[i]
Monu & I take turns to bite each other. His nipples are bigger than mine like two-rupee coins to trade for tamarind candy. In the pit of our stomachs, we carry their plastic wrappers & the shame that tickles funny like sour on tongue. Later we wipe our fingers clean on the t-shirts stretched taut on our paper potbellies. His teeth smell funny and melting. As he does not brush his teeth daily. My teeth taste white on his tongue, crystal cool. As my mother forces me to brush my teeth twice. Daily. I wash my down-there. It tickles funny. His teeth are soft to see but hard against my dotted skin: the saliva hot & acidic & nasty like him at school. But cool in the shade of the raspberry, a bloody vomit on the ground like Baba’s, but cool & beautiful. The chickens are crying ‘cause the sun says goodbye & it’s cooling down like a black knife on your neck. The thickening light is sieved green & pink on Monu’s chest but blackens & sits on his upper lip like a scowling small god. I bite on a rib to draw blood but his skin is unyielding. I miss the taste of the raspberries we gathered in our t-shirt wombs, sour & sticky & sweet-like.
[ii]
In the window, the curtains are invisible like a white sheet of dreams we imagine. The air is full of two faces impressed against its white sheet, blind & crying & spitting. Their bodies translucent like the rain-soaked pages of my maths notebook leaking their lines in the boat water. The raspberry shakes by their window in a terror that strikes us in our stomachs & fills our nerves with a cool smoke. Our lungs inflate in our shallow chests. I feel a cool beautiful bile rise up in my throat that I swallow. It tickles as it goes straight down & emerges. Emerges with the shaking breath of the two faces in the window which makes the raspberry rain. None of us move to gather the raspberries in our mouths. The faces converge & separate, one & then two, one & two, till the two mix into each other, a third appears, their melting mouths tasting metallic & sour-like in my mouth, like Monu’s. The shameful smell of their melting skin, the sound of their burning together, seeps into the gaps between my toes, into my knees, my pockets, my armpits, the folds of my eyelids, the sticky wounds punctured into my chest by Monu’s raspberry teeth. In the green light of the spying pink sun, I see Monu run homewards. His back stained by the tamarind still sticking on my fingers. The chickens standing in the cool blue shadows cannot stop crying.
[iii]
In the middle of my bed, I lie in a golden warm piss pool and dream of swans & infinite soap & mangoes & black hair & fountains & underwear & elephants & tapeworms & incense sticks & plastic chairs & keychains & discipline & strawberry jam & pubic hair & mangalsutra & soybean & locusts & a bald scrotum & pastries & hymns & sugarcane fields & wrists & xylophones & lollipops & polio drops & sock marks & roller skates & blisters & drums & marigolds & armpits & cotton balls & pillows & exile & ketchup & fireworks & ceilings & eyeballs & bracelets & abacus & car horns & buffaloes & kohl & synonyms & whistles & mango bites & mosquitos & tuberculosis & nail-cutters & moths & soldiers & leather & elbows & rivers & igloos & eggs & jute bags & lipsticks & erasers & gums & milk
Anshu Yadav is a Delhi-based writer and poet, studying English Literature at Hindu College, University of Delhi.