The women lay on the sheets, like strawberry pink polythene
Trembling on a pavement with dust, trembling on a puddle
Trembling on the gutter with a stench of sour rust and then
Flying away to another world of ceaseless, intense blight
To be picked up and thrust back into the circle of being
Plastic, dead, but strong beyond the grasp of putrefaction, elastic.
The women lay along the window sills, yellow sunflowers straining
Petals towards golden lights, away and further away from the brown core
That’s bound to spread its wings, a hawk roosting to devour life
And to savor it till its gluttony has oozed away in fatigued pleasure
Like copulating dogs panting delight in biting off the bitch’s flesh
To plant a pain that taints a body and paints a life in vain.
The women lay with their backs on the floor, their eyes on the ceiling
As clouds tempted their vision towards a paralysis of reality,
Magic and blues, their eyelids never closed like counterfeit Barbies
They never let a sound escape from between their chipped, faded pouts
The same well-curved smile they wore and dyed them anew
In scarlet, orange, maroon but mostly in some violet shade.
The women lay with silent stings, clutched the gash between
Tolerant banana thighs, all wings were clipped, their breath lost way
Among meandering sighs, and soundless blood that leaked
Hidden inside an unresolved bandage of rainbows, stars and polythene
As the women lay with vacant eyes, and prayed for bail from motherhood
All the same they understood, the wound is meant to be evergreen.
She is dying. In sleep she thinks she is a swallow, singing and singing and singing and singing and singing and singing… but no, she’s human. The more she wants to be the swallow, the more sleep evades her. At dawn, she stands before the mirror completely naked and dabs kohl on her lower eye lids until they are smudged in blackness. Then she moves closer to the mirror to admire her eyes. She can’t believe those are her eyes. More like a river, yes they are, more sad, more strange, more haunting, more hurt than any eye she had ever seen. As the day grows older, she suddenly feels shame, ashamed at her bestial nakedness of body and mind. Narcissistic? She knows not. But she hides her body behind her dress, she hides her mind behind her sanity.
“Have you been crying lately? Your eyes look red and swollen these days!” her acquaintances ask.
She never tells anyone about her kohl therapy. She knew they would forbid. They would make sure that she gets to see only her nude eyes. But she loved her kohl, she could never give out the secret. If she is to go blind, she thought, what better way than to love her eyes like her life before she lost them? She hates sunbeams, specially the yellow ones. Doctors would give tranquilizers. She never takes them though, she fears sleeping at daybreak, the time when she can look at her eyes silently. She even admires her sockets, her auburn sockets with their tiny violet veins just beneath her eyes. Sunlight blinds her eyes and thought. As it enters her room through the gaps in the curtains of the window, she sits crouched on the bathroom floor panting for breath. No, she had never smoked a cigarette in her life. Her lungs fail her without reason.
But she is scared. Scared to take the leap. She can merely bruise her knees again and again or prick her fingertips with a sharp needle until cute little red drops start oozing out. Dizzy… dizzy… food nauseates. Egg chicken mutton fish cabbage cauliflower cornflakes apples bananas mixed noodles hakka gravy veg non-veg… the waiter leaves as she vomits on her table and pays the restaurant for cleaning the mess.
The world is revolving. Five revolutions per day. Only blur. Not blindness. Blur. Madness. Nakedness. She drowns. They grab her fair neck and stick it inside the water until she drowns, completely. Does she resist? Does she force her head up to breathe? Does she…
Her dabbed kohl melts down her sallow, ill cheeks. Her tongue is black and salty in pain. She is dying. Maybe death can make her the real, singing swallow.
As a child I used to feel strange every time New Year came. I could not distinguish between new and old, torn and full, smile and tears. I would start crying whenever I felt happiness creeping up my frail, fair body; it was like happiness spilling out of my self thorough my eyes… through tears. The children would feel scared of me, the children who were my friends when I smiled.
I wanted to die every New Year. My past simply slipped out from between my fingers and was forcefully pulled towards an unreachable Vacuum. Quiet. Or so it seemed. It seems. I lie like a mass of sensation on my narrow blue bed without a past, a root. Do I float? Do I fly? But then, nothing matters when time dissolves around you and you are dragged into a familiar dream. I take a lot of time in waking up when stories, histories and memories weave this strange mesh of lullaby. And when I do, the sense of loss had gone down the abyss as well. I ask for ice creams. I go to picnics. I watch rom-com movies. I visit friends, family.
The danger of the New Year passes by sooner or later, like Mr. Woodifield I guess, just as a new fly flies in.
Every time I feel equally threatened to know that I am the boss.
On the spiral, forlorn way
Oh, nothing’s new, all is old
Same dull stories told untold
To keep awake the drooping child
I sing, I curse, I blabber wild
I want to stop, my tongue is dry
But every line just ends in ‘why’
There is no way, there is no way
I will lose life everyday
