Inside | Sanjeevani Saikia

I sit on the ceiling (I am a mosquito.)
I see her wriggling like a worm She cries, she smiles
She cries, she smiles… My air is in hers,
It’s plagued with misery There! Her face melts away And yellow wounds come alive They are fat with her life,
They suckle on her reason and rhyme. Am I hallucinating?
Is this what I have been living on? (Did I say I am a mosquito?)
I throw myself off it.
I fall and the wind blows from her nose, I float and land on her blood
Why is it clear?
It makes my stomach turn And I am minuscule,
Near to nothing.
(I am a mosquito, remember?) They love, don’t they?
Tear each other’s flesh out?
Shout sweet-nothings into bellybuttons? (I am forgetting my name.
Mosquito, was it?)
I spy with my tiny eyes; Ah, I see now.
He made her hope, didn’t he?
And she hadn’t hoped in all her years. Her sighs reek of rot,
I drift into them
like you would in a tornado.
I- I know my numbered days, Every one of us knows.
She doesn’t, does she?
I shall be rewarded with death and she, cursed with life.
It isn’t fair, really I- I believe
There, her eyes open,
a tear trickle towards me. It is warm
It burns me
She’s sent her poison
I don’t remember who I was…

I lay beside her,
A mosquito sits on the celing…

I am an Indian citizen residing in Guwahati Assam, and a postgraduate in English literature from Cotton University; active in the literary circles of my institution with contribution both in Assamese and English. I attempt to write about life as I see it, and I am blessed to have a few of my musings in Assamese published in the leading journals from Guwahati. I am an assiduous reader of English fiction works and poetry as well. I try to imbibe the legacy of my father Anubhav Tulasi who is one of the leading poets not only in Assamese but in the Indian scene too.