29/04/2025
---Theories Surrounding the Cacti's Murder---
A theory suggests—
the cactus that died in our garden,
died because, I watered it too much;
because, I took it for a croton.
Another theory suggests—
It died because I parched it;
because I magnified its resilience
to long-drawn heatwaves.
Because I took the whole earth for a desert.
And both these theories make me the murderer—
different breeds, victimized.
Who cares though? Who sees the thin line?
And so, I cannot confess to my crime.
Because, how can you scale my depravity,
when you've never seen our garden?
Because, how can you, all the time, tell apart
a sin and a crime?
Meanwhile, the theorists clash among themselves
like their theories do,
in the trial for the murder,
waiting for a verdict the judge can't give.
Because it’s not easy to understand a cactus,
when, you know, it has grown
in a personal garden.
And also because, the judge is not sure,
if the cactus in question
is the only cactus in the garden.
And it makes me ruminate—
Did the cactus
take me for a cactus too?
If rightly so, because I’m a dead cactus too;
why die so early?
Then it hits me—
How can a cactus
take care of another cactus?
Because we’re both plants, mere plants,
of the same species,
from the same genus—can’t help
but just theorize and hypothesize.
But this theory never makes it
to the courtroom where the theorists
only blame and blemish,
and the judge only listens, never speaks.
Maybe the theorists blame the other cactus too.
But how am I to know,
because I'm a dead cactus too,
my ghost ambling down
only my very own realm?
And in the hearing,
you hear stories of hate and love
from us, two only half-animate, unreliable narrators.
And you hear us wonder,
‘Would we survive if we were not in a garden,
but in a desert widening far beyond
human eyesights?
Would we survive if we were not born cacti,
but desert lilies?
Or some innocent nursery lilies
planted in the innocent soils
of some small urban balcony?’
But then again,
what use is it to theorize and hypothesize,
because we are no advocates
of the love we once had—
because we always failed to follow
its sections and subsections—
because we are just two dead cacti,
born and bred that way in a personal garden?
And because we’re dead, dead are our thorns;
at least I, if not the other cactus,
today beg a sincere mercy
to the phenomenon called love.
----J.M.S Tanjim
📷:Stock image
