A Walk on Cake (Performative Poetry)

You curse my education.
"Gender Studies? It won't involve much.
You would have all the time in the world, right?
It's just a cake walk".

I listen.
Innumerable accounts of loss and pain and death and dearth
"Cake walk"

Sir, Ma'am, if years of my tears, my midnight sobs,
My teeth-jittering evenings,
My futile complaints
My marginalisation, my annihilation
Is walking on the cake,
Well then I might be.

If my sister's labour in a claustrophobic kitchen
Her sacrifice on harrowing nights
Her tendency to drink tears
To convince a family they married
A laughing clown
Is walking on the cake,
Then I might be.

But I hate to admit this
It has been a cake walk.
To undo the atrocities on my कौम
To fight, to write, to sigh through sleepless nights,
To hope to once give back
To the struggle that brought you and me here.
I love to walk this cake, if cake it is.

If I were a City (Independent Poem)

There's a lake at my heart
And by it's ghats
Pigeons follow feeders' quirks
A market of ethnic jeweller
Cuts the monotony

And what is my ethnic you may ask
It is blood and bedroom violence
Of body politics and informed silence
Children, however,
Read it as the glorious past

Puddles through roads
Nobody cares where they come from
Has there been a sewage leak?
Has the underbelly finally given in
To centuries of consumption?

Marigold trees, like hopes, on sidewalks
No, the government didn't put them
They're mine, I water them,
They die every winter,
I sow yet again.

I get tourists
They call it a party town
Hippies, Junkies, Broken Hearts, Lovers
Politicians who never made it big
They fancy expensive hotels
They leave in the mornings

How to shave your armpits (Reply to Neetu Das's "How to cut a fish")

Lean to the mirror
Razor in Hand
Remember the youtube videos
And grieve at your incapacity
Soap the area
Until your heart stops
At losing precious hair to patriarchy
Stare long at the blade
In a slow strong motion
Bring it down
Then a second, and third
Rinse, look for remaining matter
Shatter it all.

Sip coffee later
While feeling the emptiness
In both the armpits
And the space between them.

Doiboki's version (Reply to Doiboki by Neetu Das)

Ladies laugh at me
Children gasp
They are schooled to see otherwise

Men pulled out cameras
I looked away
A photographer followed me
My hair, my betel-splitted lips
May sagging breasts
Made good money, he said

He zoomed on my wrinkles
He made my pallu fall
When he asked me to look down,
I cursed him till his mouth dried

I called him a dog
Lifted my pallu
Held my head up
And walked away
To a world of dogs.

You fight (Villanelle)

Doors close on your nose, middle of the night
There's life elsewhere, run.
You wait for nothing, you fight.

Schoolbooks told you honesty is right
They didn't know, they'd had too much of the Sun
That doors close on your nose, middle of the night.

You make a home, you love where there is light
You give your all, but if you get none,
You wait for nothing, you fight.

You look back, you weep if you might
You repeat, "forward is the only way, hon"
You remember:Doors closed on your nose, middle of the night.

Roots scare you all your long life
You write down on a wall: My days of patience are done
You wait for nothing, you fight.

And today, at rock bottom, you gather all your might
You pick yourself up, you look up to none.
You'll wait for nothing, you fight.

Cracks

I click
on your name
on a broken mobile.
Cracks, on screens
How I hate them!

Later,
when you snatched away
your eyes from mine,
the morning after,


I wondered
if all this while
the ruptures
were all you.

Shahana

There isn't much I can say, Shahana
Except let's call it a day, Shahana.


It was fine yellow, that morning
I asked you for tea, "If you may, Shahana."


I'm catching your lies, you look shaken
You weren't willing to stay, Shahana.


"I can't be with women" your words were clear
Clear about how they could slay, Shahana.


I sit and fold my palms. I adjust my Aanchal.
I don' know whom to pray, Shahana!

I desire the world tonight.

Overhoused and underdrunk,
I crave to see the night sky
The bustling roads beside open drains
To ride alongside garbage dumps
Stinking of a month old dead dog.


To be haulted long in tattered roads
For a truck decided to pass
Amid a settlement of sad humans
Cheating "the public" for a life in domestic
Crying for the inadequacy of it all.


Nay, it doesn't disgust me
My sanitized home repels me enough
This voluminous high-ceilinged quiet abode
Of treachery and crime.
I desire the world tonight.

I ogle white walls
And brethe through the hole in the door.
My windows keep my secrets-
To stich a cape, have ready a rope,
To hide a knife, and elope.

Torch

Your politics, mister,
Hunts and devours spaces.
Carries a torch and
Rejoices in lighting up
Buds and flowers and gardens
Even those which
Only blossom in the dark.

A Night Of Nodding

I fell for your magic smile.
No, not just the smile
The curve your lips made
Your chin gained form suddenly
Before one had time to realize
Your face was gleaming.

The first night amidst poetry sessions
I observed your glances at me
I couldn't stop blushing through the night
My room mate told me the next morning
She had heard me pracicing mature conversations to a boyfriend.

When I finally got to unbutton your shirt
I felt I had found the heat I was looking for.
Your insides just lay bare, staring at me
And while I draw the reader's gaze to a male body,
Your gaze was still on me.

                              ***

I can name the parts of my lean, coiled body
That you thrust your palms on,
Where you pulled open more than just clothes
While telling me natural bodies are a thing of art.

So, though I hated my exposed breasts (I still do),
I nodded along: like I nodded through your poems
And it was all nodding from there.

Nodding: To not lose you,
               : To re-assure you.
Smiling: Nervously,
              : Sheepishly.
Trying : To take my time,
             : To beg you to wait.
Sighing : For the shock that it was,
              : Which you thought was hot.

Your chest sweat dripping down my lips
The curve beside your lips-so perfect.
I wanted to jump on you once you stop
Just waiting for your load to get off my chest.

It wasn't too soon when I could see
Your load was going nowhere
That it wouldn't go; it couldn't go,
That to do me is all you got to do tonight

I called your name
You stared onto outer space
Maybe back in time
Running somewhere away.
 
                                    ***

The room lay oblivious:
The same yellow lamp by the bookcase,
The site of most your profile pictures
Reading; surrendering to an author far away.

I wanted that humility too
I wanted the calm, the surrender.
I wanted to see you un-manned tonight.
I wanted the softness with which you smiled.

And your carpets, your paintings,
Mention of which you flung in the air
One hour into meeting five fine upper caste women,
All lay silent witnesses to my atrocity.

You were done in a while.
I dresses and smiled.
"You are beautiful."
I listened.

                            ***

Three months later they told me
I should have known
They told me I invited it
They told me I did it for the fame he came with

'My person' threw file after file
Paper after paper for me : Oh what a fighter!
She said I only have to stress how much I tried to stop
They said I'm not at fault; I'm just the victim.

From a distance, I sat admiring your smile
Oh what a huge man you are.
And what stink of rot you come with.
I laid back; I could now see across the room:

All huge men with black robes and blinded eyes
With khakhi clothes and neat ties
With tattered chappals and famous lives
With Insta accounts with thousand likes

With banner, kurtas, voice pitched high
With beef parties and Ambedkarite lies
With poetry groups and tongues like knives
With faces like swans, with beautiful smiles:

These are all your men.

                                ***

On Love

How normal
How normal Is it to love
And get back more than you give

To explain
And to digest the forgiveness

To water
And to see growth too soon

To never get to wait
To never get to hover
To never be patient
To miss too little

How painfully normal.