October rushes inside with mourning petals, losing its freshness due to the shrill emptiness melting parallely over my mother’s ‘maang’

Tiredness slept in her smile while she watched me pruning a family tree out of its circumference 

She collects ‘bordoisila’ in flower vases that cry life as a palanquin of inherited storms, changing directions clumsily 

Don’t plants grow flowers to shed them knitted as garlands over corpses? 

I chew just one-fourth of the sorrow valley ploughed over my mother’s clavicle 

while she keeps mixing 

her over brewed past 

with clotted tears 

in a 4:1 ratio and 

uses it as manure 

celebrating sad glimpses, 

that probably gains more audience 

A brothel of emotions moistens her larynx, 

taking shelter behind the Adam’s apple

and I’m the exudate of 

those unsaid words 

cradling dessicated hormones 

at the feet of regret & betrayal, leaving more pain to swallow than to share 

My mother and I are two ends of a sentence, complete when together but still far apart 

We are the two parts of a garden, one that nourishes love and the other that just consumes 

We look at each other just as the dry earth chases the damp sky, aftermath of our agony groping the abdomen with hope and failures; symptoms of hibernating lies tied to my little finger unable to fit into her palm of baking realities 

She feeds my ears with harmonium grains but I inhale jarring chaos, evaporating cities on the opposite sides of same page left appressed with pale ‘kopou’ petals groaning unfulfilled promises as growing buds 

“afterall flowers never die, they just reincarnate”

Mohua Chakraborty

Mohua is a 19 year old vintage soul elected as an optimistic doer who sees the world through rose-colored glasses and gets reflected at introvertly selected spectra of chaste and dirge.