By Aarushi Sharma
My poetry is a woman
traversing the slippery terrain of the dampness
of her civil rights violation
pleating herself like an emergency
in letters
in words
in bold poems
in her dying vernacular
wanting to make the earth that has turned damp red
her bed.
Wanting to trigger a revolution that Tagore dreamt of –
Wanting
to be the stubborn
to be the resistance.
(this voice, a relic of lifeless land, lifeless identity
stands in a rebellion—)
It sings the mystic resistance of Lal Ded
wrapped in cashmere shawl
in the epiphany of brief, blinding streaks of light and rise,
she wears phirans of azadi
and pretends to be a movement
calling an independence from the roles,
rising in redemption.
She stands besides the chaste Chenab
and breathes heavily while shedding tears on the Radcliffe line
where the silence is overtaken by the petrichor of abuse.
It tries to weave her portrait in an abstract
like a ghazaled darjeeling tea leaf handpicked by her,
an autumned bougainvillea field waiting for spring to love her,
a lip in crimson
that would want a Mahal built in her name;
the footprints of her heaviness are like sunken sand on a stranded beach,
her eyes are drenched in kohl
while she walks on in the bazaars of Calcutta
and stands at a bookstall,
fifty recipes that will make you a good cook (wife)
and walks back with a tote full of expectations.
(thinking about herself
now feels like a lost memory—)
It lets her massacred dream be laid down in a qabr
dug in the verandah of her house
while she tries to make her fit into the story of an ideal woman;
she is a woman standing at the Ganga in an embroidered brocade,
she sits in a neatly tied khadi weaving her freedom on a charkha
oscillating between erosioned banks of the Godavari
refusing to acknowledge the language of trauma,
sometimes she is the ecstasy of spirituality,
in the vocabulary of her vernacular
she tries to weave her being,
she puts sindoor in her maang
cooks kheer and machhar jhol
lights up frangipani
and smells of weariness,
she hides her essence
and serves her identity onto neatly laid dining.
(even the sun is not able to illuminate this shadow of sorrow—)
The omnipresent flashbacks provoke her
when they hit her,
writing the story of her physically and emotionally raped presence
a caricature of her punched skin
like an enslaved cadaver
throats slashed to silence her pleas
hanged with the rope of rigidity
hiding her bruises behind her dull bandhani
in a white saree she sits like a rebel
deconstructing trauma and violence
framed like a resurrected portrait of life after death.
(the city inside is standing as if it is suffocating,
now it will die—)
Like a war with uncounted ailments
while 'chidiya da chamba' and 'jutti kasoori' play in the background
eighty lakhs and herself are exchanged to marry a progressive husband,
she applies alta on her hand
smears her eyes with kohl
with clinking glass bangles and maang teeka
sits braced in lajja
eyeing her trade off
but my poetry wants her
to get out of her imprisoned existence
to read warning signs
my poetry wants her to walk Kamala Bhasin
To 'be a feminist, and laugh'.
(sometimes, somewhere, some day,
there is a breath of freedom in these poems—)
My poetry is a woman embracing Sohni mahiwal,
‘Paar Chanaa de disse kulli yaar di’
And I slip a heartbeat
while imagining sacrifices in love
that poetry makes me believe in;
I can't help but write about
dowry deaths
physical and emotional abuse
of pyres of melting flesh in acid
of deathbeds that shout of justice
which are just captured in a carpet of statistics
and kept aside
only, not to find them in journals of lived experience of horror.
My poetry feels as empty as a box of your comfort food
while it sees her issues being put haphazardly aside
every hour of her existence is a question hour
but her questions have been piled up like laundry
she cries
as if there are shivers in the Ganga
and Kali is bleeding,
she cries secretly in the kitchen and no one asks why;
Who's me? Who was me? Am I there? Am I here?
In a room of metaphors
she treads abandonment
while trying to gain freedom from her roles,
from herself.
(save these words from getting cold,
there is still time, there is still a lot to traverse—)
In her torn Banarasi saree
she steps into the Bhagirathi
takes a dip into the water to taste the casualty of herself
swallowed in the everlasting symphony,
calligraphed in the history with her present tied down and beaten up,
as she reminds herself of her immortal individual satyagraha;
she doesn't want to be debated as a treaty in the UN
or be written in laws
she doesn't want to be the sidekick of political art;
she imagines to be written on a vintage
and thrown far into the horizon
to be read aloud
like a protest
like a thunder
so loud
to wake God up.
The flute plays
the drums roll
she stands and unveils herself in the battleground
like a dagh-chehra
like a memoir having no language
a (dis) embodied femininity
an engendered fear
a spectrum of leakages and spillage;
while every fear takes over her,
this time
she roars at the top of whatever she has left within her.
My poetry is a woman
My poetry is an individual satyagraha
ignored in the colonial of authority
My poetry will take revenge
it will carry its burnt identity on her spine
and see skyscrapers of forces fall
burn
die
My poetry will live
she will live.
(you probably are still searching for me in the darkness
maybe I myself have drowned
while battling
a war within—
a war with you—)
Notes:
Phiran- a costume native to Kashmir
Azadi- freedom
Sindoor- vermilion
Maang- the spot on the upper forehead of an Indian woman where the hair is parted
Macchar jhol- a Bengali recipe made using fish
‘Paar Chanaa de disse kulli yaar di’- A song title; translates to - right there across the chenab river lies my beloved’s hut
Qabr- grave, tomb
Chidiya da chamba, Jutti kasoori - names of songs
Dagh-chehra- an identity card system during the Delhi Sultanate period