
I was in tenth grade when a pup
with its head concussed
was fussed
over by a pack of rich colony kids.
they fawned over it night and day,
then gave up in disarray
when the vet
pronounced imminent death.
so the starving pup moaned alone
in silent concentric circles
corresponding to societal circles
growing larger
and smaller
till it lay
down to die alone, wrapped
in the food and nonexistent
love it’d shat out,
eye sockets a vacant lot,
pleading
the solitude in death
that had so haunted it in life.
in two seconds flat,
the vultures descended,
the cultures descended,
wrapping ‘it’ turned ‘him’,
into a jacket
of emphatic sympathy,
of tears and moans
that could have shamed
its unheard cries of death,
and they lowered it
into a grave full
of grave secrets,
whose fancy stone read,
“here lies Fido”, which
is a lie because Fido
never lied, because Fido
never existed when he was alive.
A sad concussed pup
died alone and cold,
and Fido the lie, was
a new name in Death’s Collective
book of lies
written down with
the nonchalance of deathly calm,
Is death even calm?
Was Camus,
when he wrote the Myth
of Sisyphus and said, in
order to survive, one must
believe Sisyphus happy?
And there was once born an
übermensch named Sisyphus
who happily pushed a rock
up a hill, a continuous process
spelled ‘cunt’ because
a happy Sisyphus existed
only in myth. The real
Sisyphus would’ve been
a sissy, would’ve groaned
under the deathless torture
of his chore, and would’ve
possibly craved to die,
just die, only die, die alone.
but in living death he
was found by the vultures,
erratic, literratic cultures
and they stole from him the
only thing he owned: despair.
One now imagines Sisyphus happy,
and goes on with life,
and another name has been added
in the list of Deaths’ sub head:
Buried Alive.
When the unemployed wretch
around my old family house
situated himself at the base
of a mango tree and begged
for some money for his ailing
wife, a weight machine beside
him, unable yet to weigh
the burdens of
a solitary life, nothing clinked
into his threadbare cap,
that wasn’t coated in disdain
for his pathetic attachment
to his dying wife. the
morning sun blushed
redder than usual when
it lit up the blue face of the
corpse hanging from the
mango tree, or the purple
one lying below.
by first light, spectacled
doctors had gathered to
gather in the spectacle,
collecting money to buy
an expensive shroud for
bodies which would never
be warm again.
such undying love,
they said, should be
buried together, not apart,
and two more names, were
added in the ledger of
Death’s collected heart.
“जिसे जीतेजी तन ढाक्ने को
चीथड़ा तक न मिला,
उसे मरने पर नया कफ़न
नहीं चाहिए।”
But one must firmly believe
in God, Godot will redeem,
will overcome some day,
and maybe reverse the
narrative of pain of
Plath’s head in
the oven, of Jesus on the cross,
of Woolf’s pockets filled
with stones, never as heavy
as her heart, of Narcissus
clawing his face to fucking end his
torturous beauty, of Echo
starved of love, but what echoes
instead is a narrative of
romantic death for
something that is best
described as rot and decay.
they say the one way
to end the meaninglessness
of life, is to end one’s life,
end it alone on one’s own terms.
but it’s like Wonderland’s little
doors: you can never die alone, can never, never tell
what’s on the other end
whether they’ll name you
Jesus, or Scoundrel Christ.
Good cop-bad son, teacher-
gambler, lover-wife beater,
rapist, martyr, murderer, liar, liars
all lying down in deathly lies.
Life is a lonely, lonely
business in which the fittest
too, shall eventually die.
But death is a collective,
of grudges and debts collected,
deaths collected,
a complicit web of lies
that one can’t possibly deny.
Aparajita is of the mind that human beings are receptacles for stories, and that our legacies are determined by how beautifully, sadly, terribly or carefully we weave magic through ours.
