New Delhi in winter

Fotografia de Zac Ong

Those mornings in the last days of December,

as the smog deepened over the mausoleum

& the ghost of the emperor’s first wife 

lingered about the four gardens, weeping 

over her dead child

until a solitary jogger tore the curtain of fog

with a flashlight, making her flee 

through a chink in the heavy lid of the small red tomb,

I rose at dawn, washed my face with water 

cold as needles & went to work, stomach taut 

as deerskin stretched over the seat of a chair. 

On the terrace garden above my office,

I drank coffee & smoked a long cigarette

as something unnameable loosened its grip on my neck.

I remember thinking then, This cannot be 

the worst of my days, but mostly I remember 

myself in some variation of afraid.

Why, I can’t tell. 

I had a job, an apartment,

& a woman who claimed to be in love with me

less & less each day. The city’s gray tongue 

licked the windows of our room & I knew 

they would come for us soon,

that one of us would be called first 

to initiate the slaughter, then later 

led into a dim corridor to watch 

through a one-way mirror the other 

slipping on entrails, trying to clamber out of it.

At the parties, I got drunk & cursed everyone. 

At home, I smoked anything the women 

from the university brought me.

I wrote poems that went on for years into my sleep.

When we finally parted, the city shrank

down to the few bars, her dentist, the hospital 

she drove me to where they treated 

the third-degree burns from the hot oil 

that jumped out of a pan one night 

to grab the back of my hand.

The billboards outside the malls looked

vulgar, like my scarred hand in the yellow 

light that fell on the pavement. But always 

that serious joy in the drunken body 

stammering home in the dark. 

In the daylight I felt dizzy with fear 

of running into her. This vast city 

open to invaders & vagrants for centuries 

now small for two.

A few things became clear to me then.

The body itself has no use for hope. 

It hardens in grief to live beyond hope.

And the only real use of narrative is to cheat 

that ancient urge inside us, pale animal 

with its face resembling the inside of our death 

masks, its long unheeded, persistent murmur 

clearing into a deafening verdict: Leave.

Rohan Chhetri