Instructions for surviving in a country that pretends you don’t exist

i want to be your chosen family your illegal shelter your five stages undone in one breath
i want to live inside the part of the law they reached back into and erased
i want to be the language the bill forgot to list
i want to be the flat in malviya nagar they said was for families only
i want to be your next of kin when the hospital shakes its head
i want to be not legal with you so gloriously not legal with you
i want to be the 2019 before they went back and erased it
i want to be the word they left out of the schedule
i want to live in the gap between their imagination and your body
i want to be the gharana they want to imprison
i want to weaponise tenderness and call it law
i want to break their definition of you slowly with both hands
i want to be your bruised prayer
i want to exist with you so loudly so bodily so completely
that they have to keep writing new laws and
keep failing and keep failing and keep failing

…

This side of night

My husband sleeps
I light a mosquito coil
smoke curves like the back of a hand

outside a man beats dust from a rug
the sound rising like slippers
slapping wet stone

I sip Vienna roast
on tonight’s news a debate
men in Chikankari kurtas speak of tradition

whose love is acceptable
whose must remain secret
the coil burns whether they speak or not

I think of my mother
she once said love is a house with the doors flung open
sun and rain taking turns at the threshold

she meant it as a warning
some nights I call her
listen to the ceiling fan turn

…

We named the stars after our wounds

We
lay on your rooftop
with the city murmuring below

that bright one,
the day Section 377* died.

You
traced Orion
on my arm like
a promise no country
could break.

I
named a faint one
for you
and waited
for it to fall.

*Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, introduced in 1861 during British colonial rule, criminalised consensual sexual activity ‘against the order of nature’, effectively targeting LGBTQ+ individuals. In 2018, the Supreme Court of India struck down this provision, decriminalising homosexuality and affirming the constitutional rights to equality, dignity, and privacy.

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 120

Price: Rs 399

This excerpt hasn’t been edited by queerbeat.

Credits

Author

Aditya Tiwari : Aditya Tiwari is a poet and broadcaster. His debut poetry collection April is Lush (2019) brought him early acclaim, followed by the widely praised anthology Over the Rainbow: India’s Queer Heroes (2023). He is a former BBC producer and host of the BBC’s Voices series on men’s mental health, and has appeared on BBC Newsbeat (Radio 1, 1Xtra, Asian Network) and BBC Radio 4 in the UK. A TEDx speaker and Cosmopolitan’s Ones to Watch, he received the India-UK Achievers Honours at the UK Parliament and was shortlisted for the Toto Award for Creative Writing. He was one of twelve journalists from India and Germany selected for a transnational media programme by the Goethe-Institut and Deutsche Welle. His work and interviews have appeared in The Washington Post, The Telegraph, GQ, Elle, VICE, Refinery29, The Times of India, Hindustan Times, Outlook, The Wire, PinkNews, and elsewhere. He has lived and worked across India, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe, while keeping Jabalpur, his hometown in central India, at the heart of it all. All That’s Left Behind is his third book. Find him on Instagram and X @aprilislush.

Instructions for surviving in a country that pretends you don’t exist