Collections of Poems

-Sobhana

Finding God in Delhi

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I left for Delhi this morning and my mother forced a Bible into my hands. She said, read carefully and you will find God in these pages.

On the flight my father jokes, look carefully you might find God sleeping on the clouds.

The pages are empty and clouds don’t make good beds, but in Delhi I found God on the tip of my tongue, burnt by that first sip of hot chai on a cold night.

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This town chokes me.

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Each morning, a million people wake up in ‘Depression Town’ and walk to their windows and their balconies and their front porches and their patios and their courtyards.

They breathe out and the air is colored by their disregard. I can smell their self-serving thoughts with my breakfast cigarette.

And it chokes me. The air in ‘Depression Town’ is poison. My hair falls down and my skin breaks out. My plants die and the rain makes me scream. The air here is poison.

I will die breathing the air that came out of the mouths of these people.

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The fastest way home

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If I sit at just the right angle on my balcony, I can imagine I’m anywhere in the world. If I sit just right, I don’t see the buildings or the trees or the smoke or the people.

I can imagine I’m home. Above the sea.

If I sit just right, I’m not in Delhi anymore.

Maybe that is why I want to jump off it, because it feels like the fastest way home.

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I will not be dust for the gray Delhi air.

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When I die, whenever I die, toss my ashes into the blue waters of േകരളം (Kerala) Save a spoonful of my still heart and hide me under a coconut tree, not too far from the shore let the waves cool my burning embers

I will not be dirt in the cold Delhi ground. I will not live in Delhi after my death.

My embers will not warm the cold Delhi night.

My bones will not build this city.

My skull will house crabs on the shores of my homeland, and my spine will be the bridge from the land to the sea. My knuckles will turn to pearls under the sunlight.

I will not be a corpse. I will be calcium.

And you will never see me again.

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I am back in Delhi to be eaten alive

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I am right on time for the spontaneous combustion of this city’s mountains of filth. I am back in place

to be hollowed out, to be empty-skulled.

Delhi’s vultures will gouge out my eyes because flying in circles over burnt filth will not fill their stomachs.

My earnest eyes must look appetizing to the vulture’s eye a few feet above the toxic waste of  Delhi a feast among the spoils of  Delhi a blessing to undo the curse of  Delhi,

the last bastion standing among the ruins of  Delhi.

In the sluggish traffic my racing heart must be a sought-after dessert, a final taste of sugar before the bittersweet doom Of  Delhi.

I am back in Delhi

I am back to being devoured by the great hunger of The City

And the vultures swoop down.