Suruma Writes On...

White. My first winter turns my eyes blank, I try to catch that breath of white fog that escapes my lips, And look at it with an unkempt awe, of 18 years that have passed seeing foggy breath only in movies unknown. Yellow. Chandni calls me out from  where her parents work. Breaking their backs. She tells me she has left her addiction for cartoon videos in youtube and carries a set of papers around. She gives me a kiss. Red. The memories of a flood that drowned our dreams whiz past my mind. Haunting and soothing. Resistance and a fight to overcome. Beige. I am at home, sleeping with my mother, sharing one leg of an L-shaped sofa that's hardly a few inches, our bodies, cramped like snakes, and my father in other leg. Green. I am walking through the rubber trees at the backyard of my ancestral house, watching out for rat snakes, yellow, plucking the fresh 'kantharis' that my uncle has painfully grown. Blue. The rough waves at Shanghumugham. The sta...

This winter sun and a temperature that falls below 10 were words that I've only seen in school textbooks, read and forgotten. From tensed cries in Decembers when the mercury drops to a 25 degree celsius at night, And families worrying about the infinite possibilities of so called winters bringing in diseases. From elders who always shoo us away from the sun, And sweaters that never occupied a place in our wardrobes, From summers that only lessened or greatened, never went away And fans that always circled around, a constant. From sweat that always dampened our clothes And baths, twice a day. I begin again. I deliberately search for the sun, as I write And even when the laptop screen is not so visible in the light, I refuse to budge, and pray that it only increases in strength, a prayer that that I've never uttered in 18 years. Winter clothes of all colours fill my tiny hostel wardrobe and four layers of clothing over me. And a pair of socks that my s...

They say it travels like a prisoner and they say it must travel like a prisoner. On new years eve, that incessant knocking on the door, that we were told to ignore. On 15 August, those insolent cries that we were taught to overpower with the sound of the fireworks, saffron, green and white. Voices that a radio silences once every month, an hour or so. Last night musing on the dinner table, scanning grains of rice on my glass plate, I found them. I found a story etched into that one tiny grain of rice, and another story in the next and another . In sewage holes on broken roads On trees which had knotted ropes hanging on them, In the shutters of the dams we visited, On the bars of the prison where my uncle worked, On the flowers that the nameless boy sold on the road, when signals shined red, On the barbed wires at the border, telecasted on the TV, On the giant walls of our gated community, shut for a class, On the wells that they covered, for fear of touch, On th...