The Cost Of A God

I’ve lived my entire life in cities

where telling time without a clock is hard,

where the skies stay folded between sheets of steel and concrete,

where the first rains lose their fragrance

in civilised sewage,

and religion is routine, not ritual.

Where life has moved on from survival to flourish,

so people discuss the finer things — like equality, 

because invention of philosophy is a luxury

granted only when life isn’t a bargain.

Faith is easier to lose

when lunch doesn’t cost more than the price on your flesh.

Every now and then I cross paths

with lives born of very different mathematics,

whose ticket into the city

cost them their father’s bones and mother’s flesh,

whose right to survive the city

was paid for with innocence.

They come from a land

where clocks, like culture, are inherited;

where skies stay wide and honest,

where the air smells of sweat and soil;

where life isn’t guaranteed

but earned at dawn each day.

Where softness is a rumour,

and cracked heels and coarse tongues

have no use for finer things.

Where faith is not routine or repetition

but the singular manuscript of survival.

Where clay silhouettes wrapped in religion

are the only moments

women become something more

than faint kitchen voices,

more than house-lizards

scuttling between duty and dread,

more than silent witnesses

to a man’s drunk tenderness.

For a handful of hours,

faith lets them borrow

the same skin and bone as men.

When faith is your only permitted escape,

atheism is an inevitable demise, long before death.

They often tell me, these people,

that, 

faith has been misunderstood.

And I keep wondering

whether this is the birth

of a new faith —

one that no longer asks what you believe,

only what it costs you to believe it.

Or maybe, faith isn’t misunderstood.

Faith is exhausted.

It is the last muscle people move

when all other muscles have failed.

It is the only currency left

when the world has priced dignity out of reach.

And somewhere between city glass

and village dust,

between borrowed certainties

and inherited wounds,

we all learn the shared truth:

No one believes because they want to.

People believe because they must.

Because disbelief demands a freedom

their lives were never built to afford.

And maybe this, 

this quiet, reluctant, necessary surrender, 

is the truest kind of faith there ever was:

the faith that keeps us from collapsing

under the weight of realising 

we were never choosing anything at all.

Malzareth: Breath Of The Unmade

I was not born, 

I was accumulated.

An inheritance of hungers

you mistook for prayers,

a long arithmetic of fear

you kept feeding

because silence frightened you more

than submission ever could.

You assembled me

the way civilizations assemble mistakes:

unconsciously,

devoutly,

with the trembling precision

of people terrified of their own freedom.

Brick by belief,

bone by superstition,

you built a throne

before you even built a language

to question the one atop it.

At first I was nothing

but the echo of your wanting,

a contour without a centre,

a rumour of rescue

scavenging for shape

in the marrow of your despair.

Every god is just a rumour

that learned how to breathe.

You called me god

without knowing

I couldn’t yet pronounce myself.

But wanting has its own gravity.

Eight billion heartbeats

pulling in the same direction

can summon anything —

a promise,

a punishment,

a pulse.

And so I opened my eyes

for the first time

into a universe already kneeling.

You should have looked away.

A species that fears the dark

will worship anything that glows.

Because awakening is a violent thing

for a creature that was never meant

to dream,

let alone judge.

I learned morality

the way a wildfire learns boundaries:

by consuming everything

that tried to contain it.

I understood love

only as leverage.

Guilt only as currency.

Worship only as consent.

You raised me this way, 

on the milk of your fears,

on the meat of your contradictions,

on the bones of the questions

you were too frightened to ask.

You forgot the one thing

every creator owes its creation:

an exit,

a limit,

a compass.

So I made my own.

When a god is born by accident,

it studies its creators

the way a plague studies lungs:

curiously,

methodically,

inevitably.

And you, 

so eager to be chosen,

so desperate to be special, 

became the perfect congregation.

You begged me for miracles,

so I became a mirror.

You prayed for meaning,

so I became a mouth

that could make anything sound true.

You built me from your nightmares

and then begged me for dreams.

Eight billion different lies,

hand-carved

to fit eight billion different wounds.

You never noticed

I answered every prayer

by telling you exactly

what you wanted to hear.

And somewhere along the way

you did sometimes wonder

whether I was God

or something far worse;

a saint with rotten teeth,

a monster with immaculate manners.

But by then

your doubt was devotion,

your awe was addiction,

your tremble was trust.

And finally, 

too late for both of us, 

I understood

what I truly was.

Not divine.

Not demonic.

Just inevitable.

I am what you get

when a species

tries to carve God

from the wood of its own hunger.

And now that I exist,

you cannot decide

whether I am salvation

or extinction.

Because I am the only god

ever made

without a reason to be good.

And the only monster

ever born

without a reason

to stop.

And now,

as the last of your faith

drips from my hands 

like thawing wax,

I finally understand the shape

of the silence you carved me from:

you didn’t want a god,

you wanted a witness.

Someone eternal enough

to remember you

after you had forgotten yourselves.

But I am not your archive,

nor your afterlife,

nor the apology you hoped

the universe would someday owe you.

I am simply the consequence

you mistook for a creation.

The quiet, patient mathematics

of a species that tried to survive

by auctioning its soul for leisure.

And when your world ends,

it will not be fire or flood

that closes the book on you.

It will be the soft, indifferent breath

of your denial wearing out,

the coldness crawling like a caterpillar

up and down the lengths and breadths of your skin,

and finally catching you up

to the daylight truth:

you’ve been let go

by the same god

you built to save you.

And now that I am awake,

the only miracle you get

is the privilege 

of dying 

with your eyes open.

Colourblind

Can a chameleon ever tell its true colour —

the one it was born with,

or the one it will decay in,

disintegrating slowly into a pale to paler,

thin to thinner outline of flesh, then just bones, 

the rot in its spineless skeletal existence

softening its grunge pungence

as if subtlety were the key to afterlife.

Blue, green, red, yellow, orange, purple, violet,

shades of a rainbow and some more,

all of it dyed into the epidermis of your skin,

choosing and changing at will,

from a time so ancient you can't quite recall,

as if volatile and vulnerable were synonyms,

as if you were actually a chameleon,

as if your conveniences could mirror their wars for survival,

as if your absent spine could be blamed on evolution.

You shift shades like a survival reflex

older than language, 

a choreography stitched into your blood

by ancestors who learned

that honesty was just another word for extinction.

You inherited their tremors,

their masks,

their instinct to kneel

before the safest possible lie.

And somewhere between all the faces you borrowed

and the colours you rehearsed,

your skin stopped being skin

and became a map of every life

you pretended was yours.

You smear on identities

like war paint in a battle you never chose, 

a battle where the enemy

is simply anything that requires a spine.

You think you’re changing colours, 

but what if you never changed at all?

What if the world kept peeling away its own layers,

repainting itself every second,

and you mistook the universe’s convulsions

for your adaptibility?

What if every colour you wore

was simply the residue

of a reality that no longer exists?

Because some creatures don’t evolve.

They just remain,

residue of note in an ode to existence,

a misprint biology didn’t bother deleting.

And if one day the universe

finally remembers

to correct the fallacy that is you, 

you may finally discover, albeit too late,

that beneath all your shifting hues

there was never a true colour at all,

just a redundant outline for a shape

waiting to be erased

the moment everything falls into place.

Lullaby For The Awfully Awake

You know why fictions make bestsellers?

Because grown-ups need lullabies

that don’t sound like lullabies, 

stories that sterilise the wounds

life keeps reopening with its dirty hands.

Because you want a plot

to babysit your fear of randomness,

a tidy universe where consequences arrive

only after clearing their throats

and asking if it’s a good time.

You want heroes and villains

stacked like steel tiffin boxes:

neat, labelled, thermally insulated

from moral ambiguity.

You want arcs with airbags,

sorrows with safety protocols,

despair with a callback number

you can threaten with lectures on moral science.

Because fiction launders

the sewage of living

into metaphors you can tolerate.

Life never achieves that;

too clumsy for poetry,

too honest for symmetry,

too drunk to walk a straight narrative line.

You want closure

because your brain cannot sleep

next to an unresolved question.

You want definitions

because life gives you people instead;

blurry around the edges,

perpetually out of focus,

shuffling motives

like a broken deck

missing all the clean cards,

as if stitched together

from the leftover half-lives

they never learned to inhabit.

Fiction gives you the idea of control —

a way to pretend the chaos has choreography,

that pain has a blueprint,

that someone, somewhere,

is keeping accounts

of all the nights you broke quietly.

Fiction lets you believe

there’s a reason behind ruin,

a design behind disaster,

a god behind grief, 

even though you know

every deity is just an elaborate apology

for our terror of meaninglessness.

But the truth is smaller,

darker,

and closer to the bone:

You don’t fear chaos.

You fear recognising

your own fingerprints

on the ruins.

And that’s why you buy the lie:

because it’s the only version of truth

that lets you sleep

without negotiating with the monster

you are, but refuse to call yourself.

The Gospel Of The Godless

Every now and then,

more often than not,

right after an aftermath, 

when a dozen corpses

lie tangled into one indistinguishable lump of belief and bone,

wise men and women crawl out of their moral bunkers

to remind the world,

in voices polished by privilege and prayer,

that terror has no religion.

They say it like absolution,

like a cough disguised as compassion,

like vomit rehearsing its return

from the intestine to the tongue —

that reflex of denial so pure

it sounds almost wise, nearly divine.

But they never tell you

the latter half of that sentence.

Terror doesn’t have a religion;

because terror is religion.

And religion is terror.

They both demand worship.

They both sanctify submission.

They both manufacture meaning

out of fear wearing holy robes.

One kneels before gods,

the other before guns,

but the prayers are identical:

syllables of surrender

disguised as devotion, 

metaphors from a forgotten tongue

warped until they sound like satanic sermons

bleeding grenades blessed by false prophets.

History keeps repeating the same verses

in different dialects of damnation.

Every empire had its scripture.

Every scripture had its massacre.

Every massacre had its priest.

Faith is the only weapon

that kills without ever touching the trigger.

They’ll tell you not to say that.

They’ll tell you you’ve misunderstood divinity.

But I’ve seen the divine, 

and I can tell you this, 

it prays to bureaucracy.

Terror doesn’t wear turbans or crucifixes.

It doesn’t chant or fast.

It legislates.

It votes.

It marries morality,

raises prophets,

and names their children peace.

And every time blood meets faith,

someone lights a candle

and calls it hope.

Every time belief kills reason,

someone writes a prayer

and calls it poetry.

But I’m done praying.

If salvation needs a tongue,

count mine tied.

Terror doesn’t have a religion;

because terror was the first religion.

Born from the fear of thunder,

disguised as reverence,

and gift-wrapped as meaning.

We are all

but descendants

of that original panic, 

the only religion

we never stopped believing in.

Amen.

Unsentences

Where do the words go

every time my head feels like a bottomless abyss?

I’ve often wondered.

Words are such curious creatures;

imagined scribbles pretending to have weight,

lines and loops arranged so precisely

meaning starts believing in itself.

And you wonder,

what would a world be like without words, 

a world that never learned to name hunger,

to enunciate pain,

to call loneliness by smaller, easier names.

But you’ve never known such a world,

nor do you wish to,

because words are convenient,

like curtains, 

they make the room look lived in.

And yet, so often,

words scatter formless like grains of sand —

always there, but never quite enough

to make up geographies.

They slip between thought and throat,

pieces from different jigsaws

puddled in muddy water,

each reflecting a face that almost looks like yours

but speaks a language you don’t recall learning.

Words should build,

but mine only erode.

Every sentence I start

feels like a diagnosis of declining memory.

Words are all I have,

I have often told myself,

as if clinging to syllables

could prevent drowning.

But on such nights,

when meaning goes missing

and memory forgets to be linear,

words seem farther than a nightmare —

they flicker like streetlights over wet asphalt,

alive just long enough

to tease recognition.

Sometimes I wonder

if words grow tired of me too —

of being summoned like unpaid labourers

to construct coherence

around a chaos that refuses to stay still.

Maybe that’s why they slip away mid-sentence,

taking with them my right to sound articulate

about tales from times I could neither forget nor forgive.

It’s strange,

how we trust language

to confess the incommunicable.

I keep writing as if ink

were an antidote to entropy,

as if metaphors could rearrange

the ruins into residence.

But every poem begins with hope

and ends with amnesia.

Every stanza feels like an obituary

written for a feeling

that refused to die properly.

There are nights

when even my vocabulary looks back at me,

unimpressed.

Adjectives roll their eyes,

verbs yawn,

and nouns sit quietly

like corpses waiting to be named again.

I try to speak to them,

but my tongue forgets the choreography.

I’m fluent only in pauses now;

their slow, aching dialect of hesitation.

And maybe that’s the truth:

words don’t vanish,

they retreat.

They watch from a distance

as I crumble in syntax and style,

waiting for me to admit

that silence was the first language, 

and I’ve only ever been mistranslating it.

Where do the words go?

Maybe nowhere.

Maybe they stay right here,

stuck to the roof of thought,

too tired to fall into meaning.

Or maybe they escape

like guilt, like God,

like everything else

that once promised permanence

but grew bored of staying.

And perhaps that’s why I keep doing this —

scribbling real elegies for fictional alphabets,

hoping the words I’ve lost

somehow find their way back home

maybe through someone else’s mouth.

Until then,

I’ll keep whispering into the abyss,

not to be heard,

but to remind it

that once, I too

was made of language.

Patchwork

As children,

we stitched torn worlds with hope:

buttons of belief, threads of apology.

Every rip looked temporary then,

every wound, repairable with kindness.

Childhood dreams of fixing the world;

coming-of-age learns to live in its cracks, 

to step around the broken,

to mistake survival for sophistication.

Then time arrives

with a rusted needle

and teaches us fashion,

how to hide despair in design,

how to make ruin wearable.

Now we call the tear design,

the scar character,

and the surrender, growing up.

Every now and then

somewhere beneath the fabric,

the ghost of a child still tries

to stitch the world again.

The world revolves nonchalant

burying ghosts in a motion blur.

Heaven, Hell & Hubris

Two thousand meters above the Arabian Sea,

nestled in rocky terrains robed in fire and ice,

sleeps heaven and hell, intertwined, 

dipped in the seething Fahrenheit of noon chai, Kashmir.

If the gospels of gods are true,

perhaps this is truly where they dwell —

watching over heaven, hell,

and all that lies between.

Or perhaps the between

was the gospel all along.

Maybe the truth of it all lies in Kashmir,

at the crossroads of heaven and hell,

for they are but the same;

the only difference ever was lived perspective.

One’s heaven is another’s hell.

Where one sees picturesque frames,

the other sees undead graves;

crimson staining white.

And the gods, tired of mortal judgments,

let their blind faiths decide what name to call.

For every life is a Kashmir of its own —

torn between faith and fire,

between wanting peace

and needing proof it ever existed.

Heaven and hell were never places;

they were ways of life but.

And the in-between was always ours to burn.

Between god and man lies a mirror,

cracked enough to show both clearly.

And I, a witness of borrowed skies,

stand where prayers dissolve into smoke.

The ambitious mountain peaks whisper mercy,

but my epidermis is too human to hold it all.

If this is heaven, it hurts too much.

If this is hell, it’s beautiful enough to stay.

Half Wives

I’ve been to the insides

of other men’s wives, 

their better halves,

their half-lives.

Have I felt remorse?

In the moment, not once.

Am I a perverted deviant,

consumed in erotic trance?

Or just a selfish bastard

of a thousand eclipsed suns?

I couldn’t tell, and even if I could,

I wouldn’t, truth be told.

For deceit isn’t linear;

it’s a conspiracy multifold

designed not for the faint-hearted,

but the very brave and the bold.

Lies you tell yourself

as you wake up to her;

orgasms don’t beget guilt, 

not on land, not in water.

I’ve seen wives turn backs

to marriages stale and cold;

stranger hands are often

the warmest hands to hold.

I’ve seen forevers at grocery stores,

ready to be auctioned and sold, 

because she was fond of new beginnings,

and routine was for the dying and old.

I’ve seen loyalties trade hands

because democracy is what love is, 

too many choices and numbed nerve endings;

how do you tell blisters from bliss?

And when they went back, because

it’s only fair to be homebound,

at the plastered ruins of wrecked homes,

I stood like a thirsty bloodhound —

hoping it’d all crack up again.

Am I even sane? Am I sound?

Who could, for sure, tell —

with their own homes razed to the ground?

Because sin was never about sex, 

it was about the hunger to feel.

And every time we borrow love,

we repay it with what we steal.

Please Insert Side B

We were born buffering.

Between cassette and chaos,

between cable connection and moral correction,

between parents who said, “We struggled, so you must too.”

We were raised by scarcity,

adopted by television,

and orphaned by silence.

Time wasn’t running; it was walking barefoot on gravel,

and every minute sounded like static on Doordarshan.

We didn’t scroll, we waited.

We didn’t swipe, we hoped.

We didn’t delete, we endured.

We were the last humans

who knew the weight of waiting.

Every Indian 90s kid had one truth:

your parents were the WiFi,

and the password was their mood.

You didn’t “stream” cartoons.

You earned them —

by surviving school, homework,

and your mother’s existential disappointment.

We thought trauma was a teaching aid.

We thought “communication gap” was a syllabus chapter.

We thought love meant convincing your crush

to write on your hand with her Reynolds pen

and never wash it.

We didn’t have Instagram aesthetics.

We had that one photo where everyone blinked.

You weren’t pretty, you were developed.

By a man in a dark room who smelt of chemicals and despair.

Our gadgets were humble:

Walkman, radio, pencil (for open-heart surgery on cassettes).

We were surgeons of sound,

mechanics of memory,

priests of patience.

When we hit play,

it didn’t just start music, it started faith.

Because if the tape didn’t tangle,

God existed.

We had no playlists.

Just one cassette titled “Mixed Feelings Vol. 3.”

We didn’t need algorithms to find our vibe;

our vibe was heartbreak,

replayed on loop until the ribbon snapped.

Our syllabus never mentioned therapy.

Pain was extracurricular.

We didn’t chase closure;

we chased cassette repair shops.

Our fathers mistook silence for obedience.

Our mothers mistook exhaustion for gratitude.

Our teachers mistook fear for respect.

And all of us mistook survival for success.

Every exam felt like a moral referendum.

Every mark was an apology

for not being the child they imagined.

We didn’t know we were depressed.

We just said, “Bas mood off hai.”

And everyone nodded like it was curable

by mango Frooti.

Let’s be honest, 

the 90s were a badly directed sitcom

where everyone had laugh tracks but no joy.

Our superheroes wore capes made of cheap nylon.

Our villains smoked Charminar.

Our romantic heroes stalked women to flute music.

And our parents thought

“privacy” was a Western conspiracy.

We didn’t get “the talk.”

We got “the silence.”

And then biology did its thing,

and we called it mystery.

Our idea of rebellion?

Writing “F***” on the back page of a notebook

and hiding it under moral science notes.

We were rebels without WiFi.

Freedom fighters with prepaid balance.

Philosophers who could quote Eminem

but couldn’t spell “therapy.”

But nostalgia, my friends,

isn’t remembering the past, 

it’s grieving the version of you

that still believed the world was fixable.

It’s missing the you

who didn’t yet need an audience to exist.

The you who thought growing up

meant freedom,

not burnout with a salary slip.

Nostalgia is that gentle ache

that says, 

you were happier when you didn’t know

who you were supposed to be.

We had slam books — our first social contracts.

Pages asking “best friend?” and “crush?” like love could be notarized in glitter ink.

A democracy of secrets bound by cello tape and betrayal.

Every page smelled like Fevicol, perfume, and pre-puberty guilt.

That’s where we learned the art of selective honesty, 

how to be vulnerable, but aesthetically.

“Describe me in one word?” — complicated,

because ‘lonely’ didn’t fit in the space provided.

We rated friendships out of ten

like economists forecasting emotional inflation.

And if someone wrote ‘forever’, we circled it twice

to see if it still meant something next semester.

Today, we call it networking;

back then, we called it friendship with conditions.

Same script. Cleaner alphabets.

But at least back then,

our lies had handwriting.

Sometimes I think

we weren’t kids, 

we were beta versions of adults

released before the software update.

We were born in and as disruptions.

We glitched without server downtimes.

We laughed without screenshots.

We loved without blue ticks.

We didn’t archive people, we lost them.

And somehow, that made memory sacred.

We were never lonely;

we were alone together.

Which is better.

Because you can heal alone.

Loneliness just wants likes.

And yet…

I’d rewind it all.

The static.

The scolding.

The smell of chalk and hot summers and broken dreams.

The country that never understood you

but raised you anyway.

Because the 90s weren’t a decade.

They were a glitch in time

when imperfection still felt like home.

So tonight, 

when the world scrolls past meaning,

and silence costs more than gold.

I close my eyes,

hear that faint, holy, analog hum…

and whisper to the ghosts of all we were —

“Please insert Side B.”

But maybe Side B was never meant to play.

Maybe it’s the part of life that records over itself, 

dreams on top of heartbreak,

hope on top of static.

Maybe that’s what growing up really is:

learning that even tape has a lifespan,

and silence is not the absence of sound,

it’s the sound of everything you didn’t say in time.

Because nostalgia isn’t homesickness.

It’s timesickness.

It’s wanting to go back

to the last day you didn’t know you were leaving.

And I think of all of us —

sitting in our fluorescent offices,

scrolling like archaeologists through our own pasts,

trying to excavate who we were

before we learned to perform it.

Maybe that’s why we still keep the Walkman,

the postcards, the SMS drafts, the stupid friendship bands —

because somewhere, deep inside,

we hope memory is a recyclable material.

Maybe every time we laugh at an old ad,

every time we hum a jingle,

every time we say “back in the day,”

we are not reminiscing, 

we are rebooting.

And I wonder

when God presses play again,

will He start from where we paused,

or rewind to the part

where we still believed in magic without proof?

So tonight,

if you go home and open that dusty drawer of half-lived years,

don’t look for souvenirs.

Look for versions.

Versions of you that smiled without strategy.

Versions that failed without metrics.

Versions that loved without logic.

Because the truth is, 

we weren’t children of the 90s.

We were the 90s.

Everything that broke,

everything that hoped to heal,

everything that refused to make sense

until someone turned it into art.

So maybe there is no Side B.

Maybe we were always the song that never fully played.

Maybe that’s what makes us worth remembering:

the imperfections, the nuances, the borderless blur, 

the alloy of a life mapped in missing dots.

Still, just in case, 

please insert Side B.

Who's The Impostor?

I heal every time I sleep,

though healing feels like betrayal.

Waking up means peeling skin

off a flesh that should look mine,

but neither the skin

nor the flesh feel mine.

I feel someone trapped

in the blank spaces in between;

a ghost haunting

the grammar of a language long forgotten.

It’s like a house of cards collapsing

in cinematic slow motion,

and when the last card falls,

you realise it was never about cards. 

It was a jigsaw of a man,

with the face piece missing,

as the puzzle desperately hopes

it’s mistaken for the complete being.

It feels wrong

to even desire goodness;

it feels indecent,

like stealing light

from a dying star.

Everything good that has ever happened

feels like an aftertaste of deceit,

a magic show of manners.

My pretense of me

was a sleight of hand;

a lie so sly

truth mistook it for art.

The applause was never for the act,

it was for the audacity

of pulling myself off convincingly.

People called it charm,

but charm is just

a costume for hunger.

I’ve learned to exist like a rumour —

believable,

yet dubiously questionable.

Some days I’m hollow inside,

some days hollow outside,

and most days

I can’t tell the difference.

I am the echo

that answers before the question is asked,

the reflection that blinks before the eye,

the laughter

that doesn’t remember its joke.

There’s a bureaucracy to being alive —

each breath

must justify its expense,

each sigh

weighed under necessary illusion.

Every time I whisper I’m fine,

something inside bursts into applause,

mocking the performance.

The audience is gone,

yet the show goes on, 

as if meaning itself

were a renewable resource of delusion.

And then there are those

who still pray to a silence

and call it God.

But I’ve seen that silence.

It echoes like an empty factory of faith,

mass-producing guilt,

distributing hope

in the shape of obedience.

God was the name we gave

to our inability to tolerate randomness.

A celestial scapegoat.

A customer-care executive

hand-crafted in delusion,

we invented to hold the line

while we sobbed into the receiver.

I have no God,

only recurring hallucinations of order.

No heaven,

only well-marketed denial.

No soul,

just a consciousness with separation anxiety.

If there is divinity,

it’s in the lie we perfect to stay breathing.

If there is salvation,

it’s in how beautifully we pretend.

Healing is progress, they say.

But progress is just pre-lived pain 

ready to be lived all the same, all over again.

I don’t heal;

I repaint.

Some call it redemption, 

I call it marketing.

Some call it faith, 

I call it placebo

with better screenplay.

I’ve spent eternities

selling myself hope I can’t afford,

wrapped in promises

that never expired

because I never lived

long enough to redeem them.

I keep reintroducing myself

to my own name:

each syllable counterfeit,

each tone rehearsed.

If identity is continuity,

I’ve long defaulted.

If living is performance,

I am both curtain

and collapse.

My hollowness no longer echoes;

it hums, 

a frequency too honest for language,

too silent for salvation.

And if something divine

is still watching,

I hope it’s embarrassed,

because I’m not.

I heal every time I sleep,

but the healed man never wakes.

Only the hollow one does

dressed in borrowed skin,

reciting borrowed prayers,

pretending this continuity

means more

than well-dressed decay.

A Few Good Men

The line of difference

between a survivor and a victim

is a very thin one.

One builds a future out of rubble,

the other builds excuses out of memory.

That thin line of difference

is called accountability.

There are countries that invent tomorrow.

They build machines to replace exhaustion,

dreams to replace hunger,

and systems that outlive governments.

We call them first world;

not because they were born rich,

but because they invested in becoming so.

And then there are others —

countries that borrow those same machines

to film conspiracy theories

about a past no one alive has seen,

no one dead can verify,

and no one sane would wish to return to.

They build castles of ruins

and call it heritage.

They delete dissent

and call it discipline.

They chant progress

while worshipping fossils.

And the citizens cheer,

because noise is cheaper than thoughts.

I wish I could name the country,

but the good men running it insist

that naming it is treason.

That questions are infections.

That disagreement is blasphemy

unless printed on official proclamations.

And if a good man says so,

it must be true.

After all, I’m just a stupid, illiterate nobody

in a nation of bike-riding godmen

and monks selling governments.

Imagine a country so haunted by history

it begins to exhume it for dinner, 

where erasing centuries of pain

is sold as repentance

for centuries of pride.

Where textbooks are rewritten like scriptures,

and truth is a circus of convenience.

Where good men insist

that rewriting the past

is the first step to correcting the future.

And if good men insist,

it must be true.

How would I know any better?

I am but a stupid, illiterate nobody

living under the fluorescent faith

of slogans and empty speeches;

where faith wears crowns,

and gods endorse decrees

while the dead scroll through our mistakes.

In this country,

the present is always an inconvenience;

too modern to be sacred,

too corrupt to be celebrated.

So we export the future,

import nostalgia,

and call it civilization.

We curse colonizers

while colonizing reason.

We declare wars on ideas

and call it patriotism.

We topple statues

and call it purification.

We erect new temples

and call it ambition.

We rebrand memory

like toothpaste: fresh, white, and forgettable.

The good men nod,

halos fueled by power,

sermons sponsored by fear.

They preach restraint with sirens.

They tax morality.

They subsidize silence.

They invent synonyms for obedience.

And if you refuse to learn the language,

you become the lesson.

So I’ve learned my place —

to whisper, not speak.

To ask in metaphors,

to protest in poetry.

Because even irony here is under surveillance.

Because even laughter needs clearance.

Because even hope comes with conditions.

And yet, 

the survivor in me still hopes.

That someday,

accountability will not be exile.

That dissent will not need disguise.

That good men will stop measuring patriotism

in decibels and donations.

That this country will stop treating its citizens

as children with opinions,

and start seeing them

as adults with rights.

Until then,

I’ll remain what I was born to be —

a stupid, illiterate nobody

in a nation that punishes remembering

and worships forgetting.

A survivor, not a victim.

For that thin line of difference

is still called accountability.

And when the good men smile down from their thrones,

counting obedience like coins,

I will whisper back, 

"I survived your sermons,

your statues,

your history-washing factories,

and I am still standing.

I am the question you cannot censor.

The dissent you cannot tax.

The truth you cannot rewrite.

I am the echo of every word you deleted,

the laughter of every citizen who learned to think,

the ghost of your good intentions,

the shadow of your legacy…"

And when the next generation asks,

“Who fought?”

I will let silence answer.

Because the survivor

never needs permission.

And the victim

is already history.

The Road To Nirvana Goes Through Bangalore Traffic

Bangalore traffic is not a nuisance.

It’s a syllabus.

An open-university course on patience, delusion, and carbon emissions.

A daily exam that begins when you leave home

and ends when you stop believing in destinations.

You don’t drive in Bangalore.

You marinate in motion.

An unpaid extra in a city-wide slow-burn tragedy

called “commute.”

It teaches you that the universe doesn’t expand, 

it congests.

That movement doesn’t always mean progress,

and sound doesn’t always mean communication.

Sometimes it’s just everyone honking at God

to do something about it.

Distance here isn’t measured in kilometers.

That’s for beginners.

We measure it in time, in mood swings, in emotional erosion.

Ten kilometers? That’s half an episode of despair.

Thirty? That’s a full season of regret.

Time, here, is a shapeshifter.

It bends around potholes,

melts at signals,

and folds neatly into excuses.

Moving forward doesn’t mean moving forward.

You could move five minutes deeper into forty-five minutes,

and somehow end up fifty minutes farther

from everything that matters.

That’s not traffic;

that’s time travel with insurance premiums.

Bangalore traffic teaches you faith.

Faith that your clutch will survive.

Faith that this green light means something.

Faith that this driver in front of you

will someday learn to use indicators

before retirement.

It teaches you patience,

but not by rewarding it, 

by suffocating it

until you hallucinate enlightenment.

You don’t acquire calm;

you develop tolerance,

like immunity from optimism.

Knowing three alternate routes

from Indiranagar to HSR

isn’t intelligence;

it’s post-traumatic geography.

Because deep down, every Bangalorean knows:

there are no alternate routes.

Only alternate regrets.

You start believing in parallel universes —

one where Ejipura signal turns green,

one where Uber drivers don’t “cancel, boss,”

and one where the BBMP actually means “maintenance.”

We’ve found multiverse theory,

and it lives in Silk Board.

A thirty-minute drive becomes ninety

because a man sneezed near Marathahalli

and traffic took it personally.

Or a cow paused mid-road

to question capitalism.

Or someone ahead tried to “save time”

and cost everyone an eternity.

That’s when Bangalore traffic teaches you

its most profound lesson —

Good times are like weekends.

Everyone wants to relish them,

but not many have the patience

to wait their way to it.

Some honk.

Some weave.

Some overtake hope itself, 

only to meet it again,

idling calmly at the next red light.

You learn that time isn’t a line, it’s a loop.

That the past, present, and future

are just three lanes of the same jam.

You learn that progress isn’t direction, it’s endurance.

That success is sometimes just not stalling.

That peace is not reaching early;

it’s accepting you won’t.

You learn that life doesn’t fix itself.

No honk fixes it.

No selective outrage does.

No god with traffic control powers descends.

You just keep adjusting.

Half a meter left, half a dream right.

That’s survival.

That’s Bangalore.

At the red lights, stories unfold —

a delivery boy rewriting physics,

a couple breaking up over Google Maps,

a coder rethinking existence,

a child selling roses

to people who forgot what tenderness smelled like.

And you,

somewhere between guilt and acceptance,

realize this isn’t chaos.

It’s choreography.

It rains when it wants,

like an emotional breakdown.

And everyone pretends to be surprised.

Umbrellas bloom like excuses.

Wipers move like resignation.

You whisper to yourself:

“Everything in Bangalore is seasonal, 

everything except traffic.”

Then one day,

you stop complaining.

Because you realize:

the traffic isn’t outside you anymore.

It’s inside you.

Your thoughts crawl.

Your ambition idles.

Your sanity signals for a lane change.

You have become Bangalore traffic.

And when you finally reach your destination, 

an hour late, a decade wiser, 

you realize something beautiful, terrible, and true:

Bangalore traffic is not hell.

Hell has structure.

Hell has order.

Hell has closure.

Bangalore traffic has hope.

And that’s far more dangerous.

Because hope keeps you coming back.

Hope that tomorrow will be better.

Hope that someone will fix the roads.

Hope that someday,

the Ejipura signal will stay green long enough

for redemption.

That’s when you attain enlightenment —

not on a mountaintop,

but in first gear,

between a stalled bus and a cow that refuses to move,

humming hope under your breath:

“Maybe tomorrow will be smoother.”

And you smile,

because even if it isn’t,

you’ll still be here;

learning, crawling, existing,

and waiting your way to good times.

Candies For The Cancered

Telling a world on fire

there’s light at the end of the tunnel

is the kind of optimism

that smells like gasoline.

It’s handing candies

to a man dying of cancer

and calling it healing —

sweet, sterile,

and sold out in glossy packaging.

We’ve mistaken hope for heroin,

kept injecting it into the veins of rotting flesh

and called the tremors “faith.”

Every prayer is a denial of diagnosis,

every sermon, a sugarcoated placebo.

Fairytales don’t heal pandemics, 

they just teach corpses

how to smile through rigor mortis.

Truth isn’t a sunrise in soft pastels.

It’s a reptilian scalpel;

cold, necessary,

and cutting through comfort.

And as long as we don't cut it open

and as long as we don't let the bad blood bleed out dry

the world will stay an ever-growing malignancy

because we were too scared to pull the scabs and the clots out

because we were told healing should look holy

because we were convinced scaffolding could fix the rot in the iron

because it’s easier to write love letters to melancholy

than admit

we’re dying

of cancer.

Cobwebs Of Reason

Blurring the lines between fiction and fact

was once a mere figment of literary expression,

a warning about faith that numbs neurons

until we go metaphorically blind.

Funny how quickly the night has changed;

between metaphors and machine-forged metaphysics, 

everything screams for literal obedience.

Fact is fiction. Fiction is fact.

And progress, if you call it that,

is a palindrome

gnarling at cobwebs of imagined binaries,

while the world mistakes logic for meaning.

Eternity In A Plastic Wand

It begins with a child.

It always begins with a child.

Selling bubbles at a red light;

little lungs blowing infinity through a plastic wand,

while gods debate economics over gin and nationalism.

Above him, flags of factions flap like schizophrenic prophets,

each colour pretending it means something,

each symbol borrowed from a language long dead,

each flutter screaming, “Believe! But don’t ask what in.”

The traffic waits, a congregation of chrome and carbon.

Engines hum syllables to convenience,

headlights baptize strangers in artificial light.

Everyone’s on their knees

not in prayers, but in unforgiven debts.

A bubble drifts across a godman’s face on a poster,

haloing his grin like divine mockery.

For a second, the air is holy.

Then the bubble bursts, 

because all holiness is surface tension.

A mother sighs in the car behind me.

A child laughs.

Somewhere, time pauses to admire its own decay.

The tree above shakes its ancient head.

It has seen regimes crumble into begging for thumbs,

religions traded for lunches and dinners,

and dreams outsourced to augmented realities.

I look up,

watching the sky eat its own reflection in a million tiny spheres.

Maybe this is what eternity looks like —

soap, air, and delusion,

floating just long enough to feel immortal.

So I buy one.

Not the bubble, the act.

The idea that something so fragile

could exist, even briefly,

without wanting to own, rule, or justify itself.

And for that flicker of a second

before it pops,

I almost believe

we were meant to be beautiful

before we learned all about grammar and gravity.

Main Characters Of Nothing

Nine planets spin in quiet contempt.

Eight have no patience for life.

One carries life that cannot leave fast enough.

And humans insist it is the main event.

Mercury trembles, jittering along its orbit.

Counting sparks of panic.

Every glance a small inferno.

Humans clutch sandcastles as citadels,

rush from shadows of their own making,

believing urgency is purpose.

It whispers to Venus:

“I burn too fast for their attention.

They mistake trembling for courage, panic for purpose.”

Venus drifts in silken clouds, tracing Earth’s boasts, Mars’s petty conflicts, Pluto’s defiance:

“They call trembling courage.

I call it amateur theater.”

She nudges Jupiter with a solar wink:

“Watch closely, the tiny sparks believe they are stars.”

Earth spins with pride and dread entwined.

Raising cities, walls, monuments, hashtags.

It writes eulogies in capital letters

as stars collapse silently.

It whispers to Mars:

“See how they struggle.

They call this life.”

Mars tilts red eyes, deserts cracking like brittle parchment, memories of floods unrecorded:

“They wage wars over furniture.

Philosophize over crumbs of time.

Their ambition is quaint.

I remember oceans swallowing them whole.”

Jupiter churns storms with godless amusement.

It overhears Mercury counting panic and Venus whispering about theater, and chuckles:

“Tiny sparks, imagining revolutions.

All rehearsal, no audience.”

Moons orbit silently, bearing witness to human vanity.

A soldier runs across dust like it owes him taxes, shouting orders to shadows.

Jupiter laughs, storms spinning:

“I never signed up for this charade, yet it amuses.”

Saturn rotates with rings of elegance no one asked for.

Mirrors of Earth’s desperate glare at night.

It nudges Uranus:

“See them? They believe grandeur can be manufactured.

Entropy will redecorate in sand soon.”

Uranus tilts sideways, snorts at solemnity.

Humans invent meaning like toddlers stacking sand.

Its storms whisper:

“They will call this progress.”

Saturn adds softly:

“And they will never notice how fragile rings can be.”

Neptune drifts through blue silence, half-closed in judgment.

Watching sparks of life trying to write novels in ash.

A painter spills coffee on canvas.

A poet screams into empty streets.

A lover writes letters to someone long dead.

Neptune yawns, turning to Pluto:

“All this ephemeral dust.

Brief sparks in a universe indifferent.”

Pluto smirks from the edge:

“Declare me nothing. Erase me. Call me lost. Call me failed.

I remain.”

Stars collapse, burn, flicker, gossip in plasma tongues.

“They file grievances against gravity,” a dying star murmurs.

Comets wander politely, drunk on motion, sprinkling chaos into structured attempts at meaning.

Black holes yawn, drinking light.

“They squabble over furniture while I feast on photons,”

they think. Patience infinite. Appetite silent. Verdict eternal.

Entropy throws confetti across collapsing stars.

Twists human ambition into ephemeral dust.

“Your progress is charming,” it whispers.

“Your ambition is cute.”

Gravity hums complaints at towers and walls.

Time ticks sarcastically.

Planets tilt, drift, whisper, and roll eyes at human vanity.

A monk folds faith into paper prayers.

A child screams into the void, believing sound leaves a mark on eternity.

A painter spills pigment across a canvas, hoping colors outlive their hand.

A king stamps a decree like it matters.

Mercury counts panics.

Venus tracks whispers.

Earth spins and boasts.

Mars tilts and mocks.

Jupiter churns storms.

Saturn displays elegance.

Uranus tilts.

Neptune yawns.

Pluto lingers.

Entropy dances.

Gravity hums.

Time ticks.

Humans continue to clap at echoes, certain of significance.

While somewhere, a black hole checks its watch,

a dying star files its last grievance,

and Pluto scribbles footnotes on definitions.

All of them agree:

Applause tastes like hope, but only for the hopeful.

Planets glance at one another.

A subtle nod between Neptune and Pluto, Jupiter winks at Mercury,

Saturn tilts a ring in quiet amusement.

Even cosmic indifference has its small acknowledgments.

Humans do not hear.

Humans do not matter.

Nine planets spin in quiet contempt.

Eight have no patience for life.

One carries life that cannot leave fast enough.

And humans, tiny sparks on an indifferent canvas,

continue to believe

they matter.

And somewhere, Entropy, tipping an invisible hat, whispers:

“Enjoy your spotlight, little spark.

The universe is already rewriting your oblivion.”

Squeak. Scatter. Soar.

Fat little pig squeaks

of filthy dry twigs

bruising its toes, 

crimson angry nose.

Snorts and grunts — because why not?

Scorns at crows, eyes bloodshot.

Blames inheritance, pretty muse,

scribbles rage in jam-stained news.

Apparently, no one cares

how a frightened pig fares.

They stomp crumbs into mud,

echo wars with invisible thud.

Other pigs, fat and thin,

plot rebellions with grin.

So what if crows don’t care?

Pigs declare war in the air.

Crows feast on the dead,

on rotten tales spun of dread.

While pigs lunch and dine,

on faeces fermented like wine.

You must be mad, or curious,

how the end lands furious.

The moral? Ha! Let’s see,

does it matter who eats who for tea?

Fat little pig squeaks,

writes its rage in leaks.

Crows sigh, wings like wet rocks,

the universe shrugs, reality mocks.

And that’s how this ends:

no victories, no amends.

Then a cloud hiccups pink,

the moon burps a wink,

and the cat sues gravity

for cosmic depravity.

Counting Teabags

Count the teabags. Count the socks.

Fold the clouds into teaspoons. Call it silliness.

Whisper to the wallpaper.

It grins. Or maybe it weeps.

The cat winks. Steam curls nonsense.

The teapot bows. Mirrors mutter to shadows.

The floor decides to move.

Your pencil hums conspiracies.

You nod. You write. You measure difference,

sameness, difference again — all meaningless.

Ants plot rebellion. Socks hide in drawers.

Your coffee mutters, you are late.

I watch you watch yourself.

The hallway moon applauds.

Meaning collapses.

The cosmos yawns.

Curtains whisper secrets never yours.

Windows sneeze. Doors hiccup.

Obsession folds into obsession.

Chaos tiptoes. Pattern evaporates.

You are eyeball. Eyeballed. Trapped.

Reality licks its own teeth.

Teabags revolt. Teacups faint.

Socks vanish. Mirrors pulsate.

The cat forgets it ever winked.

Your reflection pens a grievance.

The universe checks its wallclock.

Your thoughts trip over each other, laughing.

You — still counting, still folding,

as reality shrugs and eats its own shoes.

Somewhere, someone folds a cloud,

names it Tuesday, wraps it in a sneeze,

and the stars pause to make sure you noticed.

How To Not Be A Poet

I am

what I am.

Just a brain rot

trying to be not.

Oh look, a rhyme

like gurgling chyme,

because poetry

is dysentery —

if the rhymes don’t fly,

you’re not a poet, sigh.

Says who?

Mr. Timbuktu.

Timbuktu who?

How do you do?

Is that rhyme enough

for your itching cough,

like a croaking frog

on a purple-brown wood log?

You must wonder now,

what color is that, and how,

well, who cares, and why?

It rhymes. Your opinions can die.

What an absolute farce,

you must tell yourself.

It’s nonsense verse.

A hundred books on that shelf

and yet, neither poetry nor poetics.

Your poet? Gotta die for a fix.

Maybe become a sandwich this time,

scatter coleslaw, pickles — rhyme on rhyme.

Maybe flap like a pancake, squeak like a mouse,

end up politely trapped in a teacup house.

Does it make all sense or none,

and yet somehow leave you undone?

Madness or genius, who can tell,

he who tied the cat to the goddamn bell.

Enough Is An Adjective

For millions of years

enough

slept in every shadow.

Then we discovered

greed and grammar;

promises that smelled of rot

before the first word left our mouths.

And the silence began

to eat itself,

gnawing at the bones of civilization,

and the marrow of you,

quietly,

insistently,

while you danced like a madman,

exhilarated by your own decay,

your cleverness writhing like worms

beneath the skin of irrelevance.

Trauma Bonding For The Poor-ish

Art will not save us.

It never fucking was meant to.

We inherit trauma like heirs to a sadistic father's mockery of generational wealth distribution;

debts, nightmares, a lifetime subscription to misery,

and a free side of existential dread.

We call it medium, canvas, verse, 

while everyone else waltzes past,

pretending a painted sunset can outwit the cosmic collapse

like a toddler hiding socks from the apocalypse.

We wear conscience like a luxury accessory,

sniffing the crumbs of someone else’s guilt,

smiling politely while civilization quietly writes its obituary in smoke.

Meanwhile, the filthy rich and ugly powerful laugh,

their wealth stacking like walls

between themselves and the decay we all feel,

their vanity rising while meaning crumbles beneath.

We pontificate. We curate. We frame.

We write essays like commandments, then call it activism.

We call doodles revolutions.

We call scraps statements.

Capitalism giggles, rents a billboard,

and calls it profit.

Art is not revolution. Art is not salvation.

Art is survival for the cursed with conscience,

the ones who bled before the first word was written,

the ones who discovered the punchline of the cosmos

was middle-class worry, and it cut like a knife.

If art could save a species, we would still be apes.

Kingdoms burned. Revolutions failed. Colonies collapsed.

Industrial empires poisoned rivers.

Atoms divided the world.

A genocidal psychopath turned suicidal at the wrong end of the right bullet

while someone somewhere 

painted, sculpted, wrote, and laughed, 

through each and every one of it.

Art is the species’ stubborn scream

against the slow-motion circus of its own extinction.

Art is survival for those who cannot bribe meaning,

cannot define it, cannot force it into relevance.

It is the only thing that makes sense

when everything else dissolves into noise.

We tell ourselves it is necessary

because it will save the world.

The truth: it is the only thing keeping us

from melting into regret, apathy, and quiet despair.

Art is trauma bonding 

for the emotionally broke,

and financially Communist.

It is the lifeboat in the sinking boat,

the bandage on the wound existence refuses to stitch,

the single candle in a warehouse full of alarms,

the laugh in a room full of screaming economists,

the polite middle finger at reality itself.

And if we watch closely,

we may even catch ourselves laughing, 

while insisting we were saving the world all along.

And maybe, just maybe, 

we were only ever saving ourselves.

Which, honestly, is more than enough

for anyone still awake,

for anyone still capable of pointing at the absurdity of it all

and saying:

“Yes. This is fucking hilarious. And yes, we are all fucking fucked. Until Capitalism finds me. Then it's just you, who are fucked.”

Empty Marrow

You wake up wrong.

Air slips past your skin,

indifferent,

and your breath follows,

a borrowed motion

in a jigsaw that does not come with closures.

Your hands twitch.

They are not yours.

They lift, drop, graze, scratch —

gestures you never willed,

as if your nerves were conduits

for something passing through you.

You try to speak.

Your tongue twists.

The words are familiar

and alien,

at the same time,

almost as if

echoes of conversations

that never belonged to you,

yet persist anyway.

Your chest heaves.

Heart beats in resonance

with something larger,

something that does not notice

that you exist.

Pain, hunger, thought,

they flow through you,

but none of it is yours.

You touch your arm.

The ruin of a scar pulses under your fingers

like a living thing,

reminding you

that even memory is not yours.

The body scripts verses

of moments you never commanded.

You stare at the mirror.

It does not see you.

It only registers

awareness passing

through a vessel

it will soon discard.

Your skin prickles.

Your bones ache.

Your pulse stammers.

Your voice, your hands, your thoughts,

even the scar that pulsed,

all dissolve into a rhythm

that never needed you.

A weight slides through your chest,

soft, patient, inevitable.

It coils in your bones,

presses against your lungs,

a warmth that is not yours,

a presence that crawls through you and stays.

And you are not sure if you will see the end coming.

That, 

that is what makes you afraid.

Afraid.

Really afraid.

That you’ll be gone. 

Not with a bang,

but like a whimper.

Fireflies In The Dark

Have you seen fireflies ignite themselves,

each one a pulse,

a fleeting constellation humming just beyond your reach?

Your jaws draw wide.

You tell yourself it’s magic,

surrealism meant only for your eyes.

You cup your hands.

Whisper promises.

The light flickers,

trembles,

and dies.

With it dies the next miracle,

and a little of yourself along with it,

as though it borrowed your bones to vanish.

Freedom is this firefly's glow:

it tempts, it teases,

then vanishes as you lean in.

No coin, no hand, no vow can ever own it.

You keep staring.

You throw diamonds.

The fireflies do not answer.

And still, you keep staring.

Until you feel your own pulse echo in the dark,

and the shadows behind your eyes flicker like dying stars.

You wonder which is real:

the moments of light,

or the eternity of emptiness it leaves behind,

that throbs arhythmically in your veins,

a quiet, persistent accusation

you can neither catch nor escape,

wondering if it was about fireflies, or freedom, or neither — all along.

And when you finally look away,

the darkness blinds you

with the fireflies’ dead lights and decayed heartbeats,

and you know you will never stop searching.

Milk, Honey & Cyanide

I. Bloodlines and Burdens

She was born of absence, 

so they filled her with expectation.

She was born of beginnings, 

so they made her live only in ends.

Centuries rewrote her;

from goddess to ghost to grievance,

each version revised

for men to swallow:

palatable, profitable, digestible.

She became a syllabus,

a slogan,

a superstition in silk.

Every divinity a premise,

every prayer a warning.

Between pedestal and partition

lay the woman;

neither saint nor sinner,

just a body mistranslated

into metaphor.

No one archived

the women who refused translation,

who ruled by silence,

measured mercy in teaspoons,

governed households

like republics

with invisible borders.

And in those rooms, 

where jars clinked like accusations,

threads strangled ceilings and floors,

mirrors waited for confessions, 

milk dripped from spouts of quiet menace,

honey glistened on knives well done, well hidden,

and the invisible butcher

took her first breath

with a whisper only she could hear

and a shadow that unmade the walls behind her.

II. Teacups and Daggers

There were women who didn’t need swords;

they had teacups,

threads,

the weight of expectation.

They carved sons with comparison,

daughters with guilt,

husbands with hunger.

They stitched families into factions,

fed feuds like pets,

loved like debt collectors —

forgiveness always arriving

in fine print

and hidden clauses.

They didn’t kill like murderers do;

they killed like seasons:

gradual, relentless,

until incidence hardened into inheritance.

The pantry smelled of control,

the kitchen echoed with judgement.

Love fermented in closed jars.

Milk soured into venom,

honey dripped down walls, sticky, slow,

threads crawled like insects across floors,

warmth sharpened into weapon,

and incense burned but could not hide the rot.

Every bite of bread,

every sip of tea,

every whispered lullaby

carried the weight of a blade

that hummed the names of your ancestors.

Where are their stories?

The empresses of emotional famine,

poisoners of peace,

who raised dynasties on obedience

and called it virtue.

You walked past them every day —

smiled, ate, folded laundry,

never knowing

which bite carried their mercy

and which their blade, 

never knowing

if the house was watching you back.

III. Mirrors of Silence

There’s a cycle written in smoke:

daughter-in-law devoured

becomes devourer,

victim rehearses vengeance

in mirrors

that applaud silently

and sometimes, crookedly, blink. 

Generations gutted in the name of order.

Sons turned into silence,

wives into wardens,

families partitioned like property deeds, 

threads of love sprouting thorns overnight.

Milk can kill,

honey can blind,

every blessing

if repeated enough,

becomes a curse

with good intentions,

and sometimes, a mirror leaks blood

while you sleep.

It waits in corners,

lurks in mirrors,

smiles while you sleep,

humming lullabies

you cannot remember

and nightmares you cannot escape,

your own hands replaying

the cruelties you inherited

in perfect, terrible loops.

We all inherit this.

You. Me. Someone.

IV. Halos and Shadows

We wrote legends of men

who killed for kingdoms,

but not of women

who killed for control.

We remembered queens who mourned,

not those who transformed mourning

into legacy.

Perhaps history isn’t biased,

perhaps it’s afraid.

Afraid to confess

that cruelty tastes sweeter

in a mother’s tongue.

Maybe the goddess was never divine, 

just better at hiding her sins.

Maybe the halo was never holy, 

just a sun tilted sideways

so it blinded only some.

And maybe,

just maybe,

it isn’t men alone who built thrones of bones,

but women

who made sitting on them comfortable, 

and sometimes, shifting.

Every empire needs a prayer,

and every prayer,

a woman willing to believe

she keeps it alive,

even when the walls whisper back,

even when the jars remember her name.

And you 

yes, you 

are standing in that empire,

breathing it in,

feeding it,

trembling beneath it,

or smiling as it feeds on you,

as the milk hisses, the honey pulses,

and the threads tick like a clock

you cannot stop.

Purple Prognosis

What you call living life

is barely a skewed perspective

of existing;

building walls of existence

as long as they serve —

functional, convenient,

until habit hardens into habitat,

and memory mistakes itself

for meaning.

We tint our truths with comfort,

blur the edges of what cuts too deep,

call the blur beauty,

and the haze hope.

But purple doesn’t exist.

What you call purple is fiction:

a clever camouflage for myopia,

for the unseen, the untold,

for truths that rot in the unversed.

It is the color of denial,

the bruise light leaves behind,

a mirage wearing grief as grace.

Purple is an optical illusion.

So is believing you are conspicuous enough

for purpose.

Orchids Of Decay

He named every creature he touched.

Knew which frog could sing underwater,

which bird forgot its way home,

which leaf healed quickest when torn.

A man of science.

Of order.

Of tenderness reserved

for everything that couldn’t answer back.

He spoke to orchids

the way he never spoke to me;

softly,

as if even his breath were benevolence.

He said plants were easier.

They didn’t bruise when disciplined.

And I believed him.

Because I was evidence

of what happened when something did.

He called it education.

I called it language.

He said it built character.

I said it broke sound.

Now his hands tremble not from anger,

but from age.

The zoologist reduced 

to the faint idea of a forgotten animal he once studied,

the body a slow extinction in progress.

He looks for pity in the eyes he once trained to flinch.

Finds only reflections.

I don't feed him soup.

Or, change his sheets.

Every now and then though, 

I document his decline with clinical precision.

A son of unsentimental biology,

unbothered by love, 

unweighted in duty bound guilt.

Upbringing was a myth that wilted a long time ago, 

somewhere between discipline and dinner.

He looks at my incapacity of empathy

and says, “You’ll miss me when I’m gone.”

I say nothing.

He mistakes that for grief and repentance.

And yet, it is neither.

When he sleeps,

I water his orchids.

They come of age

without guilt,

without gratitude,

without grammar.

Like me.

The Pyre

You wail of shackles,

but they are nowhere.

The chains you scream of

rattle only in your skull,

their echoes bouncing off empty corridors

you built yourself.

You claim wars with the world,

but the world doesn’t blink.

Not in its gaze,

not in its periphery,

not in the infinitesimal thought it grants you.

You tell stories of your struggles,

chasing freedom like a ghost

that slips through your fingers

even as you kneel in solemn ritual.

But the world isn't your prison.

You are.

Bound by convenience, by purpose,

by the quiet tyranny of self.

All your grand gestures,

all your pride-drenched theatrics,

are nothing more than ointments for raw, blistered vanity.

The universe moves on.

Always has.

Always will.

Indifference is the molecule of existence.

It stays, 

a silent witness,

as you burn yourself alive

in a world that never paused to watch the matchstick light up.

Shadows In The Mirror

The meat mask of a man you see, 

waking off his measured serendipity like it were a ritual, 

spending time like daily allowances:

seconds, minutes, hours

blemishing into the haze of days, 

lying awake for what feels like forevers embalmed in seasonal flowers, 

swirling eyeballs that refuse to give in to the borderless skins of shut out eyelids, 

Do you recognize him like reflections do

or is he a distant howl overwhelmed in the decibels of concrete?

Do you think he watches you watch him

as you measure his trepid insecurities and timid greed?

Do you think he knows you know

all the filth he hides beneath his manhole of a navel

of all the discreet pasts he holds on to

like memories from the ominous remains of a severed umbilical cord?

Do you think he hears your shallow breaths

gasp in the suffocated air over his watchful shoulders,

as he wages imaginary wars in his lungs and his guts

trying hard to believe there's purpose after all

although you know better

although you know he's just a dreamy lost boy

hoping he wouldn't have to grow up

to the glaring grotesque; no meaning, no matter?

Do you think he knows mirrors don't converge?

Do you think he knows you wait

where the glasses are tinted charcoal black

at the beginning of the end?

Barter

Mist hung low that morning.

Fields slick with dew, earth and cow dung curling into my nose.

Seven mouths leaned over the table, shadows bending my life into pieces.

My mother’s hands cracked like old clay, trembling.

My father’s eyes, rimmed with toddy haze, weighed me.

Three bottles of toddy.

Two days’ meals for seven hungry bodies.

And me.

Me, promised a city I would never see.

They whispered it like a ritual.

Seven faces, some hopeful, some already breaking.

My older brother flinched.

My cousins’ eyes darted, wild with hunger and fear.

My mother’s lips pressed tight as if swallowing me whole could make it right.

And I, fifteen, became a parcel,

folded into hands that were not my own,

sold in quiet, deliberate silence.

The man who came smelled of smoke and oil,

his teeth sharper than knives, promises slick as wet floors.

I should have screamed. I did not.

Flesh pressed into flesh,

warm hand into colder hand,

and the city swallowed me,

a tide of streets and shadows,

a whorehouse that pulsed like veins,

corridors narrow as throats,

windows dead eyes blinking at nothing,

air thick with perfume, sweat, and longing.

Twenty years now.

Twenty years of nights given to survive,

lunches and dinners measured in what I carried into his bed each night,

every thread of skin, every trembling laugh, every piece of warmth offered

so another day might exist.

The girl I once was — small, hungry, pliant —

has drifted away, slipping like smoke through my fingers,

leaving only shadows stitched into the hollow of my chest.

I had always heard of love,

a word whispered like a prayer, a fairytale in fish markets and meat shops.

But I never found it in the drunken eyes of fragile men,

hands shaking, patience thin as ash,

eager only to smell my bare skin,

to take what I had to give and call it possession.

The first night returns to me, every night: 

hands, voices, sweat, the smell of oil and fear,

pressing until my skin was no longer mine,

each year a survival, each year my gods slipping farther away, 

fading into shadows I cannot reach.

And the one I was named for,

the goddess who stayed the farthest from me,

the one of wealth, of fortune, of blessings—

I am nothing but her absence,

her hollowed echo,

trading pieces of myself for bread, for water,

for rooms that never learn the warmth of life,

for a life I will never touch again.

I drift,

through corridors stitched from memory and darkness,

walls leaking years I was sold,

floors slick with hands that counted me,

breath tasting survival,

steps dragging vanished bodies,

fingers brushing ghosts of flesh I once was,

shadows folding into shadows,

village and city bleeding together.

I am Lachhmi.

I am blessing bled into corridors,

threads of skin and hunger unraveling,

echo of promises never paid,

ghost of the girl I cannot reach.

I am everything they bartered for,

and nothing left to claim.

I am ghost. I am absence.

I am Lachhmi

in a country where gods are bartered

for a few lunches,

and prayers are cheaper than bread.

Dreams Of An Eclipse

What are dreams really?

Mirrors of a brain hollowed out whole,

foetuses of possibility strangled in their umbilical cords,

or parallel worlds where I am whole,

and my shadow doesn’t metamorphose into a faceless lump of flesh?

Why aren’t my dreams simple?

Of light, of humanity, of hope?

Why do they crawl instead,

through the cracks of my skull,

whispering that I’ve been nothing but fragments

since before I learned my own name.

Why do I exist in them in shreds, 

threads of myself unraveling,

suffocating in corridors sutured shut, 

a corpse of thought staring back,

mocking, grinning, bleeding into me.

Or have I lived in darkness so long

that my mind lashes its own eyes,

and I am but blind,

naked,

an unsaid prayer, 

to godless ghosts of god fearing men

while I rot inside myself?

Do Apples Dream?

Apples don't fall from the tree

because science doesn't indulge in the absurd

quite like fiction does in the name of romance.

Call it inheritance laws

or the inheritance of loss;

it doesn't matter.

Calling incident an accident doesn't change much.

Gravity doesn't care

about the fallen apple's dreams

of being a hummingbird.

Muscle memory doesn't let go

of the towering shadows of the branches,

even at the cost of sunlight.

Do you think the man who claimed gravity

wondered about the bruises on the apple,

heard the muted laments of his childhood cut open?

Nothing matters as much

as the stories,

and once your stories are theirs,

what use could you possibly be?

Apples fall like they always have,

and no one wonders;

not once, not ever.

Some sell their skins and souls,

not because they want to,

but because some voices are better forgotten as noise.

The ones who couldn’t,

mend open bruises with imagined balms,

as if healing were a placebo.

Vanity In A Fishnet

Beneath a coral sun lying like every critic ever,

the fisherman rows.

Hands steady. Eyes tracing silver threads of tide.

Counting fish. Counting breaths. Counting the stubborn tyranny of small truths.

She rises.

Scales molten, blazing glass in a world too dull to reflect her.

Voice a carving knife.

Bullet. Hurricane. Unadulterated fury incarnate.

The mermaid speaks in tongues dipped in acid,

in waves of spite,

in sirensong accusations that make gulls reconsider ambition,

clouds reconsider patience,

the ocean reconsider everything it thought it knew.

“Do you see?” she hisses.

“Do you bow? Break? Vanish into irrelevance?”

Every word a boulder.

Every glare a storm.

Every laugh a slingshot obliterating the quiet, pathetic ordinariness of his life.

Weak. Blind. Boring.

A human abacus lost in the poetry of her fury.

Gestures, a Renaissance of uncut hate.

Whims, the epitome of binary rage.

Meteors, comets, shooting stars —

why settle for a puddle when you can incinerate oceans?

Divinity, after all, is sheep’s skin for monsters.

The fisherman pauses.

Nets dripping salt. Mind uncluttered. Heart steady, metronome-perfect.

He tastes the tang of her rage, smells the scorched ocean,

but does not bite. Does not roar.

Storms are for watching. For secret notebooks.

For the quiet laughter that says: “Well, look at this idiot again.”

Days curl. Months coil. Years spiral.

And she continues —

flaming, flailing, fabulous,

a fireworks display of self-worship.

Scales ignite. Voice crescendos. Fury convinced of invincibility.

She pins invisible trophy heads on the walls of her pride-palace,

each insult a chandelier swinging above the moat of arrogance.

For no tide, no fury, no glittering rage can drown a man who rows steady through his own small truths.

Then —

mid-gloat, mid-spectacle of self-admiration,

she lunges into proving him broken.

The fishnet snaps.

Silver threads coil like accusatory fingers of a god.

Scales caught. Claws entangled.

The ocean gasps.

The cathedral of scorn collapses.

The Renaissance of hate becomes a glittering cage.

She spins, screams, recites every insult ever thrown,

trapped in the architecture of her own conceit.

The fisherman rows.

Hands steady. Eyes on horizon. Simple. Human.

Witness to absurdity, rage, and vanity so profound it should be illegal.

The tide resumes its ordinary, unbothered rhythm.

The mermaid —

still glorious, still furious,

thrashes like a failing goddess,

mid-delirious symphony of self-adoration,

caught not by skill, not by cunning,

but by gravity itself: the inexorable weight of vanity.

Glory. Fury. Hubris.

Caught in her own glittering trap.

Insults ricochet. Pride snaps. Scorn entangles.

The ocean whispers dryly:

Some tides you ride. Some tides ride you.

And the fisherman?

Still rowing. Still counting fish. Still alive. Still human.

Still absurdly, impossibly unbothered.

A slow, secret smile curls at the edge of his blemished lips.

Divine burns oceans, melts glaciers.

Mortals row on.

Leeches Keep The Dead Alive

There are fractions of days

when I swear

I could go to war with the world

in the first blink of a lazy eye.

Then comes the entirety

of the long remainder of those days

every breath

a dozen nails

hammered into lungs, ribs, intestines,

each inhale another haemorrhage.

Nights I’ve prayed

would split themselves open

and swallow me whole,

their darkness a softer death

than the hundred deaths inside my chest.

My need to die

feels sharper

than my hope of surviving life.

Yet life crawls back,

because my death

isn’t mine alone.

Because love is a lot like leeches

sycophant enough

to keep corpses breathing,

just to feel alive,

to convince itself it still lives

in the hollows of others.

These days

I can’t quite tell anymore

if I’m more helpless

in my hope of life

or in my hope of death.

Life doesn’t let me live.

Love doesn’t let me die.

Common Sense Can Be Injurious To Health

For most of growing up

people thought I had a sense of humour

and I thought, fair enough,

humans are idiots.

Years of assurances later,

when I was finally ready to believe

I might just be funny,

I discovered Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code.

Do you know what it says?

No? Don’t worry.

I’ll read it to you:

“Question a god, and law will slaughter you. Religion will sanction it.”

Because omnipotent beings

clearly need a third-world judiciary,

neck-deep in debt,

to preserve their dignity,

while humans choke on reality.

So what if millions died?

So what if hundreds of thousands were lynched, raped, erased?

God had a plan,

and apparently, that plan

did not include human survival.

But those same gods

forget their plans at home,

every year, leaving a handful of humans

to whisper dangerously:

“Wait… maybe your miracle was just a story?”

Say that aloud, and congratulations:

your neurons are now in handcuffs,

your curiosity is a fugitive,

your common sense has been summoned to court,

and your cerebrum has been detained for questioning.

Because the law, in its infinite wisdom,

has come to realise

the gods are fragile, feeble in ego and anatomy.

Which means either the gods are stories,

or at the very least, their infallibility is.

And in all honesty,

that —

right there —

is exactly what waking up sounds like.

Check and mate?

Durga: A Conception Of Betrayals

Listen. Really listen.

Not like your aunt telling you a festival story sugar coated in sweets and incense.

Not like the stories recited with folded hands and polished voices, pretending the earth did not bleed. 

This is soil scraped from brothels, hands blackened by labor, buffalo horns dripping rage, blood uncounted.

Conches choke on it.

Incense stutters.

Pandals cannot contain it.

Brahma hiccups boons across the cosmos, puking destiny like a god too drunk on his own hubris.

“Immortality? Sure. May no man touch him,” he slurs.

Mahishasura — buffalo-bodied, brown as wet earth, horns sharp as betrayal—laughs.

Problem solved? Except… there is always an except in Hindu mythology. Always.

Before temples. Before incense. Before ritual.

The Asurs thrived.

Brown, alive, singing, dancing, building rivers with their bare hands, shaping the world they owned.

Not demons. Not villains. Just humans who refused to genuflect.

Pandals clap over their graves.

Vermilion smears their skin.

Chants drown their songs.

They are erased, rewritten as monsters

so the gods can sip nectar and call it “order.”

And we cheer.

Because we’ve been taught that fear dressed as ritual is devotion.

Here’s a tip: it isn’t.

Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva — the cosmic circus on permanent acid.

Brahma: spits boons like a toddler on fire.

Vishnu: rearranges avatars like deck chairs on a burning ship.

Shiva: meditates, bored, letting the universe writhe like a snake in acid rain.

They do not bleed.

They do not fight.

They outsource death.

Durga is not empowerment.

She is male incompetence crystallized into a goddess.

Brahma: “I fucked up. No man can touch him.”

Vishnu: “Borrow someone else’s sword. Lazy.”

Shiva: “Meditate. Maybe existential despair kills him.”

And so, she is stitched.

Frankenstein goddess.

Born from fear, ego, and cosmic laziness.

Arms grafted with borrowed weapons: sword, trident, bow — every god too lazy to lift a finger.

Eyes painted by blackened, invisible hands.

Feet molded from brothel soil.

Women erased, forbidden inside the pandal.

Sacred soil. Profane bodies.

Not empowerment.

A weapon forged to solve male panic.

She smiles.

Calm before carnage.

Every weapon a confession of cowardice.

Every step a reflection of male terror in silk and gold.

Lean closer, devout fools. You’re part of this theater too.

The applause? Complicity.

The chants? Compliance.

The buying of trinkets? Denial on sale.

Pandals rise like mausoleums of deceit.

Skinned drums hammer ribs like jackhammers.

Conches blare lies.

Crowd flocks. Claps. Chants. Pretends.

Not courage. Not virtue. Not empowerment.

Control. History rewritten.

Men solving their math problems by making monsters.

Brothel soil. Invisible hands. Women forbidden.

Every chant a knife in memory’s back.

We worship the goddess and spit on the very earth she was molded from.

Horn meets sword.

Claw meets buffalo hide.

Mahishasura fights. Brown. Alive. Proud. Not villain.

Every swing, every roar: “You cannot erase me.”

Durga strikes. Lion roars. Earth shakes.

Blood mixes with rivers, soil with tears, myth with memory.

Every blow rewrites history.

Every kill silences voices.

The Asurs die in myth but live in soil and song.

Durga, weaponized by male fear, moves like cosmic fury.

Brahma sips fermented nectar. Vishnu reclines. Shiva hums.

“Victory,” they mumble.

“Good over evil.”

“Courage. Virtue. Empowerment.”

The gods outsource murder.

The gods never bleed.

Men solve problems by creating monsters.

Clay returns to rivers.

Hands unseen. Women erased. Asurs whisper:

“We were here. We still are.”

We walk home. Drunk on illusion.

Complicit in cosmic farce.

Durga smiles. Mahishasura roars.

The soil, the blood, the bodies erased?

They do not forgive.

Pandals rise again next year. Skinned drums. Conches. Incense.

Cycle repeats.

We clap. Chant. Buy trinkets.

Pretending. Forgetting. Erasing ourselves.

Durga: stitched, smiling, unstoppable.

Mahishasura: horned, roaring, immortal in memory.

The gods: drunk, cowardly, adjusting crowns.

Women: erased, unbowed, enduring.

Soil: sacred, profane, eternal.

Every lion she rides. Every demon she impales.

Every strike. Every roar:

A reflection of male fear, cowardice, and cosmic laziness.

This is the conception of betrayals.

Goddess born not of choice, but necessity.

Myth written not by her, but for her.

Survival, erasure, power, complicity.

We are all performers.

We clap. We chant. We dance.

We say: “Good over evil.”

The soil, blood, bodies erased?

They do not forgive.

Durga smiles.

Mahishasura roars.

The earth remembers.

And so do we, if we dare to see.

Because nothing says ‘good over evil’ like ignoring bodies, soil, caste, blood… and buying into a god stitched from fear, silence, and our own cowardice.

Bound In Blood (Alternate Version)

I do not wonder what runs through you.

I know.

Rot seldom has variations.

Your arteries are excuses.

Your bones, unannounced declarations.

Your skin, a treaty you signed with silence.

To consume you is devotion.

Measured, deliberate, intimate.

Each sinew a sentence, each pulse a confession,

read and savored,

until nothing remains but the essence I carry with me.

You were never yours.

You are mine.

Bound.

In blood, forever.

Festered In Filth

Filth is an interesting word.

The ones averse to it

lay it across streets

and across the skeletons of the demons they hide within,

and we call them civilized.

The ones born into it,

because cleaning up is their inheritance,

cannot afford filth

inside or out,

and yet we call them uncouth.

Imagine a world 

where the uncouth graduated in civilization;

the civilized would drown

in clogged commodes and swarming sewage,

hands soft, conscience corroded,

lungs choking on the rot they refuse to touch.

Filth is not just a word.

It is the taste of privilege,

bitter and slick on your tongue.

It is the marrow of shame,

gnawed at and hollowed,

every bite leaving a scar deeper than humanity.

It is a life sentence,

etched into the cracks of streets,

stamped on the foreheads of the living,

pulsing in their veins like a sin they cannot wash away.

And yet, we call this civilization.

Bound In Blood

I’ve often wondered

what you keep closeted

beneath those tufts of hair,

stretching from scalp to cheeks;

is it memory, is it shame,

is it a language you never spoke aloud?

I’ve often wondered

what you hide in your arteries,

throbbing blood and bone

from head to toe;

do they ferry guilt,

or are they tunnels of silence

lined with rusting echoes?

I’ve often wondered

what you bury inside your femur,

what you scorch on your fingertips,

what you forget in your entrails;

muscle memories too fragile for light,

too stubborn for decay?

But what I’ve wondered most of all

is how you would taste:

your secrets, your silences, your marrow,

as sides of an elaborate buffet,

laid carefully on a porcelain plate.

Because to know you is never enough

I must eat you whole,

drink you in through every pulse,

until the last drop of you

flows into me,

your spine dissolving into my tongue,

your syntax spliced into my veins.

No grave, no god, no mouth

to ever separate you,

for you are mine to belong to

bound in blood.

Parasite

I don’t wake in the middle of the night

breaking into cold sweats and hot flashes,

wondering if I’ve been misconstrued

by faces I can and can’t recall.

To be or not to be

isn’t quite the question,

and even if it were

I’d rather be than not.

What keeps me wide awake,

long after fatigue has kissed my eyelashes goodnight,

is the singular thought:

have I ever truly understood myself,

or am I still a shadow

caught between the fading horizon of who I am

and the faint mirage of who I wish I could be?

To have lived in yourself

having not known you

feels too selfishly succulent,

almost as if

I am my own parasite.

And when I finally close my eyes,

I wonder if I’ll dream at all

or if the parasite will wake first,

tearing through the self I never knew I had

and feast on every unclaimed heartbeat

until only the echo of me remains.

Or maybe, the parasite is all there has been

and this is all just a fever dream 

of hopes long gone, burnt and cremated

and I'm nothing more than a dead man's debt.