Aditya Vikram | Poems
A Gaze So Tender
Personifications of precarious lives and fraying pasts, the poems weave a tale of the joys, perils, and imperfections of queer freedom.
Beauty
for the transfemmes of Lucknow
We walk through the graveyard wearing deep green
anarkalis, henna blooming dark on our palms as we sing
after Akhtari in raspy voices that rip the sky open.
We slurp on ice lollies in the freezing cold of midnight, tongues
sugary, lips redder than the lipsticks our mothers wore
to parties and hid out of the reach of our hands.
We greet winter afternoons with pots full of ubtan,
the haldi leaving its colour on our fingers as we scrub faces
in cluttered balconies of elders who open their doors to the world.
We tuck bright orange marigolds in clouds of our hair
as we step into the eye of a bustling street, our kohl
gazing back at regimes that draw borders through our names.
We cackle at the prophecies of people who claim the future
is queer, for we have always been here, our freedoms so tender
they could be worn on our bodies when we gather again.
Loose Ends
(i)
In the beginning
an end started to sprout
in Amma’s lungs.
It was impossible to know
until you slept in her arms
at night, listening
to songs rise
in her chest, leave
a monsoon in their wake.
Her back bent
under the weight
of her breath.
Sarees fell loose,
cotton softer,
as she pulled
at the open strings
of her silence —
handing me loose threads
many pasts to keep.
The Benaras of her youth
began to visit my dreams.
Rivers lapped
into my palms.
Rusted sickles grew
in the sky. Thunder roared
in my throat. Stories stood
like scorpions on my feet.
(ii)
At twelve, I would twirl
across the terrace
with wet bedsheets
stolen from the clothesline
tied around my waist
bathing in the sunlight
of Amma’s gaze.
(iii)
Amma kept walking
until she forgot
how to keep secrets.
When she stopped,
the end unravelled.
Sitting crouched on her bed,
she asked for mangoes.
Small slices stuffed
in the side of her mouth,
leaving no space to chew.
She spat her last few secrets
into my hands –
the tale of a young boy
who wore billowing skirts
around his slender waist,
how he was chased
by men after sundown. Flung
into a farm at dawn
like an empty liquor bottle.
(iv)
Amma died.
The end, a warning
around my neck.
A hot lump of shame
on my tongue.
I became the gender
I never wanted to be.
Benaras sank under the sea.
My closet was the grave
for an old cotton saree.
(v)
I grew up to be twenty-three,
a body full of betrayals
and haunted by identity.
It was said that boys like us
needed to flee. Escape our towns
and pasts and languages to be free.
(vi)
I wanted to do something else
with history
sing a secret
after the nachaniya –
thief of womanhood
Amma knew before me
whose skirt bloomed
facing the earth,
who danced like a storm
moving through a crowded street.
(vii)
Her warning said
I had a different destiny
corners of the city
dangerous and free
worlds I could not see
from the branches
of our family tree.
I am weaving community
with friends and lovers
who share my precarity
of stolen genders
and borrowed sarees,
freedoms that begin
at the loose ends of Amma’s legacy.
When will you be home?
my mother would ask, when she caught mewalking towards the threshold of our house.
Lately, I have stopped turning to her with excuses
parked on my tongue. The truth of gender, obstinate as dust,
flies through tiny openings in walls – settles in all corners
of our house. She sweeps it into a pile every day. Throws
it off the ledge. I jump out of the window and onto the street
when she hands me the broom and an old script
found wet and deformed in the pocket of my kurta.
She doesn’t impose, but her anger goes
sour with time. Grief begins to grow on it like mould
blooming on a stale fruit kept in the dirt for too long.
Each time she drags herself to my knock, her figure shrinks
in the mirror. Joy wilts in the flowerpots. The kohl rubbed out
of my eye, and the last slivers of purple still shining on my nails
don’t invite her bitter retorts. Silence stretches longer
between her sentences. Unspoken questions miss
the tender offering of answers.
When will you be home?
Will you be home?
Will home be?
W Home e?
Who me?
Who?
Nobody.
Her loneliness is another name
for my queerness, the sunlight that fills
empty rooms in my absence. She has begun
collecting her memories in big pickle jars, to stare at them
for hours. When I am free, she will only have these consolations.
At Chattar Manzil
We hold hands through the slender staircase
laden with rubble, to reach a room where sunlight
enters wounds in old windows. Licks
the damp walls yellow. The Gomti drifts
along the barren backyard — its water soundless,
holding a mirror to the sky. His head is pressed
against mine as we set our laughter free
on the balcony that overlooks the city beyond.
I see a carnival across the river —
that patch of land on the bank, concealed
by sprawling trees and undergrowth. Men
brought down on their knees by other men.
Queers quietly leading lovers into the arms of
Neem, to speak in the language of bodies.
We are two boys in our early twenties
who can read touch like that, who have broken into
a 200-year-old mansion, without permission,
to see from above where people like them go
after 377 has been read down only for those
who can stay behind closed doors — in the custody
of cheap hotels, or houses that welcome nights
with the sound of latches closing.
Whispers have come to greet us
on the pavilion — the ghosts of revolutionaries
who hid in the basement of this manzil in 1857.
Let out when someone excavated the halls
last month, they do not know the nation
imagines itself free now. The metro snakes past us
as they speak. A bulldozer has reached
the other side, its talons ready to dig —
modernize this part of Lucknow with flagpoles,
pavements, and cameras. The nation has a thousand eyes
sprouting everywhere in its reach. These ghosts,
like us, are looking for new places to hide.
The current is still slow in the river. Time runs
slower. There are no declarations of love
on the pillars. I am gazing at speckles of the afternoon
retreat from his face
as we ready ourselves to return —
our silence now lodged in the weathering halls
of Chattar Manzil.
About the works
Despite their insistence on staying within the bounds of my gender, my mother and grandmother were the ones who paved my freedom. They opened the window through which I jumped out of my own gender and ran away from the world of mandated desire. After this escape, I encountered the joys of community with other queer people. They shared with me new languages of gender and sexuality that claimed to set me free. Survival became easier, but the shame stayed put. In these poems, I go back and forth between these two worlds, trying to understand what freedom means to me.