Category: Poetry

THE FIRST EXHALATION – MUMBAI RAIN 

The concrete cracks open,
releasing a breath held captive since March.
It is the smell of survival—
baked earth meeting the first dark arrow of water.

No warning sirens sound,
just the sudden, heavy drumming on corrugated tin roofs,
the sky bruising into shades of slate and indigo
over the Arabian Sea.

At Marine Drive, the tetra-pods break the spray,
blurring the boundary between ocean and air.
The local trains click-clack through a new, silver world,
tracks slicked with the grease of a long summer.

Nobody runs for cover.
Instead, umbrellas remain folded like sleeping birds.
Faces turn upward,
letting the cool torrent wash away the salt of sweat,
the grime of the local,
the memory of the heatwaves.

A city of twenty million stops,
just for a heartbeat,
to listen to the rhythm of its own washing clean.


CONVERSATIONS WITH MY SHADOW 

You are the only one who walks at my exact pace,
stretching out across the concrete,
mimicking my posture but keeping your secrets.
We walk in a synchronised silence,
two versions of the same tired anatomy
negotiating with the afternoon sun.

"Why do you stay so quiet?" I ask.
But you only lengthen,
pulling yourself toward the edges of the walls,
as if trying to escape the heavy frame
of the body that anchors you to the ground.
You are my most faithful witness,
yet you refuse to testify.

When the light dies, you dissolve first,
leaving me alone in the dark room
to wonder which of us is the real entity
and which of us is just the displacement of light.
You have no voice, no friction,
just a quiet, stretching mimicry
that reminds me I am never entirely alone,
even when I am completely forgotten.


WAITING FOR A GHOST

The ordinary world is too well-mapped,
trapped in the flat geometry of the routine,
where every hour arrives exactly on schedule,
devoid of friction, stripped of mystery.
We scrub the static from our television screens
and pave over the wild, irregular earth,
until the mind begins to starve for the impossible—
the sudden, terrifying tilt of the axis.

So I sit in the drafty dark of the attic,
listening to the house settle into its bones,
actively inviting a presence I cannot explain.
I do not crave the safety of a clean answer;
I want the cold draft that defies the thermometer,
the floorboard that creaks without a footstep,
the sudden, rogue drop in atmospheric pressure
that proves the veil is thinner than we think.

To wait for a ghost is to reject the sterile grid,
demanding a life that leaks beyond the margins.
We need the shock of the unverified frequency,
the beautiful distortion of a world interrupted,
to remind us that we are more than biological clocks
ticking down in empty rooms—
we are participants in a dark, magnificent theatre 
longing for the curtain to rip in two.


HAVE WE REALLY SCRAPED THE SKIES?

We built them high to pierce the blue,
a cold, reflective, glass array,
to show the clouds what we could do,
and scrape the boring sky away.

We poured the aggregate and steel
to give our pride a vertical spine,
and made the old horizon kneel
before a corporate boundary line.

But look up at the ninety-fourth:
a broker spills his lukewarm tea,
and tracks the market going north,
while suffocating in the breeze.

The smog is thick, the air is dead,
we trapped the wind inside a shaft;
we bought a penthouse overhead
but lost the sky to overdraft.

We haven't touched a single star,
nor made the heavy cosmos blink;
we only built a higher bar
to sit inside the dark and drink.

The skyscrapers are standing tall,
a monument of concrete grey,
but we just built a thicker wall
to keep the actual sky away.