Ghazal for February

There is a dog on the road looking up at the city every day
With eyes of a poem’s tireless wonder - I too try, every day

On Rani Jhansi road, the houses have been half demolished for years
Here, construction and livelihoods carry on every day

At the chowk as I pass birds pecking at busy grain
They plunge their hearts skyward, in uprising every day

The air we used to breath free turned fire, a February ago
When again will wind in Ramjas blow khulla every day?

Wave upon wave of injustice brings new battles to the fray
Harder are the oldest battles, to be fought again every day

So many sorrows wash to my doorstep, some dear and some faraway
Hardest are those that cannot be fought, only lived with every day.

Ananya, how will your city of memories survive the earthquake?
Force not a forgetting, or it will haunt its streets every day.

With thanks to Mukul sir for inspiring the fourth couplet

Photograph: Aryamaan Bose

Documentation of the day of a student in India

if you want us to throw stones back,

we could pick the entire planet apart.

if you want, we could raise our sticks over the walls of our fortresses
till they are piled so high with bricks that they crush the sky over our heads.
we could quench our thirst with each other’s blood
till all our rivers and veins run dry,
but listen, I can tell you this: in the face of our smiles,
in the sound of the laughs that we share, singing hand in hand,
there is something you cannot kill:
the only weapon we’ll wield,
this unbreakable joy
is the resistance in our peace

[For Ramjas]

Photograph: Prabhakar Duwarah

there was a red building with open lawns

and once these were graced with strains 
of a qawwali that came all the way 
from Karachi, and played for us 
just because they could, they’d been called, 
these were the kinds of things that happened within this building.
one year, I remember being told
about a lovely man who rolled up his sleeves
to show a new world to a roomful
of college kids, along with the bangles on his wrists, 
something they had never heard before.
but most days nobody had to be called,
it happened every day, the lectures 
that sometimes would launch a debate
of ideas that’d take shape or wing
and probe boundaries of definition as well
as the walls that made up the safe space 
where they could grow.
(red from the outside, peeling inside)
this is where it began, where
we had a thought to call
a man to speak, for whom so many had 
already spoken that it was over a year forgotten
what he originally ever had to say.
(tell me, will every idea that touches your ears
be like one emerging from your own head?
but how would children ever learn to speak if they didn’t listen as they grew?)
but this, what made it
magical, or enough at least to allow me
to romanticise it to some extent,
was where left and right and the rest could find
a voice to express themselves,
and hear, dissent, something beyond
boundaries that were built in our heads and on paper walls.
and sometimes dreams.
of pyaari pyaari azaadi:
what cannot be killed within these walls, 
what we demand from beyond as well
to preserve this sanctity