Ten of swords

Shaam se aankh mein nammi si hai
Aaj phir aap ki kami si hai (I'm feeling the lack of you again today)
Shaam se aankh mein nami si hai

Dafan karr do humme ke sans mille
Nabaj kuch derr se thami si hai
Aaj phir aap ki kammi si hai

Waqt rehta nahin kahi tikk karr (Time doesn't wait for anyone)
Iski aadat bhi aadami si hai (His habits are like those of men)
Iss ki aadat bhi aadami si hai
Aaj phir aap ki kammi si hai

Koi rishta nahin raha phir bhi ek tasvir lajmi si hai
Shaam se aankh mein nammi si hai
Aaj phir aap ki kammi si hai

hoshwaalo.n ko khabar kya bekhudii kya chiiz hai
ishq kiiji'e phir samjhi'e zi.ndagii kya chiiz hai

unse nazar kya milii roshan fizaa'e.n ho ga'ii.n
aaj jaana pyaar kii jaaduugarii kya chiiz hai

khultii zulfo.n ne sikhaa'ii mausamo.n ko shaayarii
jhuktii aa.nkho.n ne bataaya maikashii kya chiiz hai

ham labo.n se kah na paa'e unse haal-e-dil kabhii
aur voh samjhe nahii.n yeh khaamoshii kya chiiz hai

I could hardly see through the intricately embroidered dupatta. Red and gold trees, red and gold sky, red and gold shoulders. And everytime I tried to raise my head a little, Dadi would reach out to rap me sharply, her leathery, gnarled face shrinking into itself in its annoyance. Which made me giggle. Because they had me so tightly wrapped up in red and gold silk and taffeta that all I felt was the dull pressure of her heavy ivory fan on my knee, an accidental caress. Almost. “You look like a doll.” I had never understood my Mother. She had hardly ever looked at me and the one time she had been fully aware of my existence, she had hot tears in her eyes. My eyes. The only thing I had ever wanted from her, she had reluctantly given to me. Almond, large, framed by long – unassuming eyelashes. The only difference was that my eyes flashed. With Anger, the most inarticulate intelligence. I wanted no part of her doe-eyed subservience. It was truly the only way you could tell I was her daughter. That I was any part of her at all. Dadi had tried to beat the shine from my eyes for as long as I can remember. With her words, with her eyes, with her cane. I was resilient for the most part, jaunty and undaunted as I watched her heave with the effort of breaking the skin on the small of my back. I think I almost felt sorry for her, as small, olive beads of sweat rolled off her nose, mixing with the tender juices of my raw, pink skin. Almost.The sky traveled past my covered form slowly – as if it was painfully aware of the irreverence of my dutifully bowed head. We had been in the palki for hours, the slow, steady gate of my slaves echoing my mechanical breathing. I had studied the blue velvet carpeting intensely – for hours. Watching the thin grey and green threads weave an immensely moving story into the furrows of the once wooden flooring. I imagined princesses in the patterns, beautiful warriors – with peacock hair and wild eyes. I saw their wheat-colored skin break into a light sweat as they rode into battle, mounted atop blue and green horses. Devil women. A warm shame busied my pink-gold cheeks. I furrowed my toes violently against the noisy thread-work, wanting to silence its articulate accusations. I looked like a doll. I was sitting here, like a doll. Like the doll my Mother had always wanted – silent, beautiful, obedient. I watched as my Dadi stared over the side of the palki. In the aging light of the tired day, she looked much younger than her sixty years. Her hair, once bright and long had been angrily shorn, cut to an inch of her egg shaped head. Her eyes were still sharp, a dull green. She was chewing on a large, brown nut – grinding away at it with her yellowing teeth. Grinding it down. She became aware of my concentrated gaze and distractedly reached for her fan.My sandalwood tree stood remotely on the far bank of the

Mendakini
River. Anchored in the muddy waters, it reached insistently – proclaiming itself a fallen angel, demanding it be released back to where it had come from. As if it had fallen, wrenched from the sky. I was the only one who believed it. The only one who stood before its blue and white face and willed it to uproot. Willed it to take me along. The Mendakini sludged her way towards the temple. I worshipped here, at the feet of my sandalwood tree.          

It was a small room, bordering on tiny – but for the huge glass windows that emptied handfuls of stultifying air into the street. It looked like a depressed clown had taken a shot at interior decoration. The huge brown enamel chairs, carved carefully to resemble sad elephants, the faded grey carpet that lay dormant on the leaf green tiled floor. The innocuous diamante chandelier that swayed disarmingly in the pockets of smoke the street pushed back into the room. I could see Samia in all of it.                 The whole room was the size of my bathroom. I took a tentative step through the low metal door and quickly calculated how long it would take me to get from this end to the windows. It would have taken longer to fall from the window to the ground, two-storeys below. I wondered how many times she had been tempted to fling herself out of her self-inflicted prison. I hated her even more in that instant, it was all I could do not to run out of the hole in the wall she had called home for the last seven years.                Everything smelled of  her. As children, Samia had loved lavender. The color, the scent – it permeated our house like a rabid weed. It grew into the walls and seeped into the floor to the point that my Father, who was nearly blind by this point, had asked when we had painted the house purple. The same cloying sweetness hit me in the face now – pulling images of a dark little girl with huge brown eyes from some hidden place in my heart. I didn’t realize how hard I had tried to forget her until I was forced to remember her.                   It didn’t occur to me that I had slipped my shoes off at the door, or that I had subconsciously wiped my feet on the shabby welcome mat that she must have taken from our house at some point years ago. Old habits die hard, some habits hibernate in corners of you that you don’t even realize exist. I remembered the day that I had stormed into her room, furious that she had, for reasons completely incomprehensible to me, written the words “Small Walls” across the walls of my bedroom. I had never understood why our Mother, an unrelenting disciplinarian with the rest of us, would look away with tears in her eyes whenever Samia committed her routine transgressions. I was livid. I raged at her, told her I wished she was dead, told her never to walk into my room without my permission, said I knew she was completely insane. I wanted her to cry, I wanted her to do something, to say something, to hit me. But all she had done was raised her dark eyes to me and said, “You know how I feel about shoes. Take them off.” I had swept all her porcelain dolls off her desk, shattering them on the floor and rushed out of the room. I didn’t speak to her for three weeks.

I remember our town
Where we all played under my skin
There was still some life then
In the now crushed jasmine
And patches of thatch
Which crumbled under a sky
Infrequented by stars
Such practiced oblivion
So beautiful, so wanderlust
The propriety of celebrated pretense
Ran rustic in my blood
So no one could say
I was dead
Two layers up.

It was as if my beauty had silenced the birds.

I had never known them to be so still, had longed for them to quietly enjoy the seldom mornings that afforded me a few precious extra hours of sleep. Spent hours architecting little beak-sized muzzles in the moody afterglow of scattering dreams. Exuberant birdsong had been the soundtrack of my waking since I had been a little girl, my own private alarm – my own personal chorus. But today, when I was wide awake – when I needed the comfort of something familiar more than anything else, they had flown to disturb another sleep. Maybe their songs were made of dream. Maybe they were mourning my leaving. I imagined I could hear the shuffling of little birdfeet in the arms of my sandalwood tree. Waking branches and rearranging leaves in a brave effort to peer into my window. I don’t think they would have recognized me.

My mother had only ever told me two things. The first had been an admonishment – an angry reproach that had taken me by surprise, not only because of the abstractness of her logic, but also because that strange voice belied an impregnable carnage that I would have never associated with her. I was six and silent. An unusual child that bred an unusual amount of discomfort. I was playing, alone in the slight sunshine that had fallen through the slated wooden windows of my room. Birdsong descended on me rapturously, causing me to look up – into the light, squinting my black eyes against the violence of the day. She must have walked past, must have seen what another Mother might have smiled at. A little girl, draped in sunlight, folded in the warm arms of morning. My mother entangled my long, blue-black hair in her cold fingers and dragged me into the shadowy corners of the room snarling. Her words still ring in my bones, disguised in the songs of birds or the teeming of a river. “In the shadows. You are to stay in the shadows.”

The next time she spoke to me was years later. I was sixteen and silent. An unusual girl that bred an unusual amount of discomfort. I was bathing in the Mendakini, running the insides of my thighs against her sultry fingers. I was golden, darkened like a charred photograph pulled from an inexplicable fire. My hair, waist length in its tumble of curls, hung heavily on my small breasts. Arching backwards, flooding my skin with the comfort of moss and froth and grey-green water – I felt her large black eyes settle on me, tear at me with their distended anguish. My Mothers eyes had been the dark wells of tragedy I had run from all my life. Their depth taught me to swim like a fish, their darkness made me embrace the light. I wanted no part of her shadows. I opened my eyes, also large and black and found her treading water a few steps away from me – her black sari draped over her white limbs, as if shrouding a corpse. We stared at one another, mirror-images suspended in a reflective limbo – it raised bile in my mouth that I looked so much like her. The same long black hair, the same wide black eyes, a small nose, a useless mouth. She had drowned me in her silence, taught me that words were for the Others, for the ones who also knew how to use their hearts and their hands. We were worthless, we were all-encompassing, we needed nothing but the confines of our skin. I waited for her to leave, for the moment to pass, to go back to the Mendakini, let her rub the tension from my muscles, the anger from my forehead. “I hardly recognize you.” She waded out of the river, leaving her words to bubble and froth at the base of my spine, to fill the spaces between my fingers. I knew this. I knew she had never loved me, had never wanted me. The little doll whittled from the darkness of her uncompromising womb. A little girl with eyes just like hers. I tilted my head back, until I was submerged in the river, breathing in reverse in her hot, hot mouth. I filtered my Mother out of my blood, my bones, my hair – reducing her to an eddy of myth and memory. Where was the sun when you needed Her.     

 The birds were still silent.

I lifted my head slowly – eyes shut tight against the inescapable wash of panic that had settled like a fever in my bones. The heavily jeweled mirror on the wall sent slim slivers of sunlight to pry my eyes open, to tease skin from skin, so that I would be naked, alone, without the warm comfort that darkness had recently come to provide. I could hardly move my arms. Weighed down by a hundred and twelve glass bangles, each delicately engraved with a prayer or a line from The Ahalya – they felt like prisoners in a beautiful prison. I felt my heart beat dully against the thin layers of organza and silk that fell across my chest in careless waves. Red and gold, gold and bronze, bronze and red. Another rush of anxiety spread through my stomach, pulling my skin from the inside out. I opened my eyes. The girl in the mirror stared back at me steadily. A doll. I was struck by the simple beauty of her gaze. Her eyes were large and unusually black. Their stare was disconcerting, fathomless. Deep wells of anguish. Rimmed heavily with black kohl, they held the jewels of an old sandalwood mirror in their grasp – miming topaz, then emerald, lapis, then sapphire. I couldn’t read her expression, her eyes were still. They seemed almost empty. I was certain that if I reached out to touch them, I would come away – fingers sticky with the blackest oil, streaked with a mineral rainbow, some blue, some green, some red. Her small nose held a large, square diamond. You hardly noticed it in the shadow of her eyes. Her small mouth was set, used to silence. Only her cheeks belied the beating of her small, pink heart. They were flushed – almond and sugar. Glowing in the half-light of the morning. I could see the tiny veins, beating rapidly under her shallow, golden skin. Like tiny fish under a golden lake. It took a second to recognize her, to see the familiar rise of the sharp collarbones, the hard, sun-beaten shoulders. The red and gold veil that snaked sensuously through her loosely braided hair.      

 “It’s alright Mother, I hardly recognize myself.”

Small Walls 

I. 

Her Mother told her never to wash her hair with the lights on. So she learned to navigate the cold tile (5 steps), the worn-down bathmat (remove clothes, untie hair), the metal divider (over, not on), the invisible tap (left hot right cold middle neutral). She would lean her head back and wait for wet hands to caress her – tentative at first, then aggressive. Cool and then hot. A monotonous invasion, an accustomed rape. In sepia.  

II.  No one thought to talk to her at school. Her large black eyes and small mouth were devoid of the warmth that illicits conversation. She was too still, too clean. Her dark hair fell to her waist in an angry rush of curls. She never spoke. And so she was never spoken too.  

III.  Sitting alone in open spaces. Enclosed on all sides by water or grass or sand or sky. It never occurred to her that she was alone, or that she lacked for something. When she closed her eyes, she could smell salt, taste dirt, feel gravel, hear nothing. She was almost happy. 

IV.  He watched her leaning her head against the pillar. It was only a little bigger than she was – small hands, small walls. She was staring out into the night. He couldn’t have known she was waiting for water. He couldn’t understand what she could possible have made out in the blackness. He counted the cigarette butts at her feet, five six seven. Eight. She methodically pulled another stick from the pack in her back pocket everytime she finished one. Her lighter was orange. The vibrancy of it surprised him. It was like seeing a clown at a funeral. She hadn’t adjusted the flame – it cast light on her shadows. Her eyes were black. Almost brown. He wondered what it would feel like to kiss her. 

V. She got home late. Her head hurt from all the nicotine. And from staring out into the dark. Her Mother was asleep on the couch. She looked like she was dead. Her room was cool – she had left the window open. The wind had blown out all the candles on her desk. Knocked all her books open on the floor. Her hair smelt like smoke. She walked to the bathroom and turned the light out.