Creative Non-Fiction I Ananya Aneja
And since I was born a nocturnal being it is always in the dark, I have satiated
the fabric of my being into a crocheted conundrum. Every night I lay with my
eyes wide open, pondering half bewildered how things that don't make sense
to completely sediment in our guts. So I think, and think, and question how-
My shoes are twins/ But they can't switch their places still/ I have
talked about you so much/ That my walls smell like you/ I
remember when I had just bought our house/ The maudlin smell of
fresh paint/ The Padauk wood that would be a feast for termites/
The taps and handles still sheathed in plastic shrouds/ The fresh
moths of the spring wiggling alone in eroded garden/ Body shamed
bricks ejected candidly/ Dreaming to have a thinner body like the
Brazilian chocolate/ A plot of land is a thin paper/ You don't know
how much weight it can carry until you decide to build a castle with
your poems/ My walls are notepads, written in Braille/ When you
visit me, blinded by love, we'll read them together/ I talk about
Istanbul so much to my doors/ As if next time I unlock them I'll
land right in the Grand bazar of Beyazıt/ Old cities are never safe in
a new world/ They are like landline telephones with corkscrew
curls/ I pity the technology staring at my favourite painting "the
creation of Adam '' on the wall adjacent to your picture/ It made
everything touch screen so that they don't romanticise fingers
anymore/ To me, the fan's regulator is like its volume button/ the
washing machine's beep is like her moaning/ the oven's door like
entering the warm staff room amidst the cold hallway/The
refrigerator shelves are like half read books in a lonely dwarf
cupboard/ Left to keep the fresh and deathless/ How do poets and
writers preserve their words even when they are pressed like olives
in the hardbound covers/ Tightly packed on the shelves reminding
me of pickle jars stacked like prostitutes on the footpaths/ Clad in
shimmery sarees on a freezing evening of January/ These prostitutes by the roads, like flowers at night afraid of stripping open their pores/ Plucked ruthlessly out of their beds, their destiny is to wilt by the first ray of sun/ Someone would tell them, love is
like blooming flowers in the sky and smashing stars with muddy
boots/ Prostitution is like poetry, to stand naked in front of
someone for your body to be seen/ But never to be understood/
Passed from one hand to another/ Bruised by the fingernails at
places where human hands are forbidden/ Perhaps so men wrote
poetry out of desire/ Women wrote poetry out of captivity/
Whoever wrote poetry/ cheated on silence without ever making
noise.
And then I fell asleep, the platelets of the night are surreal and reckoning to let
white blood cells overpower them. Soon the daylight breaks and chews dawn
as if a toddler nibbling on the ancestral photo albums. Next day is going to be
the plain morbid suffrage of nomenclature. It is only at night that the names
are pregnant with stories.