Gaurav Deka
​​Monsoon 2016

*

Things I don't do

because that evening,
there were just too many things already planned
for divine interventions to make further changes
because somewhere, on such nights, I still mourned
that I couldn’t masturbate to anyone
except my ex with his bareback facing
the Adriatic - for we never could make any real love.
because even for coffee dates to lead to real loves
one had to look at the ugly lines below my chest
and touch my chicken skinned legs
I thought I’d better stalk you,
and friend-request for some inbox-orgasm.
Something that I do not do

in the first few lines,
when you said your second nature last year
took you to Himachal, Rajasthan, Punjab, Kerala
and abruptly jumped to “why I liked Kundera?”
I wanted to tell you the truth -
that even before you would tell me the next day
how your kidney stone broke into a jog
and bled all night, I was already
in love with you. That I longed like the author’s
nostalgia for places, through that blue screen.
Something that I do not do

because theory has little to do with
rules of conversation; so when you confessed
that you had little to ‘say’ about yourself,
and that’s progression in a way, I abided
freeing you from all obligations to share your number.
So when you did, all I wanted to ask
if I could call you right then, and plead:
‘Please don’t go back on friday,’- wait
till you’d cut the phone on my face.
And go off to sleep without the necessity
to wait. Without the necessity to force myself
to think of your voice, that how you may sound in real.
Something that I do not do

we talk of bliss sitting by the Khas, and its unfinding
that you are still struggling, and I’m supposed
to have it, for I’m aware, you repeat.
Whereas in truth, I am the one, that night,
whose soul is tied to two universes -
one between our silent bodies on the terrace,
the other into the chaos you’d break into me
minutes later, and every evening after that I shall go
searching for shops that sell the same mosquito repellant
I had smelled on you when you’d made love to me.
Something that I do not do

*

The Importance of Being Far

It will be a day
when I’d no longer
like to wait
the last twenty minutes
before the flight takes
off to places where there are no
mountains,
and dial my mother’s number -
tell her of my receding hairline
leaving a new patch
every second day
asking if it was possible
for fear to fall off
my skin too

There will be reasons
i may begin to understand
for diseases take time to kill
atleast the new ones,
maybe it's a good idea:
she’d add, to try and love someone
from a different city
for they do not ask of how you
become thinner and thinner
And thinner and thinner every time
they see you. How you become
balder and weaker and
paler and lighter, light as a spirit
ready to zap out of the body every
time he pushes into you
comes and goes

During the days of her falling,
apart from the chemotherapy
it was faith that helped my father
sleep without dreaming
of his brother’s dead wife
coming back to take his
wife away wearing nothing
but a cloth wrapped
around her chest;
I’ll perhaps no longer have to
reiterate in my head every night
my mother's retelling of
the same and
how gods come to save
sparing a few who are away
from Him

For souls outside the body follow
a geometry of distance
very different from lovers in
cities separated by
nothing but an idea of eternity
It will be a day
when I’ll no longer have to
go back home and sink
into her breasts
And convince myself that on certain
days I am not going to die
for people nowadays can leave
decent belongings through
Facebook Twitter Instagram
and sometimes rarely
letters too

*

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Gaurav Deka is Delhi based writer and psychotherapist. His fictions, poetry and reviews have been published in the Papercuts journal, Himal Southasian, The Tenement Block Review, Café Dissensus, The Four Quarters Magazine, The Bombay Literary Magazine, The Bombay Review, Anti-Serious, DNA-Out of Print, Northeast Review, and The Solstice Initiative, among others. His fiction “To Whom He Wrote From Berlin” won The Open Road Review Short Fiction Contest, 2014.