On 16th November 2024, I performed, for the first time, my poems in front of an audience. It was a nerve-racking experience but I knew it was something I had to do for myself. Both these poems were written about two years ago. In that time I submitted other poems from the collection these two come from, but never sent On My Own Since 2009 and I Am anywhere to be considered for publication. I knew they needed to be heard, not read.
On My Own Since 2009
It’s 2009, I’m fat and my mummy still has reign over how I dress, do my hair. I am naïve, born a blank page. Easy to blemish. And the earliest ones leave the greatest impression. Brown-bodied, I stand out. Brown raised, I act so. Oil in my hair, it’s split into two, braided tightly. Roti rolls with aloo ki sabji wrapped in aluminium foil sit next to new books blessed by Saraswati Ma and my ma; sindoor on her right ring finger make swastikas on first pages of new notebooks and on my wrist, tied are saffron, amber and maroon threads.
It stains. All of it.
My silence is taken for compliance. A little brown girl, slightly overweight, at moments her brain attempts to compensate for she cannot communicate nor fully understand the language in which they tease and ridicule.
It’s the language in which I write and speak today.
Devanagari, oily red smudges and the scent of tadka. I erase it, with all the might of a nine-year-old, but the र etched and creased my page, the oil made it opaque and heavy-handed imprints stood their ground so I dowsed it all in correction fluid. Its smell rendered me light-headed; but the sight and scent of white could make me a companion, I could become familiar.
Instead they smeared the blank slate with charcoal, the colour of hate. Ripped off the threads on my wrist and used it to measure my waist. I would go home and mummy would scold, not knowing what I had endured.
And so, with my mutilated page, since the age of nine, I’ve been all alone.
I AM
me.