Soka: A Triptych

Elegy for a Dead Child
Karma Arambham

It wasn’t my womb
that slid you out into the sun.
But for all of your earth-kneaded days
we have shared you son-like
your blooming to beauty
a constant song on our lips.

When your story plunged
into a denouement ere the first half
of our book we stopped writing
our ink refusing to run.
That your bowl of life was smaller
than ours scissors justice itself.

Your mother asks me her maternal
status – childless/barren/bereaved?
I write “child-marked” upon her palm.
Though relatives stayed long enough
to help her with tenses and convert
your “is” into “was” she refuses to learn.

Who holds you in the world beyond
she often wants to know. Her evenings
bare kerchiefs with you around
are now nine-yard bandages she lets
herself bleed in. Could things have been
otherwise? Where did she go wrong?

She asks me to taste the pudding
when there are guests. Having given up
all you loved she is trying to grow
concave so she will have space
to hold your emptiness. It’s only
another gestation, she softly says.

But what leaves me more unsettled each time
is that memory of your father used to getting
you boxes of the best toys always
distractedly seeking
on that curfewed filigree afternoon
a box to safely put you in.

Beyond Mourning
Asthi Sweekaranam

Every time the sea ravaged me
and assaulted my faith
I made my way to the lapel of your coat
and found beneath its fold
a place to hide my shame.

Not that it mattered.
When you let go of the particulars
shame like nakedness means nothing.
It speaks only to absence
to that which should have been but is not.

The way his birthday went absent
from yesterday and his funeral stepped in
to accept the gift of flowers.
A day turned upside down inside out
acupressured endoscopied biopsied

remains a mere day
shrugging and indifferent.
When his skull broke open
like a coconut and the asphalt slowly
sipped his blood mistaking it for water

nothing stopped except for a brief while
the traffic. And no one recorded
that his limbs falling askance
mocked life’s punctilious drill.
At a shop window

a girl kept calmly sewing her eyelids
together. Ever since they shoved a rod
up her vagina she’s been afraid of openings.
She offers to sew my heart into a whole.
I tell her I pawned it at seventeen

when the sky was for sale
this hollow within a receipt I must carry
till the end of my days. Already there are
too many holes in memory’s bag.
Having shred the calendar

to plug them all I am bereft
of time tense tyranny.
No. I am not giving up this fight.
Look, I just scissored your coat
my last truce with light.

On the Ubiquity of Death
Moksha Deepam

Next to lying
the easiest thing clearly
is to die.

If you are looking for a miracle
watch just this body trapezing
across time – slicing its invisibility

into days, months, years.
It’s not just how a womb grows
a being from seeming nothingness

or how three hundred bones fuse into
two hundred six but also how
at any moment all this can dissolve

into sheer emptiness – nose, eyes, limbs
while clothes certificates dreams
fill up room and push against the seams

of memory. If life alone can be seen
all this emptiness must surely be death.
I needle my way out of crowds

convinced you are walking
down some emptiness now
Outside, the rain

is making running stitches
in the air’s soiled chemise.
I catch up with you

waving at me
from life’s
invisible twin.

Breaking Triptych

Break-up

The evening is a stale unmade bed
this body an oversized comma
between scribbles of regret.

I consult a thesaurus for this feeling
and drawn by its elegiac elegance
settle for agony /a-ɡə-ni/.

Memory is a childhood craving
gone diabetic in the bloodstream
the insulin of peace scarce in life’s war with hope.

Every third word has wings which when I pluck,
it dies slowly the way tea or desire turns cold.
The others cower, some deflower.

There is no ophthalmologist for words
to determine if they are myopic, hypermetropic
or plain blind. Intuition is all.

I ride wisdom like an empty bus where
having unwittingly slept, I missed my stop
and the conductor was too absentminded to call.

Breaking Point

At any breaking point try not to forget
it’s not their strength that vanquishes you
but your unpreparedness
your stripping off of armour and shield
and having given way to unwary sleep.

Every battle needs a plan without which one
is defenceless. That evening when I received
in a white envelope a storm
I was vanquished by my own frying pan
where instead of bread I placed my palms.

But since lapses are human and so is frailty
the idea is to even sleep in uniform
to keep the eyes on the toast and the flame
and to reach out frequently for glasses of water.
For smouldering skin there will be Burnol.

What this minute needs is a deep breath.
The breaking point will pass
without much harm if you concentrate
on keeping your flailing pieces together
determined to defy gravity’s deafening call.

Riyaz

Breaking is a language
one can learn from history
if one speaks to her griefs.

But one doesn’t usually
strike a conversation with grief
until she formally arrives.

It is best to break fluently
like a jigsaw, a palace of cards,
an egg struck across its middle with a knife.

Jagged ends can be highly unsafe.
The wisdom is in avoiding reluctance
and to be ready, like a bone, to break.

If you examine it, it is a physical change.
But it must be chemical too, for rearranged
things will never again be the same.

There is no denying that they can be better,
will be likely to take less space, less time,
fewer thoughts, sparser concern.

For in breaking it is possible to reincarnate.
Our demons and goddesses did the same
when they were butchered in myths.

Taking heart from them I practice breaking
everyday along with my French, salsa and yoga.
It takes the same effort and rewards as much.

Having broken clumsily several times
I have gradually learned to predict when it’s coming
and at my best now, I can split open on command.

Excerpted with permission from A Blur of a Woman, Basudhara Roy, Red River Press.

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