Black

by Kaushiki Saraswat
(Mumbai, India)

The sun will no longer bathe the room with its golden grace.
It will settle on my skin, warm my cold bones and burn the cloth
that blindfolds the eyes my heart was given.

It’ll be slow, like this change,
excruciating on most days
but will never fail to leave something
resembling a smile on my face.
A face that I can no longer see or catch a glimpse of
while walking past glass frames of windows.
I wonder if they’ll see as I saw myself
but each pair of eye has a new beauty to spot.
I guess, for me it would be one less now.

I don’t ask what time of the day it is.
The church bell tolls 8 times at 12 in the afternoon
and 6:30 pm.
That’s all I know of time.
Time, to which I lost a lot: relations, myself and sight;
but never my vision.
I guess, some things last against the ticking clocks.

Eyes were always the most deceiving sense of all five.
I see it now,
or maybe it’s just an attempt to be a lighthouse
for those who can see flashes and sparks.

I dearly love only a few faces and now,
I am getting to know them all over again.
People have more than faces,
they have what it took to make that face,
buried in them, and eyes can never witness that.

Their wrinkles when they smile and
creases when they fake a smile,
the scars on their face that I fell for
and the cuts I tended to,
are deeper than I thought.
I will finally learn how to crawl under their skin
to know where they come from.

I know the rhythm of their footsteps,
the music to my life and their perfume,
it does ‘that’ to me what freshly baked chocolate
cake does to you.

It’ll no longer be love at first sight now,
it’ll be love at first sound, smell, touch and
the wet of their lips on my forehead, cheeks, nose and fingertips.
Love would be what it is said to be in winters,
for things more than just what appears.

But for how long would loves let me trace contours of their face,
dive into muscle gap and climb up their blemishes and poise.
How long will it take them to get tired of a body that
touches, smells, listens, feels;
to compensate the lack of one missing ingredient
that makes me a ‘complete’ human.

They don’t know that I catch them lying
before they string words together.
Their breath becomes heavy or shallow,
as if suddenly their lungs need more space in their bodies
or syllables use up more energy
and reaches their lips stuttering their way up and ‘pop’,
they lie like a champagne bottle opens;
the bubbles wrapping me like a glassware.

I know things are not fine,
you don’t have to pretend that they are.
Don’t forget that I ‘just’ cannot see,
and I never saw just with my eyes.
I guess it’ll be my once favourite game, dark room;
till the time we find a crack to let some light in.
***

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