Alejandro

I had known him for long
Four years is a long time
Four years
Since I had seen him coming down from
what seemed like a ‘stairway to heaven’.
“I’m curious how to warm up with u”
was the first thing he had said
and for the next four days,
his warmth never left my side.
Four days
is all the time I spent with him
Embraced him
‘Lived’ with him
He told me about himself
in his broken English
“my granny is french and she emigrate to Chile with her parents”
‘Chilean French’, that’s what he called himself.
I called him
‘Alejandro’
He taught me little words
of courtesy
and beauty
and love…
He helped me around,
Showed me places
Kissed my lips
And walked with me
Hand in hand.

“N u never have wrote for me”
He complained one day
Many months later
“I will visit India
I will visit old palaces”
He had announced
“I’ll be your guide then”
I offered.
He asked,
“Hand in hand ??”

And a joke that he had made
Seems like an irony now
‘Stairway to heaven’
Is where he dwells
I wish
I could stop him
Even for a moment
And say
“See, I’m writing for you now, Alejandro!”

On ‘his’ birthday,
15/9/14
Ankush

BLACK

Black:
I smoked with him
as the smell of clove engulfed our bodies-
our conversations.
A black little cigarette would
wrap around
its aromatic tobacco
sheets of history
and burn them
and we
intoxicated by our own past
and freed by it
at the same ‘fucking’ moment
would wrap our arms around each other
and kiss
and kiss and kiss,
until
our breath would become one
like the identities that we shared.
‘Black is beautiful’,
We wrote on each others’
once-colonized bodies
through our silent lips
because the language was taken
and the voices were oppressed.
He loved and hated his name
and yet kept it;
it reminded him of a past that
he didn’t ‘want’ to forget
and whenever we talked
I realized we did search for
many such pasts
that we didn’t ‘want’ to forget.
A love like ours, then
is not just between two people
It is between histories
‘Shared’ histories
and the loss, hence
of either
is irredeemable.

Ankush, 16/10/14