Tag Archives: snippets

Popsicle

24 Jan

Death comes in many flavors, like ice cream. There’s swift, silent death, like the swoosh of a bat’s wings, where you fly into the night, leaving trails of an uneasy hush.

There’s the long, spiral, slippery slope—gradual, painful, the life ebbing away oozingly, never quite dead, always getting there.

There are bursts and tumbles and explosive deaths, and you sizzle out of the sky like a damp squib, while they murmur platitudes in white-clad circles to those left gaping.

Death can be a stranger, unrecognizable around the corner, until you come face to face with his ghastly visage and you already know it’s too late.

Death is a seductress you want to succumb to. She’ll spirit you away to sensual things.

You wish you could pick your flavor. But in this here candy shop, you’re stuck with a cone, sticky stuff dripping all over your hand, until you reluctantly, resignedly, take a bite.

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S For Swastika

21 Jan

Picture this: We’re having a conversation and I’m listening smilingly. Then you say “Anyways…” and I still smile. Because I willed that stretch of mouth to freeze, while inside, I took three steps back and flung my eyeballs around in a quick move to spy the nearest exit. Inside, I selected a well-sharpened scalpel and neatly carved the ‘s’ off the end of the word. Inside, I set fire to the letter, dropped it into the nearest trash can, put a lid on it, and walked away.

Oh but I’m still here, yes. I’m still smiling at you. Even though my body involuntarily shudders each time an “anyways” is thoughtlessly flung my unsuspecting way.

No, no, please. Don’t take the trouble. I’ll survive. The colorful inner life that results from this conversation is far more entertaining than what you have to say anyway.

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More Real Housewives

21 Dec

Because you see, while you’re busy ideating, communicating, spinning sentences into webs of understanding and outreach, the chores don’t go away. So there you are, your wonderful self, doing all these things like researching black feminist thought, organizing resistance movements, investigating the origins of Women of Color, documenting the oral history of the Partition, speaking as a panelist, constructing a sphere of influence around your persona, learning, teaching, sharing, writing, and still, the piles of laundry are unmoved. With the patience of stoics, they wait, to be washed, dried, folded, ironed, closeted away; and the dishes sit heavy in the washer, parked until removed and stashed away; and there’s no telling your bed linen to get a move on and do a DIY job, because it needs your keyboard-focused fingers to fold the shams and fluff the pillows, and crumbs are spilled and countertops splashed and the business of getting dirty-clean-dirty spins in endless cycles every day.

Your plants beg for a drink. Your carpet dreams of a dalliance with the dustbuster. Your car could do with a nice soapy scrub. They don’t care who you are, or what you do, they’re not cleaning themselves up, or putting themselves away, and will outstare and outsit you in every possible battle of wills until you finally relent and tackle them darn chores. For all your fabulousness, and even if you divide and conquer, there’s always that laundry list of things to do around the house that keeps you grounded, with the possible aim of marinating your ego in some well-deserved mediocrity. Amplify that times a thousand, and enter children. But we won’t even go there for now.

Hausfrauness: dripping dullness into the scintillating everyday, one reincarnated house chore at a time.

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Watch: The Body Neglected

2 Nov

Dayma rose with the late winter sun, twisting her hair into a knot, her saree coiled tightly around her hips, and stepped into the courtyard to wash. The stone floor felt cold to her bare soles. It matched the freeze that spread itself through her loins. Uninterrupted, they were left to themselves: drowsy, hibernating, patted fondly to sleep.

Her duty as oldest daughter-in-law began and ended in the kitchen, and the noise and chaos of their large household came to a firm halt in the silence and stillness of their clean-to-a-fault bedroom.

Dayma thought of herself as a healer, the comforter of baby boo-boos, applicator of turmeric on kitchen cuts, banisher of in-laws’ migraines, reliever of joint pain, soother of ruffled spirits.

Dayma was a human ice pack, the chill drawn from her unstirred vaginal walls that housed a castle with a geriatric spinning cobwebs under its attic.

She radiated calm, even composure, as she stepped back into the bedroom and placed the earthen container of steaming tea by her meditating husband’s prostrate form.

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Alphabet Soup

27 Sep

When possible, eat your words.

They are low in calories and almost always make someone else feel better.

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Mathematics Commando

24 Aug

To be a comrade in the war on equations, one needs stealth. Patience. Forbearance. And a determination to avenge.

Burn. Bombard. Blaspheme.

Alternating between machete and machine gun, creep up on the long baffling rows of numbers, draw yourself to full height and attack. Pound entire magazines of bullets into the curves of figures, shred symbols with venom, tear through mazes of graphs, rhombi and trapeziums, blasting, blowing apart, uncorking rivers of blood.

Wreak. Havoc.

Rip through logic, plug your ears to the screams, take down as many permutations as you can, hand glide from supertext, applaud the martyrs, put on a show of madness and impatience and flagrant contempt of what is.

Vent. Your. Rage.

Innards will splatter your dark bodysuit, your head furiously churning under the hardness of a tea-colored helmet, blown-up bits and bobs oozing dark liquids and tightly-coiled secrets, your boots crunching out the last of life as we know it in a supposed string of sense, that most despicable of creatures, that heinous crime, that assuredly unpardonable of all sins,

a mathematics equation.

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How to Keep Peace

15 Aug

Peace comes in packets. It is air-dropped. It has quotas. Not served as an all-you-can-eat buffet, where you stagger out pot-bellied, sated after three helpings of mandarin-marinated calm.  Take your packet and run with it. Rock it crooningly, make it last. Soak in its nourishment for treks through the marshland. Teach your children not to play toss with its doughy white balls. Divide it wisely. Sparingly. Warily. And always stock a crate, a spare stash of easy breath. Label it ‘Fragile’ and ‘This Way Up’.

Look to the sky. Look up in hope. Stretch your arms to the ether so they think you are praying. What do they know, Unbeliever, you’re only reaching, your eyes are only searching, your spirit is only screaming, for your next fix of stasis.

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You’ve Got Mail

20 Jul

The elevator pinged and its doors slid open. Shanti walked out into the gleaming granite lobby, almost bumping into the mailman stuffing envelopes and pizza flyers into individual numbered slots. He greeted her with his usual good cheer and asked after her family. We are all well, she replied, a half-smile fluttering around the corners of her mouth. She found a strange comfort in her daily interactions with him, brief as they were. They spoke about the weather, his children, her family’s plans for the summer, and he would invariably hand her the pile of envelopes from her mailbox as a friendly gesture. She’d leaf through them: Shanti, Shanti, Ashok, something from the children’s school, Ashok, a general request for donation, and one addressed to the both of them. Sorting them in a His and Hers pile, she’d fuss with her keys until she found the one to her front door and unlocked it.

Throwing the two piles onto the entrance console, she’d step into the kitchen for a cool glass of lassi before emerging and thoughtfully considering the stack of mail again. She was a creature of habit, she knew that. She nestled in the grooves of patterns and they rocked her to calmness. There was a secure familiarity in receiving mail from the same smiling person each morning, sorting it neatly and arranging it chronologically, newest mail first. She didn’t have to change that just because Ashok had been dead 8 months. Shanti patted his tall pile, straightened it a wee bit, and walked away to cook lunch.

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Purple is the Color of Guilt

19 Jun

I often wonder why medical technology hasn’t made guilt in injectable form. It could come in a syringe, with a shiny new needle, and flood its dark jamun color through your veins.  But first, your skin would puncture, and then, not satisfied with a mere hole, a stray hissing comment would rip open a half-healed wound, and you’d be left with tattered skin, hanging frayed from its edges, and a wound that looked aggrieved at being awakened, yet again.

Oh don’t look away, it would say, as you turned to count new leaves on the rose bush. Stay. Survey the bits and blood. Study the massacre sprawled around your feet. And ooze would lap at your ankles as you stared into the distance.

Your hope lay in naiveté, in spanking new beginnings; wouldn’t striding away faster leave time further behind? An unseeing back to the gore and the guts, fractures heal even if they aren’t set right. Pain is your bread basket, tucked under an accustomed arm, a belly-filling helping is always at hand.

And there you were, golf-carting your way through existence, when the dud cracker scorched your stitches, melted them, and you were agape, stark naked, opened up for the ravaging.

So let them be done with it. Money could buy prepared pain. You know what’s coming in the glint of slivered steel. It approaches your flesh, enters at the point of contact, plunges through layers of self-numbed cyclical stories, the ones you cradle in your marrow, will escort to the grave. And the spread begins: deep, dense, soul-sapping. Then you lie back and smile. The drug is warming to your body. You know how it feels. And guilt… feels… good.

You turn the page. It’s a familiar manual. Step 7, (level: easy), heartache. Further down, something will fold, and you’ll limp back to the business of living, but you both know, as do you reading this, that it’s Never. Really. Over.

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Carnevale

26 Mar

Every time you moan, then roll off me and lie on your back, catching your breath, trumpets sound, maracas clatter, and bugles play. Drummers beat and flotillas parade, and masked-and-feathered dancers whirl in the noonday sun. Banners wave and confetti sparkles, and colors light up the ether. Laughter erupts, there’s spontaneous clapping, and I hear crowds cheer as they line the streets.

Every time you moan, then roll off me, lie on your back and catch your  breath, the universe bursts forth in jubilation. Tilt your head back, shimmy those hips, and celebrate, World: my baby just might be on her way.

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