The metro arrives looking similar to that childhood game where we had to prevent the ever growing snake from eating its own tail. It was our first lesson in desperation, how if left hungry, the body feeds on itself. When the doors open, men and women spill out like inmates broken free. I’m new in Delhi and still as loveless as I was in Lucknow but now, I’m more alert, more receptive to hope and affection. Inside, the compartment is packed and warm with freshly washed bodies crashing softly into each other like morning waves. Ever wonder, if it wasn’t for moments like these, we would go on without touching another body— so busy we all have become with our minuscule lives? And as we wait inside this white pill gliding through the city’s oesophagus, I notice a man looking at me, once and then once again as if recognizing in me something inherent, something these people separating us might lack. When I smile and he smiles back, I know I’m not alone in my own loneliness, that no one really is. When the metro slides into a platform, I step outside knowing he would do the same. We meet, give each other our names, and I see how gently he puts what I’m called inside his mouth, licks and tastes it, and I get to hear after a long time and in a manner never before, my own name mouthed by someone else’s.
Liked my own tweets, my own Instagram posts, and called it self-love. When I was fourteen, I kissed my reflection— the mirror a fog, my own lips like someone else’s. If it wasn’t for the mirror’s coldness, I would have thought I got what I always wanted— the boy a class higher then me. During summer vacations, me and my brother would accompany our grandfather to all the distant trees his father and grandfather planted. Our favorite were the mango trees because they rewarded us for our travels with fruits like golden nuggets hanging precariously on thin boughs. Though I never learned to swim, I know the rush of water past my dangling feet. My first kiss was hasty, neither of us knowing how long it should last. On those village visits, we learned about stars, lying on the roof at night, dreaming of lands farther and farther away. I have loved many men, a few only for a night. I stopped praying when I realized I would never change no matter the time dedicated to the gods. What use were prayers when as a fag I went to sleep and as I fag I woke up. No metamorphosis for this queer, the gods must have declared. Now, I only bend my knees to comfort men, to make them rest for a while in the softness of my mouth. And how grateful they are, their eyes relaxing as deflated balloons. To love others is to love the self, isn’t it? They give so much love, I sometimes spit it out.
It's night because so many things refuse to capture the sunlight and what can a moon do floating as it does in the sky? Give credit where it’s due; at least it tries; at least you can see the road beneath your feet. I do consider it impolite to ask someone to give you something they never even had in the first place. I’m impolite, a condition since adolescence and have begged every man I knelt before to love me as they would their own. But tonight I’m promising to be good and decent, to ask only what I could be given. Walking, I hear an owl hoot, calling to what I will never know. When the solitary street lamp flickers, the mindless moths panic, hitting the bulb until it laughs gold again. I notice a pair of hands extended in that cone of yellow light, odd and sadly bodiless, beckoning me. The man, standing at the edge of that bright circle is no more than a silhouette, no more than a ghost already dissolving in the dark. Tell me, should I not take it? These are just hands, soft and maybe harmless and am I not here to be held, to let another man tell me love has many forms and this is one of them. Tell me, should I not give this man what he asks, a weight to finally anchor him to this light?
What is it? If not this belief that nothing is as cruel as the present, that future is a bed of feathers awaiting this body. If not this idea that with all the crimes these hands commit, we will be saved once again. When I learned to pray, I never questioned—to what? Because, that’s faith. Because mother had said, bow your head and gods will listen. How ma? Since, what we pray to lives someplace higher. At night, I would climb on the terrace, balance these feet on the railing and look up to the stars shining like lit windows of those who forgot to switch them off. Change me, I would whisper, would let the cold breeze take with it my words. Now imagine, years of praying returned like unanswered mail, like an echo reentering the mouth it came from. So I did what most people would do— put faith elsewhere and let the body learn to live with its own illness. Because faith, in part, is in knowing who to trust. Like the man who said love is just another derivative of companionship—a moment well spent in someone's arms. Like the man before him with his hand on my head as he guided me through the night. Faith, in part, is in knowing that if you submit, good things will happen. Like father letting mother win an argument every time, or a seaside tree accepting the wind to shape its form. Like this dark bending its knees for the morning to finally come.
Ashish Kumar Singh is a queer Indian poet whose work has appeared in Passages North, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Grain, Chestnut Review, Fourteen Poems, Foglifter, Atlanta Review, and elsewhere. Currently, he serves as an editorial assistant at Visual Verse and a poetry reader at ANMLY.
Three sculptures by Severo da Ravenna (Italian, c.1496-c.1543):
1. Kneeling Saint Jerome,
2. Writing Casket (container for pens, inks, and sand for blotting),
3. Inkwell of Hercules.
Courtesy of The Cleveland Museum of Art.
