The poet writes,
while resting his cheek in his palm:
Knowledge grows slowly like a wisdom tooth.
and I can't help but
smile and smirk,
how slyly and obliquely
he conceals certain things
that accompany its nurture.
Knowledge grows slowly,
behind all the spectacle
of the incisors,
in agonizing pain,
like a wisdom tooth.
Monsters, when granted voice
within literature, speak just.
They turn out more humane
than everyone else.
Monsters, when provided space
within life, spout venom.
They turn out more spiteful
than already thought.
Herein, therefore, lies the difference.
Books showcase spine
far stronger than humans,
put together.
Birds perform anting
without any shame,
in the open.
In different forms,
the same
relates to humans.
Literature is anting.
Love is anting.
Talking and listening, anting.
Reading, anting.
Like birds,
we wallow in there
to soar high, again.
The thing to remember, however,
is this: every body reeks of ache.
A disenchanted Maratab Ali
mourns lyrically for his beloved.
A teenage conductor swanks
his counterfeit jacket.
His yells pose a competition
to the singer while
guiding passengers to the bustling,
nevertheless seatie-khalie bus.
Meanwhile, woustie keeps
a close eye in the side-mirror
on sadah trunamath inching closer.
The handwritten board at the front
reeks of human agency.
Random couplets in graceful Urdu
adorn the side panels.
Just below, hastily, is written
laddias seat with an arrow
that hints at nowhere in particular.
Woustie's gunj baanie rests in between
some grease-ridden cloth and castrol bottles.
My dull memory,
of the Tata bus,
of the Mazda bus,
grazes past
the historicity
of your Smart Bus.
In a world
where cackling is
nation building,
where progression is
an unending résumé,
where hollowed out
mountain is development,
where truth-telling is
unequivocal cheating.
In such a world,
life is a hearse,
stuck in a traffic jam.
The earliest and the faintest memory
I have of you, is you listening intently
and diagnosing your patients
in your meticulously set medicine shop,
while I'm waiting
on a wooden plank by the counter.
You handed me a mint candy
and promised
that if I wait calmly,
you'd take me to your home,
to which I smiled like a patient
relieved from a latest asthma attack.
Decades later,
things have changed drastically.
The shop is no longer there -
neither are you.
However,
I'm still waiting on the wooden plank,
in the middle of what is now a road,
faking to unwrap the candy.
The Manna Salwa
that was, yesterday,
drone-delivered
reeked of mould.
We had to sift
the breaking news
from the legumes.
