THE ANATOMY OF HOME and other poems

1. THE ANATOMY OF HOME

Home is not a marker on the map
but a faint throbbing my pulse remembers.
It smells of strong, extra-brewed ginger tea;
of the dull, dying embers of a clay oven on a December night;
or the petrichor wafting in through latticed windows
calming the angry, scalding earth in May.

Home is the creaky charpoy that knows the shape of my silence
and the taste of my tears,
or the oil-lamp that bravely flickers in the face of rogue winds
carrying messages of love to an indifferent gypsy soul.

Home is my name uttered loud, without apology.
It is noise that does not ask me to explain myself,
walls that keep my unfinished sentences safe,
rows of forget-me-nots that urge me to erase fragile promises.
In its kitchen, burnt flatbread becomes a memory
instead of a mistake,
and angry words dissolve in the sweet swirl of kheer.

At home, I do not audition for belonging.
Here, I’m already part of the cast.
Home is the quiet rise and fall of my breath,
The soft rhythm my timid heart always returns to.
Home is the door that opens inward
even before I can fully turn the knob.


2. DISPLACED, NOT DETACHED

I carry my address like a sepia photograph.
The city scrolls past — reel after reel —
and I’m left buffering between selves.
Every mirror offers an upgraded version of me,
although stray terms and conditions pop up at times.
My shadow logs in before I do,
with a password that reads ‘displaced.’
My name autocorrects to ‘stranger.’

Airports are confessionals with swag and swank
I trade fingerprints for boarding passes.
Home is a hyperlink that opens
to 404: Not Found.
Instead, I fill in forms that promise new beginnings.

Irony and detachment form the filters to my emotions.
My tongue struggles to wrap around borrowed accents
with footnotes trailing my voice.
I delete my childhood, and trash my youth,
then click undo, undo, undo.


3. GEOGRAPHIES OF THE SELF

Every morning, I draw the complex topography of my body
and name each contour as a terrain —
but a river of memories gushes beyond its bleeding banks,
refusing to be restrained by cartographies and borders.

I hold within me mountains that no atlas records,
pinnacles of pride frosted with the flurry of old grief.
Nestled among them, meadows of unsent telegrams
and love letters lie folded like a forgotten promise.

Fault lines quiver beneath my placid smiles
while tremors masquerade as a mild seasonal flu.
I carry clayey riverbanks eroded by goodbyes
and brine-soaked crags where gulls once squawked.

And yet, I redraw the map every morning
marking ‘terra icognita’ in red, where self-doubt looms.
Becoming is not a destination but a voyage,
where I’m both the hurricane and the harbour.