Portals Are Opening
one at a time, she said, her voice feeble
like the scent of night jasmines
from the courtyard. At the dinner table
she mumbled about the neon
collision of stars which left nothing
to salvage, about the charred edges
of their lives, of the battles
they fought and what they kept
how their stories have woven
the gossamer fabric of the twilight
time in their in-between land.
When it strikes nine
she will be rolled back
to her room in the centre
darkly lit with grey
where she will be wind in trees
of stone, till she moves on.
#Rate your Experience!
“If we do something over and over, it becomes normal. If we see the same thing over and over, it becomes normal.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists
I broadcast from my voodoo doll signaling
animal inside wood, jasmine petals on welts.
Before this, I was called Lila — divine play
but night, on my path to sainthood wearing
the halo hatched by whisperers. Mind the spikes,
they leave craters in your head. My own noose,
I lingered at the edge to fish for confetti
but the sky was his forest, he taught hyenas
to laugh. Who would think he hid snakes
in his pockets? My partner was clever, divined
gold a mile away, knotted red chiffons
to roses on Valentine’s. I stuffed my wounds
with pride, burnished my castle with blood,
chanted mother’s words, doodled flying
termites in rain. She taught me to stretch smiles
on wounds, sing soothing rain, to be a pebble
like others, edges corroded to shine. In burning
I was incense, a bouquet. Such a sweet girl!
Jewelling
How many trees
in this forest
of motherhood
umbilical vines
freezing into quartz.
The third Monday
in the month of Ramayana,
the third time in the darkest
season of that year
her son hurled her
into a black cloud
to bleed as raindrops.
When new idols are sanctified,
faces painted with bruises
the ever-burning lamp within
doesn’t waver.
She is the garbhagriha
sanctum sanctorum
crowded temple.
After he left,
she lost herself to routines
of rage. At daybreak
she listened for words
in the calls of crows,
condensing into black goo
dangling from the legs
of her missing body by noon.
When birds returned
to eat their shadows at sunset
she folded her loneliness to buttress
the dark loft where bandicoots
scuttled from snakes. Every night
when the streetlamp lit
the photos, the wedding pyre
burnt the brightest on her wall.
Each round of the saptapadi
she had whispered
In your shadow forever.
Itinerant
When the dog
slipped away through the crack
in the wall, it clutched on to its leash
for comfort. It was only after ten winters,
in her first summer in the orchard she knew
he was a tiny room eyes for windows behind
which grew her miniature forest
in half litre milk packets.
These poems were part of The Poetry Issue 2023, curated by Shireen Quadri. © The Punch Magazine. No part of these should be reproduced anywhere without the prior permission of The Punch Magazine.
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