All that lies
Between
When and If,
Has gradually evolved
Into a hideous trainer, training on days and nights,
Like hot lumps of charcoal,
Shoved into the oven
Burning in the steel plant,
Growing beside my little, dusty home, ever since I have learnt to dream of life.

The When has passed through this tiny place,
With small self-sufficient shops
Of sweets, and groceries.
It has passed through dead pan faces of
Scared rickshaw pullers,
Who sense danger in my place,
In this magnanimous city of well-made people,
Running after tuition teachers on a daily basis,
Trying to avoid confrontations with religious fanatics living on the other side of the railway track. Sometimes I wake up to their shouts of not belonging.
It has also passed through
Festival lights, and lights of (un)anticipated death
In the midst of panic-stricken people,
Searching for shelters during riots.
And when it had passed through all of this, it reached my home,
And left again,
Witnessing a phenomenon of uncertainty and helplessness,
Overcrowded with a dark grey cloud of smoke above my brain,
And also covering all parts of my body
Like a blanket with no holes, suffocating my existence.
A little cloud of smoke still pollutes my room.
I saw it slowly disappear,
Leaving scars of darkness upon my days,
Of misunderstood utopias.

I have seen the If
Hanging like a spider in its web,
Asking me questions of horsemen painted in rooms,
And also about dead bodies thrown out of moving buses,
Sprinkling this little place,
In colours derived from rainbows,
A bit more towards the darker shade of purple,
Staining clothes bought from cheap marketplaces,
Bestowing a pungent silence,
Occasionally disturbed by iron being moulded into steel, in glowing furnaces defining this city.

And now I am lonely,
Trained in
Moving to and fro in restlessness,
Amidst their haunting,
Appearing like shadows across bloody window panes,
Which are not made of glass.
Shadows which are not black, or white, but only remnants of all that could have been, but never was; shadows of no colour.
Translucent shadows waiting to be pricked
Into (and/) by reality.