after Grady Chambers
After we hung up on each other for good,
I chucked away the self help book on low self esteem
and hurled myself into the odd nooks
of the city. Memorised new names and faces,
and the traffic signals that look
all alike once you doze off in the bus,
but I figured them out eventually—
The trick is the sky, the way the street
tears into it through the worn out rags
suspended in the sun—the enigma
of electricity wires always on the verge of collapse—
The curl of the muezzin’s syllable
calling out the believers for Maghrib.
I never cared much for faith but I paid attention
to the things that cling to it.
The hunched shoulders and the chapped lips
mumbling—the eyelid quiver.
Hands extended into silence like a hyphen,
and all the babble converging at some meaning
I couldn’t quite clutch the nook of.
So I kept walking through the swirl of the metropolis,
its snickers and shrugs,
shoulders brushing past me and the voice
that calls out for us all
in the beehive city street
before the light swallows it whole.
When it got exhausting, I shunned myself off it.
Read stuff I never thought I would.
Election manifestos, graveyard epitaphs,
the physical detail of every person gone missing—
Even the bible. And turns out
that the easiest thing in the history of literature
is to predict the apocalypse.
That we have known
for centuries that the world is going to hell.
We have hoped for centuries
that it does, but it outlives us
like a child that stumbles on
against better sense
in a dream under our eyelids.
And we get used to it; the hope
and its downfall.
Metro doors shutter on and off
and on and off and we swerve
through the stone tunnels
which was my favourite part of all—
The velocity and whoosh that was the sound of time.
The naught of the perpetual night
right before we slit through the dark
onto the surface again—
Everything that was not
before whatever god it was
that said let there be light.
Abhinav is a graduate student residing in Delhi. His poems have appeared/ are forthcoming in The Chestnut Review, The Bombay Literary Magazine, trampset and other publications.