The City That Forgot Its Name

In the beginning, there was a mouth that could not close.
The city grew from it — brick by vowel, road by prayer.
The wind spoke in unfinished syllables,
and every house dreamt it was a throat.

No one remembered the first builder’s name,
but everyone carried the sound of his hammer
inside their sleep — a metallic heartbeat
that never learned how to stop.

On certain nights, the moon would rise
and the bridges would unbutton their arches,
spilling light into the river
like language that lost its grammar.

Mothers whispered to their children,
don’t name the streets,
they change every dawn —
as if the city itself were ashamed
of what it called itself yesterday.

There was a tower that leaned inward,
not from age but from listening too much.
If you stood close enough,
you could hear a sigh woven into its shadow.

And the birds — oh, the birds were archivists.
They collected fallen consonants in their beaks
and flew them to the outskirts,
burying them like relics of failed alphabets.

Once, a poet arrived and said
he had come to translate silence.
He built a table in the middle of the street
and placed a glass of rain on it,
waiting for the water to confess.

Days passed. The poem never arrived.
But moss began to grow on the glass,
and that, perhaps, was enough.

People came and left offerings —
coins, ink, burnt letters, unspoken apologies.
They believed the moss was divine,
a sign that language had forgiven them.

In the market, the vendors sold metaphors by the kilo.
A woman bartered a childhood for half a stanza.
Someone weighed a sigh and found it heavier than a lie.

Meanwhile, the river kept erasing itself,
loop after loop, as if rewriting
its own myth of beginning.

Every clock in the city ticked differently.
Time here was a rumor.
Even the shadows refused to be punctual.

And yet — amid all this forgetting,
someone planted a tree in the central square.
No one noticed. No one watered it.
Still, it grew.
Its bark carried the faint outline
of a face no one had ever seen.

Years blurred. The poet’s table dissolved into dust.
The city began to echo
with voices that were never born —
each voice a fragment of what could have been said
if only the mouth of the world
had remained open long enough.

The children grew up to be cartographers
of dreams they couldn’t recall.
They mapped the pauses between rainstorms,
charted the scent of absent mothers,
measured the silence of bookshelves.

One of them claimed
that the city once had a name
beginning with the letter that burns your tongue
when you try to pronounce it.

But no one believed her.

By now the streets were teaching
themselves to hum.
The pigeons wrote elegies in their flight patterns.
Even the dust had learned
to settle in verse.

And so, when the final bell rang —
not for prayer, not for war,
but for remembering —
the city opened its mouth once more.

No sound came out.

Only a wind, carrying the shape of what it meant to say,
moving through broken windows,
into the lungs of whoever was still awake.

They say if you listen hard enough,
you can still hear it —
the last syllable, unfinished,
hanging like dawn at the edge of a word.

Pravy Jha