December, you shapeshifter.
The days are numbered,
the atrocities are the gifts that keep on giving.
When I was ten,
December was only the cold
and the rush of an annual day.
But the old calendar on my desk,
it is a magical thing –
every day, it changes.
When I turned twelve,
December was a woman bleeding,
and left for dead in the cold.
That year I learnt fear
and Maa‘s eyes –
they held an eulogy, an apology.
December was then for grieving,
to be resolute in the coming year,
with keys like desperate knives between fingers.
December and I, we’re bittersweet now.
Some years, she is silent;
others, silenced still, she’s a corpse in the dark.
Some years, December is a red pout
of the strange woman on the magazine
selling and telling pretty lies at fifty percent off.
This last year, I could afford it.
She was my reflection in the glass –
friends and warmth and security blankets.
She was the red of the holidays
or was it the bruises on the people
I live across the city from?
“Anyway, the food’s getting colder
there’s mulled wine to wash it down with.”
Mulled wine that looks like lifeblood.
But of course it’s not.
Is it? Lifeblood?
Or have I been reading the paper too much?
I’ve heard they bleed different,
the ones who put food on the table
Or perhaps it’s just the papers, the circus.
Who’s to say?
They turned the television off,
said there’s a snowstorm.
But where I am from
there’s only teargas and lathi-charge.
So which one is it?
December is for deception, perhaps.
They don’t teach you this in school,
And college, there you learn for yourself.
Education is sedition.
Speech, provocation.
But only if you’re in the wrong (side).
There’s another year coming,
Maa will tell me.
Maybe things will change.
But I want to ask
the kings and shahs and their retainers –
the whole damn coterie.
When the world is sleeping,
when dadis sing into the night,
do you lie to yourself, still?
Do you look to the mirror?
Tell me, what does your December look like?
What are your resolutions?
There’s a new year coming, after all.
More detainees, perhaps?
More power grabs, you say?
Or do you only snatch from those
whose grip is death –
starved, bony, and all things decrepit?
But I’m only 20, and you –
an old, festering sore. You’ve been around
instigated so many red Decembers.
So I’ll look at mine instead – ghosts
of horrors past, they do not shapeshift.
I see them clear as day.
December is a collective fog
of tired sighs. Now, it only obscures
our complicit crimes.
Prachurya Das is an undergraduate student in literature from Delhi University.
Featured image credit: Elena Arboleda Salas/Pixabay