When the sky is a soaked teabag
by Anannya Dasghosh

Rain— the metaphor that stains
the Chikankari kurta of a lover,
that wet the mehendi hands of
a bride. In the burlesque composition
of living, I am what a city licks
after a heavy downpour, crumbled
sunsets of the poets making fresh
flowers in a maidens hair or a Mother
balancing in the clothesline.
Everytime there's a monsoon the
sky is a soaked teabag of our
evaporated nostalgia.
In a million different ways the
news flash smelling of handwritten
letters from urdu desks or 15.6 inch
desktops with caffeine stale marks.
A lover's handwriting rage in collision
voice the deserted and fingers, shoulders,
elbows moist and dry, release and fly.
Rain is an aesthetic, a type
of survival that loves breaths and
movements, sighs and signs. I am what
you can say a yellow body
of a taxi taking a therapy
of the water in between the
limbs of the lover bidding
a final goodbye. The 10th letter
in the alphabet series is
a July where you come
home wet in ecstasy but,
little does meteorology know how
many decades the roof is
humid above us, yet we
hold each other like the
sky holds the soaked teabag.
The books with coloured spines
quivering its lusty pages like
my skin seduced by grief,
with pauses and hesitation. Our
children must know how these
pages can fly with wings
in the darkest sky. Their
hands mustn't roll paper bullets
like our skin smelling of
funeral in the paints of
Picasso and Dalí. Of
all the bourgeois yesterday's
that slips like water on
my lipstick, a tomorrow will
rise to move an extra
mile from the rains of
the curses, the blues, the
silences, the scriptures, the
rosary beads, the excavation, the
pauses like the foreplay of
lovers. The wet cigarettes empty
this daylight, how shameless of
us to be in comfort
under the sun and be
a tyrant of the rains!
I'll show my daughter and
son how rains aren't prayers
but capitalist rebels of
the sun and sky. And, we are just
volunteers.