Do hands and feet have
to be an appropriate size?
Was a standard size of bones
issued someday,
unbeknownst to me?

Because my fingers are
spindly, sweat-slick vines
that fit no ornament or jewel,
bones of fog,
they vanish as soon as clasped.
Screwed into palms that
stretch like a never ending
yellow desert,
they are streaked with paths
darkened by lines of fate
set atop a red land
of life-giving blood.
And these palms,
these palms
know no other,
they are defective locks
that fit no key,
metal rusting away
into the heavy air
with no house to guard.

Because my feet are
descendants of cyclops,
untamed,
they smash into
wooden corners
and crack into floors.
They are thick cacti,
the trunk holding up five
protruding elongated arms
I call my toes.
These thorny paws
settle in no shoe
they enter,
and with no place
to rest,
they wander—
adrift.

Do hands and feet have
to be an appropriate size?
Was a standard size of bones
issued someday,
unbeknownst to me?

Yesterday, on my morning jog, I saw a cow with a bent horn. It was as if the horn had been pulled down like a lever but never pushed back up. As I was wondering if an injury caused that or if it was a defect the cow carried from birth, I realised that the cow was now walking right next to me. Given that its horns were big enough to pierce my body in two, I increased my pace to try and leave the cow behind. But, as soon as my feet started moving faster, the cow raised its speed too. I tried to go even faster but the cow continued to match my pace. This went on for a few minutes until fatigue got the better of me and I stopped and caught my breath on the footpath. I was half-afraid that the cow would stop too, but fortunately, it finally left my side. I kept thinking about that strange incident as I walked back home. It wasn’t until I was almost home that I realised that what had happened was just like growing up. If you try to leave it behind, it runs even faster, and if you just stop and give up, it leaves you behind.

All of this pessimism was of course brought on by the fact that I of turned eighteen recently. Just the thought of it feels as if my heart was squeezing out the last seventeen years into my veins. Eighteen seems so big, so overpowering.

KThe past year passed in a daze of online classes and waiting for the results of an exam I didn’t even have the opportunity to give. One day blurred into another like a not very smooth movie scene transition. It’s as if I have to drag my memories of the past year in the wheelbarrow of time like an old pet nearing death. This has made me understand that my life is a clay sculpture that can be forced to be moulded into whatever the world wants it to be, and now that I have turned eighteen I will be the one responsible for it. I have shed the skin of a child and worn that of an adult.

By definition, an adult is a person who is fully grown. Isn’t it unfair to just fix an universal age for everyone to be fully grown. What if I don’t want to be an adult when I turn 18, what if I want to stay a kid a little bit longer? What if my body just grew up faster than my heart?

It isn’t the freedom that comes with being 18 that I fear, I fear the responsibility which tails that freedom. I fear that I will make wrong decisions and then waste my time regretting them, or even worse, make no decisions at all. I fear that the life will make me realise that I am just a little girl who forgot to grow up. But then I see Ma teaching me how to make poha—don’t soak it too long, don’t put in more than 1 tablespoon of salt unless you want high BP, roast the peanuts until they are golden brown; I see my dad teaching me how to iron clothes—don’t keep it in one place for too long, if a cloth is too sensitive, place another piece of cloth over it and never, never, leave the iron on; I see my brother telling me which app to use to find my phone if it gets lost and how people in college hostels are beasts and will rob you blind if you are not on your guard (this was clearly an exaggeration…right?).
I see all of this and realise, I might just be able to bear the weight of responsibility because I have a wonderful family to help me carry it.

When I started writing, it was less about making art with my feelings and more about letting them out so that they didn’t burst open inside me. I would let my passion squeeze out into words through my fingers and get a taste of what true achievement felt like. Whatever I felt, whenever I felt it, I would jot down, creating a chequebook of hopes, desires, dreams and everything connecting them. I would write something I was genuinely proud of and rejoice. I didn’t think it was possible to be unable to write because it was impossible for me to stop feeling. But I didn’t realise that sometimes feelings weren’t pliable enough to be formed into words, that just because there was ice on a mountain didn’t mean that it would melt into the river.

The first time I couldn’t write something that I knew I should be able to, I felt like how I imagine a half-broken tree must feel, how it still had all its parts, but it couldn’t do what it does. I sat in front of my diary with a pencil in my hand, playing catch with the letters that stubbornly refused to be welded into something I could hold. Eventually, I gave up, and the only mark the pencil made was the one I had made on my index finger with its lead, in thought, until it was black as soot.

It wasn’t until I googled why I couldn’t write that I came across the term writer’s block. Reading those words, I pictured a traffic barricade forcing my words to a standstill, stopping their journey to wherever I wanted them to travel. I pictured my ideas atrophying behind the barricades until they finally disappeared, taking my words with them. That image terrified me; what could be more terrible than a lack of ideas, an absence of intention? But then I thought, I could just be manifesting my lethargy into something bigger than myself; I could just be searching for something to blame for this apparent drought of words. It wasn’t late before self-doubt followed, and I started questioning what I had done wrong to scare off my creativity.

It took me a long time to realise that the inability to write was a very crucial part of writing because, without it, I wouldn’t sufficiently appreciate my words when they did decide to stop eluding me. I realised that self-doubt was something that would always follow me, no matter what I do, because it is a part of creating something, and the only power I had was to choose how I dealt with it.

On a Friday morning at the summer’s end, my dad woke me up at 5. We left the house behind for a grey sky waiting for the sun, blackened by the remnants of a fading moon, hosting the clouds of a monsoon yet to come. The silence of the early morning was one that I had not heard before. It was a silence of peace, of Nature healing the injuries dealt out to it in the clamour of the day, a period before the start of another noisy sentence. It was a silence that holds within itself all the secrets we keep even from ourselves. The wind, carrying the cold of the night, sighed in our faces as if preparing itself for the weight of the heat it will have to lug during the day.

We were going to see flamingos. Dad had heard about a place where they came this time of the year. We drove for some time, and as we got closer, the tress got denser, the road, narrower, and the silence, deeper. Bird calls smoothed the silence like a final layer of paint on a masterpiece, so many different birds, very few of them known to me. The noise of the engine seemed as out of place as a gun in a child’s hand. The smell of damp mud and unknown crops trailed us to our destination; we parked near a field and set out on foot.

We walked across muddy ponds and fallen branches, thorny bushes and nameless fields, the mud clang to our clothes and crusted upon the soles of our shoes. And finally, finally, we reached the lake of the flamingos. Surrounded by a thick cover of impenetrable trees, the lake sat protected, the water tinged dark green with human ignorance, reflected the folds of the leaves that gave it cover, and in the middle of it all were the flamingos. So many of them. It seemed that the beauty of the landscape was nothing but a reflection of the majesty of the flamingos. Their white bodies stood on long and lean, reddish-pink legs, more than half of which were lost in the water. They stirred the water with their gentle, webbed feet like a mother caresses her newborn. Their necks were shapes of elegance, curved like nothing human ever could. Their bills began straight and then bent down to allow eating. They stuck their beak into the water and lapped at it tenderly to filter out the water and get their food. This simple act of nourishment seemed like a beautiful dance to the most brilliant song in the world. When they landed, they unfurled their feet like an aeroplane releasing its wheels to land on the runway, making it seem as if the water was the road leading them home. When a few of them flew away, their wings were the most dazzling combination of pink and black, stirring up the wind just like they stirred up the water, softly, as if the wind might get hurt if they flew too hard.

This scene was a world so distinct from ours. I felt almost afraid that someone would come, outraged, and ask us how we dared to set our eyes upon what we were seeing. But that didn’t happen, and dad and I stood there for hours, in our little piece of serenity and watched the flame-coloured miracles live. In such moments we realise the importance of stopping, of looking around us to see, really see, all that we have the fortune of seeing.

I was wading through a poem that ended in the poet realising that in the race to know what we don’t, we forget about the brilliance of all that we already do.

Last week, I visited my school after about a year and a half for a small reunion the school had organised. This was the first time after the pandemic started that I was going to meet my friends outside of a Zoom call. The whole day, I wondered how the day was going to fit into the new reality that has been built for us, and did I even want it to fit in?

As my cab entered the narrow road—surrounded by brick walls on one side, and huge fields on the other—leading to the school, I let myself be soaked in the nostalgia that the steep twists of the road, the peacocks that unfurled their magnificent wings and danced in the fields, the farmers and their wives carrying pots of water, brought in waves. But once I reached inside, I realised that everything had changed.

The dirt paths that led to the school had been paved with red and grey stone tiles, the volleyball and basketball courts that used to be bare grounds with nets were now painted red and green, and marked with playing measurements, there were fences around plants, and flowers I couldn’t name peeked out from under them. Despite all of these changes, as soon as I stepped out of the cab, it was as if I had stepped right into my last year at the school. Each step I took brought forth fresh memories that I hadn’t realised I still had. I saw the tree I had hidden behind during a game of hide and seek and remembered with a wave of fresh glee how no one had been able to find me until I came out on my own. I walked up the stairs leading upto the school gate and remembered how during monsoons, I would dip my shoes in puddles and leave shoe-shaped imprints on each step. I still remembered the sound of the bell that rang to transport us from one subject into the next. It was as if I could almost feel the rough bark of the tree as I had giggled behind it, seeing my friends scrambling to find me, the coolness of the rainwater, and the metallic sound of the bell, jarring me through time.

But the nostalgia of the place was nothing compared to what it felt like to see the familiar faces of the people who were the only ones who could share this feeling with me. Given that most of us were vaccinated, we hugged each their welcome and those hugs squeezed out all of my frustration and anger at the world for being so crazy. We fell into the camaraderie that we shared so easily that it was hard to believe that we had been neglected by time in all those months we couldn’t meet. We met our teachers who still carried their wisdom and knowledge as an open well, and let us drink from it, just as they had when we were in school. They wished us luck for our future with an earnestness that I will forever be grateful for, as I will be for their unconditional blessings.

Afterwards, my friends and I roamed the school’s familiar hallways. We bounced half forgotten stories off of each other, checking to see if someone remembered what someone else had forgotten. We spoke so fast that it seemed as if our words were running after each other. Although, in our defence, we were trying to fit in years’ worth of memories in two hours. We pointed out the places we had been punished at, the art and crafts we had made that still hung on display, and marvelled at what was different. So much had changed, yet everything was still the same. We were ghosts in a museum we had helped create.

The entire visit was like reading the sequel to a good book, the plot had changed, but the characters were still the same. It is so difficult to remember what makes a person who they are once they become them. But it is moments like these that help me remind myself that no matter what I do and what I become, no matter how much I grow up, the places and people—especially the people—that helped me grow will always stay with me.

Melodies fill my head 
like rain seeping into
the earth,
giving life to
all that can live.
Harmonies 
of ignored pains,
of forgotten tales, 
of unconfined happiness,
of lost love,
carried to me
by these 
simple, red earphones. 
These earphones which
are always there,
waiting their turn 
to help me escape
the clamour
of my world,
like a daydream
that carries me
away in its 
promise of the 
improbable. 
They fill my head 
with the sounds 
of a world
I have yet to see,
with only
two thin, red wires. 
On these wires 
my favourite voices travel,
like reckless adventurers 
walking a tightrope,
and reach the buds
tucked into the
crevices of my ears,
triumphant,
glinting with their 
effort to carry 
me a little closer to 
my longings,
to the music of 
the life I wish to live. 

This piece is based on a prompt I came across on the incredible writing community called Write The World:

“Point of view (P.O.V.) is the perspective from which a narrative is told. Pick up a novel, and it might be written in first person, using the “I” perspective of the main character.
A novel may also be told in third person, in which the main character is referred to as “he” or “she”.
And then there are the less common P.O.V.s—the collective, and second person, in which the main character is referred to as “you”.

In this prompt, dear writers, write a passage of fiction, employing the second person—“you”—point of view.” (For the full prompt, visit: https://writetheworld.com/groups/1/assignments/936)

Here is my take on the second person:

It is your first time experiencing a cyclone. Your Ma watches three different new channels, all of which declare that the cyclone will hit the coast at a speed of 160 kmph, in an eerily similar cadence. You don’t think much of this. You still haven’t associated the word with the phenomenon. For you, the word is like the sound of too loud television from a neighbour’s home, something you tune out, not heed the warning of. You think this, and immediately think how college for you is kind of the same. How you don’t really know the real world, apart from the fact that it exists. This thought does not settle well with you.

When the cyclone hits, it looses a lot of its power. By the time it reaches you, it is not as destructive as it once was, but it still hasn’t run out, like a villain who gets defeated in the first part of a superhero movie, but is back in the second one with stories of how they conquered defeat.

It feels to you that the cyclone is slowly brainwashing every element of nature and taking revenge for some wrong dealt out to it ages ago. It starts with the wind. You hear the way it seems to beat against the entire house like a too loud, off beat base. You refuse to believe the possibility of what is so destructively insistent in you ear. You think, maybe there are a thousand helicopters in the sky, beating their wings in tandem and sending the dismembered air to beat against your windows. But if that were the case, the trees in front of your apartment wouldn’t have fallen, electricity would still be there, most of the affected regions’ crops wouldn’t have been thrashed to death by the wind.

Next comes water. At first, you enjoy it. The suppleness of your surroundings, the fresh smell of wet earth, the cool raindrops on your face. But then, the rain too becomes a weapon. It terrifies you how something as simple as rain washes away all concepts of day and night with the dark grey clouds that seal off the sky. You help your Ma plug all the openings that can let any water in and tie windows to their bars so they don’t break. You watch as all your attempts turn out to be useless as ultimately the water seeps in through the minuscule space between the wall and the window sill, the floor and the balcony door, until the house feels like every surface was made of soaked clouds.

When finally the cyclone has its revenge and the wind and the water see reason again, you think back to your thought about college. It terrifies you. The fact that the phenomenon is so much bigger than the word. The fact that the real world is really real, not just a fantasy your overthinking brain developed. But then you think that the cyclone was also just a word before you were in the middle of it.

I hear the pitter-patter of the sorghum grains or jowar, as they are called in Hindi. They hit the window ledge, falling rapidly from my Maa’s fist. The first thing Maa does after waking up is feed the neighbourhood pigeons.“You are spoiling the pigeons”, my brother and I like to tell her. I hear the bright red acupressure slippers Maa wears for the pain in her feet smack against the floor like they are slapping it for existing, and guess from my half asleep state that it must be 5:00 a.m. I hear the thump of the yoga mat as Maa spreads it on the floor and the faint hum of a hymn called “Gayatri Mantra” Maa plays every morning. I roll over and fall asleep again.

I am dreaming about the largest supply of chocolate in the world when the soft yellow light of my bother’s table lamp falls on my eyes. I think this is how the clouds must feel when the sun is backstage, just about to start for the day, and even that metaphor doesn’t make me less sleepy. I groan and place a pillow over my head. It must be 5:30. I am just about to fall asleep when his laptop makes the grand noise it makes before starting up. It’s not late before he furiously starts typing some code for some programme into his laptop, so I start counting the number of clicks his keyboard makes and fall asleep again.

I am awoken once again, this time by my Dad. The smack of his rubber slippers is much less powerful than Maa’s because their soles have worn off, but he won’t replace them until they are nothing but useless pieces of overused rubber. I hear him gargling with the heinously warm turmeric water Maa prepares for him to keep his throat healthy. It must be 6:30. He will soon start preparing the “sick pee”, i.e, water in which flowers of neem trees have been left overnight. The name was coined by me when I was 6, hence it’s unadulterated grossness. It is supposed to protect us against the harsh Indian heat. It tastes like what I imagine the earth would taste if the planet’s surface was its tongue. Needless to say, it made me prefer a heatstroke of drinking it.

I am just about to fall asleep when Maa’s spoiled pigeons start having their breakfast and since my bed is right next to the window, they spill half of it on me. I should have known that waking up late in the Bansal household is as easy as trying to make a waterfall flow upstream. I give up and sit up with a sigh. After all, home is not truly home if I need an alarm to wake up. 

You little sneak, 
how do you hide? 
in your white home 
under the black sun,
darker with every blink.

Swimming in the sea 
with the red shore
your claws crust step-stones 
on her cheeks,
for the hollowness 
to make a good climb.

With your house crammed full 
of your miserable associates 
you crawl your way 
​out of the rheumy grave 
of her laughter, 
melting away your ruse 
with the flames you light 
in her chest.

Her hands
clenched around themselves 
betray her heart’s desperation, 
as you mock her attempts 
to bleach her face 
of the redness 
​of your savagery.

She sits in a pool of eyes
that track her every laboured breath 
and wait for the her 
to drown in a fire 
of which she is accused 
as the arsonist. 

“One summer night I fell asleep, hoping the world would be different when I woke.” (Saenz Pg.1). You know a book is going to change your life when its first line makes you feel more understood than anything or anyone has done in your entire life.

This book. This book. Benjamin Alire Saenz has confronted the tumult that are our teenage years with this contemporary fiction about a beautifully honest and tender friendship between Aristotle and Dante, our main characters.

The book is set in the city of El Paso, Texas, and although it spans across over a year of Ari and Dante’s lives, the summer sun acts as backdrop for a major portion of the unlikely friendship between Ari and Dante that slowly morphs into an exploration of relationships with parents, of love, of loneliness, and of friendships so intimate, they make you question who you are.

Aristotle is, well, he is a complicated person. He is lonely, he is lost, he is insecure, he is angry, he struggles to express himself, and is still trying to find, as he likes to put it, “all the secrets of the universe”. He is tired of all the silence about his brother who is in prison. “I caught myself whispering over and over again, ‘my brother is in prison, my brother is in prison, my brother is in prison.’ Words could be like food—they felt like something in your mouth. They tasted like something, ‘My brother is in prison.’ Those words tasted bitter.” (Saenz Pg97).

Dante, on the other hand, is the most open-hearted, happy and unabashed person Ari has had the chance of meeting. He knows why birds exist, “Birds exist to teach us things about the sky.”(Saenz Pg 54). He reads poetry out loud, he draws. He can get along with just about anybody and always knows the right thing to say. He cries when he feels sad, he laughs when he is happy, and most of all, he always speaks what he feels, never caring what others think. He is, as Ari likes to put it, “uncensored”.

Ari has never met a guy like Dante. In fact, in his opinion, all teenage guys are “disgusting”. But in Dante he meets an exception to the rule: “And there wasn’t anything mean about him. I didn’t understand how you could live in a mean world and not have any of the meanness rub off on you.” (Saenz Pg 19). Ari, who has never had a real friend before and is still learning to navigate being one while Dante has no problems being Ari’s best friend:
“I liked the sketch,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because it looks just like my chair.”
“Is that the only reason?”
“It holds something,” I said
“What?”
“Emotion.”
“Tell me,” Dante said.
“It’s sad. It’s sad and it’s lonely.”
“Like you,” he said.
I hated that he saw who I was. “I’m not sad all the time,” I said.
“I know,” he said.
(Sáenz Pg 75) 

The book also focuses on the relationship between Ari and his parents, as well as the parent-child relationship in general. It shows the importance of expression, it shows how secrets can break the strongest of bonds, especially within a family. We see the way secrets threaten to taint Ari’s relationship with his parents and the mistakes parents can make in a bid to protect their children, in the most honest and raw way possible.

The book transformed the way i looked at friendships and forever changed their meaning. Ari and Dante’s friendship is the purest one i have ever come across, so whenever the twists and turns of the story threatened it, the fear I felt was palpable. Through their friendship Saenz portrays the complicated, painful, yet beautiful experience that is discovering one’s sexuality. He has created characters so vivid, that by the time the book ended, i felt like i had grown with the characters. That whatever Ari and Dante had gone through, was somehow a part of my journey too. Not just Ari and Dante, but their parents too, are characters that all the other new characters i will ever come across will have to compete against.

The book is written in first person, from the point of view of Ari, which makes the words that Ari feels, so personal. It is divided into five small parts which each begin with a small quote or a single, sneakily prophetic line that is bound to get you thinking. In each part, the tension that ties the various threads of the story together builds up even more and Saenz’s ability to twist the plot at just the right time is bound to keep you hooked.

The book drew me in with Saenz’s incredibly unique writing style. His writing is so profoundly impactful in it’s simplicity that it is impossible to not marvel over the power of words at least once while reading it. “My mother and father held hands. I wondered what it was like to hold someone’s hand. I bet you could sometimes find all of the mysteries of the universe in someone’s hand.” (Saenz Pg 140). The emotional depth that underlies the uncomplicated sentences that he weaves together always leaves me stunned. The resonance of his writing makes the journey that Ari and Dante make to discover their true selves, so much more meaningful. 

This masterpiece will forever be one of my favourites and to anyone is struggling to find their place in the world, or more importantly, within themselves, this book is meant for you.
Moreover, who doesn’t want to find all the secrets of the universe?