Graffiti loves the arrow.
The skewered heart.
The cock and balls
neatly labelled with bio-book arrows
flying off tiled bathroom walls.
Fragile. This way up.
Sortie. Exit.
Airports bristling with arrows.
Like needles, like pins,
like an expert seamstress,
I line them up in my mouth.
One arrow multiplies,
freezes and multiplies in slo-mo,
a skyful eyeful,
like in those scenes from the TV-epic
everyone was glued to
for a year of Sundays.
The streets quiet,
all the traffic gone to rest
at the feet of warring gods.
No one shot me.
Five flowers fell upon me,
ashoka, jasmine,
red lotus, mango blossom,
and blue lily the exact
unforgiving shade of the ink
from the tattoo artist’s needle.
Asuras porcupine
under my aim,
the battlefield bristles
into sickening shapes,
and Kama stitches
the five flowers of love
into my skin, painstakingly,
knowing the only way
to make them live forever
is through pain, the prickling of tears,
the long hours in his parlour,
neither yakuza nor sailor,
preferring ashoka and jasmine and lotus
over skewered hearts and demons,
knowing I’d have enough of those in my life,
knowing that this garden
must bloom on a battlefield of skin,
where lovers can stroll, wondering
why the air smells so sweet each time
I walk into a room where the blood has just
been shed, and a heart has just been sprayed on a wall,
an arrow quivering right through it.
Sampurna Chattarji is a poet, novelist and translator. Her 14 books include Space Gulliver (2015), a poetry sequence published by HarperCollins India