Rocket science will save us from doom.
Our new colonies dressed in our familiar hates.
If tomorrow comes, I will grow you as bougainvillea
In my balcony, as my colony, mine own, mine only.
Maybe colonies are a strange form of love.
Territorial. Complete.
You are my prisoner.
Prisoner of desire.
My art, my poems, my morning cigarette
All for you. But you won’t speak.
You don’t get to speak. You get to blossom.
You get to die.
Mornings will come and melt eventually
Into sultry, purple evenings.
And you will scream inwardly.
And that is my love. Complete. Absolute.
My territory, my rude obsession, my illiberal type of love.
You will wilt eventually and I will build a mausoleum for you.
I will dress you in my poems.
Write you an epitaph:
She, who screamed in silence.

…

Atreyee Majumder is an anthropologist and writer based in Bangalore.