The Kadamba Tree

Leans inward
from our living room’s windowpane.

Dangling in August rain,
its shadow lengthening.

We carry the damp breath of leaves.

Father’s legs,
the blue gathering at the bends.

the weight of years pressing
into corners,
folding into the bend of the tree.

A Delhi Elegy

The harmonium
a storm through Delhi’s chest.

A jagged silence holds the crescent
a fractured grin over the city’s cry.

Pyres in rows.
Grief stacked for burning?
each flame
a farewell.

Wind claws the sky.
one last breath.
A riverbed,
thirsting
as the dead pass.

A city stripped
to its ghost,
its streets
turned to ash
and silence.

This sorrow
cremations queue.
Each
the last breath.

Gods Do Not Answer Here

“Maa, I can’t breathe. Please don’t cry.”
– WhatsApp message, India, 2021.

Only light
into empty halls,
dripping through
chandeliers.

I cry out for you,
unheard –
the way grieving mothers
cry out
and hear only themselves.

The sky
falls
in edges,
in shores
no neighbourhood
can hold.

Men become statues
mid-prayer.

We unfold our palms.
Begging.
Begging.

(only light into empty halls.)

No Sonnets for Boys Like Me

The girl in the front row asks / what “homo” means / I don’t know either / only that when they say it / it cuts / soul-deep / I was six the first time I heard it / soft at first / then fire / then hands pressing me into the dirt / they peeled me to the rind / left nothing sweet / I waited / like a bruise forming / They filled the world with light / my body stayed dim / I told myself I was beautiful / but the words loosened like teeth / fell before anyone could catch them / I want to curse the teacher / who bent my body / into something it could never be / but she is already dead / and I am still here / No poets wrote me into existence / no sonnets for boys like me / I was a blank page / a name erased / before it could be spoken / Still / I remain / When I die / I will leave behind everything / they never let me be / carve my words into their bones / I will write those poems / each one a wound / For you / for them / for us

Instructions for Surviving in a Country that Pretends You Don’t Exist

i want to be your chosen family your illegal shelter your five stages undone in one breath
i want to live inside the part of the law they reached back into and erased
i want to be the language the bill forgot to list
i want to be the flat in malviya nagar they said was for families only
i want to be your next of kin when the hospital shakes its head
i want to be not legal with you so gloriously not legal with you
i want to be the 2019 before they went back and erased it
i want to be the word they left out of the schedule
i want to live in the gap between their imagination and your body
i want to be the gharana they want to imprison
i want to weaponise tenderness and call it law
i want to break their definition of you slowly with both hands
i want to be your bruised prayer
i want to exist with you so loudly so bodily so completely that they have to keep writing new laws and keep failing and keep failing and keep failing

Excerpted with permission from All That’s Left Behind, Aditya Tiwari, Simon and Schuster India.