THE FOLLOWING POEM WAS SELECTED IN WINGWORD POETRY PRIZE 2023 LONGLIST.

An incredibly intimate concept,
belongingness can be.
You don't realize when it creeps
into your veins
or holds you hostage,
especially when you get a whiff of that boiling raw milk,
tensely bubbling through and through when maa makes sweet rice pudding,
or when dad wraps you up in a warm blanket
after bedtime stories,
or when dadi gives you the first slice of mango
while the ceiling fan creaks and slaps the air around it, in sultry midsummers.

You don't realize that it is
ordinary days that caper around extraordinary truths
that you will miss most
when this belongingness
in your veins begins to wilt,
and when you do,
when you actually do,
these sacred mundanities begin to lie.

You cope and comb
and long for a place unknown
until this longing turns into an autoimmune disease.
It eats what produces it
until the numbness spreads to your toes, fingers, eyelashes,
for you were coherently living a lie,
and truth,
which had parted ways with choice,
was just another prejudice you couldn't get past.
That is when it shatters,
and takes with it your existence, your prayers, your faith, your tears.

You are left alone, with nostalgia scraping the last remaining bits of your tongue.

Cope. Cope. Cope.
Comb through.
That is all you do.
That is all you can do,
when belongingness and innocence
turn into cartwheels of upheaval
and responsibilities cater to anxiety.

And yet, strangely,
amidst all this,
the child in you breathes through the cracks
in your spine,
the fault lines along which form your sustenance,
subsisting in a world
that begins,
and ends in symmetry.