The Laughing Woman

Her laughter was loud.
Like a man’s laughter…
Her mother had always told her
“Women never laugh loudly.”
People used to turn away embarrassed
They pretended she did not exist…
For, her loud guffaw would reverberate in their closed rooms
where good women moved quietly
Weighed by gold ornaments
And absolute obedience…
But…
She only laughed more.
For herself, and for them…

She started laughing
To hide herself.
To pretend a confidence that she did not quite feel
To tell the world she did not care.
In a world where she met other laughing women like her
She felt the suspicion finally…
That she was accepted
With her guffaws and loud entries.

Yet…
She knew deep within.
That, it was not a pure laughter
Her irony was the cloth that she clutched
To cover her naked desperation.
Her guffaws were only there
To hide her sentimental tears…
She had inherited the fine art of convoluted speech
From the dark side of her suicidal family
Where...
A smile meant revenge
A tear, victory!

Home

A music strip
Binds the brother and the sister…
Through an alley of their common language
Of childhood tunes and forgotten memories…
Where, you wandered
Thinking you were alone…
But, discovered each other
Just before you turned
To finally reach home
Together…

Mortality through Text Message

The text message which flickers late at night
Waking me into a dazed world of alphabets.

It was him…
The untold words between us
Flood the short message
Peeping through the tiny window of the cell-phone

His words are all about his lover
Whom I have never met…
The imminent death which waits the corner
For all of us…but, for her, now.

I let the insistence of his message
Rest for the night.
Not wanting to hear the need behind it
Not knowing what to do if I hear it.

Working Women

The Whore and the hijra
They shared a seat
In the early morning bus.
Going back after a night of tired work.

They were both speaking animatedly.
Friends meeting after so long,
Grabbing, savouring that moment of respite
After the labour of the night.

The Hijra wore cheap gold-plated ornaments
They dangled against her glistening, black skin.
The whore looked dishevelled.
She was not more than twenty.

They must both have blotted out from memory
That previous night of desparate gropings
Where time sucked rhythmically
Their youth away.

That night...
Like any other night...
Of sweat, labour, police whistles
And hard-earned coins.

Male Autobiography

The woman in his life
Appeared before him
With her spread out legs
And cavernous black hole
Trying to fill her interminable vacuum
With his sprouting seeds.
Stifling, smothering…like water around him.
He would surface once in while at stag-parties
For that breathe of fresh air
But, like a water animal
Would soon crawl back home.

Once the young ones started coming
He felt strangely relieved and relinquished.
For the first time
He understood the emptiness that she felt till then.

With no one now smothering him
He tries to sleep alone.

Being a Teacher

The everyday hostile mob
Hateful looks, sneering laughter,
Questions which do not demand answers
But are asked only for approval from behind
Displays of pride and arrogance
Where wealth and its words articulates...

Peace, Hard-Earned

The light winter sun
Filtering through an early morning window.
A lover bidding a reluctant farewell
A piece of hard-earned peace!

The Body Remembers

The body has ways of remembering.

While massaging oil into your scalp today,
That careless knock on the head
When you bent down yesterday
Resurfaces again,
Surprising you with the memory of a wound long forgotten.

Wiped out by daily life and nagging chores,
The endless cigerettes of loneliness and pain
That you lit long ago,
Breaks into cancerous nodes inside your tongue today
Surprising you with its ferocity in keeping your past.

Comicstrips and Peotry Writing

The ten year old girl
Used to hide in the ancient attic
Where sunlight used to filter in
Through the single glass tile on the roof
Creating a square patch of slanted light.

Bending in the strip of filtered light
She used to devour volumes of comic strips
Mandrake the Magician and Phantom, the ghost who walks
Passed through her universe of absolute solitude
Undisturbed by screams and shouts from the world below
Where relatives arrived as hordes of judgmental comments
Where her mother’s endless demands
Were finally reduced to her being shown off for a single moment before them
And then withdrawn with embarrassed laughter
But, the cruel looks would by then judge her to be deviant
Some of them even squeezed in one or two disparaging comments.

At thirty five
She came home again.
To confront her tired parents
And still-thriving relatives.

Like before, she still escapes through words...

Numb

First came sorrow
In uncontrollable gushes of tears
Which soaked her lonely pillows.

When she realized
That tears were worthless
Not even worthy of a second glance or a forgeteful hug
They stopped.

Then came anger...
It burst out like a long sleeping volcano
Jolting her with its violence and force
After the flames and the lava drained out
Destroying whole nations in its wake
The embers settled and the ashes covered the floors...

Then came numb silence
Which she had seen, feared and avoided
In both sorrow and anger...
It finally came...

A Glimpse in the Morning

The open window
Behind it
The silent man.
A glimpse of a woman
which takes him
Into the morning of work, books, libraries...

Blanket of Words

I weave a blanket of words,
Under which I shiver in desparate nakedness.

Growing up to be a Woman (Savarna)

I remember the early years of my childhood.
it was so difficult to convince others that you are an individual
you are a citizen with rights
which includes the right to privacy.
your letters are "your" letters
they cannot be opened and read and commented on by everyone
your time is "your" time
it cannot be pried open and demanded for public display.
i remember the days and months and years it took
for my family to just leave me alone.

by then, i had read feminism.
i had understood
it was really difficult for a woman to be an individual
and
being a person with rights? - a citizen?
impossible!
by then, i had a name to call myself...

a woman in patriarchy.

then...
after years of discovering women's friendships and the cracks within them...
After years of silence and madly running away from all that i had learnt.
trying hard to unlearn them...
after discovering that my freedom could be other women's rejections
my space could mean threatening for other silent women...

I ran into the arms of my father's waiting home
Where kithen utensils were to be cleaned endlessly
Where the time you spend in folding a soiled sheet used by another person
Is time spent, unacknowledged.
Where, I learnt to enjoy cooking different recipes
Though it was hardly noticed before being consumed.
Where, I became more accountable than my earlier self
Where some time spent with a long-lost woman friend
Came to be entered in the ledger-book of liabilities
That you had to pay off by days of silence and nights of lonely tears.

I realize...
i am facing the same situation
That i used to face as a child...
All families are alike...
Yet...
I had escaped apparently once...

the painful years when i spent in utter loneliness
in a women's hostel in a far away city
were also exhilarating years of freedom and exploration.

now...freedom is a word of disrepute
my freedom means his hurt and humiliation.
my rights mean his utter degradation!

but,
wasnt it the same for my father? my brother? even my mother and grandmother?
they left me because
finally, i was a woman.
someone who will go away.
as long as i don't express freedom (which was loose sexuality, for everyone!)
under their noses
their tattered respectablities would be intact.
and, i left them!
i cut off from the everyday negotiations that were necessary by simply walking out.

I think I will have to walk out yet again...
this time i am not saving his respectablity...
in fact, i can do that only by being bound.

but...
I knew what I was saving before...
my self...
Now...
In my shameful confusions and cowardices of middle age,

I am not so sure.

End of the Honeymoon

Only in moments like this
Did her life become clear to her.
censoring ...
her gazes,
her words,
her laughter,
her movement,
her thought,
her "self"
Covering her body...
Covering her mind...
so that others finally understood her
As an insipid, dead person.

Life and Writing

"Life itself has never been enough. It became real for me when I fashioned it into stories."
Murasaki a character in Lisa Dalby's The Tale of Murasaki"

A Quarell

We had a quarrel…
About the fragrance on the way
To my room
He said they were guava flowers
I was positive they were the heady smell of the pink and white flowers
Which lacks a name in this foreign tongue.
Finally…
We both turned out right
We saw the guava trellising the creeper of the pink and white flowers…

New Habit

We had finally understood
That we will go on like this
Without talk, without love,without tears
And more frighteningly...
Without hatred too!

Yet,
I have developed this new habit of late,
I weep incessantly...
Loudly, embarassingly, crudely
When I read any cheap romance of grand passion
Picked up from the roadside.

Peace

We have finally found peace,
The peace which settles on a loveless marraige.
The peace which understands
That our lives will always run parallel.
The peace when the eye still fills with tears
Yet, one takes care to wipe it out fast.
The peace when one is awake alone
And composes her tiredness
in interminable poems.

Marriage

Resounding silence of a tired relationship
Surrounds me in lonely, married evenings.

Time for Myself

This ten minute gap between two rushed buses
Spent in a strange, untended park
Filled with middle-aged morning exercisers
And beedi-smoking homeless young men
of this vast, lonely city.