representative said they couldn't provide a timeline.

And then, they thanked me for my understanding.

I couldn't quite understand

what, precisely, I was supposed to understand.

That nobody had intended this?

That everybody had done their job?

That somewhere between

the person who wrote the rules

and the person who suffered them,

we had built a machine

that could make a human decision

without requiring a human being to stand behind it?

We used to need a person to look you in the eye while ruining your day.

Now we call that inefficiency.

I closed the browser.

The decision remained.

Somewhere, someone had made it.

Somewhere, someone could reverse it.

Somewhere, a person

was having a perfectly ordinary day, unaware

that doing nothing had become the most consequential thing

they'd done all year.

There was no villain to expose.

No monster to drag into the light.

Just a job well done,

a policy correctly applied,

a performance review to look forward to.

And me,

holding the consequences of a decision

nobody had made.

The Art Of Saying Nothing

Don't write if you have nothing to say

that hasn't been said over and again,

in more ways than your vocabulary permits,

your imagination allows.

Don't borrow metaphors

like they're your neighbour's scissors

and you've misplaced yours.

Don't claim them either,

unless you got them as birthday gifts.

Don't scribble mindless mnemonics

until your brain freezes,

then inspect the wreckage

and call it literature.

Don't waste pages upon pages

if not one of them makes you angry,

teary, or dizzy

when you read them aloud in your head.

I know what they say.

Anyone can be an artist.

Anything can be art.

Well, they lie.

Delusion has sold more art supplies

than Nobel Prizes ever could.

Narcissism has slaughtered more trees

than greed ever would.

Because the world has never run short of people with something to say;

only of those who'll say what everyone thinks but no one else would.

Dead To Rights

Someone told me today

I should die.

Someone told me today

that a good man 

lives with the consequences of his errors

every time he is told he has erred, 

and that if he dares to question the telling,

he should die

to cleanse himself of the sin of asking.

Don't get me wrong.

I've been asked to die before.

In fact,

I've failed more death wishes than cats have lives.

I'm sure each of them had reasons.

Reasons grand enough to warrant a death.

Wetting a bed of expectations is a rather expensive crime,

I've been made to understand.

But today wasn't one of those days.

Today I was asked to die 

because I had the audacity to question.

Today I was asked to die

because I had the arrogance to refuse surrender.

Today I was asked to die

because I had the gall to be allergic to commodes for mouths.

Today I was asked to die

because I had the tongue to read the law of the land aloud,

and the teeth to enunciate it,

to call a felony a statutory violation.

Someone told me today

I should die

because the creatures of convenience

lurking inside their nervous systems

whispered to them:

"He is the crime. He is the criminal."

Someone told me today

I should die

so they wouldn't have to live with their consequences.

And perhaps that, after all,

was the greatest crime I had committed:

I had refused to die 

so they could bury me guilty.