A Colonizing Metaphor

I read somewhere that conscience is like the intestine, the more we try to empty it, the more we're roped in and choked by it. It works when we sleep, as we hang ourselves in nightmares in which every second wound kills the last one.

I have an aunt who stitches pillowcases at a pharmacy and walks back home every evening. I wonder if she ever tries to calculate all the rickshaw fares she has saved. Blaming her back aches on age, at nights while twitching on her bedding- the funny and inert smelling hospital cloth she got to take home once. She couldn't wash it away. She didn't ask for it, they were only giving it away. Really, they were only giving it away.

We all pack our bags differently, some we leave behind like we're travelling light, and some with take along in the shell of our brain, and then some are the nauseating song on loop for the seventh consecutive afternoon. Which makes me wonder how many hearts have pieces of me they are trying to erase, how many of those are dead now.

I stand very uselessly around at the gate, my fingers picking at the brown chips of cheap paint, as my father effortlessly reverses the car. I hear the the music start with a boom, where we left it the day before. Yesterday we drove in a long and lovely rain that beat and bellowed at the windshield. Dad laughed at a dog, mom changed the song and I was warm.

Today mom is late, and my dad and I are just bitter, but not like its for the first time.

The roads feel dubious and uncertain, but I am only doubting the timing of everything, there is nothing new besides loving you, amidst the milieu of some black seat covers, familiar songs on the AUX, my dad's occasional muttering, and my mother's perfume.

A man with glasses and probably some hair on the back of his head, genuinely tired with age and grocery, stares into the window at the seatcovers. His t-shirt, unusually reads that the 'internet is broken'. He has the thinnest lips. He probably believes that Europe is just Latin writ large, while I could stare into his wrinkling eyes and promise Sanskrit dried over the mouths of his forefathers and mine and in every contextual word India spoke.

There's more to 5 a.m. cold winds, than fear of the unknown, it's the known that scares me. The forgotten gestures which makes the fog look like its beckoning, turgid monsters drunk on the moon against my cheek and cherubs sweet as cherry sitting cross-legged over the wilting flowers on a creeper only curl inwards, as their veins die with minerals that stopped agape midway. Or the canal below me, that went down with the trees, and the feeling of regret that strangely makes me happy. Oh, oh.

I need to wake up.

I slept through the whole dream and ride. My conscience tells me something like an avant-garde art. My mother stands at the gate now and looks rather useful than I ever did, her hand maneuvering through the air more than the tyres did on the ground. I sit holding my stomach. Still grappling with the truth, eviscerating my conscience, asking my intestine what I had eaten for lunch.

It feels like a country hangs on my window, with no citizens and wide roads, littered with some letters I find hard to read. Latin or Sanskrit or some script that said freedom is shit. I am a lie, I am an ocean wave spitting at a gunpoint, I'm a rebuke in both languages, my mind is the last place they will leave. Railways and tea, we didn't ask for it, they were only giving it away. Really, the colonisers, they were only giving it away.