Poem | Ishan Kukreti

Ishan

Painting by Chintu Das

Ishan,

I have seen you create demons and angels out of the atomic blanket of atmosphere,

Seen you talk for hours in perfectly structured sentences without making sense to the surrounding,

Seen you running for your life ducking in alleyways, dodging vibes, light, WiFi signals and rainbows.

Seen you create castles and no-man's land of your ideas and thoughts, packed neatly in an immobile montage of insanity.

And I am proud of you.

Ishan  you,

a fissure in the cosmic, brought down to the galactic, then rendered earthly, your craving for that extra activity in brain cells is not unjustified.

A thinking man's Prophet Mohammad, a sensitive man's Jesus Christ, just before their deification, parting packets of wisdom, which no one understands.

A four billion year old bacterium, collapsing into itself with every new life, shouting obscenities in the face of its own understanding, is finally evolved enough to frame questions to her own existence.

And what have they done to you?

I know the voices you hear are real.

I know you are the next messenger on an earthly recce,

I know you know, it is all going to end.

I know you fear not death, but oblivion,

I know you are here to solve the cosmic puzzle,

I know you are here to save us,

But, we have already locked you up.

Ishan,

We have seen the fabric of time and space, all bundled up like a crumpled bed sheet, overlapping, merging, extending and going round and round at the same time.

We know what is real and what is not, we know we can't talk in absolutes, never a fixed amount of dead cells left our body,  as humans we are bound by perception, not even causality.

We have seen ourselves sitting smoking in cafes, through a Google Earth sort-of-view seen ourselves from the Moon, from the Sun, through Mercury and through Venus.

We have seen every one from a distance of a thousand light years, living their irrelevant lives.

We have felt the hum of the universe reach us, the slow rumble of the divine dynamo,  before anyone told us of Om or CMBR.

Ishan,

I know what you are thinking is right.

I know you are working backwards from a plausible answer.

I know you are pissed off

I know you are not at peace.

I know, they know that you are losing it.

Ishan, a name, an identity, an authorization code,

I am with you in Vimhans,

where your serum swollen veins have turned you into a vegetable.

I am with you in IHBAS,

where your head hums with the latest doze of ECT,

I am with you in AIIMS,

where your bed hurts and you munch meds more than food,

I am with you in Apollo,

where they are working nightshifts to make you forget everything,

every feeling.

I am with you in RML,

as you lie curled up in your bed, distort, distant and paralyzed.

I am with you in Fortis,

where the needle hurts not because it pricks but because it is followed

by a darkness that can never be measured on a clock or a calendar.

I am with you in those pale dusty dawns,

when you are all alone between gathered chorus of

oxide-in, dioxide-out, and feel hollow and truncated.

I am with you in those compulsory garden strolls,

where the trees don't  speak to you, as they

did a week before, while your vigilant mother

provides a background score to soothe your

numb mind.

I am with you in every room, cabin, canteen, hallway,

where you'd probably need me, as

they try to calm you down, slow

you down, put you down, and don't let

them convince you otherwise.

Ishan,

In the absence of activity there is an activity nonetheless,
Between vocal chords changing their dance move to produce another sound, there is no silence.
The space between the alphabets of a word is not empty.
The period between breathe in and exhale is not breathless.
Between synapses and the jumping neurological signals there isn't a nullified gap.

Ishan,

in that place of chaos and nothing, you and me are the same, diffused and  amalgamated, inseparable like two atoms of hydrogen, two grains of pollen, chromosomes in a cell nucleus.

And, there, I will always wait with you, for you,

 to come back.