Aryaman Kakkar's Archive

Just imagine it. Feel your skin creeping down your eyes, your scratchy cheeks, the hardened tips of your fingers. Everything slowly goes, and its this thick batter of sleep that fills the space between your palm and cheek. You say and feel nothing as you sit in the golden light that shoots at you in the night. He just walked past. The wind changed and the corridor filled, taking in his essence with yours. The sounds of the highway peek in through the scant trees, reminding us that they are still there. Taste the bitterness of the leftovers in your mouth as spit floods the caverns to tide away. You can now sense the flaky skin at the corners of your lips falling away. The Autumn has arrived and I have still not slept and I do not know why. Try to fight it. Fight it! Battle! Win! The night is not the time for peace. Nothing ever settles for even dust flies in the night with the constant kicking and the stepping and the wind blows through the corridor, leaving it cold again. Dreams ...

  Its okay. You are not everything they think you are. They think you are kind, good, maybe even happy.   You know the weight of your lies, how many beds and swords you have conquered, how many nights you  have lost wishing for something that will never come. Stop searching in other poets what you can write  for yourself. You are not the filth you were. You are what they say: sweet and a little bit meetha 15 . You  can stand outside while it rains and clutch your notebook as if the rain - as it disguises your tears - will be  inspiration for you. You are as sticky and persistent as red wine on white cotton to talk to the people you  know, the ones who can see that something in you is slightly off   kilter.   It's fine that you stay in their houses and make pancakes and laugh and talk till two and you're not  thinking of sleep at all.   It’s okay.   You are as lost and listless and apathetic as you think...

It doesn’t come as easily now. Always when I want it least, Never when I need it most. I wait and lie in the darkness but It doesn’t claim me. Like a moth to a flame, I am drawn close to burn and hover But my wings hold me back from those midnight pleasures. Keeping me from the scorching dreamscape. Yet is comes in fits and bouts like an indecisive plague. It consumes me in tumultuous waves and drowns me, Only to find myself breathing as it deserts me. It is erratic, wild; a pixyish entity that thrives on My dark circles and red-eyes and silent sobs in the night. When it allows me dreams, I am lost in labyrinthine structures; Worlds that defy my imagination, my reality.   It always leaves me wondering why It doesn’t come as easily now. The innovations we know are the survivors of late-night massacres. Midnight thoughts slaughtered and buried in the recesses of our minds all because we think sleep is necessary. Yet sleep does not come for sometime...

Walking the wisp of a footpath on that crowded Sunday morning, tonight I can still remember what it felt like to be there. A week before we left our homes for Chandbagh, I still roamed the galis and metros of Delhi, enjoying the company of my cousins (all of them a decade elder to me mind you) when cousin brother Keshav introduced me to Daryaganj. Having missed the opportunity the previous Sunday, I kept my last weekend in the capital free for my first experience of the Sunday Book Market in Daryaganj. Arriving mid-morning, I followed Keshav bhaiya around, intoxicated by the avalanche of paperbacks that ambushed my eyes. Willpower abandoned and desire consummate, we explored every bookshop and path-peddler we saw (I say ‘we’ but how could you expect me to resist!). Lost as I am, overjoyed I was more, for they sold paperbacks by the kilogram! Oh, the wondrous ideas I was struck with. Unfortunately stuck with a meagre sum (for books at least, I care not for the rest) I would like to say ...

Darkness is not despair, though we have made it to be. It is not a fear a monster (incorrectly named, for monstrum meant ‘the one who warns’ / we are constant perpetuators of misnomers for we believe the old demons to be gods). It is simply the absence of light, the unknown. And man humanity fears everything it cannot understand. Darkness is not grief or pain, though we have ascribed it to be. It is simply beyond you; the universe of you simply cannot comprehend what lies beyond your reality. So for you, my universe is darkness. Yet, we grow. Yet, we see light. Fear is unwanted, unneeded. I may write of dark things. That for me is words, thoughts, and the genius of oppressively suffocating history that paints the dark with colours, names you so dislike. You so don’t understand. My darkness is beyond your reality. You cannot begin to comprehend the infinite possibility of the void. If devoid, means empty, shouldn’t darkness mean everything? Nonetheless I accept your reality...