Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries
My first white chest hair
My dentist told me I lack wisdom
teeth while filling my root canal cavity.
His slender three-eyed metal swan shone
light on my every misdeed. I had ignored
my body, as if it was mine only
on a monthly subscription. Free repairs,
as long as I kept paying the asked price.
The hair on my head had already turned
against my youth five years ago as I shoved
sand down my throat while working
on the precipice of the Thar desert. My beard
had followed suit soon afterward. First
the hair on the right side of my face stayed
dormant, black. I was ageing faster
on the left. I wondered then, about pseudoscience.
Whether the left part of my body was entirely controlled
by the right part of my brain? What fastened ageing
anyway, except tobacco, alcohol, and a beloved
unable to seep through illness? There were no answers
until you appeared. The single white spider web
thread in the rainforest of my chest hair.
The one strand of defect
that would bring down the value of any garment
by a quarter. You shot up unannounced one morning,
adjacent to the mole on the centre of my chest,
right above my heart. That’s when I read
about the whitening, the shortening of telomeres,
the loss of pigmentation. I am ready for a faster
departure even though I am afraid of the day
it finally arrives. Will my brain tire out
before my heart? Memories leak out
of my right ear? Will the sand I engulfed
all those years ago absorb it at all
or let it seep? Soon, I will be good
for nothing. Not even the doctors
would want anything to do with me.
I’d be cremated on a bed of rosewood. All of me,
reduced to a few grams of ash, as white as you
around the cool, fresh charcoal of my pyre.
Breakout at Madras Tiffins, Kalyan Nagar
For P.N.
After a lunch of chicken bibimbap and kimchi at Hi Seoul, we walk
down the 100 feet road, towards Madras Tiffins. Across a wellness spa,
a calisthenics studio. Pot-bellied teenagers in parrot green polo t-shirts wait
outside their advanced Physics and Mathematics tuition classes. A woman
behind a glass wall sits comfortably in front of a dressing mirror
getting her hair dyed gold. Bank employees flirt with potential customers’
money in open-air wooden cabins. Courier services and stationery shops gasp
in a corner basement. A skinny guy with a pressurised hose removes
dirt and stains from a foaming Hyryder. Most of the footpath is undulated.
In other places, twenty feet long rebars catch rust on the road while waiting
to be stuffed in the foundation of new, commercial buildings. Some houses
still stand between those dug-out enclaves and newly inaugurated buildings
like paati and tatha’s memories, blackened and cracked, unable to keep up
with the demands of technology. An old man sits on a red lacquered bench
the length of the restaurant, spread-legged in dhoti, hiding his pox-scarred face
behind the breadth of Mathrubhumi. The self-checkout kiosk is waiting
with its bright screen for us, announcing Specials of the Day. Only
for my index finger to touch it and order two filter coffees. I hand over
the paper slip to the brewmaster. Black decoction in a steel cup. Plenty
of frothing milk. Soon, parts of my skin rise up in rebellion. As if they want
to detach from me like gemmae cups, beget a new me elsewhere. Little drops
of me on the floor of the restaurant spread far and wide like orbeez. I wish
I grew under the shade of a rainforest tree too, immersed in mist like a bryophyte,
not in a concrete apartment next to an open sewer. On the tree’s mossy bark.
That orchids grew above me undisturbed, displaying their affection to the world
and each other through iridescent beetles and hummingbirds. Unabashedly.
At the restaurant, everyone stares at the red spectacle of me in pity. I sit across
you, disgusted with my body’s inability to love itself. I slurp my sugarless coffee
afraid to meet your eyes. In half an hour I’ll be back in my body again. Clean
enough to look at your face, let you hold my hand. If you stick around for a bit,
we could plant that rainforest together, date by afternoon date, don’t you think?
Thievery
Certain things don’t work in your favour
unless you steal them, like money
plants. Billionaires must have an entire floor
in their glass towers, an escape room each
in their mansions, lush with stolen money
plant grafts. They must be heavily-guarded too.
Each of the grafts, with their ever-expanding
personal bell jars, a plaque detailing the exact
coordinates, date, and time someone stole them,
then gifted it to the billionaires. Our family had
a money plant as well. After years of nurturing
with discarded tea leaves, it grew confident.
Its trellises, those tender spirals grasping
in all directions for support, clasped the iron grill
that guarded our small verandah from macaques,
spread all across it, cutting sunlight with shade.
I had never seen anyone repel the Sun
with such defiance until then. I didn’t know
of Icarus, who burnt his father’s waxy wings.
Or Hanuman, who, in his innocence, held
the dawn Sun in his mouth wondering why
did it not taste like a sindoori mango?
I didn’t know that my father also stole
leaves from his friends’ houses and empty plots.
Grew them unlabelled. His kidney stones’
diagnosis in one hand, he pointed at a new plant
in his collection. Thick, waxy leaves
with serrated edges, he said he’d picked it up
from the newly abandoned house across the road.
He plucked one of its leaves, tore it further,
handed me a quarter, and said, “taste it!”
I hadn’t seen him this happy about anything
since our family’s partition. A ray of sunshine
beyond its usual rainclouds. Without visiting
the doctor again, his kidney stone dissolved,
one tart leaf at a time. He stole all the plants
from all the abandoned plots after that. His secret
garden safe with me, richer with each thievery.
Lavanya Arora (they/he) is an independent researcher and writer from Uttarakhand, currently residing in Bengaluru, India. Their literary work has found a home in Josephine Quarterly, Frontier Poetry, Thimble Literary, and elsewhere. A 2024 Himalayan Emerging Writer, they dream of extensive dinner dates with fictional characters while (begrudgingly) editing their debut novel.