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

On Diwali night,

strings of lights try to lift
the darkness, but they don’t mitigate it
quite as much as the smoke from the crackers
that makes the sky purple
and silvers the air
prematurely,
something about the way
the lights are hung up over houses
that doesn’t reveal
their sadness or happiness
reminds me of people,
bright stars of smiles
like facades decorated with rangoli powder,
that could scatter in a second
in a breath of wind
or lit with diyas burned out by tomorrow
and as we pass
on a road
filled with celebratory trash
winter air combined
with the ash we can’t cough out
for a year
there’s a house in the corner
that’s under construction,
uninhabited yet,
and on its side
is a jhuggi
like a forgotten child
that will never not be
under construction
that can’t keep out
the bitter ash in the air
but it’s lit as much as the house on the corner
and for one night
on a festival
both houses will light
a candle to their gods
pretending to smile
for
as long as the wick will burn.