Translated from the Hindi by Aditi Bhattacharjee
Newspaper
It comes crawling inside
through the keyhole
Even before I open the door.
Lurking on the newspaper-spread outside
The stench of blood.
These days, the newspaper man, leaves
at my door
for the price of four and a half rupees
about twenty, say twenty-two litres of blood
I swallow
with sips of my morning tea
news of murders and note to myself
that the tea isn’t strong enough,
that I might need to try a new brand.
We need a different label
‘mob lynching’
has dissolved into our tea
and lost its strength.
Report of Murders
Those boys
who wanted to hold boy hands
who wanted to kiss boy brows
and commit to them evergreen dreams
Those boys whose love reaped
a toxic crop of narrow bars
Those boys who search in bookish lovestories
a corner reserved for them too
Those boys who were not spared any corner
Those boys who were caught in bed with other boys
Those boys who have blue on their calves
Those boys whose sock-stuffed mouths have screamed
Those boys who were told son, understand
Those boys whom no one understood
Those boys who
were boys but boys
they were not
Those boys
who became men
but manly they were not
Those men
who have mold under their eyelids
Those men who are forced to write betrayal
as their wife’s name
Those men whose families
are the reward of their body’s performance
Those men whose mouth, eyes, nose, ears are not their own
Those men whose faces have been robbed
Those men whose smiles are elegies
And mouths, sock-stuffed
Those men whose rooms remember
their suicide letters, verbatim
You may find these men manifest around you
in your streets, shops, homes, offices
in your prayer-houses, these men
when they finally find their faces
the murder reports would read like fiction
then what would be the sentencing of cases detailing humankind’s most heinous crimes—
Funerals or the docks?
Bir, Himachal
Trees are the primary residents here.
You may find one or two people, growing
in the garden planted by them.
The hills are slides in their park
where twelve children of cloud
slide down their surface.
A tune born of water
falling on stones form the background
music for a flowerdance.
Butterflies surround
saddened eyes, here.
The five flowing colors
of Buddhist flags put a finger
on the lips of speaking mouths.
The child bicycling in the faraway farm
maneuvers her tyres
to hopscotch her way around the sunrays.
A few corners light up
in an excellent brightness
of this hilly stage design
while others dim till scene-change.
The audience of this musical
theatre staged in the valley
are hills laden upon more hills.
Nancy Boy
When science was sending the first
rocket, Sputnik to space
When Miller-Urey were simulating
the early days of Earth for a way
to see the origins of life
A boy’s mouth was being stuffed
with cockroaches because
he liked boys.
When, even laughing a manly laugh
and putting the barrel of a gun
on dancing boy legs
and spitting on eyes that were eager for embrace
could not eradicate his desire for sex
with another boy
could not erase his
colorful, absurd, enjoyable, cheap, rude, rude, rude
lustful thoughts,
his trembling hands thought it better
to shoulder a gun.
When Congress was including ‘God’
in the American pledge
Spanish priests stood as whipping ropes
in their detention camps
Boys who were called Nancy boy
Their desperate gaze, sinking from their eyes,
could go only as far as the bars of a cell—
a lifelong confinement.
Ordinary prisoners would fill
the ears and pockets of the jail staff
to facilitate their sexual exploitation.
What will you do
if a body tells you
that more than sex
it has endured rape.
Shubham Negi is a poet, writer, and director from Himachal Pradesh. He was one of the winners of Film Companion and Netflix’s TakeTen grant in 2024, through which he developed his debut short film ‘Hills Don’t Dance Alone’ which is on its festival run. His Hindi stories and poems have appeared in many literature magazines and performed at Kommune, UnErase Poetry and elsewhere. In 2022 and 2024, he received the Hans Award for his stories and reviews.
Aditi Bhattacharjee is an Indian writer and translator. Her work has been shortlisted for The Prose Poems’s Spring Short Prize and nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize 2024. Her debut poetry collection Daughterling was a finalist for the 2025 Orison Prize in Poetry. She has worked in independent publishing and currently co-organizes the monthly River Reading Series which focuses on community curation, opening space for dialogues across voices, languages and disciplines. At the moment she is translating the untranslated stories of Mahashweta Devi from Bengali to English. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School and lives in New York City. You can learn more about her at https://aditibhattacharjee.com