From the eleventh floor of the hospital building
the world looks almost minuscule.
The air in the waiting room is laden with despair,
like all the grief on earth has been condensed
between its four walls.
Dinner is eaten out of steel tiffin boxes
and aluminium foil pouches,
hands shake.
There are no tears,
but a mother says,
“My beta had to be brought to Dilli
in an air ambulance from Ranchi—
the doctors there had given up.”
An unuttered consensus is reached
by everyone present,
if time were to stop right then,
on the condition that they would
never see their loved ones again,
they would agree in the blink of an eye,
if it meant they won’t have to read
the obituaries in the newspapers,
or worse, write them.
A man sitting in a corner all alone,
says that God will make things better.
The silence in the room shrieks—
God has been a little deaf to the prayers lately.
These lives have been intertwined
through hours spent waiting
in a room on the eleventh floor —
like balls of yarn
left in the bottom-most shelf
of the almirah years ago.
If you were to try to untangle
these lives from each other,
you’ll probably have to tear some of them apart.
All of them knew,
their lives will never be the same again.
– D
Tag: Family
For Maa
Maa often tells baba,
“I hope you die before I do.”
He says nothing.
Baba knows how to cook
enough food to feed a village,
he knows how to wash clothes,
wring them dry,
and hang them neatly
with pastel-coloured alligator clips.
He knows how to clean under the beds,
how to dust the armchair, the curtains,
the unreachable corners on the top of the bookshelves.
He knows how to do everything,
almost.
The only thing baba doesn’t know,
is how to live without a woman.
Maa says that she grew up learning
how to take care of men.
She says her mother taught her that
men will never admit that they need us.
And yet, they will sulk
behind their newspapers in the verandah
if we forgot the fact.
Maa says men are stubborn.
I tell her, we are stubborner.
We refuse to put down the burden of duties
that a man decided hundreds of years ago
were suitable for us.
We refuse to look in the mirror
and see just ourselves.
We are convinced
that the fact that men need us
is the reason we need men,
that being needed is the only reason
to be alive.
When I tell maa
that I will never get married,
she wonders who will take care of me.
I inquire if she means to ask
who will I take care of?
She says I’ve been reading too much.
Every word I say to her after that,
she takes it like a rebellion,
she says that knowing too much
isn’t good for us.
My throat gargles up words
I want to tell her that there’s power in defiance.
Instead, I tell her I’ve become the woman
she had always wanted me to be.
I tell her that every time she said
that she hoped my life
turns out to be better than hers,
she was telling me to learn from her mistakes,
and I did.
Without knowing,
she had taught me to defy with my every breath.
I tell her,
Thank you.
– D
On bleeding
The women in my family
Talk in hushed whispers behind closed doors.
The secrets are smuggled in,
The struggles go unnoticed by men.
But it’s okay,
The men are the breadwinners
The caretakers,
The moneymakers,
They are busy.
They have the right to not notice,
They have the right to forget the lessons
They learnt in highschool biology,
The right to forget
That women bleed every month.
And it hurts.
The walls have ears.
The first time my cousin bled,
My mother filled a plastic bottle with warm water
And took it to my chachi’s room.
The bottle was pressed against my cousin’s stomach
And she was asked to not scream even if it hurt too much.
She was eleven,
They took away her right to feel pain.
My mother never taught me how to protest.
She taught me about endurance,
She taught me how to hide.
I learnt to stay in the classroom
Waiting for everyone else to leave before I did,
I was scared of being seen.
I often found myself staring at my reflection
In the broken mirror in the second-floor washroom of my school.
I stared at my face scrunch up
As the pain in my stomach made me want to scream.
But I remembered,
I was supposed to hide.
The women in my family laugh together,
Cry together, hurt together.
I sometimes feel like they have locked themselves
In an invisible glass room
That they don’t know how to escape from.
The men observe from a distance,
But cannot enter.
Someday,
I will pick up a rock and smash the glass walls,
I will help them escape.
Someday, when I have the courage.
But right now,
I am trying to teach myself to scream at the top of my lungs
When I hurt,
I am trying to teach myself to not be ashamed,
Of my pain.
– D
The war – i
A ladybird came and sat on my bed today.
It’s red wings with black polka dots fluttered,
Like a bleeding body covered with bullet wounds.
Hundreds of thousands of people chant war cries
Sitting in front of the television in their living rooms.
The anchors on television channels explain
The definition of revenge.
My mother tells me that she was five years old in 1971.
She tells me that her mother finished cooking dinner
By four in the evening,
That their family of eight ate their dinner in candle light.
She says that their entire neighbourhood could have vanished
If they forgot to turn their lights off.
She says it’s the closest she has ever felt to death.
My father was eleven.
He tells me about how they covered all the windows with newspapers,
And how no one ever stepped out of their homes after six.
I wonder what the homeless did.
I wonder where they hid, or if the value of their lives
Was lesser than the others because they were poor.
My parents are old.
They say that if there’s a war,
They hope it never reaches the streets of Dilli,
And if it does, they hope we all die together.
On social media,
There are viral videos,
Some of them are real, most of them are not.
I know how to read three languages,
And I’ve learned that the people speaking them
All have the same definition of violence.
They want bloodshed,
Not enough to flood the roads outside their homes,
But enough to make sure that the country doesn’t lose.
The soldiers, when they signed up for their jobs,
Knew that they might have to die for their country,
And they do.
On TV screens,
Political leaders congratulate each other as spectators clap,
And they smirk at each other
Like this was all a part of some big scheme,
And maybe it is.
But there are people from our country dying,
And even though we claim to be heartbroken,
We lose the right to mourn their deaths
The moment we start celebrating loss of life
On the other side of the border.
– D
The city smell
It’s 11 pm.
I step out of the Moolchand metro station
And walk down the street.
On footpaths,
People make their beds.
The stench of poverty floods my nostrils,
Makes me scrunch my nose.
I sit down beside a pile of bricks,
And take a deep breath.
This is what my city smells like,
At night.
During the day,
Poverty is hastily pushed
Into steel trunks,
The edges hang out.
The scruffed blankets
Remain hidden in plain sight,
We never pause while walking down footpaths,
Never remember the beds
That are made there at night.
We do not make sure
That the bottom of our shoes are clean.
At night,
Barefooted children play there,
Barefooted children laugh.
The city transforms after 11,
The street-lights shine a little less bright,
The office-goers walk a little faster,
There are warm beds awaiting them,
At home.
Three young girls,
Maybe sixteen, seventeen,
Wait at the crossing
Under the Moolchand flyover,
Hoping that a car will stop.
Business hours have started.
I sit there.
An infant wails.
The mother pushes the aanchal of her saree
To the side,
Unhooks her blouse,
And presses the wailing mouth against her breast.
Silence descends like an envelop over the street.
A car stops at the crossing,
The youngest girl,
Wearing a crop top and a faded denim skirt,
Smiles, and approaches the window.
The child is asleep,
The mother puts him down on a torn blanket
Carefully laid out blanket on the tiled pavement,
And lies down beside him.
The barefooted children
Find their beds.
The youngest girl gets into the car
With three strangers.
My nostrils have gotten used to the stench,
I do not move.
After all,
This is what my city smells like,
At night.
– D
The occasional presents
In homes where the yellowed plaster on thin walls
Peel away to reveal sighing bricks,
Where every time someone turns on a bed
The tremors are felt in every nook of every room,
Homes where the weather forecast is never warm,
The occasional presents come wrapped
In old newspapers.
The faded headlines stare back, unblinking,
Like flashbacks from a previous life
That never was.
The children carry their wooden cars
And rag dolls around the house,
The cacophony of their voices
Transforms the sleeping backyard
Into a bustling city.
The occasional presents
Are cherished.
One old lady,
Thick glasses perched on her nose,
Sits in a corner, her knees pressed
Tight against her chest.
Her shaking hands hold the ends
Of a piece of yellowed newspaper
And she reads.
Beside her is a plastic bag, translucent,
A little bloated, a little heavy.
Inside, there are papers,
Old postcards, old letters,
Newspaper bags,
All stained, all faded,
All there.
Her small eyes twinkle
As she reads word after word,
Slowly, as if the language might lose its meaning,
If she rushed.
An hour, a decade, an era passes by,
She folds the piece of paper into a neat square,
Keeps it in the plastic bag.
She smiles to herself.
The occasional presents,
Are revered.
– D
Photographs
Prompt: Relieved
i.
Maa
Holds her breath
For as long as she can.
Tries to vanish.
Finds relief
In the crook
Of Baba’s neck.
ii.
Tinni,
Four-year-old,
Hides under the table,
Refuses to look at the world,
But screams at the top of her lungs.
Thinks relief has a name.
“Maa.”
iii.
Subho
Claws at his own flesh
Tries to tear everything apart,
Including himself.
Turns off the lights,
Doesn’t move.
Finds relief
In giving up hope.
iv.
I
Grab a Polaroid camera
And try
To not run away.
Try,
To find relief
In people I love
Finding relief.
Poems that do not make sense, but do too.
The Smol Dittowski 