I read from Ilya Kaminsky and Richard Siken more often than ever but sometimes, when the heart shuts its door to understand anything written in foreign, when all the words I know are in a shade of brown and olive green slipping down from the plant placed in my verandah, sometimes, when I hold pain in my sleeves, I read Faiz and Ghalib.
I dip my fingers in the ink pot of every writer I came across and drink their words one by one thinking someday I could feel the same. My knuckles shape themselves like those in old pictures and try to finish the sentences with fear, with every word except mine. To be a writer is to know but never do, similar to being a father.
As the lines under my eyes grow darker than the ones I sketch on paper, I know it is time for me to rethink; maybe if I try harder to be someone better, I can make at least one of these lines look pretty.
One plus one was ten when I was counting shells while playing at the sea; one plus one was one when I was studying science of fusions and reading Dostoevsky; one plus one was frightening because it is so simple yet I would draw straight lines on the paper and write eleven as the answer. Now that I have grown older, and written every possible wrong answer for this basic addition problem, the phone on the table rings and the voice yells at me ‘it’s wrong, it’s entirely, wrong’. I hang up the call and walk towards the mirror, standing in front of it, the reflection yells back — ‘it’s wrong, it’s entirely, wrong.’
That night, when the moon was neither gemini or cancer, it glimmered hot. The sky always loves you back, just like the roadside flowers which grew against the concrete’s will, just like every thing which was ceased to exist but lived otherwise. As the shift comes to an end, my blood too spills from my eyes, crying never on cue. A plant shivers when the wind brushes past it and I run my arms on its behalf, like somehow feeling everyone’s pain for them will lessen the total burden. Like the plant, I will too tear down someday by turning brown, like the plant in my verandah which people stopped watering; forgotten. That is when the moon whispers to me
Because you’re in a car with a beautiful boy and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you
means tu jo mil jae to taqdir nigun ho jae
Because dil na-umid to nahin nakam hi to hai
is like you swallow a bottle of sleeping pills but they don’t work.
