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12.5k · Sep 2014
Humility
Cheryl Mukherji Sep 2014
During one of my recent internet travels,
I came across a picture of a “minor”,
posing with tinted lips
and exposed *******.
What got my eyes
pinned were the thousand number of likes
by virtually hooting “boys”
and comments by other group of “gentlemen”
telling her how to dress.

HUMILITY: I have been asked to repeat the word
too many times to recall what it means:
the man on the subway cat-called
and accused me of showing too much skin
but instead of fighting back, I smiled
because girls ought to be nice.
I have been taught to survive
by using my body as a swiss army knife,
and I convince myself that
there is protection in being polite.

H-U-M-I-I am forgetting the rest.

The smoke curled up from between his fingers
and he blew out toxic, blurring my vision.
I gasped and wheezed
but I held my sneeze,
I cannot slap him across his face. HUMILITY.
So, I just pretended to cough, hoping he’ll feel ashamed.

I have been trained to flutter my eyelash,
clench my jaw at a whiplash
and business school boys,
who manifest success by refusing to take “NO” for an answer.
And for every time his prying eyes
scan down by body,
as if rating my inexperienced assets on a scale of one to five,
and every time his touch trails a chill down my spine,
I wonder:
Male kindness is so alien to us; we confuse it with seduction every time.

HUMILITY: the quality of having a low view of one’s importance
but, I fail to understand
when did it become synonymous to diffidence;
there is a subtle difference between
papercuts and shattered integrity,
holding hands and chaining souls,
building houses and creating homes,
humiliation rotting down to bones and humility.
HUMILITY, have you spelled it too many times to know what it looks like?
Cheryl Mukherji Sep 2014
If you ever fall in love with a writer,
Your days will be musical
The nights will have their own song
Not anymore will you look at things as regular-
The trees will seem to give you more than just shade,
The sunlight will trickle down on your skin
Bouncing off the window pane
The wind will do a waltz through your hair
Your eyes will carry the universe in them
All the things will not be the same again.

If you ever fall in love with a writer
I don’t promise that it will be easy
For, writers can be insane sometimes
What good is love if you don’t jump off sanity?
They are forgettful. Terribly so.
They will not remember anniversaries
Or to buy tickets for your favourite show
But, they will never forget how you smell after a bath,
The colour of your eyes,
Thoughts of you will never escape their mind.

Writers can be clumsy,
They will trip over their own shabby scattered notes,
Spill the ink onto a fresh piece of poem
But, the way their fingers will trace stories on your bare skin,
And how they will carefully settle
The baby hair on your forehead before kissing,
Will seem to you as their finest work.

If you ever fall in love with a writer,
They will never tell you how much
They love you back until,
Your absence makes it hard for them to breathe,
Makes you more of necessity.
They will, then, hold your hand,
Close their eyes
And cry like they have already lost you;
The tears will spread over their face
Like delicate words on paper,
With each one rolling down their cheek
Their clutch of you will grow tighter.
It is when they open their eyes,
Look at you as a miracle in disguise,
That each part of their soul will sing
To you their love
And the million “I love yous” you wrote to them
Will not be enough.

If you ever fall in love with a writer,
Kiss them in the stormy rain,
Drive them to a distant place
They have never been to,
And watch carefully their expressions change,
Build them sand castles
And let the tides wash it away,
Don’t buy them flowers
On Valentine’s day.

For every blown out candle,
every Mazel Tov,
every turn of the tassel,
you gift-wrap what a writer dreads most: blank pages.
It’s never a notebook we need.
If we have a story to tell,
an idea carbonating past the brim of us,
we will write it on our arms, thighs, any bare meadow of skin.
In the absence of pens,
we will repeat our lines deliriously like the telephone number
of a parting stranger
until we become the craziest one on the subway.

If you really love a writer,
find a gravestone of someone who shares their name and take them to it.
When her door is plastered with an eviction notice, do not offer your home.
Say I Love You, then call her the wrong name.
If you really love a writer,
bury them in all your awful and watch as they scrawl their way out.

If you sincerely love a writer,
They will carry you inside them
Till you are all they remain,
Hold you like the glint in their eyes
If a writer falls in love with you,
You can never die.
5.3k · Sep 2014
Scars
Cheryl Mukherji Sep 2014
That night, I stared at the night sky,
Soaked up the stars
Enough to form constellations of my own
And named them after you.

That is the thing about stars,
The more you look
The more you find.
Scars, alike.

Though, I am a novice
In the realm of
Pain and suffering,
I have already understood
The difference between
Papercuts and broken hearts
Chaining souls and holding hands
Flying paper airplanes and shooting darts
Abandonment and negligence.

And for once,
I want to believe in afterlives,
Wishing on shooting stars that are
Confused with fireflies,
If only it was as simple as
The art behind tracing your lips,
Falling asleep to the rhythm of your breath,
Your glinting eyes floating in pools of bliss.

But, we are more than music.
A noise
That beats in our ears;
A scream
That burns our throats.
Of Shattered vintage vases,
Wrecked ships
And sinking boats.
2.2k · Sep 2014
Understatements
Cheryl Mukherji Sep 2014
Somewhere between the ruthless January and the grey Springs,
I realized that my feet had begun to sink
way too under the ocean bed
and that I could no longer swim;
and to call it suffocating would be an understatement.

I never could justify to myself
the need I held of listening to your voice.
Sometimes, I would listen
to the dial tone for hours
and fall asleep to it;
and to call it crippling would be an understatement.

I spent Saturday night without you,
flipping through old photographs and listening to blues.
I can tell from what it felt like inside,
that I have never been more neglected.
And to call myself abandoned would be an understatement.

I would watch the short shadows elongate
and the rising sun, set
and yet,
I thought that if I waited a little more,
I could figure out why I wasn’t just scarred but,
scarred to death.
And to call myself numb would be an understatement.

And with each time you hung up on me,
each time you made me cry,
each time you left me alone,
left me to here to die,
I put on a broken smile.
And to call it love would be an understatement.
1.3k · Nov 2014
Storm
Cheryl Mukherji Nov 2014
I wonder
what you meant
when you told me,
over the fifth cup of black coffee,
that you had fallen out of love
more than the number of times
you’d kissed someone,
your hands were not under-oxygenated
but, cold
because each hand you held before,
took away your share
of warmth too
and people
were just bricks
that you kept stacking
to build a wall around
your heart;
while, I
held your sweaty palms
and heard your heart
beat against your ribcage
like a storm.
1.2k · Sep 2014
My father has Alzheimer’s
Cheryl Mukherji Sep 2014
Unruly crayon marks,
ketchup stains
and ***** handprints
held an affinity for
the newly painted white walls.
Half-chewed nails dug into the soil,
tender feet splashed into puddles of joy.
Laughter echoed through the hallway
and the sweat on the forehead
was a sign of happy times.
The hardest decision of the day was
to find a place away from mother’s prying eyes;
torture was confined to the glass of milk
that she forcefully tried to make me drink.

Speaking of which,
I remember her screaming at me,
over her shoulder, as the milk boiled
to spread on the kitchen slab and turned to vapour,
“You are a mess”
and I always wondered what the word really meant.

There was a corner in my house
that I called my own- a bench for two,
often occupied by one,
unless ‘Baba’- what I knew my father as,
would come over, hiding,
what he called “magic”,
the same glass of milk that I had been avoiding.
I would cover my mouth
with my little hands
as he would begin to sew a thread of words into rhyme,
I often found myself lost,
weaving a meaning,
after I was done licking my milk-mustache,
it was magic, indeed, I thought to myself.

His biceps always were the right size of pillow,
the songs he hummed was
all I that I needed for a good night’s sleep;
the tickle in his fingertips as
he pulled my cheeks
was an affirmation that I was his favourite one
and how firmly I believed that I was prettiest of all,
even with the shabbiest of the braids
he managed to tie that morning.

Even on lazy Sunday mornings,
my mother, out of habit,
would draw open the curtains
for the blazing sunlight to disturb my sleep.
It was continued by irritable faces and whines,
lectures about management of time,
when Baba would somehow convince
mother that it was important for me to dream.
On regular weekday evenings,
I would sit by the attic window,
stare at the front gate,
wait for him to return from work.

He walked me to school,
locking his little finger with mine
and waited for me at 1.25 pm sharp
outside the school gate,
a balloon in his hand
and a glint in his eyes.
For hours together,
he made me repeat my mathematic tables-
5 times 3 is 15,
5 times 4 is 20,
5 times 5 is 25
a million times.

I was sixteen
when it first “skipped his mind”
to pick me up from school.
That didn’t change anything between us
until the night he called me up
to ask me the way back home
from his office because he was “too stressed”
to remember it on his own.
I remember him
entering the house at 2.06 am,
asking me who all were home, then
and also,
that I giggled at that question of his.

From then on,
for months together,
I woke up to my father
screaming at my mother
for not arranging his socks in pairs,
for being disorganized and careless
even when the third drawer from the right,
in his cupboard was the place where
he would end up finding all his belongings.

I was coming to terms
with the fact that my father
was too much under the pressure
of work
because that pretty much explained
why he stammered
before recalling his “to-do-list”,
had difficulty in meeting deadlines
and skipped family time.

I am 21 years old,
my father doesn’t seem to get any get younger day by day.
Last month,
on a sunny day during awkward monsoons,
I saw him sitting by the window,
tracing droplets of rain race
down the glass for hours.
He left the room without
saying a word when I asked him
if he wanted to play football beyond the bars.
“Gaah, he must have been preoccupied”, I still convince myself.
Around the same time,
we were invited
to his best friend’s marriage anniversary-
he was thrilled
so he narrated the story
about how they first met
thirty two and the third time;
introduced himself to my boyfriend
twelve more times, that same night.
“Fathers”, I just rolled my eyes.

Some time back,
one afternoon, at 3.16pm,
I saw him flip through sheets
of a calendar dated 1985.
When I asked him
to fill his details in a form,
he, without second thoughts,
scribbled “8” in the box
that enquired about his age.
Eight.
The same night, mother
must have called out his name
eight times to join us
for dinner but,
he didn’t respond to a single one
nor did he come out of his room,
his excuse being that
he couldn’t move.

He doesn’t talk much to us, anymore-
just blurts out vague and irrelevant
words like Screws, Notes, Coffee and News
at irregular gaps.
Apparently,
mother understands it all
and chooses not to discuss the facts.

Few weeks back,
on a lazy Sunday,
he entered my room,
squinted his eyes at the curtains
that were drawn open and
flexed his arms to draw them close.
He left without saying a word.
When I asked him about it,
he replied, “No talk strangers”
and kept quiet for the rest of the day.
He walks to places,
jogs back home
with a balloon tied to his little finger, sometimes.
And when he is not asleep,
he repeats mathematical tables
from 2 to 13
in a monotone for hours together.

The good side of it
Is that Baba and mother
do not fight
over lost pairs of socks or belt and wallet;
Baba just calls them “Things” generally,
and fiddles through all the drawers in the house.
And he proudly says “Stuff”
when mother asks him about
what he would like to eat.

Doctors say,
Baba has been suffering from Alzheimer’s.
I believe he is not.
1.1k · Dec 2014
Alphabets
Cheryl Mukherji Dec 2014
Later that day, I sat with an empty notebook in my lap to write down thoughts: as a child, the routine was to repeat alphabets until I had them straight but I always started to lose my breath by the time I reached L. That day was no different.

A- your arms wrap around me under the moonlight;
B- the only sound I can hear is the rise and fall of your heart beat;
C- you light candles with the same lighter you burn your cigarettes with;
D- and shut the door behind me.
E- I have always loved how your eyes look into mine and so I do, today-
F- as your fingers move through my messy hair-
G- and I give in as prey.
H- Your hands feel cold on my skin;
I- your legs intertwine with mine under the ***** sheets we’re lying in-
J- and your jaded voice calls my name.
K-we kiss;
L- and I hear you stutter when you say that you love me.
955 · Dec 2014
Thoughts/minute
Cheryl Mukherji Dec 2014
1:35 AM.** I sit by the window and listen to the raindrops sounding like the ring of calls I make to you around the same time, each day to ask you about how your day was. You subtly mention about the times when you thought about me and how it makes you smile: you picture me laughing with the children you befriended on the subway, the wind flowing through my hair, and my eyes getting narrowed as I stare at the sun.

1:36 AM. The patter of the raindrops against the fragile glass picks up speed and I lose touch of the tune I created in my mind with the rhythm as I get distracted. I recount the days when we skip topics like children skip ropes, trying to oblige all days’ craving for each other in three words, lost breathes and skipped heartbeats, when we finally meet.

1:37 AM. I try to pull close the windows to keep the shrivelled leaves that were blown off trees by the rising storm away. In the process, I chip off my nail but my fingers are too numb with cold to hurt. I can still feel your fingers run down my nape, circle on my back and tap on my waist while all I do is quiver, wiggle my toes and complain about how cold your hands are.

1:38 AM. The sky is getting clear but there still is haze and unsettled mist in the air that surrounds me. Some nights, you pull your blanket over our heads and try to encapsulate our world into the warmth beneath it. You have convinced me that we are storms trapped inside lifeless bodies as we lie very still but our breaths chase our heartbeats.
876 · Oct 2014
Distant Lover
Cheryl Mukherji Oct 2014
I hoped to see you at least once
before you left-
behind the sixth lane,
walls of which still have hand-prints
that we made as kids;
under the sign board
which read something in French,
meant something that
our inexperienced hearts are
still incapable of comprehending;
or maybe, under the staircase-
beside the empty cartons
where we promised
to make our own little house,
someday.

I listened to you,
ranting about your day;
who made you smile;
whether you believed in magic;
what your muse was,
silently,
watching words bounce off
the edge of your lips,
your pupils dilate
when you said the word “Love”.

I stole memories of you
from the pinch of your cheek,
the tip of your nose,
your eyelids,
which would twitch
at an external touch
until the warmth of my fingertips
blended with your skin.

You would laugh
about something that
had happened months ago-
the echoes of which still keep me going for days-
I would just sit back
and mentally make notes
about how hard
my heart pounded against my ribcage
every time you breathed heavier
to compensate for the ones you skipped.

You hair would fall on your face,
you would push them back
without a pause while,
I would be looking at your hands.
I love how
your hands look under the sun,
the soft curves;
how each crease
on your palm discloses secrets about you
which was why you always walked
with your hand knotted in fists;
the freckles on its back –
how it could be woven into constellations
with names of your distant lovers
carved on your pale wrists.


I write about you-
carefully picking up words
that describe my whims,
decorating the corners of letters,
choosing to draw hearts
in the tittles of I’s,
imitating the curve of your smile
in my Y’s-
and when I think
that words are not enough
to tell you how much
you mean to me,
I smudge a range
of contrasting colors
on a fresh canvas
till it fills up the space inside my nails,
smears on my face
and spoils my favorite white dress;
you are a beautiful mess.

The sky reminds me of you.
And feathers too.
So, stuff them in my empty pockets
on my way from work until,
I have a feeling
that one more to them
would make me fly.
I wish I could fly to you;
you’re so far;
my words don’t affect you,
and the dust that has
settled between us
doesn't let me see you, any more.


And I am not ready
to let your memories
become the dead flowers-
pressed between
the yellow pages of a book;
a rusted twig in an abandoned nest.
So, I’ll wait for you
by the broken window,
stained drapes,
until you make your way
back home.
813 · Oct 2014
Love Stories
Cheryl Mukherji Oct 2014
Love stories.
When the man of 56
asked a girl of 7
if she knew what love was,
she didn’t know that
she would spend
most of her life convincing herself
that love was more than
how he dug his nails
into her raw skin
only to leave it pale;
it was more than the stench
of his breathe and clothes
that she hasn’t got rid off
from her body, yet;
it was more than the sharp,
stabbing sensation between her legs
and definitely something
that needed consent.

Love stories.
You think you know what love is,
but what about that girl
who was left crying
at the subway station?
She went back home
after 3 odd days,
took an overdose of pills
she couldn’t even pronounce names of,
slit her wrists
and was found lying
in a pool of blood
after another 3 odder days.
I wonder whose life flashed
before her eyes and
where she hid all the
undelivered letters she wrote
the night before she died?

Love stories.
He shifts the pawn in a chess game,
carefully,
sitting on a wobbly bench
in a massive hospital ward.
This time, it’s his queen
that he is protecting.
Though, he could see
her last breaths fluctuating
like the black and white squares on the board,
he still tried to win.
They didn’t kiss each-other goodbye;
neither did they share laughs
nor, did they repeat their vows.
She didn’t even wait
till the last chemotherapy.
What happened to his love story?

Love stories.
I fell in love with a boy
with a storm in his heart
that wrapped me in itself,
ripped me off piece by piece,
picking on already existing wounds
and now he’s nowhere to be seen.
I hear the incessant clash
of the windows in a stormy rain,
the picture frames
tumbling,
stumbling
and shattering into a million pieces
against the floor
where I sit and bleed poetry about him
even when I know
that he doesn’t even remember my name, anymore.

Though, I Love
the way your tongue curls
at ‘L’ and your teeth presses against your lips
tenderly at ‘V’
when you say “love”,
but I am sorry,
I have grown up
in a home of fists and frowns
where love stories were more fragile
than paper towns
and I will not make eye contact with you
when I say “I love you”
because I am unsure about
how long it will last.
723 · Oct 2014
Transitory, forever.
Cheryl Mukherji Oct 2014
We spent the whole night
planning our lives together
to the rhythm of
each-other's whiskey-stench breaths.

I woke up
to an empty bedside, next morning.
709 · Oct 2014
Home-sick
Cheryl Mukherji Oct 2014
I spent five hours thinking about you, that day,
flipping through your pictures,
smiling at the letters
you never wrote for me but hoping that one day,
you might just draw the first alphabet of my name in a different style,
trying to figure out if my name rhymes with yours.

I smelled through the pages of the book
that has hidden notes about your eyes
and your smile in spaces between the lines
and shabbily scribbled dates
under the dog ears of the turn down page
that reminds me of the day
when you looked into my eyes for a second;
when your hands brushed against mine
and you didn't apologise for it
like you mostly did and,
when you told me that the closest
you had ever gone to someone
was by harming yourself.

And then,
there were moments
even after those hours when
I sneaked extra memories of you
from my subconscious and
laid it under the table lamp
like we did- under the blanket of the night sky,
squinting our eyes to search for the stars
amidst the silhouetted leaves.

I wrote letters to you,
I couldn't ever find an address to deliver it to
because until the last time I met you,
I never realised I could be homesick for people too.


Some nights,
I call you to ask you if you have ever loved someone,
if you have laughed just enough,
how deep have you been hurt,
how long will you wait till you belong to someone
and then, I just hang up before the dial tone goes off
because I am afraid you won't ask me the same
and even if you do,
I will end up liking you enough
to not let you go.
I know you won't say word after that
so, we will just sit there,
listening to each other's whiskey stenching breaths
over the telephone.

— The End —