“Why bang against the door which leads to infinity? It is open, there is no latch in it. I am a mendicant at the door of mathematics. The dancers asked: if you leave out life and death, what remains?” – Rukmini Dey
SECTION I: FEEL The Weight of Being Human
Heavy.
SECTION II: TASTE Gradually It All Makes Sense
The air tastes like cotton candy minus the sugar. Only rough cotton in smoky hues, drying up the insides. It feels like tongue touching cardboard. Hack, cough, sneeze. The air tastes like a loved one’s ashes——preserved but forgotten, known yet gone. The air near my home has this flavour, I can’t quite name, but it makes you tear up. The city council said the air used to be better. Plants peek from cracks in buildings and the pavements are all grey. A sad thing of beauty!
It Tastes like Goodbye The edge of the terrace feels rougher than the breeze. There's the scent of guava and tamarind, sweet and sour, like the stories we once shared, rolling them over our tongues as if testing for bitterness. The kitchen downstairs hums with the evening rhythm—pots clattering, oil sizzling in the kadhai. Maa is making dal again, thick with turmeric and the memory of better days. Dadai had brought a bag of imli with him. We cracked the pods open, the pulp sticking to our fingers, sourness cutting through the air between us. He was quiet, his smile thin, like something stretched too far. I didn’t ask what was wrong; we’d grown into silence, each of us carrying what we refused to offer. When he didn’t come home we went looking. The streets smelled of smoke and roasting peanuts. No note. Just the quiet that followed, as if the world held its breath for a moment too long.
The house smells different now. Maa’s dal taste flat; the pickles no longer burn. Sometimes I slip a spoonful of sugar into my plate, just to see if it changes anything, but the sweetness always disappears too quickly, leaving nothing but the faint taste of iron in my mouth. The mango trees are heavy with fruit though we never pick them anymore. They fall and rot where they land, a sweetness too ripe for us to touch.
The neem tree casts shadows long and thin, like the whispers we avoid but know too well. The train whistles in the distance, a sound that once meant possibility, escape. Now it drifts past like a ghost, unnoticed. Somewhere, beyond the fields, the firecrackers from a wedding burst into the sky, but they feel distant. Dadai’s sandals lie where they were left, untouched for months, gathering dust. We don’t talk about the tracks or how it must have felt against his skin—cold, indifferent. Instead, we speak in half-truths, pretending the river took him by chance. But there are no accidents where longing meets water. The seasons change, but the air inside remains the same—heavy with the things we don’t say. Outside, the neem tree droops until the ground is littered with leaves, brittle and dry, just like us.
SECTION III: SAY When Flowers Speak
like the first blood of sisterhood
we bow down and listen. The starry bokul in the white of the cloth they carried Baba away in, his face buried in snowy rajanigandha. Frangipani scattered on the veranda like the first blood of sisterhood. The carnations colourless as if the shame of puberty and the blush of old betrayals were forgotten lovers in their folds. The purple hearts of orchids bruised and unbending, silent like soldiers’ tongues and belt marks. The lavender of innocence that swayed like wild grass, reckless, and childhood burning like saffron. We broke through like lilies in concrete; life appears in strange ways and death a gentle teacher or a thief in the night. Marigolds strung for gods, the orange pressed against our chests as we held our breath learning that the fragrance of loss lingers longer than amnesia.
Lotus, wet and holy, on waters we feared but dipped our toes in the cool of survival and depths that cradled our secrets. The weight of the world not so heavy in our palms but soon our bodies grew beyond us. Fierce roses, red like a mistress' lips, remind the worth of the blood once spilled. And the wilting jasmines in mother's hair, once white as promises, now yellowed like bones of chrome autumn leaves. But that too is life, and so we crouch, and lean closer. The bokul has blown away like the first winter without Baba.
Whisper with the Crickets Do your cities have crickets? Or your towns? You know, the ones that loudly chirp at night when you are trying to sleep? Try joining the chorus. Fold your hands like a mantis, and whisper (don’t chirp): I pray for all the life in suffering. I pray for their happiness and their healing. Do you reckon they are singing?
SECTION IV: LISTEN Answers from the Bird
perched atop the coconut tree the koel coos a shrill tune; men say to seek love. But what if it just wants to wait? For a future with no glass walls no airplanes to race with. No books made from its home. The bird coos all evening long to identify a want, a protest.
Listen, now, hurry, before she stops.
The Clouds Shift Night awakens to cloud the sky in a ghostly mist. The sun leaves with a roaring display. “I will be back tomorrow,” sun mutters as sun walks away, footprints on the shifting water. The fishermen hear and hurry to the shore. The natural world shifts and contracts and cools and there are new sounds to hear. The faint yawns of leaves in the easterly wind waking up from siestas. Transpiring. The buzz of mosquitoes tuning the cosmos like an old veena’s drone. Snakes slithering back to their dens. One by one, little bulbs twinkle over the land with a power hum—only the crickets don’t vibrate at 50 Hz. The rage of the night is more than one sees. The sound of moonlight glinting off the narrow by-lanes. Sloppy licks of the mother cow working on her child’s new hairdo. A deliberate howl of the street dog risen by the rumble of cars. The city pumping the din of nightlife into pulsating streets. Soon it is morning. As day slumbers, the stars slip under duvets. But the moon gets an invisibility cloak?
The Noise of Pain The bees buzz like chainsaws that cut open rock and carve earth into furniture. The Bible’s weeping and gnashing of teeth. Like a flame that blooms right before the wind tears it off, the person blazes right before her death. Noise is a symptom of pain but silence is the prognosis.
SECTION V: WATCH The Infinite Message
grass grows, a mighty shy sword / from one small lead peeks a tall green blade
in the shy dawn, it rises with a big stretch / bending out till the seams of the horizon
each a show of strength gift-wrapped in the soil / your letters rot away in the overflowing shelf!
nature’s message is packed away on the front lawn.
Cold The tree wraps herself in new clothes every winter. Layers and layers of warmth. Her bark is proof of many anniversary rings of self-love. The sparrow flits and dots and pokes his own wings. The river falls, a step down, falls, tumbles, and jumps off the cliff. It goes every way, carving land and rock. All the huts have blown away and there is no fire at home. Listen — there is no fire at home. No wood. How do we keep warm now? The animals fall asleep in the cover of dusk. A stream of darkness, a burst of night, fills the house. The dark dances with the playful owl and entraps humans in deep rest. Before the flower-sharing alliances of neighbouring housewives begin, I hear angry birds argue outside my window. I see them perched on the wires. Electric bird zipping through the sky, warm to touch. Electric bird at lightning speed speeding through vast unknowns.
Mangoes God crafted the world and came to rest, a weary dog at my doorstep. The sky thunders yet He slumbers dreaming of eighth day. God dropped dead from the tree into the drain a half-eaten mango. The storm kept blowing but nowhere was He found. For your brother knows that today and everyday is Sabbath even if we see bloodbath.
Victory Men at the battleground fall as if to bandage wounds on the Earth. A tiger lurks in the forest, unaware of the deer tiptoeing to the stream nearby. Fireflies dawn onto the room crawling on the mosquito net. Flitting across the ceiling like missiles they send across the border. Under this makeshift constellation the boy is the galactic prince embraced by twinkling green soldiers.