What do shadows do?
Do you know what they sound like? (a breathless night wind floating over crystalline desert sand. Or the unrhythmic rustle when you remove a first edition from the top shelf of a nineteenth century library still lit by the wisdom of ancient civilization and phosphorous lamps. Sometimes, a lullaby wrapped in a cradle of a torn sari. Or stolen trinkets.)
Shadows don’t rebel when grandmother wakes them up before dawn on winter mornings to pray to gods they are not supposed to question, in vermilion customs adorning supple skin that has yet to blossom.
Shadows don’t speak up when bathed in milk of tradition, and the healing touches of turmeric lathered across burn scars on their body that they must carry, in the name of history and justice.
Shadows don’t complain about anaesthetising desire with the well-meaning advice of aunts and mothers, the vomit that must sit at the base of their throats until a husband permits them to throw up at a designated place on an auspicious hour as per the calendar.
Shadows watch for adventures, spectating on memories they cannot make – of painting houses whose cement and colour peel off into homes that are now empty, and stand unsold on account of cheap sentimentality; of holding on to wooden makeshift mopeds racing across dusty roads that have now become cold flyovers, though the coconut seller's grandson still sits by the old street carrying on the family legacy, even of the betel juice graffiti on the adjacent wall.
Shadows follow the sun, the heat of day that sweats into their dark existence, cardboard, two dimensional lives that collect unique seashells left behind by tsunamic streams of fleshy words (not theirs), that shiver in the eternal spring of laughter (never theirs) that cackles and breaks into bouncing rays of sunshine meant but to deepen their earthly gloom.
Shadows cower in shallow corners, spawn darknesses, slip and slide across unmarked thresholds, eavesdropping on brightly encounters they make murky, and remain insignificant, never enough, racing to tick the boxes of unforgiving love, forever lost in the recesses of its emptiness and at the mercy of celebrated light and manhood.
What do shadows do?
They fall.
Do you know what they sound like? (a breathless night wind floating over crystalline desert sand. Or the unrhythmic rustle when you remove a first edition from the top shelf of a nineteenth century library still lit by the wisdom of ancient civilization and phosphorous lamps. Sometimes, a lullaby wrapped in a cradle of a torn sari. Or stolen trinkets.)
Shadows don’t rebel when grandmother wakes them up before dawn on winter mornings to pray to gods they are not supposed to question, in vermilion customs adorning supple skin that has yet to blossom.
Shadows don’t speak up when bathed in milk of tradition, and the healing touches of turmeric lathered across burn scars on their body that they must carry, in the name of history and justice.
Shadows don’t complain about anaesthetising desire with the well-meaning advice of aunts and mothers, the vomit that must sit at the base of their throats until a husband permits them to throw up at a designated place on an auspicious hour as per the calendar.
Shadows watch for adventures, spectating on memories they cannot make – of painting houses whose cement and colour peel off into homes that are now empty, and stand unsold on account of cheap sentimentality; of holding on to wooden makeshift mopeds racing across dusty roads that have now become cold flyovers, though the coconut seller's grandson still sits by the old street carrying on the family legacy, even of the betel juice graffiti on the adjacent wall.
Shadows follow the sun, the heat of day that sweats into their dark existence, cardboard, two dimensional lives that collect unique seashells left behind by tsunamic streams of fleshy words (not theirs), that shiver in the eternal spring of laughter (never theirs) that cackles and breaks into bouncing rays of sunshine meant but to deepen their earthly gloom.
Shadows cower in shallow corners, spawn darknesses, slip and slide across unmarked thresholds, eavesdropping on brightly encounters they make murky, and remain insignificant, never enough, racing to tick the boxes of unforgiving love, forever lost in the recesses of its emptiness and at the mercy of celebrated light and manhood.
What do shadows do?
They fall.
