we took turns dipping our unwashed heads into the floral bucket filled with water just to see / who could stay in the longest. / your knees on the white tile around me. shampoo bottles, shower caps and existential brown footprints around us. the sky was green, the rooms were snoring the air conditioner sounds, you did not tell me how you got bruised. / we wore the same slippers. / you had asked me if i had watched a film called The Mask, i told you i had— but it was a lie. ‘Yes I am talking about that superhero one only’, Easy. The Mask did sound like a superhero film, anybody could have guessed it if they knew you. your overwhelming knowledge of Marvel Comics and Beyblades and Cheap Japanese Martial Art Shows that came at 9 AM, that had me wake up at 5 trynna practice those combat punches on my soft knuckles, to be worth of your company. / we started roleplaying The Mask without me knowing the story. in the film, someone wears a mask and turns into a green-faced manic who can comically alter himself and his surroundings. in our version, i was wearing a purple shirt with patterns like shivering electricity down till my sleeves and i kept saving you from falling off the bed. until you grabbed my arm and told me “No, you are doing it the wrong way. you do not have super strength”, so i stopped saving you. / and learned to be a superhero.
living for me is eyeing the concrete scratches of me trying to live, and leaving its fragments all around me. like you know, the way you see a bandage peel off and know somebody was hurt, and the way you catch my eye when the room is discussing horror stories and know we don’t need ghost stories, and the way dead audio cassette reels spring out of your trouser chains when they are sent for cleaning and everyone knows whose voice have you been carrying in your pocket.
now we kept swirling our pale fingers around the bucket trying to create the hurricane the radio said had hit the Pacific Ocean. you sink your flesh down the cold water and i start the count on my fingers, ek do teen chaar paanch six seven… silence feels so mystical here. can you hear it? can you hear it mingle in the blurry blue movements of the shifting corners of the liquid? you come out almost at twelve and start panting. i dip my face into the bucket and for a long time could smell only your moist skin cream down the water, i move my eye back and forth amidst the calm and when it feels like i could be there forever— you pull me out by my collar wetting all my clothes by the aftershock, you looked at my eyes with amazement and say that i have won, but i didn’t know if my lungs were stronger than you or was it because the air bubbles that i saw crawling towards the pink brim that made me feel / that i was not drowning.
i turned 19 last month. and although it’s an age at which i have always skipped imagining myself in the past, it somehow feels like a very unusual part of the journey. will this year just feel like a long train journey until i get down on a station where i can see myself through the eyes of my past?
i have been thinking a lot about so many things these days that it’s been really hard just to track what all has formed and deformed during this course of time.
my nephew Qasim has a habit of painting the sky and ocean in the same shade of blue that you could not even decipher between them if you really wanted to. that always landed him into corrections yet i told him what his colours dreamt of can never be a mistake. so i narrated him a story,
an ocean once formed a huge cluster of rain-filled clouds. it used to stay close above, and rain upon the sea for years; until one strong wind pushed the clouds to the shore. and kept pushing them more and more, until it forgot where it blew them from. and so for centuries the clouds got lost in the unbridled lithosphere, promising it rain but always in hesitant gulps of the childlike liability, always halting a tear on the lash. and then one day accidentally, a cloud reached the sea water and when it realized that, it sang the world’s saddest song and started to rain on it the wildest it can bear. you wanna hear what it said? it said: “when i fall on you, it feels like falling on myself. but when i fall on the land, i have to figure where to run through and hide my shame; i have to pave ways, dodge the halts, absorb in the dying leaf, and moisten the field just to beg to be held by someone my own” the ocean heard this and so it responded, “all these years that we were apart, all my waters had turned sour. i’ll keep you in my depths now, because that’s where i can ever be still, because when i did not know how to call you back, i quivered my body into waves, just to hit the land every five seconds to remind it that it’s been centuries since i have kept you on my lips. but i was wrong to plea the sands, look! you haven’t forgotten me, all these years that you kept dropping on foreign bodies cursing to be understood, your grief was not weak. it kept collecting down like trinkets from a sewing box for years and formed these magnificent rivers and lakes. rivers that would drown anybody who tries to correct it now, and now they are growing towards me, with your sweet waters. you did not forget me, and look! your rivers are here, and they open down on my knees and eyes, and they overfill me with the love we once had. you have found a way to me, and it doesnt matter if it feels like the end of the world, the way your fingertips graze on my solitude, touching each tip complete and around like dry hay being lit on unapologetic flame— for me, the world has just been created again.”
my mother used to paint a lot too, she dreamed of becoming a well-recognized artist one day. till now the shelves of the forgotten storerooms in our house secretly store her paintings and sketches. when we would ask her why she stopped painting that often, she would tell us about how after she got married, she left painting because she was now liable for bigger responsibilities: the balance of turmeric and coriander in baba’s favorite biryani, the sunlight to dress hangers with our wet clothes, and everything after about the time of asr. she said she chose us over her dreams and what she said was right because even at the times when she used to paint, we always saw them mostly get buried in one of her brown trunks. she used to dislike the sharp pungent scents but when she painted, she used too much turpentine that the room drowned itself into only the scent of poison. i guess everyone has their own ways of killing something in them, and then talking to it’s graves pretending its alive. one day i told her that there is a new small art institute somewhere near the himalayas where they have artists residing from across the country, just living their day off creating and experiencing each other’s sculptures, paintings, pottery.. she listened to me so carefully, smiling like a surrendering knight at each of my sentences. i think for that moment she imagined her life in one of those places, discussing strokes of a brush, critiquing monet, inventing new patterns of block printing wood. being free, and without a thought of our fragile existences, just being her own and with people who would understand the love she always had for art. no dishes to be done, no bedroom filled with loud noises, she could sink her head any place that can hold. the clouds would overlap each other, the green mural in my room would not be half complete. i think to tell her its alright, she can come back to her life now. she comes back. my sister has lost her sweater, we can hear her calling.
i have been thinking about how this modern-day technology has forever changed us. the first person to teach me how to use a computer was my uncle, and till now i let him teach me ways to use the things that i recall knowing deeper than him. somehow, i think it will break my heart if i show him that the dynamic between us is changing.
there was a person who first taught me the possible ways Portugal could score that one goal in the match and stay in the league. his feet over the edge of the bed, his arms concealed behind his arsenic hair. he often forgot to turn off the lights of his car and it seemed to follow him wherever he went, a yellow light down his calves slicing his ashy nose into suburban plots. now that he passed away from cancer, i have fallen into a habit of putting the win predictor on the internet next to me whenever i watch football. he would always support the team i would support, and it’s my way of telling him that i would never stop looking at his face to know what to feel whenever theres a sport on screen. i wish i could hug him for the first and the last time.
i also think about my maternal grandfather, he was famous of calling us his “chaman ki kali” (buds of his garden) it used to warm our hearts but he was very strict. he could not stand any sort of wastage of electricity, he would enter rooms nobody was in and turn off the lights and then scold us for the same. everyone used to be afraid of him, but he sacrificed so much for his children, from the time he migrated from kanpur to our city disowning away all his elite worldscape. when he passed away infront of us in the drawing room everyone was there, from pune to kent— all the members surrounding him. we gave him a grave where there would be no lights for him to turn off. when the days passed, we saw his phone on the table lying and it broke my heart. so you see, he did not know how to use his phone or call anyone but he always recharged it again and again. i think he kept recharging his phone so that he could pick up if someone ever called. so i checked his logs, but there were no missed calls for the month.
his absence is louder than everything else about him.
dont you feel like a cyborg sometimes? how these small things are so real part of our life now. i still cannot believe i learnt skin routine from the videos you sent, now i just feel i dont deserve being loved.
once in september i was surfing through the google maps sitting beside my aunt. i had turned on the street view so she asked me if she can view any street in the world with the app, i told her that she probably might. she took my phone and searched an address i have never heard of, in toronto a street called bakery and a house number. there was a suburban with grass all over the pavement, and at the corner of one house in brown brick was a blue dustbin. my aunt has had one failed marriage in toronto, around ten years back. everyone has forgotten about it, she smiled & whispered to my mother that the dustbin outside the house is the same she bought. i wished to tell her that the image is ten years old but i didn’t. in that streetview, she might still be in the house as a young bride, making pancakes in the kitchen perhaps— not knowing her husband was a cheat.
my father used to hoard his memory cards filled with random videos and photos like he used to hoard cassettes when he was in college. he used to think that these data was precious because he came from an age where these videos can only be made for something important and mostly were kept with delicate care. and i find it so human that these times are changing us so internally.
this was all that i was wondering, i guess. i think i am slowly being exiled from my own self, but people in exile write so many letters when i can write to you only. what i need is for now to never end. is it wrong to wish to know myself without the sound of door shutting behind me? but it’s alright, there’s still a lot of time i have to spend with your weights. for now, i am just wondering if the face ID can detect the smile i learned from your face.
just kidding
i’ll keep your phone back
love,
kabeer
kinda died reading this... WHY WOULD YOU WRITE THIS??!?! cried over a conversation between a cloud and the ocean. cried over someones grandfathers empty call log. cried over someone feeling happy ahout a 10 year old photo. ohhmygod fleur the way you write kills me every time