Everything Is Special When You're Leaving
a place.
the bookstore with cheap, second-hand copies
and several bean bags—
a soft, shallow music emerging
from somewhere inside
as people hang their faces over a book,
front and back.
your barbershop— a ten-minute walk
from your home,
twenty if you count the detour to the
grocery store for a packet of
chips and a chocolate bar.
how it was an ominous,
makeshift wooden shack when
you were ten
and now you're twenty-three,
having a near-saloon experience
for half the price.
how your barber was the first person
to teach you the lesson of
patience,
you can either sit here peacefully and get
what you want, or create a ruckus
and bleed.
the uncle running the dairy shop in the
morning and a
beer shop at night,
both across from each other.
how polio ruined his left leg,
and boiling milk his right.
the red car with the red L sticker
at the back—
the driver a pregnant woman
with a husband whose eyes,
so huge and so pushed out like a cheap,
underpaid ghost
in a worn-down haunted house.
the street beggar with a smartphone
and a pet dog,
his tail incomplete— cut in half.
the roadside toy shop,
which is nothing but an old woman
with her wind-up monkeys
and birds
scattered on a strip of cloth,
their plastic stomachs giving off light
(red-yellow-green-blue-red-yellow-green-blue),
and toy cars that sing filtered Bollywood songs—
her eyes so inside the sockets
like a canopy,
forcing her not to see any more of the
hopelessness
she has already seen enough of.
the kids with their footballs
and their cricket bats
and their still unoccupied brains.
the old man and his jewellery shop— empty.
you wonder whether he has a
family to sleep with,
you step aside to move forward anyway.
the smell of crushed ginger
and boiled tea leaves from the
chai stall,
the familiar faces with their familiar stories.
that house with pink walls,
windows wide open and curtains pulled back.
when you cross you see a
girl and her father splayed out,
humming along with
their thick CRT television set
as it hums a familiar tune.
a familiar song you once knew.
that street dog who knows you by
the sound of your slippers
sleeping— half of her body darker,
cooler,
under the edge of a house.
that cow which always stands there,
below the streetlight
and always looks north.
or that certain smell of your
neighbourhood with not one source to track down.
the two German Shepherds
living across from you—
two tiny heart-shaped lockets fitted into
their collars,
one each,
with two tiny heart-shaped photos of
their parents,
when opened.
how the sunlight that falls over your house
is uncanny,
sparklingly white.
like a Ghibli movie.
the sound of your doorbell— like a
'90s video game console
loading.
your mother's anklets rushing
like a short, humid spell of rainfall,
bursting for a minute or two,
before the sky finds the sun again—
your mother
pulls open the metal door
and you face her like a sunflower to the sun,
as she welcomes
you in
with her arms spread out.
because everything is special
when you know,
it is short
lived.
Absolutely Nothing
I
she shouts, from behind the pile
of linen, the watermelon blood
drips down my elbows
while I carry the two halves
like war trophies,
absolutely nothing
again, I turn around and look at her— my mother,
caught in a posture like pressing down
on earth's chest, like digging
a reverse womb: an unhappy mother
is always closer to death,
the gravity in the fruit pushing
back my palms, I wait, there is no
escaping an unhappy mother who
spreads like the foul smell of spoiled
milk,
do you know what you have done for us?
II
Afterwards, we sit with our legs folded
inside ourselves, spitting disgusting
watermelon seeds out in a silence made grotesque by a ticking clock,
with her watermelon fingers she
gulps her pills down— when the doctor
suggested surgery, and intensive
rest, she troubled the doctor to give in, to
suggest medicines,
if I go down, the house goes down said
my mother with spine issues,
can't leave the house
in just any hands said my mother, the
spine.
I can take over Ma I said, a half-hearted
whisper,
I don't trust people who leave.
III
There were reasons for me leaving:
the walls of my room were wet with
the cries of my sister, all the nights when
I returned home a failure, my father
stood over me like a man cheated
on by his own son, the dust from his
dreams into my nose and eyes, into my lungs
and out,
it cracked— the house, walls
so dry we licked life off of each other, until
our tongues bloated with insults, until
I could not tell when the doors opened
anymore, I could only hear the wood saying
run,
I dug myself out of my mother,
like spooning the sloppy, juicy—
defenceless part of a
watermelon away from its almost
rock of a shell,
almost rock of a mother.
IV
The day I returned home, there was a message
with a watermelon popping out
of my notifications,
at the door, she hugged me with that giant fruit
between us— like a clouded
shell of animosity, a mother
left behind will excessively
store for the son who left her
behind—
because mothers don't hold grudges,
they hold you responsible, then sit
with you, the same fruit sawed
off, the clouds now struggling to gather,
as she welcomes you
with a face soiled with age, death and
juicy, blood-red wetness sleeping
on her lips.
V
My mother loves watermelons because her
mother could never taste one, could never
know, what a cube of red water
does to your tongue;
every year, we never
run out of them— nothing defines love
better than memories,
my mother eats for the stomach of two,
for an extra stomach
that, when alive, never presented
its hunger, never was cared for.
VI
Nothing defines love
better than memories.
Better than doing, what they could never.
Eating for the stomach of two.
Or
knowing when to leave to stay afloat,
because your mother
could never know,
and your mother could never
float.
Parallel Universe
My father, before he was
my father, loved
exploring.
My mother, before she was
my mother, loved
poetry.
His bicycle by his side, he pedalled to
untitled places,
documented corners he never knew,
and I still don't.
Her leather-bound diary— a gift from
her nana, the ink of her pen
tiptoeing around the hungry pages,
waiting to be fed
along the thin blue lines.
Drop him a location and he would tell you
what beauty hides in its centre.
Plant in her a thought and see her ink her
fingers in the soil of her memory.
Before they were someone
significant to me,
they were significantly someone
to themselves,
to one another.
If I appear in this poem, that means I have
already borrowed from their lives
what I can, but cannot
return to them.
Which means stealing.
Which means they gave up
what they loved,
for someone they love.
I see now how easy it has been to be a son.
To have recreated, reshuffled the versions
of their lives and compress them into me.
A version where he burdens
me to remember the
particularity of every mass of land.
And she hands me over fragments
from the poems she could never
birth to life.
In some versions,
he never settled for a place less appealing
and
she never saw her diary burn to ashes.
In some versions, I never appear in this poem. It is
never written. Never thought of.
But in here, they will never return to what they once were.
Inside A Slow Local To CSMT, I Think
all life is love and loss—
mostly loss were the sweat soiled dead over
your pillow was to answer.
every morning when you crawl out of
your bed you are fearful to look back at
the growth in the fall of
your hair, scattered, like amputated parentheses
wronged by a sentence.
because the origin of every need
is elimination,
in search of a life on your own terms you traded
whatever good you might call rest.
you traded the soft familiarity of your home for
a corner in Mumbai, in this unforgiving city
you have to earn to put your
ageing body in—
to live knowing that living has a price tag,
to live knowing there's always somebody eyeing
the four walls you pay for,
that everybody ends up here and nobody
wants to.
this city and you— your bodies are out
of safe spaces and sheltered corners but you
never built an exit gate.
in the meantime, you realise that promises
are a magnitude of
the unfortunates in this city—
still, there are more people who come
dreaming than there are rooms
to have them.
there is mud, there are buildings and then
there are people living in both.
you rest your body in a room closer to the clouds
than to the rush of the land.
in sleep you sound like an old man's
raspy cry, your heart beats as
if dreaming the bad version of the life you
were supposed to have.
or are having.
in this city, you are never first anywhere.
you are always brushing shoulders,
and knocking elbows with twenty others,
and are sandwiched between
two bags the size of boulders.
whatever you pray for is drained away
in the monsoon,
and you sleep under a rainy roof— if
at all you sleep, if
at all, you have a roof.
you were once the smell of all distinct,
uncategorized fragrances your home harboured,
now you are the armpit of every second person
reeking, of nine hours of
corporate shift— overdid to be
underpaid. here, you are everyone else,
your face the thousandth shade
of a man a few hues too similar. when looked
from above you are
occupying space which is never there and is
never yours. nobody reaches anywhere
and everybody is leaving for
somewhere. you see, how the eyes that look red,
sleep-hungry,
leave early, to
reach late to a job that doesn't ask
for much, because you have nothing to hand,
because the cost of keeping you in
is already coming at the cost of isolating
you out. through all this, you think, your
legs trembling, your hands
rough from tightly holding onto, as the train
leaves another station
with thousands pushing in, to swipe
through your old photos, when there
was not one worry in sight. you smile
at the photo of your mother
aggressively kissing you, like reclaiming your
birth, as you sit on a table and she, in her
nightgown,
grabs your cheeks.
you think about your mother as the dull train
pushes forward, the sweat finding itself on your
face, dripping down
to your chest. you think about her the way
one thinks about his home as the
lights go out— even in darkness, you are
where you belong. where you are
loved, you are safe. you are
in your mother's hands, as she pulls you up
on a table, gives ears to your pain,
and reclaims you with a kiss.
the possibility of rest pumping blood in
your heart, as the train shoves inside
more, of what is, already
there.
About the poet:
A systems engineer by academic background and a writer by passion, Utkarsh keeps his life simple: eating good food, taking impromptu trips, loving freely, carrying books everywhere, reading voraciously, and writing. His work has appeared in online journals and magazines such as Verse of Silence, The Blahcksheep, and Writefluence. His short stories have been featured in several paperback publications.