Category: Poetry

Couldn’t find the time.

For the longest time,
Just haven’t had the time.

It’s funny, isn’t it?
Biding your time.

Being so occupied
that you haven’t had the time
to realize

That you’re buying time.
Not creating it.

Yesterday, I heard that
we’re out of time.

---

Humare paas waqt nahi hai / हमारे पास वक़्त नहीं है।*

*(More of a transcreation than a translation)

He wants me to feel at home. And suddenly, he himself does not.

He has looked into my eyes, and is reminded of that which neither died nor lived.
Stumped by the ‘0’ when he tried calculating the rate of depreciation for his feelings.

I know I upset him when I step back from the edge. I mean no harm. I just don’t share this fascination with staring down deep wells.
He has come to find the view thrilling. He can say, with some certainty, that he will never fall. Never slip.

For me, he relinquishes his favourite chair, before wrapping a shawl around his shoulders. In anticipation of catching something from watching the sunset on my hair.

We’ve never agreed on where this goes. We’ve never discussed it, in fact.

There are no milestones in the garden.
Whenever we meet, we enjoy walking together.

People stop to look at flowers.
They take pictures of the full moon.
There’s solace in witnessing these things,
even as
you will pick flowers for them no more,
and for whatever reason,
you will not exchange such pictures.

It’s funny how people using earbuds
sometimes look like they are talking to themselves.
And for a moment, you take solace in the fact,
that you might not be the only one going insane.

But then you remember,
they will never again be the phone call you wait for.
Or the face seeking yours in a crowded station.

Maybe now, you count your days in escitalopram tablets.
And struggle to recall
the last time you did not dress up
in the bubble wrap of sarcasm.
Or
the last time that you did not cite
your freedom to move,
your duty to move,
necessity even.

Home?
Home was the time you managed to stay,
afforded to stop,
were not compelled to flee.
Some hands were home.
Home was everything you did not bring along
but wanted to the most.

Home are the people ruining your pictures by not being in them.

It arrives,

as a gaze falling on your face, unfamiliar, for the last time.

It lives,

carving out dreams within the words of a rhyme.

It leaves,

with an ageing gait on a frosty morning.

And dies,

mostly off stage and without a warning.

Nostalgia is a luxury purchased on short train journeys.

Regrets and complaints cost a third.

Hope, meanwhile, is infinitely undetermined,

Since, in some languages, hello and goodbye are the same word.

Shaam ka rang
bahot pasand hai mujhe,
Paanch baje ke baad
Apni zindagi wapas milne ke ehsaas se
Aap kabhi bore nahi ho sakte.

Us raat ko, Keylong mein,
Har pahaad par alag alag kism ka neela rang tha.
Humne kab tak baith kar dekha hoga un pahaadon ko?
Aur log kehte hain ki jawani adheer hoti hai.

Wo shaam hi to thi,
Jisme gum gaye tum.
Us raat, andhere mein,
Tumhari taxi bahot dur nikal gayi.

Har wo shaqs jo aaj nahi hai,
Har wo vikalp jo sach ho sakta tha,
Har wo baat jo nahi kahi gayi,
Roz raat ki syaahi ban jaati hai.
Thodi bahot to haath par bhi lag jaati hai.
Galti se.

Aaj kal to din dhalte hi
Parde laga deti hu main.
Dhalte suraj se milna
Mujhe khaas pasand nahi.

Khair, rehne do.
Tum batao,
Tumhare wahan
Shaam ho gayi kya?

---

I’m rather fond of the colour of the evening.
The feeling of reclaiming your life after 5 pm can never bore you.

That night, in Keylong,
Every mountain bore a different shade of blue.
How long did we sit and watch those mountains?
And people say that youth is restless.

I remember you dissolving into the evening.
Your taxi making its way into the dark night.

Every person who isn’t here today,
Every possibility that could have been reality,
Every word that was left unsaid,
Turns into the ink of the night.
Some of it even stains my hands.
By mistake.

These days, I draw the curtains
as soon as the day fades.
I don’t particularly like
meeting the setting sun.

Anyway, let it be.
You tell me,
Is it evening where you are?

March is for magnolias.
The water at Port Meadow ambles in my favourite colour once again.
First conversations and last hugs.
And such naïve convictions about falling in love.

A women’s history month here, a mother’s day there.
And a global lockdown, which should be over,
any day now.

One March, your father shared your baby pictures with me.
There’s another with large kites flying on a beach. But I don’t recall who sent it.

Words flow out of me in verses
or not at all.
Like spring, a stubbornness
to begin with flowers.
By then,
the tragedy is so ornate
that these might as well have been another’s tears.

March is for beginnings.
And certainly, for endings.

---

Have you recited Faiz in bed?
In lieu of letting someone be the wind beneath your wings?
Love is a ballroom dance and I must check those wings at the cloak room.
We might climb the stairs hand in hand,
But your fall will be yours,
As will the shattering of my spine.

Have you recited Faiz in bed?
In the hope that someone might just prove you wrong.
Or prove you right,
So that you might,
Recite Faiz in bed again.

---

2023/VDS

---

U left my colors.
And s was kicked out of romanticizing.
I recall love songs from a time
before 9/11 broke America’s heart.
In that archive,
remember to put mm before dd.
Even as we’ve waited years
for the permission to exhale.

Tiny hands bleeding on barbed wires.
Purple flowers next to mounds of cement.
Sliding down large, shiny boulders.
Making memories: the realization that life
moves in one direction,
and one day, you might want to return to this, here.

Meanwhile,
How little I believe in the lyrics
that would fill my chest with yellow amaltas.
Can the present compete
with unfulfilled yesterdays
and cursed tomorrows?

Things get so tough
Fighting the undone and the done again.
Of course,
You have the right to remain silent,
The right to leave.
What if I want to speak?
What if I’d like to stay?

What I’d really like though,
is to sit down on a bench,
somewhere between all and nothing.
Because it’s spreading to the lungs,
This future we weren’t promised.
And there are no proverbs yet,
about apples that fall far from the tree.

---

21.03.2024/VDS

---

You went under.
The piece that did the remembering was anaesthetized.

Like, I can tell that those three standing together on the red line are a family
because they’re wearing the same brand of shoes. Converse.

I get tense wrong, a lot.
The more I am schooled in clean ends and beginnings,
The more viscously my mind rejects them.
I’m very aware that this doesn’t change the facts.
My feelings don’t count.
They don’t count.
Can’t be calculated; don’t tell a story; won’t fit a peer reviewed publication.

But I hope it comes back to you.
So that when you read me, you read you.
Because death anywhere is death everywhere.

For now, I boil oranges.
Simmer, really.
I can fill my lungs, fill this house with the fragrance.
Let it overpower the rose scented candle I bought and burned
because it’s Feb.

All things were poison. So we made the dose.
And I know it’s been a while
since the scream left your lips.
But it’s making its way back to you.
Will you let it find you?

---

20.02.2025/VDS

---

Come to me as orchids,
purple and blue.
Too good to be true.
As children who haven’t lost limbs yet.
And as adults who haven’t lost heart.

This may be the one time I disagree with Lorde.
These are the masters tools,
but it’s your hand that wields them.
Your sweat carving into the grooves.
Your fingerprints on those keyboards.
You can choose what you drink in the company KeepCup.

Do you remember when your goals began growing out of fear?
How did you learn to play hide and seek with power?
Who told you the world was yours to devour?

---

21.12.2024/VDS