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.