for a food court stranger

I don’t suppose you
write your alphabets like I do - maybe yours are alphabet domes and alphabet temples with alphabet men bending their backs in prostration -
my alphabets in my Urdu notes are curved and dotted and the alifs adorned at the top with a cape of their own because I give that to them -
but we exchange money on opposite sides of the counter and our words match because they sound similar on both sides of the border -
I don’t know if I can trace your chocolate skin to smell of spices and saris and a decade of street cricket and now we are here - polished floors and air brushed pictures for perfume ads that say “euphoria” - but for us it means something different, it means the first drop of monsoon rains and the first sight of mangoes and secret love letters that feel forbidden even inside our hearts -
the food court doesn’t smell of your amma’s favourite recipe, it is modern, it is all this it is all that and you can see your face on the slab of the counter and it doesn’t feel like our streets because no one is being ridiculous -
they give you stares at airports, did you know? i feel nervous at customs and what they have seen of our kind, when bad drives you crazy and crazy drives you bad but it would be so sad to have
become what people have thought of us -

i pledge to wonder about you, i pledge to write you letters, i pledge to think of you as a hero, the hero of your room, the hero under the blanket at night who goes to sleep thinking about childhood streets, i pledge to trace your skin back to the smell of jasmine and garland clad wrists that you fell in love with, i pledge to paint with bare air with my fingers the family portrait you carry inside your wallet, i pledge to read the book stowed away at the end of the shelf untouched for weeks or months, i pledge to find a hand and look for graffiti on walls and take a blurry photo of someone on a chingchi, i pledge to point out places in street corners and the obscure coffee shop and the bakery that looked a lot like the one in a story book, i pledge to reach out for stardust of fallen stars and the patchwork that still remains on broken dreams

because everyone can see you towering, but would you see me cowering? In an alleyway with a notebook and downsized dreams because dreams are expensive and my voice can be small - i want to hear you from miles away, the moment of making before it becomes victory, the time of your life before it becomes a memory, the memoir before death, the epitaph before you are gone - we are now, we are this, wrapping aluminium around Arabic food so someone else can have a better life - and you tear your gaze like you are not an infinity, like you do not have dreams and like the universe would ever be complete without you - how could it be? it is the universe who decides who is beautiful enough to be showcased under nights skies and sun lit days that hover above us - the universe decided on you. the universe decided on me.

isn’t the light in the nightsky from stars that have crumbled away? we are crumbling stars with fallen lights but ones that make the darkness lighter.