Aww, baby

You say I wear my heart on my sleeve,
that I always love a little too much and a little too hard.
That’s why I get hurt so often, you say.
In my head, I vehemently disagree,
but when I am sitting with you,
I nod.
I have learnt that disagreeing
is the shortest route to resentment,
and I don’t want to hate you anymore than I already do.

My therapist says that I learnt staying quiet
during the years I spent at home with my parents
struggling to disappoint them less and please them more,
training myself—
to nod, say yes, practice, perform, outperform, win—
until I couldn’t do it anymore.
The first time I failed a test,
my father didn’t talk to me for three weeks,
and my mother looked at me
like I had just handed her a death sentence.
So I started focusing on being good
at everything they hated,
and being the absolute worst
at everything they wanted me to accomplish.

You see the pattern here, don’t you?
Each time I disagree, disobey, disappoint,
someone explodes.
And baby, I am so tired of cleaning up someone else’s mess.
So I would rather listen to you go on and on and on
about how you have got me all figured out,
and nod,
while I think about the best sex I have ever had
(and it wasn’t with you)
instead of saying “fuck off”.

You see the pattern here, don’t you?
After all, you have got me all figured out
after three dates and mediocre sex (twice)!
You should,
because I (“the girl who falls in love
every time someone is nice to her”) do.
So when you call me the next time,
asking for a fourth date,
I will cut the call, and block your number.
And trust me, baby,
you will see me flip you off
from your fancy flat in Hauz Khas or wherever,
and you could clean up your own mess,
afterwards.

– D

For the women named defiance

Pyaari Ruqsana,
You are going to remember these nights.
When you grow up,
you are going to tell the story of the winter
you did not go home for so long
that you had started to forget the colour
of the walls of the two-room apartment
Where you lived with your Ammi and Abbu,
and you will tell it so often, and so earnestly
that everyone who listens
will know how it feels to be born in broken country.
You will tell people that during the coldest winter
that Dilli had seen in decades,
you learnt the definition of warmth.

Ruqsana,
You will tell them that despite spending the nights
on the streets, sitting on the red and green carpets
rented from the tent-wallah,
you never went hungry.
You had just turned nine that winter.
The women sitting around you,
they exchanged smiles,
they exchanged words,
“Tabiyat kaisi hai tumhari? Kuchh Khaya?”
These women, who were portraits of concern.
were also portraits of defiance.
“We won’t move an inch from here,”
Said the women of Shaheen Bagh,
who will be written about in history,
for their resolve.
And you, Ruqsana, are a woman of Shaheen Bagh,
and will always be.

– D

I’m not a war veteran

Trigger Warning: Self-harm

A boy I had once loved used to tell me that
every breath we take should be a struggle,
so that when we died no one could say
that we didn’t fight.
He said every cigarette he ever smoked
was a mutiny against his life,
every night he spent alone in his room
was a reminder that the fact
that we didn’t ask to be here
didn’t matter,
that we were all stuck in this game called life
forever.
And we had infinite turns left before
someone could be declared a winner,
so everyday we must smile at strangers
and shake hands with our own demons,
remind ourselves that this pain is only a sign
that we are alive.
He was wrong.

Because every moment hundreds of kids
are picking up a blade for the first time,
and every scar they leave on their skin
will make sure that they never feel okay
stripping in front of a lover.
Every stranger they bring over after a drunken night
will always ask, “What happened?”
And they will never know the answer.
Because how do you tell someone you just met
that you realised at thirteen that this was the life
you weren’t supposed to live?
How do you tell them that
there’s not a story behind every cut,
that sometimes you hurt yourself
just because it was the only way
you could get through the day?

I once spent a night with a girl
with scars in the same places as me,
and we shared silences the size of epiphanies
because neither of us knew what to say.
It was as if we were waiting
for Archimedes to say eureka in his grave
because we had found two pieces of a puzzle
that no one else needed.
If that night had lasted forever
we’d have had no regrets
because as far as our stories go,
that was all we needed to be.
We both refused to keep the lights on
as we made love,
our hands searched for SOS messages
on each other’s skin,
we both knew where to look.
She told me she had once slapped a boy
who had called her cuts battle scars,
for she thought it was unfair that
we were foot soldiers in a war
that other people had privilege to not see.

I never saw her after that night,
but despite being an atheist I say her name
like a prayer every morning,
because I know that she’s somewhere out there,
and this fight — we are in it together.

So everytime someone tells me that
we need to be in pain to feel alive,
I call bullshit on it.
Don’t tell me that we’d have smiled less often
if we didn’t have wounds to nurse,
that our lives would have had no meaning
if they weren’t defined by the scars
that on the best days we call mistakes
and on the worst days,
our identity.
Our scars aren’t love poems etched on our skin
for the world to see,
and you smoking a cigarette
and calling it mutiny
will never be the equivalent of a ten-year-old
locking himself in a room
and cutting open his skin with a paper knife,
because he believed that was his destiny.

So, come here,
put on these shoes and walk a mile.
I dare you to then look at me with a smile,
and tell me that you want your life to be a fight.

– D

For Maa

Maa often tells baba,
“I hope you die before I do.”
He says nothing.

Baba knows how to cook
enough food to feed a village,
he knows how to wash clothes,
wring them dry,
and hang them neatly
with pastel-coloured alligator clips.
He knows how to clean under the beds,
how to dust the armchair, the curtains,
the unreachable corners on the top of the bookshelves.
He knows how to do everything,
almost.
The only thing baba doesn’t know,
is how to live without a woman.

Maa says that she grew up learning
how to take care of men.
She says her mother taught her that
men will never admit that they need us.
And yet, they will sulk
behind their newspapers in the verandah
if we forgot the fact.

Maa says men are stubborn.
I tell her, we are stubborner.
We refuse to put down the burden of duties
that a man decided hundreds of years ago
were suitable for us.
We refuse to look in the mirror
and see just ourselves.
We are convinced
that the fact that men need us
is the reason we need men,
that being needed is the only reason
to be alive.

When I tell maa
that I will never get married,
she wonders who will take care of me.
I inquire if she means to ask
who will I take care of?
She says I’ve been reading too much.
Every word I say to her after that,
she takes it like a rebellion,
she says that knowing too much
isn’t good for us.

My throat gargles up words
I want to tell her that there’s power in defiance.
Instead, I tell her I’ve become the woman
she had always wanted me to be.
I tell her that every time she said
that she hoped my life
turns out to be better than hers,
she was telling me to learn from her mistakes,
and I did.
Without knowing,
she had taught me to defy with my every breath.
I tell her,
Thank you.

– D

Yaad nahin hai?

“Yaad nahin hai kya kiya thha unn haramzadon ne
Kashmiri panditon ke saath?”
My neighbour says.
He says they have had it a long time coming.

My voice box crumbles before I can answer,
and I feel myself choking on the pieces,
with anger.

“Uncle, suniye,”
I try to say,
I try to ask him the definition of loktantra.
Democracy.

“Uncle, Wikipedia ko toh Bhagvat Gita maante honge aap?”
He doesn’t understand the sarcasm, frowns.
“Wikipedia says,
‘The Hindus of the Kashmir Valley were forced
to flee the Kashmir valley as a result of being
targeted by Islamist insurgents,’
Samjhe uncle?
Islamist insurgents.
Individuals.

Uncle,
your political science degree from Hindu College,
hangs framed in your drawing room,
you must know the difference between
the individual and the State?

Sarkar maar rahi hai unhe, Uncle.
Ten years later,
when you’ll hear your grandchildren say,
“Yaad nahin hai kya kiya thha unn haramzadon ne
Kashmir ke saath, desh ke saath?”
Will you stay silent?
Or are you already raising them to be too scared
to ask questions,
Uncle?

– D

On bleeding

The women in my family
Talk in hushed whispers behind closed doors.
The secrets are smuggled in,
The struggles go unnoticed by men.
But it’s okay,
The men are the breadwinners
The caretakers,
The moneymakers,
They are busy.
They have the right to not notice,
They have the right to forget the lessons
They learnt in highschool biology,
The right to forget
That women bleed every month.
And it hurts.

The walls have ears.
The first time my cousin bled,
My mother filled a plastic bottle with warm water
And took it to my chachi’s room.
The bottle was pressed against my cousin’s stomach
And she was asked to not scream even if it hurt too much.
She was eleven,
They took away her right to feel pain.

My mother never taught me how to protest.
She taught me about endurance,
She taught me how to hide.
I learnt to stay in the classroom
Waiting for everyone else to leave before I did,
I was scared of being seen.

I often found myself staring at my reflection
In the broken mirror in the second-floor washroom of my school.
I stared at my face scrunch up
As the pain in my stomach made me want to scream.
But I remembered,
I was supposed to hide.

The women in my family laugh together,
Cry together, hurt together.
I sometimes feel like they have locked themselves
In an invisible glass room
That they don’t know how to escape from.
The men observe from a distance,
But cannot enter.

Someday,
I will pick up a rock and smash the glass walls,
I will help them escape.
Someday, when I have the courage.
But right now,
I am trying to teach myself to scream at the top of my lungs
When I hurt,
I am trying to teach myself to not be ashamed,
Of my pain.

– D

Make a wish

I’m sorry
If my voice sometimes feels like
Shards of glass against your eardrums
Believe me
I was forged with honey and wine
And the blood in my veins is bittersweet
Like the taste of your ex-lover’s kisses
Left in your mouth
I wasn’t built to hurt
But my words sometimes feel like shrapnel
And my tongue bleeds as I feel you shudder
Against me

One day
I had an epiphany that the cacophony around
Is going to drown us
So I asked you to build a bunker with unopened notebooks
Where we could hide forever
Between the lines
You have a problem with unsaid words
And I had been deafened by silence so long ago
That I sometimes forget how to speak

It’s strange
How we manage to co-exist in same universe
Strange how the world doesn’t burst into flames
Every time our lips meet
You have been kissed before
And I have been kissed before
And we both never knew that affection
Could hurt so much
Like we are both trapped in our utopia
And the walls are closing in
Against our flesh

So build me that bunker
Hide me between the folds of your skin
Like a pressed flower
And when my lips refuse to move
Gnaw at my flesh like it’s your dying wish to hear me speak
Even if my words pierce your eardrums
Like shards of glass
Even if you bleed
Even if I bleed
Love me like you’re dying
And I am dying
And we’ll never again
Be in love

– D

For farmers

 

They say
That if you starve yourself for long enough
You forget what the word food looks like,
Forget the way in which your lips gently come together, barely touching,
Forget the cold gush of air that glides over your chafed skin
When you say the word.
Your taste buds retire
And find themselves homes on rusty cots
In abandoned old age homes.
Your teeth decay, vanish, like they were never there,
Your body heaves with the burden of every breath you take,
Death takes birth inside you
And spreads its wings like a phoenix.

A field of crops rot in a corner of the country
They don’t teach us about in highschool geography.
The man, the woman who had sown the seeds
Sit inside a dark room and scribble on a paper,
Their vocabulary somehow doesn’t seem vast enough
To write a suicide note.

In another corner of the country,
A farmer rummages through the cowshed,
Trying to find the strongest rope he owns.
His son, six years old,
Sits in the backyard and tries to learn the alphabet in candlelight.
He is six, struggles to figure out the order in which
Letters come together to form a language,
But knows that the crop that his father grows doesn’t feed the family,
Knows that there is something called money,
That kills the hunger that his stomach grumbles with,
But they don’t have any.
He wakes up fatherless next morning,
His mother stops him from entering the bedroom,
Pulls him to her chest, and weeps.

Pangs of hunger do not stop the men and women
Who walk barefooted on the streets across the country in sweltering heat,
They chant slogans of protest, of defiance,
For the ones who have died, for the ones who are dying,
They chant in anger,
For their right to live.
They are the farmers, they feed,
They chant for their right to not starve to death.

Somewhere far away,
A minister’s throne trembles.

– D

The war – ii

I’m twenty-one.
I’m too young to remember the Kargil war,
But old enough to know the definition
Of violence.
Old enough to know that there’s a country, and a religion,
That we are supposed to hate.

I met Ali on Facebook.
We bonded over the fact that our cats are the same colour,
Over our shared love of food,
And over our mutual hatred of the fact
That our countries will never allow us
To visit each other.

He sends me pictures of the streets of Lahore,
I show him Dilli, the city that has my heart.
And believe me, on some strange nights,
They look the same.

I met Auwn in a different country,
For we could have never met in India or Pakistan.
I met Auwn in Nepal.
And I met Rehana.
We spoke the same language,
Knew the lyrics to the same Bollywood songs,
Had the same Coke Studio episodes
On our YouTube playlists.
We lived in two countries,
That were once one.

So when on television channels,
They ask us to hate the lives that are lived
On the other the side of the border,
It confuses me.
They are the same as us.
They didn’t draw the Radcliffe line,
Neither did we.
No one asked us which side of the border
We wanted to live on.

They say there’s a war going on,
And we have to pick a side.
They do not ask us if we want to fight.

– D

The war – i

A ladybird came and sat on my bed today.
It’s red wings with black polka dots fluttered,
Like a bleeding body covered with bullet wounds.

Hundreds of thousands of people chant war cries
Sitting in front of the television in their living rooms.
The anchors on television channels explain
The definition of revenge.

My mother tells me that she was five years old in 1971.
She tells me that her mother finished cooking dinner
By four in the evening,
That their family of eight ate their dinner in candle light.
She says that their entire neighbourhood could have vanished
If they forgot to turn their lights off.
She says it’s the closest she has ever felt to death.

My father was eleven.
He tells me about how they covered all the windows with newspapers,
And how no one ever stepped out of their homes after six.

I wonder what the homeless did.
I wonder where they hid, or if the value of their lives
Was lesser than the others because they were poor.

My parents are old.
They say that if there’s a war,
They hope it never reaches the streets of Dilli,
And if it does, they hope we all die together.

On social media,
There are viral videos,
Some of them are real, most of them are not.
I know how to read three languages,
And I’ve learned that the people speaking them
All have the same definition of violence.
They want bloodshed,
Not enough to flood the roads outside their homes,
But enough to make sure that the country doesn’t lose.

The soldiers, when they signed up for their jobs,
Knew that they might have to die for their country,
And they do.

On TV screens,
Political leaders congratulate each other as spectators clap,
And they smirk at each other
Like this was all a part of some big scheme,
And maybe it is.

But there are people from our country dying,
And even though we claim to be heartbroken,
We lose the right to mourn their deaths
The moment we start celebrating loss of life
On the other side of the border.

– D