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Everything Is Special When You're Leaving — Poems by Utkarsh Kumar


Utkarsh Kumar

Everything Is Special When You're Leaving

 

a place.

the bookstore with cheap, second-hand copies

and several bean bags—

a soft, shallow music emerging

from somewhere inside

as people hang their faces over a book,

front and back.

your barbershop— a ten-minute walk

from your home,

twenty if you count the detour to the

grocery store for a packet of

chips and a chocolate bar.

how it was an ominous,

makeshift wooden shack when

you were ten

and now you're twenty-three,

having a near-saloon experience

for half the price.

how your barber was the first person

to teach you the lesson of

patience,

you can either sit here peacefully and get

what you want, or create a ruckus

and bleed.

the uncle running the dairy shop in the

morning and a

beer shop at night,

both across from each other.

how polio ruined his left leg,

and boiling milk his right.

the red car with the red L sticker

at the back—

the driver a pregnant woman

with a husband whose eyes,

so huge and so pushed out like a cheap,

underpaid ghost

in a worn-down haunted house.

the street beggar with a smartphone

and a pet dog,

his tail incomplete— cut in half.

the roadside toy shop,

which is nothing but an old woman

with her wind-up monkeys

and birds

scattered on a strip of cloth,

their plastic stomachs giving off light

(red-yellow-green-blue-red-yellow-green-blue),

and toy cars that sing filtered Bollywood songs—

her eyes so inside the sockets

like a canopy,

forcing her not to see any more of the

hopelessness

she has already seen enough of.

the kids with their footballs

and their cricket bats

and their still unoccupied brains.

the old man and his jewellery shop— empty.

you wonder whether he has a

family to sleep with,

you step aside to move forward anyway.

the smell of crushed ginger

and boiled tea leaves from the

chai stall,

the familiar faces with their familiar stories.

that house with pink walls,

windows wide open and curtains pulled back.

when you cross you see a

girl and her father splayed out,

humming along with

their thick CRT television set

as it hums a familiar tune.

a familiar song you once knew.

that street dog who knows you by

the sound of your slippers

sleeping— half of her body darker,

cooler,

under the edge of a house.

that cow which always stands there,

below the streetlight

and always looks north.

or that certain smell of your

neighbourhood with not one source to track down.

the two German Shepherds

living across from you—

two tiny heart-shaped lockets fitted into

their collars,

one each,

with two tiny heart-shaped photos of

their parents,

when opened.

how the sunlight that falls over your house

is uncanny,

sparklingly white.

like a Ghibli movie.

the sound of your doorbell— like a

'90s video game console

loading.

your mother's anklets rushing

like a short, humid spell of rainfall,

bursting for a minute or two,

before the sky finds the sun again—

your mother

pulls open the metal door

and you face her like a sunflower to the sun,

as she welcomes

you in

with her arms spread out.

because everything is special

when you know,

it is short

lived.


 

Absolutely Nothing

 

I

 

she shouts, from behind the pile

of linen, the watermelon blood

drips down my elbows

while I carry the two halves

like war trophies,

absolutely nothing

again, I turn around and look at her— my mother,

caught in a posture like pressing down

on earth's chest, like digging

a reverse womb: an unhappy mother

is always closer to death,

the gravity in the fruit pushing

back my palms, I wait, there is no

escaping an unhappy mother who

spreads like the foul smell of spoiled

milk,

do you know what you have done for us?

 

 

II

 

Afterwards, we sit with our legs folded

inside ourselves, spitting disgusting

watermelon seeds out in a silence made grotesque by a ticking clock,

with her watermelon fingers she

gulps her pills down— when the doctor

suggested surgery, and intensive

rest, she troubled the doctor to give in, to

suggest medicines,

if I go down, the house goes down said

my mother with spine issues,

can't leave the house

in just any hands said my mother, the

spine.

I can take over Ma I said, a half-hearted

whisper,

I don't trust people who leave.

 

 

III

 

There were reasons for me leaving:

the walls of my room were wet with

the cries of my sister, all the nights when

I returned home a failure, my father

stood over me like a man cheated

on by his own son, the dust from his

dreams into my nose and eyes, into my lungs

and out,

it cracked— the house, walls

so dry we licked life off of each other, until

our tongues bloated with insults, until

I could not tell when the doors opened

anymore, I could only hear the wood saying

run,

I dug myself out of my mother,

like spooning the sloppy, juicy—

defenceless part of a

watermelon away from its almost

rock of a shell,

almost rock of a mother.

 

 

IV

 

The day I returned home, there was a message

with a watermelon popping out

of my notifications,

at the door, she hugged me with that giant fruit

between us— like a clouded

shell of animosity, a mother

left behind will excessively

store for the son who left her

behind—

because mothers don't hold grudges,

they hold you responsible, then sit

with you, the same fruit sawed

off, the clouds now struggling to gather,

as she welcomes you

with a face soiled with age, death and

juicy, blood-red wetness sleeping

on her lips.

 

V

 

My mother loves watermelons because her

mother could never taste one, could never

know, what a cube of red water

does to your tongue;

every year, we never

run out of them— nothing defines love

better than memories,

my mother eats for the stomach of two,

for an extra stomach

that, when alive, never presented

its hunger, never was cared for.

 

VI

 

Nothing defines love

better than memories.

Better than doing, what they could never.

Eating for the stomach of two.

 

Or

knowing when to leave to stay afloat,

because your mother

could never know,

and your mother could never

float.


 

Parallel Universe

 

My father, before he was

                                            my father, loved

                                            exploring.

My mother, before she was

                                            my mother, loved

                                            poetry.

 

His bicycle by his side, he pedalled to

                                 untitled places,

       documented corners he never knew,

       and I still don't.

Her leather-bound diary— a gift from

                                 her nana, the ink of her pen

       tiptoeing around the hungry pages,

       waiting to be fed

                                     along the thin blue lines.

 

Drop him a location and he would tell you

                  what beauty hides in its centre.

Plant in her a thought and see her ink her

                  fingers in the soil of her memory.

 

Before they were someone

                                        significant to me,

they were significantly someone

                                        to themselves,

                                        to one another.

 

If I appear in this poem, that means I have

                already borrowed from their lives

                                    what I can, but cannot

return to them.

Which means stealing.

 

Which means they gave up

                                           what they loved,

for someone they love.

 

I see now how easy it has been to be a son.

 

To have recreated, reshuffled the versions

of their lives and compress them into me.

 

A version where he burdens

me to remember the

                     particularity of every mass of land.

              And she hands me over fragments

                     from the poems she could never

birth to life.

 

In some versions,

             he never settled for a place less appealing

and

             she never saw her diary burn to ashes.

 

In some versions, I never appear in this poem. It is

                never written. Never thought of.

 

But in here, they will never return to what they once were.


 

Inside A Slow Local To CSMT, I Think

 

all life is love and loss—

mostly loss were the sweat soiled dead over

your pillow was to answer.

every morning when you crawl out of

your bed you are fearful to look back at

the growth in the fall of

your hair, scattered, like amputated parentheses

wronged by a sentence.

because the origin of every need

is elimination,

in search of a life on your own terms you traded

whatever good you might call rest.

you traded the soft familiarity of your home for

a corner in Mumbai, in this unforgiving city

you have to earn to put your

ageing body in—

to live knowing that living has a price tag,

to live knowing there's always somebody eyeing

the four walls you pay for,

that everybody ends up here and nobody

wants to.

this city and you— your bodies are out

of safe spaces and sheltered corners but you

never built an exit gate.

in the meantime, you realise that promises

are a magnitude of

the unfortunates in this city—

still, there are more people who come

dreaming than there are rooms

to have them.

there is mud, there are buildings and then

there are people living in both.

you rest your body in a room closer to the clouds

than to the rush of the land.

in sleep you sound like an old man's

raspy cry, your heart beats as

if dreaming the bad version of the life you

were supposed to have.

or are having.

in this city, you are never first anywhere.

you are always brushing shoulders,

and knocking elbows with twenty others,

and are sandwiched between

two bags the size of boulders.

whatever you pray for is drained away

in the monsoon,

and you sleep under a rainy roof— if

at all you sleep, if

at all, you have a roof.

you were once the smell of all distinct,

uncategorized fragrances your home harboured,

now you are the armpit of every second person

reeking, of nine hours of

corporate shift— overdid to be

underpaid. here, you are everyone else,

your face the thousandth shade

of a man a few hues too similar. when looked

from above you are

occupying space which is never there and is

never yours. nobody reaches anywhere

and everybody is leaving for

somewhere. you see, how the eyes that look red,

sleep-hungry,

leave early, to

reach late to a job that doesn't ask

for much, because you have nothing to hand,

because the cost of keeping you in

is already coming at the cost of isolating

you out. through all this, you think, your

legs trembling, your hands

rough from tightly holding onto, as the train

leaves another station

with thousands pushing in, to swipe

through your old photos, when there

was not one worry in sight. you smile

at the photo of your mother

aggressively kissing you, like reclaiming your

birth, as you sit on a table and she, in her

nightgown,

grabs your cheeks.

you think about your mother as the dull train

pushes forward, the sweat finding itself on your

face, dripping down

to your chest. you think about her the way

one thinks about his home as the

lights go out— even in darkness, you are

where you belong. where you are

loved, you are safe. you are

in your mother's hands, as she pulls you up

on a table, gives ears to your pain,

and reclaims you with a kiss.

the possibility of rest pumping blood in

your heart, as the train shoves inside

more, of what is, already

there.


 

About the poet:


A systems engineer by academic background and a writer by passion, Utkarsh keeps his life simple: eating good food, taking impromptu trips, loving freely, carrying books everywhere, reading voraciously, and writing. His work has appeared in online journals and magazines such as Verse of Silence, The Blahcksheep, and Writefluence. His short stories have been featured in several paperback publications.

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