Choolhe ki Thandi Raakh aur Kuch Zinda Huroof

My mother has a habit of counting her prayers on the knuckles of her right hand while keeping the television news on mute. It is a strange, restless dance. Her thumb moves from joint to joint, calculating divine mercy, while her eyes trace the red tickers of local disasters on the screen. She does not see the contradiction. To her, survival is not a philosophy; it is a series of small, domestic tasks performed under pressure.

People on this app often ask me where I get my shiddat—the raw weight of my poetry. They write in my comments about the 'glorious pain' of my verses. I find myself deleting those drafts where pain feels too beautiful. The truth is much more awkward. My poetry does not come from a place of aesthetic sorrow. It comes from the sharp, metallic hiss of our leaking cylinder, the smell of mustard oil that has burned too long, and the blue veins on my mother’s wrists that tighten when the flour tin runs low.

The Kitchen as an Altar

We live in a house where the walls are perpetually damp from the July monsoons. The plaster has peeled off in the shape of a map no one can read. In this small, square kitchen, my mother has spent thirty-two years. She has never read a book of Ghalib or Faiz, yet she understands rhythm better than any editor I have met. She knows exactly how many seconds to let the cumin seeds splutter before the smoke turns from aromatic to bitter.

One evening, while I was trying to find a rhyme for sabr (patience) on my phone screen, she was cleaning the soot off the bottom of a heavy iron tawa with a piece of brick. The sound was abrasive, filling the small room. I asked her, with the irritation only an unproductive writer can muster, to stop. She didn’t look up. She only said, "Kore panno par dukh likhna aasan hai, Mehfuza. Bartan dho kar dekho, hath dukhne lagte hain." (Writing grief on blank pages is easy, Mehfuza. Clean these pots, and you’ll know what actually aches.)

That night, I wrote this:

Ungliyon par haldi ke nishaan, hatheli pe chhaale hain,
Maa ne duayein boi hain, tab jaake humne alfaaz paale hain.

Tum jise kehte ho shayari, wo mere ghar ka dhuan hai,
Humne har thandi raakh se kuch zinda huroof nikale hain.

The Contradictions of Resilience

Resilience is a heavy word. In literary circles, it is treated as a badge of honor. In our mohalla, it is simply what you do when you cannot afford to break. My mother is deeply religious, yet she has a fierce, profane vocabulary reserved for the local water board officials who cut our supply every second Tuesday. She will spend two hours in silent, tearful prayer, and then spend the next hour arguing with the milkman over three rupees of diluted milk.

She is not a character in a tragedy. She is a woman who hoards empty plastic oil bottles because "one day they might be useful," and who refuses to let me buy her a new cardigan because her old green one "still has some warmth left in its threads."

I write about her because her silence is a language I am still trying to translate. When my sister’s wedding was called off three years ago over a demand we could not meet, there were no grand speeches in our house. There was no weeping in the courtyard. My mother simply went into the kitchen, made a fresh batch of chai, and added extra cardamom to mask the smell of our collective humiliation.

We drank that tea in silence, the steam rising between us like an unspoken agreement.

Ghar ki geeli deewaron se tapakti hai jo khamoshi,
Usi ko humne ghazal ka naya bayaan likha hai.

Siyahi mein mila kar thodi si mitti apne aangan ki,
Humein har zakhmi patthar ko naya aasmaan likha hai.

The Aftertaste of Unspoken Words

Writing on WritOn feels like sending letters from a basement to a skyscraper. I see younger poets writing about self-love and healing in clean, English stanzas. I wonder if they have ever had to choose between buying a new notebook or saving that money for the kerosene stove.

My mother still doesn't know what an app is. She thinks my phone is a tiny, glowing devil that is ruining my posture. But sometimes, when she thinks I am asleep, she covers my feet with the corner of her old cotton saree.

Yesterday, I saw her looking at her own hands in the afternoon light. The skin was dry, patterned with tiny white lines like dry riverbeds. She didn't say anything. She just rubbed a little mustard oil into her palms and went back to picking small stones out of the lentils.

I didn't write a poem about her yesterday. Some days, the poetry must remain in the kitchen, unwritten, burning quietly on the stove.