‘Delhi smoulders along the length / of my finger, a cigarette that refuses / to go out.’

- Aranya

Legacy

Ensconced in a cement pavilion,

my grandmother’s headstone stands

before a papaya tree, planted at her funeral.

If you plant stone, you will grow a memory.

My grandfather’s name kerned into thick relief,

blazed larger than hers in the milkweed sun.

He passed it on to my mother like a family secret,

his being trapped into wings, which were clipped

too early in their flight, and a worm

cocooned her heart with rage.

In this way it was passed on

like the Noor, before it was colonised,

from childhood to childhood,

atrophying steadily on the curling vine,

that pricks the sides of the forest with its envious barbs.

This rage is not my own I have evolved into it,

and spread the thin film of its armour,

all along the coast of my body

so that it simply washes over me,

like an angry but distant sea,

howling at a beached whale.

so that they simply flutter against the windshield

of this clunky vehicle, those wings

translucent as butter paper.

*

Speaking tongues

Delhi smoulders along the length

of my finger, a cigarette that refuses

to go out. The hours stack up as crimson

logs that you know the sunset will filch.

I’m early, and you will be surprised,

as I stand outside the doorstep of your gaze.

My shirt is untucked, and the suburbs line up

on my arm, faces upturned. I tick them off

one by one, as I tell you the story of my day.

I lay my conquests before you, an urchin

running errands for nostalgia, between

a forgotten backpack with no stomach,

and certain shady bars whose ceilings

are too low, padded in case some lover

drunk on the stench of waiting loses his head.

The moon is a broken plate, with a stain

that could have been lipstick or impatience.

I mumble and the night slakes as muslin wings

from my shoulders. The city upends the glasses

on the table, and nobody sees our reflection,

but the chandelier is bent double, eavesdropping.

I curl your ear, and open a forest with a flick of nail

on cartilage. Let me kiss you when you breathe,

suddenly, inhaling the smoke from nights of laughter.

How they seep into the skin. Weariness rusts around

my eyes, jerked awake in your surprise,

but the shape of sound is a whisper.

I lick the edges of this song, I taste its saxophone

before giving it to you, a letter, nothing more.

This body petals your fields of rolling green,

and becomes a kind of soaring. My tongue burns

your skin, a moat around your waist. That is how

you will know my past, through language.

Before you finish, I climb the steeple of your limbs,

and plant the flag of this religion, redder than the sky.

*

There’s always a third

A squirrel and a rat chew on old grain

scattered on two see-saw ends of the same bench.

Both regard each other with practiced distance between bites

A tea-stall-bread-omelette-oasis discusses the third wave

as a regular fastens his mask, walks away from friends,

and sheepishly parks his haunches on the other side of the road.

A minute of rain carpet bombs the drying clothes

I washed this morning. Still, I leave the window open

for the world to wash its dirty laundry in my room.

*

Ecdysis

The rain comes as suddenly as it goes,

an angry courier drumming at the window

of your daydream. The winter is locked outside,

where the conversation is subdued. You step down

from your perch, no cage this, merely a home.

Four flights down, the subtitles are still blurred.

The morning takes time to buffer, surprised

by the cracked shell of the sun splaying ochre slime

A ragpicker hurries away, confused. The jaw

of the automatic gate unclenches, the street’s cleft lip

curls into a sneer at the cur’s entitled bark.

The gatekeeper’s muted crackle of palms stops as you pass

A resident buckles a military print sweater around the dog’s belly.

Good boy, he spits out from behind the rising window of his car.

He makes sure to coax a Salam from the gatekeeper.

Another dog snarls at the cowering urchin, just a stray this time.

He picks up the garbage, eyes searching for trinkets.

The cold has no eyes, only claw. You walk away.

Back home, an ant scrabbles against cling-wrap. You find it

as it dies. Exhausted with freedom, your legs give way. You slither

to the door, your scales grow rough as you search for a dark corner

Your backbone breaks into a question, your eyes well up

with the effort.

You moult quietly

There’s no one around

You can see better now. Guilt is just another skin.

*

Delhi

There’s a bazaar in the heart of the city

where the moon comes to wander sometimes,

as cobblestones laugh to the sound of footsteps.

A woman sits on a chipped platform,

her face, a mosaic window that looks wistfully

at the hungry shadows that yesterday

disdained. Her hands sing breathlessly,

braiding the night into a girl’s hair.

Her laughter is filled with dust and smoke

of Delhi uncoiling into the arms of the throng.

She watches the pornography

of conversation between buyers

and sellers, making deals with their loneliness.

No middlemen here, only the thrill of the chase.

From under cane awnings peek

a burnished copper helmet, compasses

whose norths point to a corner where

eyes have found a place to close,

where no questions remain, and the mouth

rests at the altar of the high-priestess

who has offered silence to the god of pursuit.

Locked in a handless embrace, like stones

marked by the names of those who carried them,

the inadequacies of dreams unsex themselves

in the naked light of streets that demand

a ransom of desire. This city is stretched taut

like a clothesline fallen out of the memory

of washermen trying to thrash out the stains

from its angry fabric. Da Vinci said that

an arch is a strength held together by two weaknesses.

This city is nothing

but a congregation

of arches.

*

Ittr

My shoes have taken on the colour

of sour scotch sunsets, hoarse with the rust

of days lisping through them, soggy with age

I grimace as I survey the peeling leather, a father’s gift,

that only the gargoyles outside Victoria Terminus,

whose tongues glisten with the grime of toiling bodies,

can understand

I set my tongue down on the plastic table,

folded into neat triangles, the way you’re supposed to

in certain red curtained rooms in hotels behind bhindi bazaar.

I walk down the lobby, past wallpaper with purple roses

and cumstains, and before I look up from my watch,

time leaps out, and the city assails me,

snatches my wallet, grabs me by the scruff,

a dog at the end of its leash,

frothing with love,

and summertime.

On the pavement, where the hour

has fallen down laughing,

the day sits in a fetal knot

that a nail unsettles

The mallige-seller unties her pallu,

spits, and grudgingly allows the little bird

of the sun, to crackle through the market

She passes the small change to me,

frowning slightly

Between catcalls and fish scales,

I get a whiff of red earth

moist with the first rain,

and an old man chuckles

a half-shuttered chuckle

In his hands, the cylindrical cap

of a small kaanch ki botal

smarts in the morn-glow

In her outstretched fingers,

white mallige wrapped in banana leaf

withers in the breeze

her face breaks into a smile

a wave shores

a flower remembers

its birthplace

***

Aranya is a poet who is currently based out of Delhi, a place to which he does not belong. You can find him on Instagram: @Poetly.

Speaking Tongues: Six poems by Aranya