‘A crucified alphabet of crossed out names’: Four poems by Ajay Kumar
Photo: Karan Madhok
‘we break news with each other more than we / break bread. this just in: i’ve never been out / for blood anymore than i’ve been out for good.’
my father decides to wait but forgets to decide
i see my mother coil the air around her
finger talking on the phone. i remember
the knot in the spiral cord of the landline
as we plucked it out and dusted it off
when we moved out of the old house.
i remember my father filling out forms at
the BSNL office for the return of the now
small amount they’d then paid as deposit
when they first got connection a decade ago.
i remember thinking my father was miserly.
i remember the torn ten rupee note he’d saved
to cellotape later. i remember he’d known misery
working for the building he stayed in to be allowed
to stay on while he looked for some real work.
i hear my mother tell my father on the phone to stop
waiting for the bus and to just take an auto instead.
on my way to the cybercafé to play counterstrike
on LAN i used to see words scrawled on the glass
of the phone booth that the dew was too weak
to wet and erase knowing whoever wrote it
must’ve run out of coins, out of time, of places
to fiddle with, but not out of words to touch upon.
i remember my parents queued outside the phone
booth on halfprice sundays to call back home. i don’t
know if i was already there or only going to be.
i remember how no one accepted the cellotaped note.
i know the deposit never came. my father still waits.
*
high stakes
they’ll remember him as a cloud that happened
to be where they were. if your care is updated
to the latest version you’ll see they’ve added
new futures: the one where thunder swirls its
little finger and we crash is my personal favorite.
we break news with each other more than we
break bread. this just in: i’ve never been out
for blood anymore than i’ve been out for good.
the way the story dances around the locus of its
first draft when it hears of the poet arrested for a
facebook post is something akin to calling insinuation
dance, fear impersonality, life story, while counting
the number of news swipes away i am from a lynching.
*
trickledown
we rode here on the longtails of blackswans
but we hunt for white feathers. no wonder
we find nothing worth keeping. the body
that surfaced was inflated to levels beyond
the reserve bank’s recommendations.
almost as if death belonged to an economist’s
nightmare. a stone skipping on the surface
of backwards. i sometimes mix up my DMZs
with my SEZs. i sometimes beg my network
provider to buy enough spectrum in the 5G
auction for i have been a co-conspirator
in their unlimitedness. i remember one day
i had one idea sim and one vodafone sim
and then the next day i had two VI sims.
one day i had a father and a mother then
two albatrosses. i hate to admit it but i felt like
a chimera that day: the day they merged my sims.
by the time we visited the body it’d become
a mnemonic aid for something that no longer
needed remembering: a rain designed to contract
on impact so that when you try to dissect wetness
you won’t even find bits of water.
*
hamper
even after you died your story was visible to everyone
on instagram: the usually tap-pastable skip-awayable
cringe rewitnessed as tailspun paperboats folded out
of wills mistaken for flyleaves. now they are done for:
gum chewed to the same extinction that all flavors reach
a crucified alphabet of crossed out names, and the ghosts
of geometry boxes. when you said your dammed heart
i heard your damned art, which, surprisingly, hurt more.
(you laughed at my lack of dreams so i dreamt this:
i publish your collected poems posthumously and
even the hardcover is a bestseller and i’m invited
to koffee with karan where i win the hamper just
for reciting you and i’ve complete creative control
over the netflix special on how i’m reviving you.)
i find you in the house where one finds everything
someone imagined before they imagined something
better: an arcade of the half-assed, whatifs, butbuts.
with both-end-sharpened borrowed pencils, your wounds
have been drawn back: let me show you what hampered us.
***
Ajay Kumar lives in Hyderabad where he’s a student of Literary and Cultural Studies. His work has appeared in The Bombay Literary Magazine, Rattle, The Bombay Review, and Usawa, among others. You can find him on Instagram: @kafka.kumar.
