Bombay Sandwich

Not so long ago, 

I was in Mumbai, 

and I realised something

that often misses the mark by more than a few miles:

the city still looks like Bombay 

but with an amputated tongue speaking Mumbai somehow.

On the way from Colaba to Marine Drive, 

I had time to spare, 

so I decided to stop by the place 

everyone from Mumbai tells you, 

you must visit

to etch shreds of the Mumbai chromosome in you, 

just enough to not be just another tourist, 

yet somehow well short of having lived the city.

Colaba Causeway is an unruly, thumping sea.

It is a marketplace of survival,

where aggressive negotiation collides 

with the agreeable roar of black-and-yellow taxis,

and the air is thick 

with the competing aromas of roasting corn, cheap incense, and sea salt.

Humanity moves in a dense, sweating swarm:

a chaotic symphony of street hawkers shouting negotiable "fixed prices" like gospel,

tourists stepping over cracked pavements,

and the relentless honking of a city that refuses to wait for its own breath.

Right in the heart of this cacophony 

sits an ancient, quaint cafe: 

archaic architecture buried in fresh coats of wall paint.

A hasty stitch on a pair of torn pants,

holding just enough to keep the city moving.

The whole of Mumbai is ancient and quaint really, 

so this building doesn't quite stand out; 

it’s so lost in plain sight, you’d miss it in a blink if you didn't know where to look.

Leopold Cafe.

A century-old relic 

that has seen five generations 

while away the years. 

Small heads and long blades, 

on rods long enough to be iron giraffe necks, 

brood down from the overreaching ceilings. 

Wood has weathered 

from a bright, varnished brown 

to a damp burnt sienna, 

carrying the clatter of conversations 

as old as civilisation itself.

As I sat at a table, 

ordering a coffee and a Bombay sandwich, 

my eyes hit a square metre of the wall 

right next to the elderly man seated diagonally opposite. 

There it was: a crevice in the wall, 

like someone a long time ago 

had pierced a nail through its heart.

Except, it was a gaping hole. 

A gaping bullet hole.

My eyes almost instinctively moved sideways, 

tracing trajectories along the white paint, 

and thirty seconds later, 

I had stumbled upon another four.

Five bullet holes. Out of the thirty-something.

From an ordinary Mumbai night, eighteen years ago.

They looked so ordinary,

one could almost never tell 

they once smelled of smoke, gunpowder, fresh blood, pierced flesh, and torn tissue.

My coffee was getting cold. 

My Bombay sandwich lay numb on the plate, 

a cold assembly of bread and vegetables

rapidly losing its purpose,

and all I could think of 

was an ordinary Mumbai night, eighteen years ago. 

As I watched fifty odd people,

mostly Indians, a Korean couple, a British family of four, and half a dozen Americans,

I couldn't help but imagine the hundred on that night 

who had walked in for a chicken stroganoff, a mutton keema pav, or just coffee, 

and suddenly found themselves 

at the sweltering end of a pair of smoking AK-47s 

as their only way back home.

I couldn't help but imagine

their faces at the bottom of a fear

they had never needed to know existed.

The cold sweat. The swallowed screams.

The desperate arithmetic of bodies

looking for somewhere the bullets wouldn't.

The gunpowder settling into the walls,

the grenades splitting the room open,

the blood turning a quiet dinner into a butcher’s block of human flesh.

I couldn't not imagine faces I had never met 

and lives I had never crossed, 

and the fifteen minutes of that Mumbai night eighteen years ago, 

that time has spent eighteen years failing to forfeit, 

that is still happening behind the fresh paint.

They say eighteen is the onset of adulthood, 

and yet here, time is a milk tooth rinsed in blood.

Summoning The Selfish

Selfish.

The word for a life that has stopped taking dictation.

We arrive without consent

and spend the rest of our lives

being charged for the privilege.

A name.

A home.

Nine months of somebody's body.

Then years of being reminded what existence cost.

The account changes hands.

The balance doesn't.

"I gave you everything."

How quickly a gift learns to speak in the imperative.

You can spend thirty years

being somebody's answered prayer

and never once be asked what you were praying for.

We inherit lives like family silver:

too old to question,

too polished to use,

too precious to put down without being asked who we think we are.

Selfish.

The accusation arrives

when the plot someone wrote for you

loses its ending.

We learn to interrupt ourselves

before anyone else has to.

The dream crossed out

before it can become a quarrel.

The truth swallowed

until the throat forgets the shape of its refusal.

Years spent keeping peace

in rooms where nobody has thought to ask whose peace it is.

We keep the receipts.

In the pause before a favour.

In the little afterlife of 

"after all I've done for you".

In the gift that arrives open-handed

and leaves you holding the obligation.

We wanted to be good.

Then necessary.

Then so necessary

that leaving us would look like cruelty.

We made ourselves too good to abandon.

And called it love when they stayed out of guilt.

We became landlords of lives we never had to live.

Collected rent in obedience.

Called it heartbreak when the tenants left.

Imagine a world of selfish people.

People too occupied with the work of becoming

to supervise what others become.

People who could watch someone rise

without mistaking the height for an insult.

Who could lose

without needing someone else to lose more.

Who could be ordinary

without making a failure of somebody else's extraordinary.

That there was work enough in becoming themselves.

That someone else's becoming took nothing from their own.

Not people without tenderness.

People who knew 

that being loved did not 

make them the owner of the wound they healed.

People who could give

without making the gift a future tense.

Who could love someone

without putting their lives under oath.

Imagine how many lives might have escaped

the punishment of being made responsible

for somebody else's inadequacy.

And no, not every sacrifice is a trap.

Sometimes the last piece of bread is given away.

Sometimes a hand stays through the hours that offer nothing back.

No witness.

No secret hope

that the hand will be held

in the same way when its turn comes.

The hand opens.

That is all.

We keep asking

how much someone would surrender for us.

We rarely ask

when their surrender became our entitlement.

Selfish.

The word we reach for

when a person stops being the answer 

to a question we never had the right to ask.

Can Coupons Really Be Redeemed?

Who doesn't like coupons to go with lunches and dinners?

What's not to like about dinner and dessert at the price of just dinner?

Take away the coupon, and suddenly the appetite for dessert dies down dry, dehydrated.

Is food only as good as its coupons? 

Are coupons only as good as the food they come holding hands with?

If the former were true, 

capitalism would have been a starving boy 

begging for what you and I save in coupons, for lunch and dinner.

Some people are like coupons;

the only time they're worth a grain of salt

is when they come nested in substance.

They have no currency of their own,

so they attach themselves to things that do,

mistaking proximity for possession,

and the reflected light of another's existence

for evidence that they, too, have a sun.

They mimic the behaviour of moss:

find something sturdy, overwhelm it,

and call the infestation a relationship.

They contribute nothing to the architecture,

but once they've covered enough of it,

they begin speaking as though they laid the foundation.

Their greatest talent is not creation,

but the careful cultivation of appearances.

They learn the vocabulary of the accomplished,

borrow the convictions of the courageous,

wear the scars of battles they watched from a distance,

and rehearse the biographies of people

whose actual lives would expose them as frauds.

They are all packaging, no product; hollow bone, no marrow.

And if you think

this is just empty calories

sold as a vital nutrient,

give it time,

for the diet gets a whole lot funnier.

They eventually forget they were ever pretending.

The borrowed opinions become convictions.

The borrowed vocabulary becomes a personality.

The borrowed prestige becomes a résumé.

The parasite begins introducing itself

as part of the organism.

Delusion is a funny little thing. 

Call it home long enough, 

and it winds up on a wrought iron bed 

in a dingy asylum smelling of altered carbons.

Strip away the names they invoke,

the institutions they flaunt,

the accomplished people they orbit,

the borrowed language they deploy like credentials,

and what remains?

Just a coupon.

Nothing to offer with.

No one to offer it to. 

Nothing left to redeem it against.

No redemption. No resurrection.

Even Christ had to break bread, turn water into wine,

and give the world a body to hang its faith upon.

Coupons, on their best days, are crucifixes before the crucifixion:

promises of salvation that mistake the price for the sacrifice.

Sons Of Surnames (Alternative Version)

A sixth of my life I've spent

never speaking a word to my mother.

Or my father.

They are not dead.

Dead silences are awkwardly honest;

it's the ones with breath in them that haunt.

Half my life I've whiled away

trying to be a son to parents

who razed two-thirds of it

questioning the anatomy of inheritance,

then spent the remaining third

issuing corrigendums on how to prove I was one.

Two-thirds of a lifetime,

assuming the past will let me call it mine.

The remaining third I've tried to outlive,

hoping to wake up someday

without the yesterdays

I've buried, still answering to their names.

You must unbecome inheritance to let your lungs inherit you.

But unbecoming is a violent subtraction:

pulling their surnames from beneath my fingernails,

scraping the shape of their jawlines off my own face,

refusing to let their history dictate the geometry of my spine.

How many fractions remain

when you divide a ghost from the bone?

Zero. And still, the lungs.

Sons Of Surnames

A sixth of my life I've spent

never speaking a word to my mother.

Or my father.

They are not dead.

Dead silences are awkwardly honest;

it's the ones with breath in them that haunt.

Half my life I've whiled away

trying to be a son to parents

who razed two-thirds of it

questioning the anatomy of inheritance,

then spent the remaining third

issuing corrigendums on how to prove I was one.

That's two-thirds of what one might call a lifetime,

if I were to transcend from present tense to past.

The remaining third I've tried to outlive,

hoping to wake up someday

without the ghosts of yesterdays

I've buried but couldn't exorcise myself of.

You must unbecome inheritance to let your lungs inherit you.

But unbecoming is a violent subtraction:

pulling their surnames from beneath my fingernails,

scraping the shape of their jawlines off my own face,

refusing to let their history dictate the geometry of my spine.

How many fractions remain

when you divide a ghost from the bone?

Just the zero it takes to breathe.

The Tongue Of Rot

Have you seen the flowers on a dead?

The colours, the fragrances, the patterns:

none of them as necessary

as the fact of decomposition.

They're not jewellery to embellish the embalmed;

only ever an honest submission penned in perishable petals.

Nothing speaks of rot as fluently as the biodegradable.

Flowers on a dead are words in a civilisation.

The God Gene

I've never seen a dog proud

because one of them, six decades ago,

went to space and died a martyr to science.

I've never seen a cat proud

because one of them, in a black coat of fur,

froze strangers in their tracks.

I've never seen a monkey proud

because its ancestors, a thousand years ago,

went to war for a god in fancy folklore.

I've never seen a hamster proud

because its grandfather, twenty years ago, 

helped three men share a Nobel, for killing him and calling it a breakthrough.

I've never seen a pigeon proud

because its grandmother, fifteen summers ago,

shat on a president's expensive shoulders.

I've never seen a bug proud

because one of its kind, once upon a time,

had a computer malfunction named after them.

I've never seen a virus proud

because its kind, for centuries,

sent thousands of humans to their graves, one deep cleanse at a time.

I've never seen a bonsai proud

because its father was a banyan,

though it barely passes for anything more than a hallway pleasantry.

I've never seen an amoeba proud

because it inhabits the very waters

artificial intelligence thirsts for every day.

I've seen us scream winning evolution, 

and pride in all of it anyway.

Irritable Bowel Syndrome

This might be for you if

you shat when you could have farted,

you farted when you could have just burped,

you burped when you could have just stopped swallowing junk.

This might be for you if

your asshole forgets adjusting

because your sphincter's dysfunctional

from your gut leaking god complex,

you gloriously replay all the times you shat,

not once wondering if a fart could have sufficed,

or maybe just an antacid.

This might be for you if

you and a public lavatory are one and the same

in tongue, teeth, ribs, spleen and gut,

and the other parts I forgot in farts;

you are never a good idea, 

but a desperate measure for a mild inconvenience, at best,

you mistake presence for significance, 

pants down for vulnerable, 

and when the air changes, 

you think stink is the smell of scripting history.

This might be for you if you're sure it isn't about you.

For My Own Good

At thirteen, I was taken to psychologists

because I was disobedient.

I remember the wooden scale.

I remember the stick.

I remember my mother's hand,

the kitchen,

the sudden importance of standing still.

Before that, there was an argument.

There must have been.

I had answered back.

I wouldn't listen.

I had been told.

I had been told.

I remember being told.

I don't remember what.

I remember what happened after.

The part before keeps changing.

At thirteen, I was taken to psychologists

because I was disobedient.

I remember the journey.

I remember why we were going.

I don't remember their faces,

their questions,

my answers,

whether my parents were in the room.

I remember my parents.

Perhaps I told them everything.

Perhaps I told them nothing.

Perhaps I told them what I had learned to call the truth.

Perhaps I was disobedient.

I have no memory of the verdict.

I remember being taken there.

Years later, I remember my mother feeding me.

The plate.

The meal.

Her hand bringing food to my mouth.

The wooden scale.

The meal.

The wooden scale.

She was feeding me.

She was hitting me.

I keep trying to put one memory after the other.

The meal before the hand.

The hand before the meal.

If she fed me afterwards,

perhaps I had been forgiven.

If she fed me beforehand,

perhaps I had been loved.

If I had been loved,

perhaps —

I don't know what comes after that.

Sometimes I remember being loved

and spend the rest of the day

trying to establish what that proves.

I have spent years trying to put the sound

in the right place.

Before the hand.

After the argument.

After I had been told.

I had been told.

I wouldn't listen.

I had answered back.

I had answered back.

Somewhere in the order

there must be a reason.

Somewhere in the reason

there must be a version of me

who deserved what happened.

I have not found him.

I have not stopped looking.

At thirteen, I was taken to psychologists

because I was disobedient.

I don't remember what I said to them.

I remember what I must have said

because I know what was wrong with me.

Difficult.

I don't know who first called me that.

Perhaps my mother.

Perhaps my father.

Perhaps the psychologists.

Perhaps I had already learned the word before anyone needed to say it.

Difficult.

The word fits inside the mouth 

without leaving a mark.

Years later, someone goes quiet.

I know this silence.

I begin again.

I reconstruct the conversation.

I revise my tone.

I find the sentence that might have sounded wrong.

I apologise for the sentence.

Sometimes I apologise for the tone 

I might have used while thinking the sentence.

Nothing has happened.

Nothing has happened.

I am relieved.

I hate how quickly my body understands.

I remember the wooden scale.

I remember the stick.

I remember my mother's hand on an ordinary afternoon.

I remember the meal.

I remember being told.

At thirteen, I was taken to psychologists

because I was disobedient.

I don't remember the misdeed.

I don't remember what I did.

I must have done something.

I had answered back.

I wouldn't listen.

I had been told.

I had been told.

I remember it was for my own good.

The Sanctity Of Appetite

When you hold a headless chicken in your hand,

its body spitting blood all over,

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

you don't look at the chicken and flinch,

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

You don't think murder.

You think lunch. And dinner.

Breasts. Legs. Wings.

Sometimes, the chicken isn't chicken.

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

Sometimes, the faith isn't food.

Sometimes, faith is a necrophiliac, 

dressing death up as devotion.

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

Blood on the hands. Blood on the teeth.

An anaemic appetite that keeps gnawing for more.

Suicide bombers and serial killers

have thought themselves noble.

As have honourable men and women

slaughtering, in acts of faith.

Blood In My Kahwa (Alternative Version)

At the stroke of midnight,

in the humid August of 1947,

India woke up independent.

Kashmir woke up

inside somebody else’s argument.

The British left behind two countries,

hundreds of princely states,

and enough unfinished business

to keep generations of children

inheriting the consequences

of decisions made by men

who would never have to inherit them.

Jammu and Kashmir was one such state.

A Muslim-majority population.

A Hindu Maharaja.

A subcontinent being torn apart

by men who had mistaken

religion for geography

and geography for destiny.

Then came the accession,

the war,

the borders,

the competing claims,

the maps with their little coloured certainties.

India. Pakistan. China.

Three countries with arguments

about a place

where people had to wake up the next morning

and somehow continue being people.

Kashmir.

Ice-capades and lush valleys.

Kahwa-dipped afternoons.

Ghazals curling around bonfires.

Mountains so beautiful

you could almost forgive the world

for looking at them

instead of at the people beneath them.

Almost.

Because paradise, apparently,

is what we call a place

when we can afford to ignore

what it costs its inhabitants to live there.

Kashmir was cut through its spine and ribs.

Head separate.

Limbs separate.

The rest, 

whatever remained

after the men with flags

had finished deciding

what the body was called.

And the world kept its vocabulary.

Territory.

Sovereignty.

Accession.

Integration.

Dispute.

Beautiful, bloodless words.

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

Tell me:

if your home becomes a question

that powerful people keep asking each other,

if your dead become numbers

that strangers use to win arguments,

if your future is negotiated

in rooms where your absence

is not even considered a logistical problem, 

what exactly

are you supposed to pledge allegiance to?

The flag?

The border?

The man on television explaining your own life to you?

Would you give a fuck about governments

that remember your existence

whenever your existence becomes bartering currency?

And before you start with your neatly laminated answers,

understand something.

People are not a referendum on your patriotism.

Their suffering is not a loyalty test.

Their silence is not your evidence.

And their existence is not a fucking group project

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

Children of conflict learn things 

the rest of us get to learn metaphorically.

That fear can become so ordinary it stops announcing itself.

That the future can arrive looking exactly like the thing

your parents spent their lives praying you would escape.

Their history is not yours.

Yours may begin with a headline,

a classroom debate,

a breaking-news notification,

a holiday booked months in advance.

Theirs may begin with a door kicked open.

A name called into the dark.

A father who does not return.

A mother learning to recognise footsteps without lifting her eyes.

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

They have to live in the paragraph you abandoned.

And still, you claim to understand Kashmir.

You have smelled the pine.

Have you smelled the gunpowder?

You have held the warm cup.

Have you felt what it means

to have your grief examined

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

You have seen the valley.

Have you seen what happens

when the world falls so deeply in love with a place

that it forgets the place is full of people?

When paradise becomes a product,

its inhabitants are reduced to features to optimize user experience.

And if you think

you can reduce every complicated existence

to two flags,

two religions,

two sides,

two columns in a schoolbook,

as though a human being

were a labelled diagram

in a ninth-grade biology textbook, 

you have mistaken classification for comprehension.

And you are a dumbfuck of the highest order.

Not because you know too little.

Ignorance is survivable.

It is the moment you peddle

your ignorance for authority

that other people begin paying for it.

Because now your certainty has a flag.

Your certainty has a microphone.

Your certainty has an audience

and a thousand convenient ways

to make somebody else's pain

sound like an inconvenience to your worldview.

And suddenly,

the people who have lived the history

must prove it to the people

who have merely inherited an opinion.

Fuck that.

Kashmir does not owe you

a version of itself

that fits inside your head.

Its dead do not owe you a useful lesson.

Its living do not owe you a performance of suffering

convincing enough to survive your next argument.

And its children do not owe you a future 

that makes your certainties look prophetic.

You want to understand Kashmir?

Start by admitting

that the place is larger than your understanding of it.

That its people are not props

in the grand theatre of your nationhood.

That a mountain does not become yours

because you love its photograph.

That a border does not become innocent

because you have learned to draw it neatly.

That the word peace does not become meaningful

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

Kashmir is not your fucking metaphor.

It is not your classroom debate.

It is not your patriotic reflex.

It is not your holiday photograph

with the inconvenient parts cropped out.

It is a place full of lives

that were already happening before you formed an opinion.

And will continue happening long after 

your opinion has become another piece of history

somebody else's children are forced to inherit.

Damn Dissent

If batons and bullets

and sticks and stones

and gas and grenades

could rid the world

of every spine

that dared to stand up and ask why,

or worse, say no,

revolution would be a museum artifact,

behind glass,

with a little plaque explaining

how humanity once mistook obedience for peace.

The ones who belong in museums

keep finding crowns,

mistaking the present for their kingdom

and the past for an inheritance.

The guillotine, too,

was once a government instrument.

Concrete Copulation

A fish develops legs, 

crawls onto land, 

invents a mortgage, 

and spends the next several millennia 

trying to get back indoors.

We call this civilisation.

We spend millions of years evolving on the earth, 

billions of dollars extracting things from it, 

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

Eventually, we discover concrete.

Sand. Stone. Water. Cement.

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

Mountains become raw materials.

Rivers become supply chains.

Beaches become investment opportunities.

And the species responsible for the arrangement 

starts advertising harmony with nature 

in brochures featuring infinity pools.

The infinity pool is particularly inspired.

We have managed to make water look infinite 

by putting it in a rectangle 

beside a planet running out of it.

Civilisation is full of these little triumphs.

We excavate mountains to build skyscrapers, 

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

We put fences around land 

that existed before the concept of a fence. 

Draw borders across geological formations 

that have never heard of countries. 

Print deeds establishing ownership of a planet 

that has been operating quite comfortably without a legal department 

for four and a half billion years.

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

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

We are the only species 

that can stand on borrowed ground 

and demand the owner produce identification.

And then there's sand.

Sand is what happens 

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

We looked at this and thought:

Excellent. Construction material.

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

Its usefulness depends on where it came from, 

how it was shaped, and what it can do. 

River sand, desert sand, crushed rock. 

Geology has its specifications.

Even the earth has a quality-control department.

We have a procurement team.

And our procurement team has been having a spectacular century.

We dredge rivers until their beds begin to collapse.

Strip coastlines of what protects them,

then commission studies to determine why they are collapsing.

This is what we call progress: 

making a problem expensive enough 

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

We will destroy a wetland

to build a luxury housing complex,

install artificial landscaping,

and advertise the development as an escape into nature.

The trees are ornamental.

The lake is a feature.

The birds are a bonus.

The entire ecosystem has been reduced to amenities.

Nature has finally found employment in the service industry.

It is not permitted to unionise, though.

We paved the earth against the rain,

then built drainage systems

to make the water someone else's problem.

The sky kept its appointments.

The soil could no longer keep them.

But the city looks beautiful at night.

This is important.

The city must look beautiful at night.

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

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

Ours uses architectural lighting.

Glass facades. Illuminated towers. Landscaped terraces. 

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

Luxury redefined.

Usually by the square foot.

We have even managed to make impermanence aspirational.

Buy a home, they say. 

Build equity. 

Leave something behind for your children.

Leave them what, exactly?

A thirty-year repayment schedule? 

A shrinking coastline? 

A river converted into a municipal problem? 

A city where the temperature is rising, 

the groundwater is falling, 

and the air purifier needs a replacement filter 

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

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

We are leaving our descendants the invoice.

And concrete. So much concrete.

Concrete is humanity's favourite love letter to permanence, 

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

because you appreciate its commitment to staying in one place.

We have spent thousands of years 

building things that promise to outlast us, 

and naming them after places we are busy destroying.

We are not the landlords of this planet.

We are an unusually destructive tenant 

with a god complex, a construction loan, 

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

The lease was never signed.

The deposit was never paid.

The landlord has never once acknowledged our existence.

And still, we keep renovating.

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

Sit on the ground? 

Feel the sand between our fingers? 

Look at a mountain without calculating its commercial potential? 

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

a coastline to exist without somebody submitting a proposal?

That would be absurd.

We are civilised.

We have paperwork.

We have cranes.

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

And the fish?

The fish left the water,

crawled onto land,

invented a mortgage,

and spent several millennia trying to get back indoors. 

And when it finally did,

it found the water waiting for it.

In a rectangle.

Plausible Deniability

Earlier this morning, something incredible happened:

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

I asked who was responsible.

The representative said the algorithm.

I asked who had built it.

The engineer said management had specified the requirements.

Management said legal had approved the process.

Legal said the decision was consistent with policy.

I asked who had written the policy.

They sent me a link.

I read it.

The policy stated

that all decisions were made in accordance with applicable criteria.

I asked who had chosen the criteria.

They sent me another link.

This one explained how the system applied them.

I began to suspect

I was being fucked by a committee

that had outsourced the fucking

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

I asked for a human being.

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

I asked when one would be required.

They said if I wished to appeal.

I appealed.

The appeal was reviewed

by the same system that had rejected me.

The appeal was rejected.

The system had considered my case from every possible angle.

Except the one from which I was a person.

I asked to speak to someone

who could overrule the decision.

They said no such person was available.

Not that the decision was irreversible.

Not that nobody had the authority.

Only that the person with the authority was unavailable.

I pictured them at lunch.

A sandwich in one hand.

My future in the other.

Both entirely disposable.

I asked when they would return.

The representative said they couldn't provide a timeline.

And then, they thanked me for my understanding.

I couldn't quite understand

what, precisely, I was supposed to understand.

That nobody had intended this?

That everybody had done their job?

That somewhere between

the person who wrote the rules

and the person who suffered them,

we had built a machine

that could make a human decision

without requiring a human being to stand behind it?

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

Now we call that inefficiency.

I closed the browser.

The decision remained.

Somewhere, someone had made it.

Somewhere, someone could reverse it.

Somewhere, a person

was having a perfectly ordinary day, unaware

that doing nothing had become the most consequential thing

they'd done all year.

There was no villain to expose.

No monster to drag into the light.

Just a job well done,

a policy correctly applied,

a performance review to look forward to.

And me,

holding the consequences of a decision

nobody had made.

The Art Of Saying Nothing

Don't write if you have nothing to say

that hasn't been said over and again,

in more ways than your vocabulary permits,

your imagination allows.

Don't borrow metaphors

like they're your neighbour's scissors

and you've misplaced yours.

Don't claim them either,

unless you got them as birthday gifts.

Don't scribble mindless mnemonics

until your brain freezes,

then inspect the wreckage

and call it literature.

Don't waste pages upon pages

if not one of them makes you angry,

teary, or dizzy

when you read them aloud in your head.

I know what they say.

Anyone can be an artist.

Anything can be art.

Well, they lie.

Delusion has sold more art supplies

than Nobel Prizes ever could.

Narcissism has slaughtered more trees

than greed ever would.

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

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

Dead To Rights

Someone told me today

I should die.

Someone told me today

that a good man 

lives with the consequences of his errors

every time he is told he has erred, 

and that if he dares to question the telling,

he should die

to cleanse himself of the sin of asking.

Don't get me wrong.

I've been asked to die before.

In fact,

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

I'm sure each of them had reasons.

Reasons grand enough to warrant a death.

Wetting a bed of expectations is a rather expensive crime,

I've been made to understand.

But today wasn't one of those days.

Today I was asked to die 

because I had the audacity to question.

Today I was asked to die

because I had the arrogance to refuse surrender.

Today I was asked to die

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

Today I was asked to die

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

and the teeth to enunciate it,

to call a felony a statutory violation.

Someone told me today

I should die

because the creatures of convenience

lurking inside their nervous systems

whispered to them:

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

Someone told me today

I should die

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

And perhaps that, after all,

was the greatest crime I had committed:

I had refused to die 

so they could bury me guilty.

A Systemic Guide To Annihilation

I won't slit your throat.

What am I, a butcher?

I won't break your bones.

What am I, a thug?

I won't take your life.

What am I, the State?

I'll break your nerve.

Your nerves, actually. Plural.

I'll break them like they weren't.

And then I'll let you live.

Because the dead

can't spend the rest of their lives

waking in the middle of the night,

breaking into cold sweat,

wondering when I might return.

I'll leave you alive.

With your pulse intact.

Your doors locked.

Your windows shut.

And that little suspicion that none of it matters.

You'll wake up tomorrow.

Then the day after.

And every morning

will have to explain itself to you.

That's the kind of bastard I am.

Call me cruel.

Call me evil reincarnate.

Call me whatever you like.

The wound doesn't care what you name the knife.

I'm more of a sledgehammer, though.

Knives are too efficient.

They cut quick.

And what cuts quick doesn't cut deep.

A sledgehammer gives every surface

the depth it deserves.

That's how I have always imagined poetic justice;

when you want to plead with all your mouth and all your life for mercy, 

but you have too little left of either. 

If you must know, I take my poetry rather seriously.

Gang Of The Fall

Termites scream camaraderie,

hoping infestation will be mistaken for community,

fermenting folklore in their gassy guts:

"everyone with a gang is a gangster".

Until one morning, pest control arrives.

A lone silhouette,

unbothered by the arithmetic of mobs.

A hint of sulfuryl fluoride,

and camaraderie falls to its death,

like Communism in Soviet Russia, 1991.

Call it justice, vengeance, due process,

actualities have never bothered with etymology.

Sometimes,

sulfuryl fluoride is spelled Constitution.

The Singularity Of Plurals

I have a moustache, long and thick,

and I don't shave my armpits.

I think that's rebellion,

and I'm the discounted Medusa

of a Friday clearance sale.

So what I was pushed out of a burqa-clad uterus?

That's not oppression.

Not unless I say so.

So what I nitpick religion

and wear it with liberalism,

like I wear my ripped jeans

on a saree

on a pair of sneakers?

My fingers are so jangled

in affordable junk metal,

they almost don't let me forget

the oppression I was conceived in,

because then,

what story would I sell my moustache to?

I was born into filth, really.

But apparently

that's how you gather privilege:

that,

and money,

and entitlement,

and the arrogance

to believe you are beyond consequences.

You know how the greatest sinners

flock to the greatest demigods?

Because they see in them

what they could become.

Show them enough filth

and they'll call it a wet dream.

And so flocked my mom and dad

to a man wrapped in saffron,

from a cult that reeked

of sweat and blood,

of women it had pillaged,

raped,

and murdered.

I wear fishnet stockings

to roleplay as a poet

because I learnt nuance from pornography.

I airbrush my obesity

because navel

is the only language

my poetry sells in,

and my lovers

like it skimmed.

Low-fat.

I have cut my arms,

wrist to elbow,

umpteen times,

both hands,

because nothing screams trauma

quite like scars do.

I peddle stories

about things I diagnose myself with,

depending on what the weather

is like that day,

and pity usually follows.

Right on cue.

My words,

my opinions,

my art

are a lot like my life:

borrowed.

But I've learnt

egos are like snakes.

You pet one long enough,

it eventually flashes its fangs

at everything

you don't approve of.

And so I hiss.

At every one of them

who dares call a spade a spade,

oblivious to the daylight truth

that I come from a land

where even breathing is a privilege for a lot many.

I've traded my mediocrity

for manners

and called that professionalism.

So when someone refuses

to give me my wins

simply because I demanded them,

I call it

carcinogenic corruption.

Because whatever isn't convenient

must be cancer.

I bully like an oligarch

and cry like a homeless orphan

the minute the tables turn on me.

And somehow,

people like me

have convinced the world

that this is called inclusion.

That this is equality.

That this is justice.

That this is voice.

We are four,

but really one,

because singularity 

demands spine,

and we are mostly plastered holes.

Long Live The Dead

Culture.

Such an interesting catchphrase.

A fifteenth-century English word, derived from Latin,

meaning “tilling of land” or "agriculture" —

or, as the ones whose lives depended on it would call it,

“farming.”

Interesting how farming means moving on

from yesterdays,

no matter rain or drought,

because tomorrow won't be yesterday.

Never forgetting that

is the only road to a good harvest.

And yet, six centuries

and a handful of evolutions later,

culture means the cheap whiskey of nostalgia,

of yesterdays that came long before yesterdays,

poured into a crystal glass of false pride,

sprinkled with deluded vanity.

You put silkworms in a culture,

and you get nine yards

of unadulterated elegance;

you put humans in a culture,

and you get a future spent sniffing

the claimed flowers of a yesterday

no one alive has ever seen

or smelled.

Life killing life

because the dead need to be defended,

even if what's alive now

needs to be dead first

so another life can kill another

to defend this dead.

It's funny how easy it is

to kill something;

all you've got to do

is pretend you're saving it.

Death By Origami

The thing about paper bullets is,

they make bullet holes of papercuts,

then cut right through

the heart of the gaping void.

Where once was all blood and tissue,

now stands a giant wormhole

of absconding matter.

Where once was a throbbing, pounding epiglottis,

now rests a dehydrated raisin

of bled-out larynx.

And if you thought 

paper couldn't

buy you, bury you, and buy your burial

at the very same instant,

you sure have never

cashed a paycheck,

been in an autopsy room,

or watched empires fall.

Slaughtered For A Stanza, Served For The Rest

You sprawl seven thousand two hundred and thirty-nine words laid out in spleen-stained sheets,

your handcrafted paper origami of yourself, that you peddle on the internet,

hurl slogans like the madman at the traffic signal hurls abuses at nothingness;

you swirl dirt and dust into the blurred lines of disdain and disguise it as revolution,

over the rotting flesh of lives damned and devoured by depravity.

And you think you have moved worlds,

like they were globes spinning on your fingertips,

and you think you have brought mountains down,

like earthquakes bringing homes, housed in mortar and concrete,

down to dust and debris.

Do you think they died

with their entrails dug out and their ribs caved in

so they could be an asterisk in your tainted tale of an existence?

Somewhere beneath your carefully arranged outrage,

beneath the metaphors, the manifestos,

the magnificent little catastrophe you have mistaken for an identity,

there is a simpler obscenity:

they were lives;

you needed them to become your literature, 

you needed their deaths to become your significance.

Tell me —

what species does that make you?

The Importance Of Pronouns

The ones on the inside

and the ones on the outside

always have the same thing to say:

"We are in the right lane,

they aren't."

Temple, church, mosque.

Continent, country, colour, class.

Government, asylum, jail.

Change the latitude.

Change the longitude.

Homo sapiens barely changes its certainty.

"We" are always on the right side of the border.

Newton's First Law Of Motion

The loneliest moment in someone's life

isn't necessarily when their whole world falls apart.

It's when they are watching it fall apart

and all they can do is stare blankly.

Sometimes for a day.

Sometimes for weeks.

Sometimes for months.

Sometimes for years.

More often than not,

long enough

for what was once a life

to become the remnants of a lifetime.

Most people who you know and who know you,

won't ever know.

The ones who do, will tell you it'll pass. It'll all be fine.

They'll say it with the confidence

of people standing outside a burning house

knowing firemen are on the way,

explaining that fire is temporary.

And perhaps it is.

Perhaps they're right.

Perhaps tomorrow,

you'll wake up and discover

that the thing you thought was the end

was only another morning you didn't know how to survive.

But there are nights when none of that matters.

You lie there, staring at the stagnation

of the moving blades of the ceiling fan,

watching them go 

round

and round

and round,

and wondering

how something can move so much without going anywhere.

Slowly, the wondering stops.

Not because you've found an answer.

Because you've run out of questions.

And somewhere between one revolution and the next,

you slip from wondering to accepting 

that maybe

this isn't something you're passing through.

Maybe this is what remains.

Maybe this is the life

you'll remember

as the moment

your life stopped being something you were living

and became something you were watching.

Maybe this is how the dying watches life halt.

Life Of An Afterlife

The dinosaurs died

without knowing their name.

Sixty-five million years later,

we named them dinosaurs

and called their disappearance

extinction.

Imagine becoming history

before anyone existed to remember you.

Perhaps that is what an afterlife is:

someone else's explanation for your absence.

Manners For The Dead (Alternative Version)

Not so long ago,

I was summoned to make people laugh.

It wasn't the first time.

In fact, it's really more of a habit now.

But it was the first time

I'd been summoned to palliative care.

Palliative care.

Or, as you'd think

but never say out loud,

on the brink of death.

What you'll really say is

terminally ill,

as if they were at a bus terminus,

headed to extinction.

Apparently, a good laugh is the best foot forward

when easing into conversations about death.

I've always found that idea

both outrageously ridiculous

and abrasively deluded.

How do you bring yourself

to talk about the one thing

you have spent your entire life

teaching yourself to run away from

at the first hint of it?

I lost my father's father

when I was ten

and he was eighty.

I didn't know him enough to cry.

Or so I told myself.

How else do you explain

looking at others wailing and lamenting,

and somehow pinching yourself

into crying,

only to find

your eyes paralysed dry?

I lost my mother's mother

when I was seventeen.

I needed to be strong

so my mother didn't need to be.

Or so I told myself.

How else do you explain

watching someone wither away

from shallow breaths

to deathbed

to ashes,

and feeling

this vast grassland

of tamed void?

I held a hen by the throat

as it was beheaded

when I was thirteen.

Warm blood

gushed out like smoke

into the thick winter air,

then clotted

across my palm and fingers.

I told myself

this is how dinners

must have felt

for cave men.

I was just a boy

temporarily frozen

in a time my father's father,

or his father,

couldn't remember.

I've watched people die.

I've heard people die.

I've watched things

animate and inanimate, die.

I've heard things

wise and otherwise, die too.

And yet, every time,

I've failed at crying.

Failed at feeling

the stab through my ribs.

Although I've always known

those were supposed to be

the acceptable ways

of civilisation.

So every time,

I've questioned my manners.

I have tried killing myself.

Not once.

Not twice.

A whole of three times.

And except for the scars

on my skin,

I don't remember much

of those either.

I've seen people go awfully silent

on learning someone's lost

a parent,

a spouse,

a friend,

a family,

an animal they called a pet.

I've seen people apologise

to the grieving.

I've often wondered:

is it on behalf

of the dead,

or the bereaved?

A wise man

who'd studied minds

for a living and loving

once told me

I am but a graveyard

of the many corpses

I've had wither away

beneath my blood and bones.

And graveyards don't emote.

They only observe.

Every time I see

or hear of death now,

I wonder

if they can see

the ghosts

I house.

Manners For The Dead

Not so long ago,

I was summoned to make people laugh.

It wasn't the first time.

By then,

making people laugh was almost a habit.

But it was the first time

I'd been summoned to palliative care.

Palliative care.

Such a polite phrase for a place 

where death has already entered the room.

We want to say "dying" or "at the brink of death" but that's rude, we have been taught, 

so we say, "terminally ill", 

as though the person were waiting at a bus terminus,

ticket in hand,

headed somewhere we've agreed not to name.

Apparently,

a good laugh is the best foot forward

when easing into conversations about death.

I've always found that

both outrageously ridiculous and abrasively deluded.

How do you make conversation

about the one thing

you've spent your entire life learning not to look at?

I lost my father's father when I was ten, and he was eighty.

I didn't know him well enough to cry.

Or so I told myself.

How else do you explain

watching other people wail and lament,

then pinching yourself

into trying to produce tears,

the appropriate evidence,

only to find

your eyes paralysed dry?

I lost my mother's mother when I was seventeen.

I needed to be strong

so my mother wouldn't have to be.

Or so I told myself.

How else do you explain

watching someone thin themselves 

from breath to deathbed to ashes,

and feeling nothing that looked sufficiently like grief?

Just this vast grassland of tamed void.

When I was thirteen,

I held a hen by the throat while it was beheaded.

Warm blood gushed over my hand and fingers,

steaming into the winter air

before clotting across my palm.

I told myself

this must be how dinners felt to cavemen.

I was just a boy,

temporarily frozen in a time

my father's father, or his father, couldn't remember.

Perhaps that 

was the first thing I learned about death:

when something becomes too difficult to feel,

the mind gives it a story instead.

I've watched people die.

I've heard people die.

I've watched things animate and inanimate, die.

I've heard things wise and otherwise, die too.

And every time, I've wondered

where the feeling was.

Not because I didn't know

what I was supposed to feel.

Because I did.

There are manners for the dead.

You cry.

You lower your voice.

You remember the good things.

You stand beside the corpse

and behave as though

grief were a language

everyone was born speaking.

I have always been bad at the language.

So I questioned my manners.

I have tried killing myself.

Not once.

Not twice.

Three times.

I remember very little.

Except the scars.

They remember more than I do.

I've watched people go awfully silent

on learning someone has lost

a parent,

a spouse,

a friend,

a family,

an animal

they called a pet.

I've watched people apologise to the grieving.

I've often wondered, 

is it on behalf of the dead,

or the bereaved?

Death is very good at leaving people without verbs.

We say sorry.

We say take care.

We say they're in a better place.

We say anything

that keeps the corpse

from becoming

the only honest thing in the room.

A wise man who studied minds for a living and loving

once told me, 

I am a graveyard

of the many corpses

I've had wither away beneath my blood and bones.

I've thought about that more than I care to admit.

Because graveyards don't cry.

They don't scream.

They don't ask why someone had to die.

They only keep what is left.

And perhaps that is what I've been doing all these years.

Keeping.

The grandfather.

The grandmother.

The hen.

The strangers.

The people who became memories before I learned what to call them.

Every death leaves something behind.

Sometimes a photograph.

Sometimes a scar.

Sometimes a sentence someone keeps repeating

because repetition is the closest thing we have to resurrection.

And sometimes, apparently, it leaves a ghost.

So every time I see or hear of death now,

I don't wonder whether I can feel it.

I wonder whether the dead can see the ghosts I house.

Chromatic Malfunction

Colour is a neurological rumour.

Think about it.

We trust our eyes with astonishing confidence

for organs that spend half their lives

mistaking shadows for people.

Your eyes don't actually see colour.

They perceive different wavelengths of light.

Your brain takes the evidence,

runs it through some ancient wet software,

and announces: RED.

And because nobody has ever thought

to question the software,

we call this reality.

Purple is even funnier.

There is no single wavelength of light that says: I am purple.

Purple is your brain

looking at certain combinations of light

and essentially going,

"Fuck it. Call it purple."

And we did.

We named it.

We painted with it.

We wore it.

We put it on flags.

We gave it royal significance.

Humanity has always been remarkably generous

towards things that don't exist the way we think they do.

Black is stranger.

White is stranger still.

Neither is a single wavelength of visible light.

Black is what you get

when visible light doesn't make it back to your eyes.

White is what you get

when a whole spectrum decides to arrive, all at once.

And yet, 

put them on a palette

and suddenly:

Black.

White.

Colours.

Apparently physics can be overruled

by an artist with a piece of cardboard.

Which should have been the end of the matter.

And yet, it wasn't.

Because then we looked at skin.

And we did 

what humans always do

when confronted

with something different.

We named it.

Black.

White.

Brown.

As if a human being were a paint sample.

As if melanin were a moral position.

As if somebody's epidermis had arrived with political affiliations.

And then,

because naming wasn't apparently quite stupid enough,

we arranged them on the branches of a tree.

This colour is beautiful.

That colour is dirty.

This colour is intelligent.

That colour is primitive.

This colour belongs here.

That colour belongs there.

This colour should rule.

That colour should serve.

This colour should be feared.

This colour should be desired.

This colour should be married.

This colour should be killed.

A photon changed direction

and civilisation lost its fucking mind.

Think about the scale of the stupidity.

We took an optical distinction

and turned it into a social distinction.

Then a social distinction into a hierarchy.

Then a hierarchy into an institution.

Then an institution into an empire.

Then an empire into a history textbook

with the audacity to call itself objective.

We have enslaved people over pigmentation.

Colonised people over pigmentation.

Segregated people over pigmentation.

Murdered people over pigmentation.

Generations have lived and died under systems

built around how light happened to bounce off their skin.

A fucking photon.

Imagine being so confident in your eyesight

that you construct a civilisation around it.

We don't even agree on what we are seeing.

Ask two people to describe a colour

and eventually you discover

that nobody has access

to anybody else's experience of it.

Your red could be my red.

Your red could be something

I have no god damned idea how to imagine.

We have no way of checking.

And yet we've spent centuries

checking each other's worth

by skin tone.

That is perhaps the most human thing about us.

Black is never just black.

White is never just white.

Purple isn't even a single wavelength

and somehow

we gave it a fucking monarchy.

So perhaps

the problem was never colour.

Perhaps colour

was simply the first thing

our eyes noticed and our egos could weaponise.

We keep insisting

the world is black and white.

It isn't.

It never was.

There are wavelengths.

There are bodies.

There are billions of slightly different ways of being alive.

And then there is the human brain,

squinting at all of it,

desperate to simplify what it cannot control, and whispering:

"I know what colour you are."

Perhaps that is the real malfunction.

Not that we see colour.

That we see it and think

we've understood the anatomy wearing it.

Shame On You

Every now and then,

a question trickles in.

It never stops at the question, does it?

Before you know it,

questions pile up like worms,

crawling beneath the skin

and above the flesh,

looking for somewhere

to make themselves hurt.

It always starts innocently enough.

Something mundane.

Something frequent.

Something with just enough

existential crisis

to still be considered

a recreational drug.

Something like,

"What is this life I've been living?"

And before you can exhale,

your entire existence

comes rushing back at you.

Childhood.

Adolescence.

Adulthood.

Not the flashback

you imagined death would give you.

More like, 

an anthology of evidences on trial.

You want to remember

every memory that once made you happy,

every story you once told proudly,

even if only for a second.

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Everything that once made you happy

is either dead, broken, or extinct.

Everything you once took pride in

has been drowned by everything

you hoped you would one day take pride in,

but could only ever lose face over.

And that is what floods your hollowed-out insides now,

as though someone carefully removed every organ of your being

and kept only the shirt of your skin alive.

You look into the mirror

and before your reflection can look back at you,

you flinch.

Grainy lumps gather

around your epiglottis.

You swallow.

They stay.

You swallow again.

They stay.

You look away,

and still your peripheral vision

catches the shape of your anatomy.

You shudder from within.

The face isn't yours.

The dark circles aren't yours.

The wrinkles aren't yours.

The warts on your neck aren't yours.

The malformed torso isn't yours.

You can't tell whether your idea of you has failed you,

or whether you are the one who failed your becoming.

Then come the other lives.

The lives you secretly desired.

The lives you criticised

because admitting you wanted them

would have meant confessing

you were jealous.

You called them shallow. Pretentious. Lucky.

Anything that made envy sound like discernment.

Now they flash before you

like breaking news

on a channel bought and paid for by the throne.

Everything you've faltered at.

Everything they haven't.

Everything you could have had,

had it not been for you.

You have always been

your weakest tissue.

Your one true nemesis.

The only person you could never outrun,

because you kept taking yourself with you.

And somewhere

between the promise of a prodigy

and the frantic of a failure,

your life stopped hanging by a thread.

Instead, it hung itself with the thread.

You can't quite tell when.

If you could,

perhaps you could blame a particular year, month, week, day, hour, minute, second.

A decision. A person.

A door you didn't open.

A door you opened too late.

But there is no moment to blame.

Only the accumulation.

One compromise. One hesitation.

One morning you didn't get up.

One thing you never finished.

One thing you finished and wished you hadn't.

One version of yourself after another,

quietly becoming the person you promised you wouldn't be.

And no matter what you've done,

you know it isn't enough.

Because although

it broke every bone inside you

to become who you are today,

it isn't enough to be remembered, is it?

If you were gone

like a sudden southern wind,

if you dropped dead

in the middle of the day,

do you think

you could halt the traffic?

Would somebody step out of a cab

and gasp, "Shit!"

Would the city notice the absence of one more body?

Or would everyone simply go around you,

late for work, late for lunch,

late for something they would forget by evening?

If the world didn't stop to notice your life

and doesn't stop to witness your death,

what exactly were you doing here?

The temperature inside your body changes.

Your neck stiffens.

Your head feels giddy.

Flashes of scorching heat

trade places across your skin.

It is a pleasant night outside,

and yet you are sweating

like a smouldering afternoon.

You wish wishes were true,

so you could have a disappearing wish,

if not a death wish,

because apparently even wishing death

has been another thing you've managed to fail at.

You've spent a life trying not to be ashamed.

Trying to outrun

the things you've done, the things you haven't done,

the person you became, the person you didn't.

Trying to hide from every mirror, 

every memory, every comparison,

every version of yourself

that knew exactly what you had failed to become.

What a shame.

You've spent a life trying not to get caught

in its game of hide-and-seek,

when shame has been breathing

the same air your shadow's been

all along.

Mumbles Of Meaning

We have decided

the butterfly means something.

Of course we have.

Give a human being

anything that exists

without requiring our permission

and within minutes

we will put a metaphor on it.

The butterfly must mean transformation.

The bee must mean perseverance.

The lotus must mean purity.

The crow must mean death.

A crow! 

It was just looking for breakfast.

We decided it must be an omen.

This is what we do.

We cannot leave anything

alone long enough

to remain itself.

A flower cannot simply be a flower.

It must represent innocence

before we pluck it,

put it in a vase, watch it die,

and call the arrangement beautiful.

A tree cannot simply grow.

It must represent resilience.

Especially if it is growing

through concrete,

because apparently

photosynthesis becomes inspirational

the moment civilisation tries to kill it.

We adore resilience.

It makes oppression look like character development.

The butterfly is particularly useful.

It crawls into a disgusting little sack

of its own dissolved organs

and emerges with wings,

so naturally we decided 

suffering is the admission fee for becoming beautiful.

The butterfly has no idea.

It is busy looking for nectar.

It has never heard of your healing journey.

It did not emerge from the cocoon

to become the person you were always meant to be.

It emerged because that is what butterflies do.

Honestly, the arrogance! 

Imagine being a butterfly and discovering 

that some bald ape has written twelve thousand words

about what your metamorphosis taught him about himself.

You were eating.

He was having a breakthrough.

The bee is worse.

We have made tattle tales out of it.

Hardworking.

Disciplined.

Selfless.

Productive.

In short, everything your parents wanted you to be and your paychecks needed you to be.

The bee has no fucking idea

it is the poster child

for adulting and corporate resilience.

It is simply collecting pollen.

It will die doing it.

We call that dedication.

If a human does the same thing

we call it burnout

and sell him a wellness retreat.

The flower doesn't care either.

It doesn't care that poets

have compared it to women.

It doesn't care that painters

spent centuries trying

to get its colour right. 

It doesn't care that somebody

once received a bouquet

and finally understood

what love was.

The flower was trying to reproduce.

You were trying to get laid.

Only one of you needed the metaphor.

Then there is the sunset.

Holy shit!

We have done terrible things to the sunset.

We have made it hope.

Closure.

New beginnings.

Goodbyes.

Second chances.

A reminder that even endings can be beautiful.

The sun, meanwhile,

is undergoing a nuclear reaction.

It is not saying goodbye.

It is not forgiving you.

It is not closing a chapter.

It is burning.

It has been burning for billions of years.

Without a single fucking opinion about your breakup.

And yet,

we stand beneath it

with tears in our eyes

and have the ravishing audacity to say,

"Maybe everything happens for a reason."

No.

Maybe the sun is just a ball of violently collapsing plasma.

Maybe the bird is just hungry.

Maybe the tree is just ageing.

Maybe the river is just going downhill.

Maybe the butterfly is just trying to find a flower.

Maybe the flower is just trying to fuck.

Maybe the bee is just trying not to die.

Maybe none of them are trying to tell you anything.

Maybe they don't even know you exist.

And that should be the most liberating thing we have ever heard.

But we can't have that.

Because 

if the butterfly doesn't mean transformation,

then what does your transformation mean?

If the river

isn't teaching you to let go,

then who exactly

is going to validate your letting go?

If the dead bird isn't a sign,

perhaps death doesn't need to teach you anything.

And if the sunset isn't beautiful

because it reminds you of something,

then perhaps beauty was never the point.

Perhaps the universe has never been speaking to us.

Perhaps it has been doing something far more insulting.

It has been existing.

Without symbolism.

Without sentiment.

Without a fucking audience.

And we,

unable to bear the possibility

that something can exist without needing us,

have spent thousands of years

turning everything around us into a mirror.

Then we looked into the mirror,

saw ourselves,

and called it God.

Dare I Question The Patron Saints

How dare you question a dead woman?

Have some decency.

She's already dead.

Can't you see she has suffered enough?

Besides, we've finished improving her.

The woman was complicated.

Disgusting, really.

She had contradictions.

Existential dysfunctionalities.

Barometric fluctuations of headspace pulled at the poles between serotonin and cortisol.

Children.

She had children.

A kitchen.

And, a life that refused to behave like a feminist literature seminar.

So naturally, we killed the woman and kept the name.

That's just so much easier.

The corpse doesn't ask for royalties.

The corpse doesn't say, "actually, that's not what I meant".

The corpse doesn't object when you put a flag where the diagnosis used to be.

And suddenly,

miracle of miracles, 

suicide becomes empowerment.

Despair becomes resistance.

A breakdown becomes a declaration of rebellion.

A tragedy gets an inspiring backstory.

A nervous system gets a political affiliation.

The dead are very progressive that way.

They never contradict the people speaking on their behalf.

But there were children. Two infants. In another room.

And this is where the poetry gets awkward.

Because if the gas had spread,

if the fire had started,

if the accident had become what accidents occasionally become, 

the literary canon might have had two additional corpses to turn into metaphors.

What a relief that literature got lucky.

Apparently luck is now a feminist virtue.

Don't misunderstand me. Or actually do. 

But don't miss the fishbone in the throat.

The poems can be brilliant.

In fact, let them be brilliant.

That's the fucking point.

I don't need the poet to be a saint to read a poem.

I don't need Shakespeare's moral clearance before reading Shakespeare.

I don't need a poet's childhood, marriage, politics, sins, saints, sins against saints, or parking history

stapled to the back of every metaphor.

A poem isn't a character reference.

A metaphor doesn't inherit its mother's criminal record. Or its father's.

Art is not a family court.

But apparently

we've decided the artist and the art must be Siamese twins.

So when the artist does something you in your deluded godliness deem unforgivable, 

cut the poem in half.

When the artist is clinically insane, 

medicate the metaphor.

When the artist is politically inconvenient, 

ban the stanza, because burning was never enough.

When the artist is useful to your politics, 

quick, somebody laminate the corpse.

This is not criticism.

This is taxidermy with a reading list.

And feminism, 

dear God, 

feminism has become

the world's most convenient laundering service.

Put anything through it long enough

and apparently it comes out empowered.

Victimhood? Empowered.

Despair? Empowered.

Self-destruction? Empowered.

Abandoning infants while constructing a potentially lethal environment?

Careful.

That's not a sentence we like in the brochure.

Please say “act of rebellion” and keep walking.

The really delicious part is that 

you cannot question any of this.

Because she is dead.

Which apparently means

she has been promoted

from human being to constitutional amendment.

You may not dissent.

You may interpret.

You may adore.

You may write three thousand words about her courage.

But question?

Absolutely not.

How dare you question a dead woman?

She cannot defend herself.

Which is precisely why everyone has decided to use her like mascara:

apply when politically convenient, 

wipe off when the argument ends.

We do this constantly.

We find a dead person who suffered beautifully and immediately ask:

What can we make this suffering mean?

Not, 

what happened

to this person?

Not,

what was wrong?

Not,

what could we have

understood?

No.

Meaning first.

Human being later.

We don't want the corpse to teach us about human dysfunctionalities.

We want the corpse to teach us about our imagined brilliance.

Much more flattering.

So here's my heresy:

perhaps a woman can be brilliant and broken.

Perhaps a poet can write masterpieces and commit acts sanity cannot forgive.

Perhaps damage is not automatically empowerment just because the patient wrote beautifully about it.

Perhaps feminism doesn't require a woman to become a saint, and a man, a sinner.

Perhaps the dead don't become morally immaculate simply because their funerals are over.

And perhaps, 

brace yourselves, 

a poem can survive its poet.

Apparently this is now radical politics.

So bury the woman if you must.

Canonise her. Weaponise her.

Turn her into a feminist warrior, a tragic heroine, 

a patron saint of every argument that needs a dead woman to stop answering back.

But leave the poems alone.

They did nothing.

And if you insist that the poet's sins must contaminate the poetry,

fine.

Be consistent.

Start burning the entire canon.

I'll bring matches.

You bring the hypocrisy.

Martyrs Make Memorable Merchandise

In a country that never stopped learning

the ethics of slavery,

we call what was once survival

ambition.

There is more opinion than education,

and yet we wonder

why governments keep failing us.

We wail about a dying democracy

because it no longer benefits us

befittingly enough,

and for the self-proclaimed elites,

the crème de la crème,

that is apparently worth waging wars over.

We work for people

who work for people

who work for people,

for a monthly allowance

we dare to call financial freedom,

then scream our lungs out

in dim-lit bars

about equality being our birthright

and hierarchy

a capitalist conspiracy.

We live capitalist lives

while preaching everything but capitalism,

and depending on which side

of the fallacy you're standing on:

religion as an act of faith

or intellect as its currency, 

you're either the right

or the left.

However much you plead otherwise,

the choice was made

before you arrived.

The left insists on being called intellectual

while abhorring labels,

identities, definitions,

and every other grammar

that becomes inconvenient that day.

The right is rather keener

on taking your food,

your land,

your tongue,

your faith,

and eventually

your definition of a life worth living.

The difference is simple:

the right is united

in its uncouthness,

its barbarism,

its certainty;

the left 

can never seem to agree

on what is left

and what is not.

And yet,

for the better part of the last half-decade,

both have had

a common currency.

Umar Khalid.

The left pulls him out of the hat

like a rabbit

whenever it needs to win an argument

against the left.

I know you were expecting

left against right,

but the right doesn't believe

in conversations

that aren't monologues.

The right reserves him

for another purpose:

a cautionary tale

for anyone who mistakes

a democracy

for permission to question the government.

I'm not going to waste words

cataloguing the right's failures:

the ever falling rupee,

the whenever falling bridges,

and the never-falling appetite

for trading people

for cheaper than cows.

But then, mothers have always sold

greater stakes than children

in this country,

haven't they?

But Umar Khalid

isn't really about Umar Khalid.

The left uses him

the way Umar Khalid wishes

he could use a get-out-of-jail card:

whenever,

wherever,

against whosoever.

It lays siege to his name

as though it owns him,

then comes out wearing his face

on fabric,

linen,

paper,

plastic.

But 

Umar Khalid refuses

to remain symbolic.

Because how long

can you defend an idea

without knowing

the skin of it?

So the argument moves.

From him

to Kashmir.

From Kashmir

to Gaza.

From Gaza

to Jews.

And the farther it travels

from the country

that produced the argument,

the louder the confidence becomes.

Because opinions are important.

Context is negotiable.

And staying out of jail

is non-negotiable.

Perhaps that is the great joke

of our politics:

the right turns people

into warnings,

the left turns them

into arguments,

and both forget

that people are neither.

If intellect were currency,

the left would have Umar Khalid

on the rupee.

Because that is the only way

we seem to know

how to value a revolution:

by printing them

on the side

we have already chosen.

Escape Velocity

They thought I would be an easy kill;

break my bones, leave me for dead,

let time do the rest,

and I’d become one more of their hunting tales.

When I stood back up,

they went into hiding, mistook escape for safe passage.

They thought this was a hiccup they were over with.

They’re about to realise it was harakiri.

It won’t end in death; death is mercy.

It’ll end with them

becoming a story nobody remembers telling.

Muscle Memory

My father stopped shouting when I was seventeen.

Not gradually, like he stopped smoking. No.

One day, the house simply became quiet.

No slammed doors.

No footsteps approaching like a verdict.

No voice turning my name into something I had to survive.

For years afterward, I thought I was fine.

I became good at reading rooms.

A pause meant anger.

A sigh meant disappointment.

A door closing meant someone was leaving.

I called it awareness.

People called it maturity.

Then, one evening, the woman I loved said,

“Can we talk?”

Three harmless words.

My body heard something else.

My jaw tightened.

My heart accelerated.

I began explaining myself before she had accused me of anything.

She hadn't even finished sitting down.

She stared at me, “What are you doing?”

I didn't know.

So I went home and looked it up.

There is a word in physics: hysteresis.

It describes what happens

when a system changes because of a force,

and keeps behaving differently

even after the force ceases to exist.

The system remembers what happened to it.

I read that again.

Then again.

Because my father hadn't shouted at me in years.

He wasn't in the room.

He hadn't even been the subject of the conversation.

And still, some part of me was bracing for him.

I had not carried my father's anger into adulthood.

I had carried the version of myself his anger required.

The child who listened for footsteps.

The teenager who rehearsed every sentence before speaking.

The adult who left first so nobody could leave him.

I had mistaken adaptation for identity.

I called myself cautious because fear had made me careful.

I called myself independent because needing people had once been dangerous.

I called silence peace because I had forgotten

how to hear it without waiting for what came next.

And maybe that is the cruelest thing about surviving something:

survival doesn't always know when the predicament ends.

The danger leaves. The body doesn't.

The person disappears. The reflex stays.

Years can pass

and some old version of you

can still be standing at the door,

waiting for footsteps.

So I called her.

I told her, “I wasn't answering you.

I was answering someone who isn't here.”

She was quiet.

For once, I didn't mistake the silence for danger.

I just stayed.

My father stopped shouting when I was seventeen.

It took me years to understand that the hardest part wasn't surviving the noise.

It was learning that quiet wasn't waiting to become loud.

The Birth Of An Optical Illusion

Imagine this.

There’s a woman somewhere,

a woman you know.

Imagine her going about her day

when a man meddles,

decides they should have a conversation,

and she obliges

in the way her parents taught her

was respectable.

The man says he loves conversation.

He doesn't.

He loves monologue

with an audience.

Anything beyond agreement

is noise,

unless it arrives

as submitted obedience

to his extravagant opinions.

He doesn't like questions.

Questions about his opinions.

Questions about his lived experience.

Questions about the roads

he travelled

to arrive at his conclusions.

He doesn't like them.

Not one bit.

So every time there is a question,

he misdirects.

The woman,

meanwhile,

had grown up learning

to respect herself

and her sanity.

Obedience wasn't her bread.

Submission wasn't her breadcrumb.

So she did

what any rational person,

any objectively sane person,

might do.

She disagreed.

Respectfully.

And left.

The man had a fragile ego.

And what kind of world is it

where a man finally has to make peace

with an injured narcissism?

So he ganged up.

He brought his brothers.

A brotherhood of men

with no jobs,

only jabs.

And boy,

did they swing.

They ripped through her dress,

her skin,

her flesh,

her bonework,

but never touched her.

They weren't uncivilised savages,

you see.

They did it all with words.

Wild accusations.

Filthy rumours.

Rotten verdicts.

All because

she had decided

she could afford

an opinion of her own.

They called everyone who knew her.

Everyone they could.

And they didn't stop

until voices began

hollowing into echoes.

They came at her

day and night,

through monsoon,

winter,

summer,

for months,

until months became a year,

and a year became more,

until there was nothing left

of the bricks in her name.

She was alive.

And yet

buried six feet under.

Then one day,

when she had had enough,

she dragged them all

into a courtroom.

And the men cried

like a pack of sheep

in front of a wolf

whose shepherd had gone.

People gathered.

Watched the circus.

Then returned to their lives,

leaving behind

the usual unsolicited opinions:

“She’s making a mountain

out of a molehill.”

“She’s equally to blame.”

“Why couldn't she just apologise

for hurting their feelings

and move on?”

Does it infuriate you?

The audacity

of unscrupulous people

peddling justice

like pocket change.

Now imagine

the woman were a man.

And the men

were women.

Does it still infuriate you?

If it does,

good.

If it doesn't,

then perhaps

what you called justice

was only projection.

And what you called feminism

was only loyalty

to the side you recognised yourself on.

You can sit there

with tense anuses

and worked-up sinuses

beneath those stoic faces.

Remember,

I can see you.

Every one of you.

And you,

you are why

justice so often

begins to feel like vendetta.

You are no feminist.

You aren't even humanitarian.

You're as much a feminist

as Genghis Khan

was a prophet of peace.

Math Of The Many (Alternative Ending)

Do you remember LCM

from when mathematics was just another subject at school,

and not a currency of your existence?

LCM.

Lowest Common Multiple.

We grew up.

Our mathematics didn't.

We still flock together,

call ourselves community, society, cult, religion, civilization;

names for the same old arithmetic.

An assembly of LCMs,

each pretending the whole

must mean something more than the parts.

With HCF

as their selling proposition.

HCF.

Highest Common Factor.

Or, as the LCMs call it,

ambition.

They spend their lives

calling themselves prime numbers,

waiting for someone else to agree.

Not because they believe they are, 

but because lies need lamination.

Gloss and glitter

are the oldest misdirection

truth has ever had.

Every now and then,

a prime number turns up.

And the LCMs feel it.

The HCFs tremble.

Because if a prime number

is recognised for what it is,

who would bother

mistaking an LCM for one?

So much for faith.

So much for creed.

So much for civilization.

Nothing

but basic mathematics.

And before anyone gets the wind of it,

the LCMs, armed with their HCFs,

line up to take the primes out of their way.

Because what is death by numbers

if not

the habitual repetition

of normalcy?

In a world ruled by HCFs,

LCMs are prime and non-prime,

the rule and the exception;

prime numbers, a conspiracy.