Poet’s Note: I wrote “What If” in response to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “What if You Slept?” His poem is about a dream where the sleeper finds herself in heaven and picks a ‘strange and beautiful flower,’ and on waking finds the flower in her hand.
In contrast, my poem, “What If”…is from the point of view of a poor sweeper woman, and about her living nightmare. Rather than a flower, she finds a broom in her hand. Because of her gender, class and caste, her occupation is ancient and fixed. She cannot escape this destiny which includes working with dirt, navigating through public spaces where she is an 'invisible' person, and bleeding on a dirty rag during her period. I wrote the poem moved by the stories of the sweeper women of Lahore, in Ayra Inderyas’ essay in Period Matters (Pan Macmillan India).
What if
Not even begun
Your life was already over?
And what if each day was only
Bending, crouching, brushing, sweeping, clearing, swishing, swashing
Pavements, roads, streets, alleyways and gullies?
And what if at thirteen you told your mother, I have cramps,
I’m bleeding, I’m dying,
And she said, use this cloth, don’t touch this food, don’t take a bath,
don’t meet your friends, don’t smile at boys.
It’s time to find you a husband.
At fifteen a mother, what if when you whispered to your husband,
Will the future be different for us?
He said, be grateful for what you have.
And when you complained to your boss, and asked for a female toilet
He said, sleep with me here and now, and I’ll make it better for you later.
And what if at thirty a grandmother, and at forty widowed,
You never had a moment of pleasure?
And what if there was
No writing or reading, no singing or dancing, or brightly coloured dresses
Only coughing, spluttering, shaking, drooling, vomiting, shouting,
bleeding, crying, and being screamed at, jeered, and taunted
With no time for thinking, feeling, or dreaming?
And when you knock, knock, knocked on the doors of the church,
Pleading, let me in, I’m one of yours,
There was no answer.
And centuries later you are still squatting on the ground
Sweeping litter and leaves,
Bleeding on a rag.
And what if no one came forward to offer hope
Nor raised a hand to help?
And the years passed by like a flowing river
And you drifted and floated, and were lugged along
Sometimes almost drowning,
And the river continued its course, never changing across time,
Always dragging you with it, and tossing you up on a bank now and then,
Like the debris and rubble you swept from the streets.
What then?
Excerpted from Period Matters: Menstruation in South Asia, edited by Farah Ahamed, with permission from Pan Macmillan India
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