Do seeds talk to each other
as they gestate in the earth’s
deep, dark womb? Are there
secrets ripening with promises
that only unborn vegetables
can know — the alchemy between
trapped moisture and heat, between
fire and water, between desire
and drowning — before
the sapling cranes its neck
overground?
Is that how seeds find
their way inside chubby aubergines
and slender beans? Life bursting into life.
One unto a pod, a bed, a whole
efflorescent farm.
Is that how, by
Multiplying, desire eclipses
drowning?
I have thought of redoing
my hair many times. Imagined
pretty curls, bought a curler that
travels with me to places and
comes back in the suitcase, unused.
Or that smart-look, snappy boy-cut
That bold and edgy women don with
spunk. At the very least make it
shoulder length and leave it
open sometimes? I hear friends whisper,
“Come on, try it, it’ll grow back.”
I know this is true because when
my hairstylist — the husband — cut it
shorter than I had requested, it actually grew back.
On YouTube, I ceaselessly watch videos to learn
the art of a French roll and the French braid. I vow
to practice and get them right. Then I
go to the mirror and pull my hair into
a plain braid. Exactly like
my mother has done forever. There is
Wisdom in knowing a single plait tied
Well can save you from many bad
Hair days.
Morningness bathes you. Grandfather’s Arms rise skywards. The newspaper-man hurls elastic-clasped, rolled-up headlines into the porch. Mother lights the stove to wake up milk.
Ahir Bhairav takes you to a place so empty, it’s full. The absolute centre of nothingness. The beginning of all beginnings. A lighthole.
In a slowly-igniting corner of your mind, your guru’s saintly beard unspools. You can hear him talking about the sadhu who devoted his life to the service of Bhairav, the primordial sound. Your guru’s smile is a cryptic message now.
Vilayat and Imrat lead you with strings. Unscratched morning flows into a cowshed. The uniraga sadhu still befuddles, but with Ahir Bhairav, you partake in a fraction of his madness, his self-absorbed samadhi in the lighthole.
The school girl dreams. One day she’ll tune her voice to the throat of the songbird whose call mocks the cage of age.
***
2.
FISH OUT OF WATER
Water was the first traitor she came To know. It didn’t drown her. Seasoned traitors seldom do that. She was the river’s sibling-child, knew its mood swings, joaar and bhata like she did her night terrors, throat-clasping. Easy to forget once the grip loosened.
When father spread his net over its body, the river heaved through the mesh, packing fish into its giant mouth. She should have known then What it is to be thrown onto dry Ground. Gasp. Wriggle. Writhe. Succumb. Forget that water ever nestled your breath.
The river’s betrayal came not in abandoning her. It did when it became a concrete mesh, And she, a fish in the city’s sewage tank.
A long-dead poet brings home truths to the work desk. Mid-day ennui seeks lunch break and a walk in the park. Between flesh and flight, the girl chooses to ride the breeze Like kebab smoke trailing the gallies of purani Delhi. Careless, footloose. Another dead poet dreams of a new day on earth, a more womanly day. Old wounds find new ways of festering. Congealed blood rejects washing. Rain harnesses in megapixels tears that no longer wet hearts.
The cubicle slumbers with a whirr of weekday monotony.
Defying screen slavedom, we three meet for lunch. She
from China, I from India and she from Canada. School
harks back to the lunch table as I cajole her to share
my chicken pot-pie. We discuss roots. “South-western China,”
she says, hastening to add the immigrant’s near excusatory,
“but education in Beijing and Shanghai.” She nods
when I speak of women and their place in Asia. My
“decent-enough-to-earn-me-a-writing-job-English”
surprises her. We branch out into languages thus.
Mandarin is hers. She makes sure her child mutters
it too, even though he claims to be a Canadian. I
talk about my mother tongue and how it created a new
country. Their eyes brighten, ears perk up. And she, the lanky,
blue-eyed one is taking a shot at Italian, her husband’s
root tongue. “Oh Italian!” our Asian friend squeals,
“Do they all carry guns there?”
And so we begin making
maps with fleeting-floating stock images, hackneyed
threads–losing sight and redeeming it with a native’s
estimation. I tell them about India, its many topographies–
“each state a country unto itself,” the need for
its women to develop lateral vision and thick
skins. What’s her origin, I ask the blue-eyed one.
“Danish-Swede hybrid,” she says lamenting the inhuming of
both languages beneath the inter-generational sedimentation
over the arctic snow.
We part with sweet somethings, convoluted
cartography and a promise to “do this again.”
Bhaswati Ghosh 