Weather Update

Last night, an acquaintance got small talking, 

it’s something acquaintances apparently do, 

and I’ve only just recently come to realise

there’s no gentle way to ask someone to fuck off,

so I indulged

in stretching the conversational rubber band.

“What’s with the weather?” he asked,

with politically correct politeness.

It’s the kind of weather

that makes you crave a good cup of tea.

That way you know

if you’d ever be invited over.

But more importantly because,

the one who was supposed to be selling tea

is presently unavailable,

preoccupied selling what a billion and a half

call a democracy, apparently.

I can neither confirm nor deny;

both require documented evidence,

and let’s just say,

our good old grandfather

isn’t particularly fond of paper, 

or as he calls it,

being eco-friendly.

The one thing he hates more than paper

is evidence.

Because imagine

every grandfather having to prove

all the rivers they crossed to get to school,

or the simpler fact

that they ever went to one.

Twelve summers

of broken spines,

jailed mouths,

London Bridges falling down

like architecture fell in love with gravity,

and an army of monkeys

scratching and biting

until you agree

the only colour this country

and its people

could ever bleed

was saffron.

Because crimson

is too reminiscent of criminal evidence,

and by now

we know

dear old grandfather

abhors the idea of evidence.

At an age

most reconsider life choices

and potential osteoarthritis,

dear old grandfather gathers around

his pack of hyenas, 

or as he likes to call them,

the petals of the lotus

he’s the epicentre of.

Lotuses are very specifically precise

to his peer group.

Both thrive in

and from

absolute and utter filth.

Almost as if

they are a walking, talking, breathing

washing machine —

or as he prefers being called,

the geopolitical Ganges

of a nation

being told

its past

is the only future

it ever had.

Dear old grandfather wakes every morning

complaining

how noisy and nosy

his neighbours are,

sipping imported tea

from saffron-embossed porcelain

bought and paid for

with taxes he collects

like inheritance mistaken for birthright.

He doesn’t read newspapers.

Partly because

one can’t quite tell

if he ever learned to read,

but more importantly because

he dislikes anything

that doesn’t have him printed in capitals

across the front page,

the back page,

and every page in between.

Every now and then

he reaches for his designer chappal.

Now don’t you dare judge him

for million-dollar footwear

while he hands you a list

of everything

you shouldn’t be buying,

because greed

is his sole inheritance.

He reaches for those chappals

every time he sees a cockroach.

Word has it

he’s been suffering

a rather severe infestation lately,

and it’s got his cholesterol-choked heart

beating rather fast.

A grandfather however obnoxious

you are taught not to pray ill for,

and we are, after all,

a land of cultured chromosomes,

so we ruin another night’s sleep

breathing through

his audacious farts.

I could have called him an appendix,

but appendices,

when arrogant enough,

can be uprooted overnight.

He is, to be factually precise,

a variant

of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus:

the Hindutva Immunodeficiency Virus.

A potentially lethal,

definitely contagious disease,

mostly spread

through unprotected mindfuckery,

commonly found

in civilisationally virgin nuisances

desperately seeking purpose

through the pointless pride

of a polluted past.

And the most fascinating thing

about the HIV virus

is how effectively

it convinces the body

its own cells

are the enemy.

Because once you wage war

against yourself,

death becomes

a matter of clockwork.

Imagine believing

you’re a martyr,

when all you ever were

was the last nail

in your own fucking coffin.

Imagine drinking cow piss

as beverage,

and still wondering

why your skull,

split open,

smells of stale bullshit

and fresh cow dung.

“I had just asked

what’s with the weather,”

is, I’ve just discovered,

a remarkably efficient way

to lose acquaintances.

Temple Of Flesh

Have you ever held

the papercut edge of a shaving blade

against the epidermis of your skin —

a flimsy thin slice of stainless alloy,

smelling of metal

like it had sensed the fahrenheit rising

beneath the thick sandwich

of flesh, sweat, skin and hair,

and gone through with it?

You’ll be surprised

how quickly it cuts through,

and how deep.

And that’s when you realise

meat is just about meat;

naked pink

sprayed in hues of crimson,

man or chicken.

The first few seconds,

the flesh stares back at you,

almost as if caught by surprise.

And then the blood arrives.

First,

a few droplets of red sweat.

And then follows the crimson monsoon.

And suddenly,

it’s far more

than you expected;

like someone

had punctured

the heart of a cloud.

Minutes in,

it all begins to look

and smell like a fish market.

Because spilled blood

is never only blood.

It is blood and sweat

on unswept floors,

fast losing colour,

fast losing shape,

and yet somehow

still smelling of itself all along.

And that’s the first time

you truly understand:

blood is embarrassingly democratic.

Man or fish,

it never learns the difference.

Once you've held a blade

against your own skin

and gone all the way through,

enough times,

the body stops feeling singular.

You begin to forget

the parts of you 

you'd intended to keep intact. 

For meat is just meat

when there is no one left

to disagree.

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 chanting:

“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.