A Death, forgotten!
Not all deaths are mourned,
some are revolutionised,
On a winter morning as I watch Rose Lizo dying in a popular web series,
I am reminded of a river of people on the streets of my town,
And fierce cries of protest,
For a young girl who died,
Abused by power.
I cook potatoes for dinner,
and wash my face with raspberry facewash
I look for another TV show.
Not all deaths are mourned,
Some are revolutionised,
And as quick as revolutions, forgotten.
What if there is no Hell on the Other Side?
They say when you die,
Your nose is as cold as
the space.
Your brain stagnant
Like the distant mountains.
You have been dying to remember it all, dying to make sense to the world,
And to yourself.
Dying in the vicinity of your crushing existence, echoing that summer class on Kafka.
Dying is remembrance they say, of creation and destruction.
But all you remember are the ripples on the lake near your house
And the Monster that ate people. They called it the Tsunami.
The dead do not return, they say. The dead are the Imagined.
And,
What if the living were dead in the memory of their own imagination?
What if there is no hell on the other side?
the lump of the living
the ceiling was heavy,
smelling like a cloud of disinfectant.
on the couch,
the father smoked up a cancerous silence.
she stirred the milk powder,
in the half-cooked pudding,
lumps looking like fresh tumours
cut.
eyes of crystals--closed,
half spilt soup on the loin cloth.
the ceiling was different a few years later,
it gave way to life,
she wanted to embrace it,
but, the lump in her throat!
About the Poet:
Udita Banerjee is a research scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar.