I am just a touch away from dissolving

A little nudge, a little tug at the hem of my shirt,

perhaps a handshake that turns into a hug, or just a small confession at the altar of my heart.

There are not enough gods who aren’t hungry,

So carry me in your frail arms and feed me to them, like an offering/apology 

I, for once, want to be desired even if it means death.

Look at my eyes, see for yourself that there aren’t enough traces left by memorable laughter that can convince me into staying

But here I am,

Still surviving like a Beatles’ song, or perhaps a school prayer 

Where the voices of other save you from your own.

I want to be saved like a flower on the sidewalk

But these fragments of longing, worn fibres of an old blanket which smell like past, are too visible to hide

So I pull them apart, one by one

Until the cold eats me, winter never ends for people who know burning as love

And there aren’t enough rivers to carry the ashes,

Not enough people who know that the only thing separating water and us is the ability to come back home.

Yellow gaze of the setting sun

Reminds me of the days

When the flowers wouldn’t droop at the sight of me

I wonder if happiness is all glammed up

In the little corner of my heart

Waiting for the train to arrive

And take her farther from this lonely world 

Glimmering sunflowers

And setting sun 

Teal blue sky

And violet eyes

Is it too much to ask for beauty?

I wonder if things when left alone

Come back together like a lost cat to its home

It’s still feral

This need to be happy 

But tell me a sober way 

Where I don’t run away

From striking realities

Steel countenance of a monotonous life

I am afraid if I wait long enough

I might fade into nothingness

Empty cans and unread books

Vacant roads leading nowhere 

Is it enough if dreams remain distant 

Ghost of memories haunting at dusk

And me wondering  things if touched become real

Everything sleeps to the lullaby of silent sky

The flowers

The birds

The pages of a half-read book

And the girl who wonders about her place in this sinful world 

Everything eventually comes to an end 

The colourful skies

The lonely birdling

The pigmented dreams 

The rebellious blue moon 

And me, entranced and sad

Like the little star falling and fulfilling wishes

Sometimes I look at the regrets of my mother trailing along the corners of her eyes

As she wonders about her place in the world too often

There is no secret to motherhood, I suppose

Just a constant feeling of doing it wrong

My father consoles her, calls her beloved 

A sincere way of reminding her of their own vows

Yet when she wakes up at night, feeling the clutches of past on her throat, she simply lets him sleep without saying a single word

I believe it is when a relationship turns into partnership as time moves along the edges of their bodies,

Sometimes becoming a game, as they team up together, shake hands, pat each other's back, constantly reminding themselves about the love that blossomed years ago

This is how I see my mother, constantly juggling between motherhood and being a wife

On most of the days, this is all she can offer 

Yesterday when I read about the case where God was being sued for damaging a man’s house, he won it because God couldn’t/wouldn’t show up in courtroom

I want to do that too,

Charge him with the felony of breaking my mother’s hope too soon

Have that kind of justice which nobody speaks about

But it is when I remind myself that faith has no witnesses, and the act of dreaming is still not covered in the law books or what punishment is suffice when they are chased off, like cats when entering the house

My mother seldom prays and when she does, it is the symptom of her surfacing anxiety 

Every gurbaani I know is because some days my mother can’t remember the difference between faith and repentance 

She has shed more tears for what she didn’t do and no God has ever tried to tell her otherwise

But then I remind myself this is how prayers work,

To fold hands mean begging in some cultures

Last night I dreamt of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly

I could see its little face with dove eyes and tentacles like my mother’s embracing arms

Everything reminds me of her

But mostly this poking need to fly away

I see her angry and I see her calm

On the days when she doesn’t make a noise, I see her being both

And now when I am old enough to notice that mothers too wake up with sweat on their foreheads, racing heart or dizzy head

It becomes difficult to see her as just a mother and not a grieving woman in her forties, who once dreamt of travelling or buying sarees, have jewels or sit in Ferris wheels

I sometimes forget that mothers too carry their mother’s longing, or a young girl’s little wish for freedom

Sometimes she tells me about the time when I was born, her first child

The mistakes she did, all the awkward ways she held me in her arms,

The stories she told to put me to sleep

Or the secrets she confessed when I couldn’t comprehend confession from noise

But time has grown over her body like vines

She wobbles sometimes, cries like a little child

Says words she doesn’t mean, 

Gets sad over a poem I write

Stops midway and asks me what claustrophobic means

Sometimes I offer her my lap to sleep on

And other days, frustration takes over her as she looks at me 

But I suppose this is how motherhood works

You bring a child in this world

And spend the rest of your life convincing yourself that you did the right thing

Sometimes we grow up to be women first than daughters

Our hands still young from the nostalgic childhood,

And heart ripe enough to be broken,

Our grandmothers constantly warn us of the homes waiting for us, 

Their kitchens empty, like forlorn lovers, waiting to be touched by the hands of a new bride

Our rage buried under the layers of skin,

The first lesson we learn is to be silent.

Mothers talk to us in language of past

Their wishes never excavated, they become the living fossils of rushed growth

Perhaps this is why when my mother tells me how much turmeric is good enough to add colour to the food,

She pauses for a while

Her countenance, a snapshot of fine lines of wrinkled time, folds itself into the size of her red bindi

I believe this is how we mimic our mothers

Layer by layer,

Unravelling our own skin, forming bridges between hearts of each other.

There is always a tussle between all that a daughter could be and what she has to become eventually 

And our mothers know it so well

They start conversing through sacrifices.

My mother and me never talk about how we really feel

But when we do find a chance,

We rather reminisce how weather reminds us that rain once meant freedom and not this urgency to take the clothes off the clothesline and rush inside home

My mother sometimes resent how I do not take seriously, this art of cooking food

Says, one day, the house will fall upon my shoulders like lightening striking at a tall tree that  doesn’t bend too much in storm

And I laugh

I say, “Mother you aren’t going anywhere”

She neither agrees nor refutes 

I fear she must have imagined a thousand times how to run away from this home

The thing about mothers is they never learn to say that they can choose themselves too without adding the “buts”

Some days, I tell her all the useless facts about the world

How the dust on the windshield of our old Santro is nothing but dead stars’ remnants

Or if we look at our thumb, millions of neutrinos strike it at a given second

I tell her about gravitational waves and the bend in our space

And that the universe smells like gunpowder or burnt almond cookies

To which she casually replies, “Perhaps it is the only way God learns to devour things he love; by burning them around the edges a little too much; it gives them a nice crunch, a proof of how when things end, they leave behind a sound”

She then reminds me how yesterday when I forgot to turn the gas off while boiling the milk,

The smell of burnt milk resided in the hand towels and the utensils

She laughs saying our home was universe too, we were closer to god than today, 

And then scolds me for not watching it, 

Tells me that the only way to cook good food is to let it simmer slowly, add salt only when the onion turns brown and gives away a shriek when water is added

As she consoles me that it is by practice that I will learn to know the difference between burning and cooking, 

She whispers while gazing at the television behind that the only way we women have forgiven the world is by not setting the kitchens on fire.

An empty room with photographs on the opposite wall

Is yet another way to say that past in unreachable 

But I sit there still

Looking out the blue window

Which makes grey skies look less miserable 

I keep the door open,

Wait for the only cat that visits me three times a day

And I stand by his side

Watching how he eats every last bit of roti dipped in milk

I think the only way I have ever known to stay inside this open prison of my body

Is by observing people, places and animals

My eyes fill with tears when I look at an abandoned cow

Waiting in the middle of the road

As if she wants to say, “Kill me! I won’t tell anyone, I promise I will make it look like an ignorant mistake.”

There are days when this world seems unbearably sad, not cruel

And my desperate need to caress it,

makes me look like a good person

When all I know is conversing through hands.

I know every act of kindness I have done 

Is just to tell myself that I deserve to be here

Isn’t it the purpose of goodness,

To give yourself a reason that you can go on in this world as if you have earned it

To immortalise what you could never put in words?

Isn’t it the only way this world talks back to you?

The thing with people like me is

We make it all about ourselves

Even if we cannot change what eats us alive

This is the only way to go about life

By believing that earth tilts just for us

Flowers bloom when they can’t speak 

Weather changes or how else will we console ourselves for being stagnant

Yet when I read about this fear of breaking into pieces

It makes me wonder

How our skin is malleable

The only way for our body to declare that we can be too much or too less

It all depends on how it is touched 

On the days when everything is too gentle

We dance rather than move, unconcerned about how our bones will twist

Or our muscles spasm

Perhaps love is the only way to dare

Being loved, a lot like mercy 

I keep reading about it

How it is associated with melancholy

And melancholy with “black bile”

How despair is a part of our body and not something outside 

How there was a dancer who feared his head would fall off his shoulder and break

Or a king who made clothes to protect himself from shattering 

But isn’t it all human?

This fear of breaking and dying?

This need for keeping ourselves whole and intact?

Isn’t it similar

When our hearts break

And we say we hear it’s sound 

Only if we think of it as vase or a mug

This need for being whole,

Even when the fibres in our body try everything to hold our bones together,

Has made us presume that only something  fragile leaves behind a sound

Or how else do we prove that we are hurt 

If not by carrying this disclaimer on our bodies that say “handle with care.”