By Somedutta Chakraborty
Here lies-
Dreams of silk,
Stitched into cotton eyes,
Embroidered with sequins of passion,
And fashioned in pearls of resistance
Dyed in a brilliant crimson.
Crimson roses dried and pressed between pages
Alluding to the softness of my lover’s embrace,
Our love sounded like a soft prayer in my ear
On that beautiful evening when the sun looked like an orange;
I ate oranges peeled by my father,
They are now rotting away in this bowl
Along with a bunch of hybrid watermelons
Kept beside a book on Gazan history, a cup of sugar and glasses of kahwa
Under the wintry sun.
The sun shines upon,
A kodak container storing hairpins,
Once touched by my mother during a Bharatanatyam recital
Railway tracks, suitcases,tickets
A myriad goodbyes squeezed in between.
In the suitcase,a crumpled paper, featuring my sister's first painting,
Of fairydust and Tinkerbell and Peter Pan’s Neverland .
Our faces smeared in pink,
A huge red blot,
Slowly turning black
And finally, white,
With a tinge of yellow,here and there.
There, I see ants crawling ,
In circles, lines and tangents
Around the bottle of gur(jaggery),
Prepared by my grandmother
Her smile fading away
As her motherland moved away from her,
When it was split in two
Like the split she creates when parting my hair ,while oiling it
The memory like a soap is slipping away from my fingers
So is the foam,
Moving farther and farther from the rugged shorelines.
On the shore, I find a bottle of fake Dior sauvage
The scent infused in my flesh
Tightening into a noose around my neck.
Their watchful eyes,
Entombed in the fibre of my being;
Raw,unkempt,laid bare
Like my naked doll
A totem for all my bodily agonies
Filling the pail of my soul
The soul as hollow as our faith
My soul is burning, like the string of billets doux that lie here,
Unread, unopened,undiscovered.