There's A Ghost In My House (Unhinged)

Travellers loved my house.

At least, that is what I told myself.

That they weren't trespassers.

That this was still a house.

The truth was less poetic.

People love houses the way they love hospitals.

Mostly when they need one.

They arrived at dusk.

Wet clothes. Heavy bags. Heavier histories.

I opened the doors.

Not because I was kind.

Because empty rooms have a way of reminding you what you are.

A house without inhabitants is just a corpse with better architecture.

So I let them in.

Everyone left something behind.

A photograph. A promise.

A stain on the carpet they swore was already there.

I never complained.

Complaints are for places that still believe they deserve better.

I had stopped believing that some time ago.

They called me home.

I found it amusing.

Home is a beautiful word.

It convinces people that a place belongs to them while quietly hiding the fact that they belong to their habits.

They came here to rest.

To heal. To hide.

Some succeeded. Some didn't.

Some broke things. Some repaired them.

Some loved the house. Some hated it.

The difference was mostly how honest they were.

Because every person leaves fingerprints.

Even the ones who arrive with flowers.

Especially those.

Years passed.

The walls grew tired.

The floors learned the weight of departures.

The windows stopped expecting faces to return.

People called it a ruin.

I disagreed.

Ruins are honest.

Houses are just ruins that haven't admitted it yet.

I remained.

Not because I was abandoned.

Abandonment requires someone to have promised permanence.

Nobody did.

I remained because that is what houses do.

They stay.

Even when staying is no longer loyalty.

Even when staying is just another form of cowardice.

Everyone who lived here became a chapter.

Everyone who left became a memory.

And I?

I am the ghost inside the ruins.

Not the ghost of the people who left.

The ghost of the house that believed being needed was the same thing as being loved.

Everyone had somewhere to return to.

Everyone had somewhere to go.

Everyone had a door waiting for them.

Except the house.

The only thing that was always open

was the only thing

that was never allowed to leave.

There's A Ghost In My House

Travellers loved my house.

At least, that is what I told myself.

That they weren't trespassers.

That this was still a house.

The truth was simpler.

People love houses the way they love hospitals.

Mostly when they need one.

They arrived at dusk,

with rain in their pockets and histories in their hands.

Some came carrying flowers.

Some came carrying fires.

Most came carrying both and called themselves guests.

I opened the doors.

Not because I was kind.

Because empty rooms have a cruel habit of introducing you to yourself.

A house without inhabitants is just a corpse with better architecture.

They all left something behind.

A photograph. A promise.

A crack they swore was already there.

Some loved me. Some hated me.

Most simply survived their time here.

Years passed.

The walls grew tired.

The rooms learned that footsteps sound identical whether someone is arriving or departing.

People called me a ruin. I disagreed.

Ruins are honest.

Houses are just ruins that haven't admitted it yet.

I am the ghost inside these walls.

Not the ghost of those who left.

The ghost of a house that mistook being needed for being loved.

Everyone had somewhere to go.

Everyone had a door waiting.

Everyone eventually became a story they told about their time here.

Except me.

I remained behind to preserve the evidence.

The only thing that was always open was the only thing  that was never allowed to leave.

Dead Once. Buried Twice.

Goodness and greatness are but

buds of a night jasmine

that bloom in the chilling air of autopsy rooms,

beneath the flicker of dysfunctional neon lights;

never quite as much

in the changing seasons

of an oxygenated existence.

Perhaps some things need the smell of death

before people finally notice they were alive.

Spare me the circus.

I have a rather lengthy journey to oblivion.

Don't pretend to cry.

This isn't a funeral.

Funerals are reserved for people who were loved 

or liked at the least,

before their stories could be harvested

and rewritten by those who mistook surviving for having the right to write.

Would it befit a protagonist

to author the obituary of an anticlimax

that met its ending exactly on schedule?

No.

Say what you always wanted to say.

Say I deserved it.

Say it should have happened sooner.

Perhaps it will help cover

the blisters on the tender skin

of your shrunken anuses,

caused by years of sitting

on the throne of your rented moralities.

You are all storytellers.

Sacred in faith.

Righteous in truth.

And I was merely

the hiccuping epiglottis

choking the vocal cords

of your carefully rehearsed tales.

A minor inconvenience

between the lie

and its performance.

So let the story remain.

Let it sink.

Why clean a biography

you spent years writing

with neatly drained ink

from neatly manufactured lies?

Don't let death guilt you

into granting me posthumous glory.

You have a reptilian honour to preserve.

Don't contaminate it with the inconvenient interference of a mammalian frontal cortex.

Think of me exactly as you always intended.

It is easier.

Stories survive longer

when nobody checks whether they were ever true.

As for me,

I shall take your leave.

Keep your stories. Keep your sermons.

Keep your immaculate versions of what happened.

I'll keep the only thing you could never redact; the corpse.

The Melody Of Naren Uncle

Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar was a vile man. 

He called Mumbai his beloved, 

long before Bombay became Mumbai.

Then, in 1993, he cut her up, head to toe, 

like a butcher draws through the flesh of a slaughter goat,

and history had the decency to call him what he became.

A terrorist. An enemy of the state, and the country.

The grammar was honest.

Years later, a wise elderly well-meaning man came along, 

and turned the idea of romancing geographies into a thriving business. 

He was fondly called Naren uncle.

He didn't stop at a city. His first love was a state. His motherland.

He doused his first love in petrol, left the gas on, and a matchstick lit itself up, like it were a firefly.

He called it cleansing.

Fire has a strange way of sounding romantic

when politicians are the ones writing the wedding vows.

By 2014, his appetite had outgrown his legislation.

"The nation," he whispered, "is my one true love."

Petrol became patriotism.

Hatred was declared a civic duty.

The matchstick learned parliamentary procedure.

Citizens of the country were so hypnotised by the performance,

so busy waving flags at the theatre,

they never noticed 

they weren't being hugged, but held captive.

That's the thing about propaganda.

Unlike bullets, it enters asking politely.

It removes your spine before it removes your freedom.

Then convinces you standing upright is foreign conspiracy.

Dawood wanted a country to fear him.

Naren uncle wanted the country to mistake fear for love.

One murdered a country in a city.

The other turned a country into a slaughterhouse and then changed the meaning of the word "country".

Vocabulary is honest.

Until someone powerful gets hold of the dictionary.

Then suddenly, antonyms become synonyms.

Cruelty becomes compassion.

Silence becomes peace.

Obedience becomes patriotism.

And the mirror reflection of a monster is introduced as a messiah.

And Naren uncle has always been known to be a tongue-twister.

Because the most dangerous tongue-twister is not the one that makes you struggle to pronounce the words.

It is the one that convinces millions to pronounce the same lie as truth.

Question Paper

The government doesn't fear terrorists.

Terrorists make excellent headlines.

It doesn't fear wars.

Wars arrive with flags, anthems,

and enough cameras

to make destruction look like history.

It doesn't even fear hunger.

Hungry people are too busy

counting their last meals

to count who took the first one.

No.

The government fears classrooms.

Because classrooms have a dangerous habit

of creating people who read before they obey.

A child with a question paper

is more dangerous than an adult with a slogan.

Because slogans tell you what to think.

Questions ask you why.

And why

has buried more empires

than weapons ever did.

In a country

where generations escaped 

famine, debt, discrimination, and surnames

that arrived before they did,

education was never just education.

It was a ladder built by people

who were never allowed inside the building.

Every examination was a small rebellion.

Every piece of paper earned in a classroom

was proof

that destiny could be negotiated.

Which is why 

nothing terrifies power

more than a child who believes

their future belongs to them.

Because a child

who believes they own tomorrow

eventually asks who sold yesterday.

Every dictatorship begins the same way.

Not by burning books.

That comes later.

First,

it convinces people

that questions are disrespect.

Raise your hand?

Suspicious.

Raise your voice?

Seditious.

Raise an eyebrow?

Anti-national.

Raise your child

to think?

Now that's dangerous.

We tell children there are no stupid questions.

Then they grow up.

Turns out there are.

Mostly the ones asked loudly.

Outside Parliament.

Inside classrooms.

Anywhere a microphone

can accidentally hear the truth.

The funny thing about a baton

is that it has only one answer.

It keeps repeating it

until the question forgets why it was asked.

History teachers must be exhausted.

Every few decades, they have to explain

how every empire made the same mistake.

They mistook their own echo for applause.

They mistook silence for agreement.

They mistook fear for loyalty.

Funny.

We celebrate the people who questioned an empire.

Then punish the people who question a government.

As though

a government and a country

were the same thing.

They are not.

A country

is the child who studies beneath a broken tube light

because darkness is cheaper than failure.

The farmer praying to clouds

that arrive everywhere except his field.

The student carrying an answer sheet

like a lottery ticket written by someone else.

A government is merely the hand borrowing the pen.

And history has always been cruel

to people who mistake

holding the pen for owning the paper.

Because eventually, the question changes.

Not:

"Will you obey?"

But:

"Why did you think

you were allowed

to ask?"

You can arrest the student.

Confiscate the notebook.

Break the pencil.

Rewrite the syllabus.

Erase the names.

Polish the statues.

But the question?

The question has already graduated.

It lives in every person who watched.

Every person who remembered.

Every person who quietly wondered

if the answer sheet was ever meant for them.

Because that's the problem with question papers.

They were never for the students.

They were always for the examiner.

And governments, no matter how powerful,

eventually discover the most terrifying truth about examinations:

The person holding the pen

is not always

the person giving the marks.

History has been invigilating governments for centuries.

Every empire entered the examination hall

believing it had written history.

Centuries later,

history arrived with a red pen,

and failed every answer

they spent centuries,

forcing generations to memorize, 

until the lie no longer needed to be defended, 

for, 

it had learned to answer in everyone's handwriting.

Name. Place. Animal. Thing.

Drawers

are strange places.

Things go there

when they are not ready

to disappear.

Not because

they are valuable.

But because 

sometimes,

throwing something away

requires admitting

you were wrong

about why you kept it.

Twelve watches.

I keep buying them

as if one of them

will eventually confess

where all the time went.

They all work.

Every single one.

Which somehow

makes it worse.

A broken watch

would have been merciful.

It would admit

that something ended.

These keep ticking,

quietly proving

that time does not stop

just because

someone inside it

has already expired.

A sketch pad.

Pages of faces.

I have always trusted

black and white

more than reality.

Colours are dishonest.

They know how to seduce.

They paint over wounds.

They make corpses look alive

from a distance.

But monochrome

does not negotiate.

Every wrinkle

becomes history.

Every shadow

becomes confession.

Every face

becomes an autopsy

of everything

it survived.

Some finished.

Some abandoned.

Some staring back at me

like people I knew

before they were dissected

and served as memories.

Perhaps that is why

I keep drawing faces.

Not because

I want to remember

how people look.

But because

I want to know

what remains

after everything

they spent their lives

pretending to be

is removed.

Three sticks

of charcoal.

The only things I own

that understand

how darkness

can be dragged

across a surface

and somehow become

something worth looking at.

Perhaps that is why

I never trusted light

as much as transformation.

Light reveals.

Darkness creates.

And sometimes,

darkness creates

better things

than the people

who escaped it.

A stack of origamis.

Animals.

Or whatever remained

after my hands

failed to remember

what animals

were supposed to become.

Although my brain

remembered

every fragile detail.

A bird

with wings folded wrong.

A wolf

that looks more afraid

than dangerous.

A horse

whose legs

forgot the purpose

of running.

I never corrected them.

There is something honest

about creatures

that carry

the fingerprints

of their maker's failures.

Perfect things

only prove

someone followed instructions.

Broken things

reveal

who was holding

the paper.

Pens.

Too many.

Some expensive.

Some stolen.

Some collected

from places

I no longer remember.

All waiting

for a sentence

important enough

to deserve them.

A fountain pen.

Reserved

for words

that need to pretend

they are permanent.

Funny,

how humans invented

permanent ink

while spending their entire lives

trying to erase themselves.

A passport.

Full of stamps.

Evidence

that I crossed borders.

None

that I arrived.

I carry proof

of everywhere

I escaped from.

Apparently,

the world is large enough

to run across continents

but small enough

to always find yourself

waiting at the destination.

And somewhere beneath everything,

a crooked nail.

I don't know

what it belonged to.

But I keep it.

Because perhaps

everything deserves

one last chance

to become useful.

Even broken things.

Especially broken things.

Especially the ones

that no longer remember

what they were supposed

to hold together.

The drawer

is full of them.

Objects.

Ideas.

Dreams.

Failed experiments

with human skin.

Versions of myself

I started building

and abandoned

halfway through.

Every night,

I open it.

Not because

I need anything.

Not because

I expect something inside

to return.

But because

I need evidence

that I once believed

there was something

worth constructing.

The watches

are still ticking.

The pages

are still waiting.

The charcoal

still understands darkness.

The animals

still pretend

they were meant

to be alive.

The pens

still believe

there is something

left to write.

I envy them.

The objects.

At least they get

to remain unfinished.

Humans are crueler.

We call unfinished things

failures

and unfinished people

potential.

Then I close it.

Slowly.

Carefully.

Like shutting

the lid

of a coffin

that remembers

the shape

of its resident.

Because some things

do not need

to be thrown away.

They only need

to be kept long enough

for us to forget

why we kept them.

The drawer

is not a place

where unfinished things wait

to become whole.

It is where

failed versions of ourselves

go

to die quietly.

And perhaps

that is the cruelest truth

about broken things.

They do not always need fixing.

Sometimes,

they only need

a dark enough place

where nobody asks

what they were supposed

to become.

Every night,

I open the drawer.

Not because

I am searching

for something.

But because

for a few seconds,

the watches still tick,

the faces still breathe,

the distorted animals

still remember flight,

and the broken pieces

still have the audacity

to pretend

they belong somewhere.

Then I close it.

Slowly.

Because even abandoned things

deserve privacy

when they are dying.

And tomorrow,

I will open it again.

Not because I miss them.

Not because I love them.

But because I need to know

whether the drawer

is still full

of things I abandoned

or whether,

somewhere between

the watches,

the charcoal,

the broken animals,

and the unfinished faces,

I finally found

the only thing

I was ever trying

to throw away.

Myself.

Unfortunately,

I was the only thing

I abandoned

without ever putting down.

Stranger Stranger

Strangers arrive

with desire.

It is acquaintances

you should watch closely;

and the conveniences

they mistake

for love.

I would rather

remain a stranger

than become

a creature

of convenience.

I would rather

be desired

than remembered

by routine.

Desire

is a wildfire.

Routine

is what remains

after the smoke

has learned

the furniture.

You and I

could keep

gasping for air

until the fire

recognises us again,

claws through

the ash,

settles

inside our ribs,

and welds shut

the ventricles

we were foolish enough

to leave open,

mistaking

the absence of bleeding

for healing.

Because sometimes

the person you know best

is still

the stranger

you never met.

And, 

I would rather

bury the stranger

than hold on to

a corpse

wearing your name.