When she shaved off my lockdown beard

you hold my face up by the chin

you clasp my legs between your knees

you make sure i stay still

you put cream on my cheeks

sharp blades slide over, baring soft skin

discarding the illusion of a few extra years

you touch my face, your fingers tracing

its contours; you hold up the mirror

it shows me a boy; i think

i knew him when i was younger

i move it aside and see you smiling

i see the home that boy always yearned for

Before me

I am scared of your past
Of your life before me
The lips that may have kissed yours
The hands that may have held yours
The bodies that may have embraced yours
Do you think of them?
Do you see them in your dreams?
If you were asked to close your eyes
And say what a kiss feels like
Which pair of lips does your mind conjure?

River of Ash

Come back,

Meet me where your tears caught fire yesterday,

Back along the boiling river of ash you left when you ran away,

Come back and show me where it hurts,

Let my cold tears ease the pain of your burns...

Barzakh

The intermediate realm… a conduit between the red earth and the blue sky… conveying the prayers of the living to the eternal being… a barrier separating the two worlds… a portal connecting them.

The soul of the saint resided in the luminous corridors… listening to the prayers of the faithful… comforting them with his ethereal presence… and when they left he supplicated the almighty to relieve them of their difficulties.

His existence transcending both life and death… in a world of dreams… his fingers counting on a tasbīḥ.

Hmmm…?

Sometimes I look at you and for a split second I feel like I am seeing you for the first time. I see a stranger in the wave of people going about their day in a narrow corridor.

I see the wild curls in a half ponytail, a worn off shade of burgundy, and I sense a warmth spreading out from my chest. The cream and the orange of the kurti… the golden brown and white in the eyes… I see them and a rush a familiarity embraces me… and in these few seconds I relive every moment I have spent with you since that hot April day I first laid my eyes on you… those of happiness when I felt loved beyond what I’d ever dreamt of… those of unbound joy as well as those with tears. I remember all those times at night on the bed, when you asked me if I loved you…

You walk towards me as I am lost in this dreamy vision… you look at my blank face and ask “Hmmm..?”

I nod to say, “Nothing.”

In the sound of my breath I hear, “If only you knew how much!”

Still air

Two breaths in discord

The space between them in a swirl

Labored to match each other

Each slowed for the other

Never falling in step

All that was left

In the morning

Was still air

Safe Hands...

Me and her, husband and wife, we were in the midst of an awkward post-fight reconciliation phase in front of a stationery shop when a red Hyundai i20 screeched to a halt dangerously close to the divider on the road beside us. Five seconds later, a few people with concerned faces had crowded at the driver’s side of the car trying to pull open the door. If this was an year ago, I would have just carried on like nothing had happened, choosing neither to be a good Samaritan nor a curious onlooker, not because of a lack of humanity or compassion, but purely practical reasons. Curious onlookers usually block traffic and one too many good Samaritans usually lead to confusion and delay in a decision.

But now, I was married to a doctor. I felt like she, and by extension me, was duty bound to help. “Come!”, I shouted at her as I crossed the road towards the crowd. When I looked back, I found her in a daze still on the other side of the road. I ran to her and led her back towards the car by hand, pushing the crowd aside with shouts of “she’s a doctor!”. As we approached the driver’s side, I caught a glimpse of an unconscious young man in the driver’s seat. There was foaming at the mouth, his eyes had rolled upwards and both his fists were clenched into balls so tight his fingernails were digging painfully deep into his palms. She got near him and I watched as she instructed the people there to lift him out of the car, lay him on the ground and stand back. She knelt down to check on him. People poured in from all sides to see what was happening and I got pushed back. I watched as a growing wall of people separated me and her. As the stream of people flowed into my vision from its peripheries, I felt my sense of self shrink in my mind. As the accumulated weight of the ideas of my own importance and centrality in the world lifted off me, strangely I smiled to myself.

He had regained consciousness in under a minute or so and it was decided to take him to a nearby hospital. Some people laid him down in another car and just as they were about to drive off, they looked at her in expectation. She in turn looked at me in contemplation. I nodded in affirmation.

I made my way to the hospital in my bike. The cloudy sky had let loose a cold drizzle as I waited outside the casualty. A few minutes went by before I saw the familiar outline of the curly haired girl come out, her golden-brown eyes looking for me. The corners of her mouth curved upwards as her eyes caught mine and immediately I felt a ticklish warmth envelope my chest, like it does every evening when I go to pick her up from the metro station, and I thought to myself, “my life is in safe hands!”.