 This one is called I pray to you for all of India's students fighting against the CAA and NRC. You student, you student of resistance, unfurling a banner, thrice your chest. You forming a fence with the unwavering flag of your body. The blue in your long line of blood, lines of blood streaking your skin penetrated by the nation's bullet. The nerve in your eye holding back its water in the face of tear gas. And the whip from their stick and the whip from their stick and the stick you duck, the one you couldn't and the bruise that will darken tomorrow. Tomorrow, my dear student, is another sponsored history textbook that will white out your name. This day its souls and its slogans. My forehead kisses the floor of your courage five times a day and six and seven. There is no internet shutdown, no cut-off, no curfew that can stop a prayer that begins and ends with no. May the static of your bullhorn enlarge your spirit voices, deafen the ears of those parliamentary beasts in murderous thrones. I imagine them muting you when you are on television with your banners. Those beasts licking their fingers at dinner as they wipe clean our democracy morsel by morsel. There you are and you and you challenging our cold capital sky in this coldest winter of Delhi with portraits of Ambedkar and Gandhi. I worship you as I do church goers who hold up their children to the blankness above us. Tonight I wrap myself in your muslin message, painted with inkalab in all our recognized and unrecognized languages. I weave a rosary with your trembling voice, your lost voice, your repeating chorus, joe Hitler ki chal chalega, wo Hitler ki moth merega. He who goes, Hitler's way will die Hitler's way. You who have stirred again the melancholy asleep in Faiz's Subeh Azadi. And you dear poet Faiz, I beg you for a new war cry. You are all my gods, you are all citizens in the cathedral of my faith finding heart. Each of you is a country in my 37.2 trillion celled body. You are the only country I want to wake up in. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. I acknowledge that this is not the right audience and I wish I was home protesting outside the prime minister's home or in the streets of Bombay, which is my city, but I really, really needed to say that. All right. Over the last three months, I've been trying to write a whole lot of new poems, which still feel like they're in conversation with the first book I wrote. So this one is called Genesis. Genesis, age zero. I am upside down in her belly, deemed impossible to be a natural delivery. My grandmother picks a lucky Thursday. My mother is cut open. Genesis, age seven. My neighbour, 11, his friend, 13, beg to see what's under my frock. Genesis, nine. My father is desperate to have me shifted from a co-ed school to a convent school. The nun at my school interview asks if I've been exposed to multiplication. Genesis, age 11. Mum says I'm always constipated because I don't give my shits enough time. All summer every morning I spend an hour in the loo, Christian each tile with a name A through Z. Each name is a name I want to give my child. Daughters come out first. Genesis, age 16 through 20. Will kissing make me a mother and a centimeter of your tongue and your finger in my ear and your spit on my navel and your nails like little moon stamps on my thigh. Welcome to the auction of my hunger. I say more, stop, more, stop, more, stop, stop now. Genesis, age 22. I locate a chemist shop my father wouldn't have frequented. He loves befriending lifesavers, you know, for life, savers and for discounts. The morning is a pink pill in a blister pack, 0.2 centimetres in diameter. It has a butterfly engraved on it. The brand name is eye pill. Who is the eye in eye pill? I swallow it body and wing, wait for my blood to return to me. Thank you. And then I think the occupational hazard of being a poet is to keep chasing ghosts of old lovers. So this is for one of those old loves or its remembrance. Fade out him. I switch the light on at sundown, kiss my hand, vapor up it on my chest, imitating my mother the way she prayed to all sources of light. I want to find a way to pray to my desire, my desire a beast more loyal than any family I've ever had or chosen. My desire a cage pacing, hungry lion, kiss the heat of its ravenous floor, sprinkle it with holy water, bless its recurring birth mysterious as heads of waterfalls. All of last year I brought your name to the page as a knife that could sculpt the shape of our bodies, slice the curves of our resentments. When I read us out loud, they clapped when I said come. They went crazy when I said sex. That line about love though got not the laugh I wanted it to. I prayed once to you in song with that con ball of a refrain, tujh mein rab dikta hai, yara mein kya karun, in you I see a God to my beloved, what do I do? Sajde sar jhukta hai, yara mein kya karun. Like a trader now, I'm trying to write you off as a bad debt in the books of my body. But how can I forget I'm still the daughter of a businessman who wants scribble love songs on borders of outstanding bills, receipts and refund slips. How do I then make a prayer of forgetting? How do I sift your skin from the skin of my want and with what must I graft the face of separation? Just before we left home, my father or I for an exam or an important deal, my mother used to place a sugar cube on our tongue for fate to go easy on us. So now before I enter another body, I let your name swell and slowly dissolve in my mouth. Very rarely do I love my first ruffs, but I love this one. Can you all hear me okay? Can you all hear me okay? Clever. Fourth, meaning the fourth day after the funeral. In this dream I have of mother, she still hasn't lost her hair. When she arrives, she doesn't speak. Three days since she has become a waz. Gone in a maroon salwar kurta, I knew she did not like. In this dream, she doesn't speak, she stands still as if for a fitting, still as I stood after school on a stool as she measured the holes of my arms for a robot costume. Her silence prudent and willful as if she'd be taxed per word. Silence sits between us like the suggested time for thawing on a recipe. And I tell her in my preteen voice, don't worry mama, I am like super wise now in three days. I've been reading the Bhagavad Gita and shit, all the heavy duty parts. You know, the body is only a vehicle. I mime the soul its driver. She looks at my steering hands and back at my face the way she looked at me when I faced my first stage. She taught me how to be a robot in 1991. I am the pinnacle of the human mind. My speech's opening line. I am the pinnacle of the human mind. I rehearsed as she fixed the tinfoil head on me. I wake up feeling like something between a god and a robot. But in the dream she doesn't speak, she looks at me the way I saw her from under my guise. As we waited in the wings and she kept pricking tiny holes in my tin head making several inconspicuous openings for me. So I could go on breathing. At this point, I think it's possibly toxic and dangerous to be owning my mother's last lipstick. She passed away in 2008 but I'm still holding on to it. The shade is called berries and creme as is this poem. Berries and creme. Mouth open, I run my mother's last lipstick over my lips. I'd forefeet all my words for a snippet of her voice. Her absence keeps swinging into my frame like a door with a broken latch. A mysterious spot in the house lets the cold raft in. In Egypt, they force open the mouth of the dead to help the soul find fuel in afterlives. The first night my mother tucked me in a separate bed in a separate room she swore on her mum she'd always leave both our doors a little open. An amber light still hums a lullaby in the passage connecting our rooms. Did you know grief is a multi-use punch card with no concession at the end? Did you know that any love song can become a veil if you sing it over and over? Imagine this simple tune. I make my lips wrestle each other in the last midge of her discontinued shade and like a test sound from a sax a long hollow note defends the room. So one of the superstitions that my family very strictly believes in is that you be don't pass anything sharp or metallic by hand. You place it on the table and wait for the other person to take it because passing it by hand forbids a fight. It means you're gonna fight with that person. Dinner conversation. I walk to our living room having cut the tiniest hole in the restaurant's chutney packet. Hand my father the scissor to cut open the tied bag of vadas already losing their crunch. He motions for the metal to be put down then lifts it up because we believe that passing sharp objects means a fight is about to happen. The marigolds on my mother's funeral frame are still alive. We share a bowl, eat the dosa straight from the single leaf it came wrapped in. Less mess, less dishes. We are a ministry of less. We are four eye bags and a race to the remote's volume high button. I mute the possibility that my father skimped on my mother's cancer treatment. Like a chutney that's clever enough to never let its final ingredient be known, my father holds back his decision to remarry. I swallow the sambar's drumstick whole with skin. Ask the channel to be changed to comedy. He leaves to wash his hands. I'd be able to identify his agitated gargling from planets away. This is a life split open between what's left over. Why isn't mom smiling wider in this photo we've chosen of her? If she were here, things would be different. At least two. One, no takeout. Two, no blades while eating. That woman could untie even the most invisible knots with just her hands. I wrote a screenplay for a feature length three years ago. I love saying that because it's never going to see light of day. It wasn't commissioned, but hey, I got paid for it. That was amazing. Notes from the producer on my first Bollywood screenplay. I write all back stories as a religion. The producer says it's inessential like knowing the Bible by road. He says, at best the past can be accommodated as a quick cut montage. Transition to the protagonist's current conflict, give her a minor victory. Tell me why she's unable to love. The answer rattles in the formative years. I argue on second draft and see myself morph into my therapist. How she preemptively slides the Kleenex box towards me before saying the words, your mother, your father. Can I ask my dad to stop singing Osathire in the bathroom then? But remember, this isn't their film. Assume they are gone, replies the producer again. There's never enough screen space for grief, but plenty in a Bollywood film for dance and song. Can a song advance the narrative? Another one-line email. I ask my dad to stop singing Osathire in the bathroom. The one from Omkara, a Hindi adaptation of Othello. As in that Omkara, which was the last film my mother and father ever saw together in a theater. He hums to the drum of the shower. Which means come, let's try to stop the day. Let's run after this dying sunshine. This is the story my father tells me filled with the same daily vigor as style drying his back after a shower. Omkara, what a real tragedy. The real was faulty. The film kept stopping. The theater was hot. Thank goodness your mother sneaked in pistachios in her dupatta. We left before it got over. Missing the big deaths. The way I reached three hours too late after my mother closed her eyes. A decade later, I will remind my father how it all ends. How does Demona is pretty, even in death. How else can I fall in love with her? How does the time faster make transition smoother? Consider another close. Lay memory out on an edit table. Hold delicately in my hands the scissor which is this mind. One blade loss, the other blade time. Thank you. If you haven't seen it, Omkara is a fantastic movie and I think it will be available online. It's a great adaptation of Othello. I'll do two more and then I'm going to call it a close. Thank you so much for having me. Obigery for cremation ceremony, women aren't permitted to attend. My virgin shell. Was it wider or narrower than the slit in the pyre through which my mother was set to flames? Penetration was my first stage of grief. Bombay sweat curdled under my bulk purchased thongs. The city's gutters overflowing the way I squirted pretend moans into ears and ears of hungry men. The smell of sex leaked into my theatre of loss. Every performed orgasm, a rhythmic contraction of muscles to forget which parts of my baby soft mother must have surrendered to fire first. My body a fist afash of the whole girl she once birthed. What else could I do with my earthly heat? What else could I do with my earthly heat but keep singing about disappearing? There is a stat I would love to see changed and that stat says that every 20 minutes in India a girl is raped. Hasn't changed for the last 10 years and these are only the cases that get reported which is a number in the early 20s. And every time a rape is publicly reported and news channels pick it up there is more often than not an all male panel that tries to discuss what is right and not for women. Those kind of news footage scenarios have led to this poem. An apple a day. An apple a day and a pear and a person in a banana at 6 a.m. Lately I've been eating a ton of fruits to accelerate my immunity. Pomegranate coming loose at its heart. Bleeding the front page headline another woman in India raped, beaten, found without breath, uterus, bra, belongings. Fresh blood oranges I slice dramatic as sunsets. Bitter rind on my thumb lingers than fades like expletives elegised in my mouth. I am immune. Every 20 minutes a girl is raped in India. I let the statistic sticky as a jackfruit abduct my tongue. Late show hosts shade the body of the country into safe and unsafe zones. And which country do I belong to if my country begins with my body? Do I even care? 8262 miles away from home I am gently breaking open segments of mandarins arranging pips into smiley faces for the girl I babysit. Her ear abnormality makes her wail at the faintest sound of firecrackers bursting on the other side of the water. I say I'm sorry Peechi but tonight the giants have won again. The words desensitized, normal, not news lodged between my enamel-losing molars stubborn as seeds of tamarind, sour pleasure of pulp and flesh those tamarind sticks which damaged my voice box at 9. I secretly bought fistfuls with lunch money hid from mum as I did the story of the neighbour who begged me to show him what was under my red frock. Is stillness a kind of reacting? Have I reacted enough? Did I react the night a rom-com loving banker, blue moon and citrus lipped helped my hair captive at the back of a bar said, call me your master baby. Yes, no, what did I feed him? I am immune and is my yes, yes, yes, a submission of presence as in here sir or a submission of the shame I am to feel but cannot or is it a tick box checked under the pursuit of pleasure? And of course this is not the same at all as the news today. Some say the average girl is incapable of telling what is what is not rape. A pluot is a plum crossed with an apricot tangelo is a marriage of tangerine with pomelo, my body is the hybrid history of my wanton desires fucked by undefined boundaries. My ex is a hashtagged predator, my co-worker calls himself an ally, my boss circulates a new HR policy. Another girl is raped, I am immune, I carry my body and infested orchard to another candle march, hold hands with women I have nothing and everything in common with. Every was it abuse or not riddle raises itself as the disappointed eyebrow of the convent nun who asked me during my kindergarten interview, is this tomato a fruit or a vegetable? This belief is the first song I picked up when I learned to unbutton my urges, knew it as my national anthem before they could agree on a final name my family Christian me Chiku, a rough skin fruit, sweetness of malt survives only in intense warmth. It is cold inside a body that knows not was taught not to husk tyranny from touch. I forgive me, my every unknowing, my every denial avail for how could I let that happen to me. I offer my fruits ripe unripe even the rot that starts much before the bruising of skin to root deep silences my own and the ones I loan from every girl I cross paths with. I pray that all the missing parts of the girl can be found. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.