He always snips off ends. My tranquil ends,
fins deep asleep. Hair is frond. Hair is leech.
Hair is auction. Hair is lintel. Hair is traffic,
sigh, umbrella butt. Gaya, Kashi, Vrindavan.
Coconut-flesh scalps, a manifesto. “Boy’s cut.”

He always snips off ends. Antennae
of lust, tendrils of moist defeat. Hair is vial.
Lady Godiva. Hair is oyster, hiding nudity. Scissors
– suspicion’s toolkit. Sita, Vedavati. Sharpness
a male moral – “Haircut’s our last ahimsa art”.

He always snips off ends. Kesh is a congested
city. 1984, shears, rape of the lock. Hair is pilot.
Haircut is amputation, tattoos on memory. Indira.
Taslima. Bun’s a burqa, beni a beauty of bridges. Bob,
Bang, Blunt. Hair burns, without waste, like a vowel.

He always snips off ends. Hair is shame’s prosody.
Hair is sex – a woman’s mistake. Hair is hotel. Chemo,
autumn, venetian blinds. Hair loss is Sibyl’s prophecy.
Hair is habit. Hair is rosary. Hair is vomit. Hair fall is debt.
Comb turns into procrastination. Haircut to humility.

***

Sumana Roy’s first novel, Love in the Chicken’s Neck, was long listed for the Man Asian Literary
Prize 2008. She’s working on a collection of stories about clothes, tentatively titled SML. She’d
like to work harder on growing her hair.

Now before you assume I speak of the sexual, let me assure you I am merely referring  to the way she sat. Her wide thighs spread apart, printed cotton dresses hiked up beyond the knees, tapping her finger to keep time with the keys, Miss Printer cared a whit for the proprieties of womanhood. If one was writing their lessons at ground level, her mammoth bloomers would greet anyone who bothered to stare (and I was witness to many a curious young boy who did). Back home, lessons in ‘ladylike behavior’ weren’t complete without a reference to the disgrace that was Miss Printer and how a future of single misery awaited me if I didn’t rein in my knees.

Miss Printer has been dead 16 years. A new century has rolled in. At 31, I’m a girl no more and the ‘lady’ tag my grandma worked so zealously on is a grey area. I don whatever garb I please, jeans and pants taking preference over traditional wear. My legs are long and take up space and I don’t usually give a thought to how I sit (I’m sure a star called Nana is cringing somewhere up in the heavens) but occasionally, those words come back to chant in my ears and I find myself hurriedly clicking knees together, adjusting my skirt and feeling just the tiniest bit guilty for letting my ‘good girl’ guard down.

Such is conditioning. And I’m sure it’s been inflicted on many of you too. Do share. I’m curious to know how many women experienced something similar and whether men were at the receiving end of something comparable. Good girl or otherwise, this is one legacy I hope not to perpetuate. The world can do with one less pair of knees posing as Siamese twins.

Woman Made

always the same shop of decency
from where my books and dresses are bought.

my nationality is decided by the
identity i hold between my legs.

i have no Pandora’s Box
in whose depth, i can store my fantasies.

it comes swimming to me, his battle ground;
bringing me currencies, carnal, banal.

other times, my timidity decides
how not to find me left, mid-way.

i flick my pages; a constitution i’ve become,
placed at the highest pedestal; to be violated
again and again.

*Previously published by Gloom Cupboard, USA

Taking Account

I’ve seen female elders
stocking dead cowries in the God’s throne.

I fill the cereal bowl with it…makes you smile;
the child calls it–fish…sometimes
the food even; she will learn.

I don’t know, how your red diary
travels to me often, with outstretched arms;
it was important though, to know

the void left by the moneta pies—to make our home,
was filled with sighs. I thought
they were to be tossed out.
It is an eternal sojourn—
to jostle space with them.

Cretin that I am—
figure out: the frugality does not help.
It is the scrawled sub-formulas—in the air
that I must learn, to read.

***

June Nandy’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various literary journals such as Taj Mahal Review, Sein Und Werden, Poetry Super Highway (featured), Kota Press, Up the Staircase Lit Review (featured), Gloom Cupboard, Decanto Magazine, Clockwise Cat, Malaysian Poetic Chronicles, Kritya, Femina, and Heavy Bear. She was the third prize winner in the Poetry with Prakriti contest, 2009. Her works can be accessed here.

Bertha & I

Tonight I feel like Bertha Mason
with a fire and sadness in my soul.
I pace my room – this attic of madness –
it keeps me sane. I think it keeps me
whole, somehow. There’s no breeze
through the window, just an empty
vastness of night and shadow and
half-lights. And the knock on my door,
well, it came before – today, tomorrow,
or never, who knows. Tonight I am
Bertha Mason. I see her in the mirror,
lifting her hand to strike the match,
to knock the lantern over. I wait for
the crackle and hiss of wood, the empty
kiss of lapping flames. Yet all around
me is darkness, darkness. What burns
is a fury for what’s come before
and will again.

***

To Sylvia

When I put away Ariel
I cannot sleep, though
the night is as you describe
it – black, blue. With the moon,
a white knuckle and terribly
upset. Do you still brood
like a rook in winter,
somewhere behind flowering,
mystical clouds? Or walk
a dark landscape beneath
gothic yew trees? Has the
terror come to life in death?
If so, you could not
have escaped, except for
the aged face in the mirror
that now lies forever youthful;
in the back of your poetry books.
I wonder if you still drag your
marble-heavy bag full of god.
If you still hate as much as you
used to. Or has it all magically
faded and made you pure as
a pane of ice? A gift to the stars.
In the distance, I think I see Ariel
– the hurl of mud from hooves,
the brown arc of neck – and you
alongside, running towards morning.

***

Janice Pariat is a freelance writer now based in her hometown Shillong after many years of being away in Delhi and elsewhere. She studied English Literature in St Stephen’s College and Communications at Westminster, London. At the moment Janice is working on several projects – a graphic novel set in Shillong, a first novel as well as a collection of poems based on women literary characters and writers.

The world premiere of Eve Ensler’s ‘I Am An Emotional Creature’ was some things expected and many not. It began regularly enough, with the usual spine-tingling statistics on female abuse, neglect and violations. Essayed as a relentless spiral of separate pieces without an intermission, the portrayals of women from around the world shifted from mediocre to spectacular as the play progressed. Moments of intense pain in “Free Barbie” were interspersed with a more defiant stance in “The Refusers” and stories of prostitution in Eastern Europe, military sex slaves in Ghana, bulimia in North America, child labor in China and forced cosmetic surgery in Iran tumbled out unapologetically, amidst joyous expressions of dance and womanhood. Woman cried, laughed, screamed, spoke, vented, explained, twirled and chanted their right to be emotional creatures and engage in the feminine act of dance as a form of expression.

Which left me wondering if this wasn’t stereotyping my gender just as much as any other descriptor. Are all women truly emotional creatures? More than men? Do we feel more intensely? Need to express more urgently? Or are we as much victim to this erroneous belief as to the acts perpetrated on us worldwide? Do all women desire to dance? Is feminine expression primarily manifested through physical acts? I, for one, certainly feel no need to plunge into a waltz each time I absolutely must say what I feel.  I am born of a mother who clicks her tongue at being “too emotional” and believes it clouds practicality and better judgement. My friends are women who rarely cry, even when they have much reason to. Are performance and feeling necessarily the domain of the XX? Could we not be harming ourselves by tarring all women across the world with the same brush and insinuating that a woman’s natural response to a situation is based on her feelings first and intellect later, if at all?

I could empathize with individual tales but not with the premise. And while I wish women power to overcome their tormentors, human and situational, I also hope that they strive to stand apart from the cluster of characteristics that haphazardly—and often thoughtlessly—define their gender.

~~~

To view a short clip about the play, go here.

Our love toils about one period.
On the bloody and lusty grassland
You transform me into your self-pitied crippled rabbit.

When you finally discard everything you have
That is inside your permanently bulging equipment,
You turn your back
And ride towards the flat horizon

On a white horse
Whose tail is momentarily dyed pink.
Your horse clip-clops on the flatland.
Your horse remains no more.

I am still bleeding, and my inner thighs are sore.
I hop to the muddy river
To get myself some water.
That reflection of mine is startling:
She’s a ghostly ancient whore.

First published in Hutt

***

The Fisherman’s Wife

The Summer shower comes down
as mercilessly as running horses on full speed.
The afternoon news reports again that there’s no news
about the lost fishing vessel of late.
‘It’s okay, he’ll be back.’ They keep telling her.
They keep telling themselves to keep telling her.

Tonight, she leaves home and mounts the pier
on her palms and knees, without help
from her husband, presumably lost in the sea.
Before departure, he said it would be
a marvellous genesis.

To the salted wind and the salted rain
she serves herself. By the morning
she knows he isn’t returning.
The white-haired waves loom high,
clutching tight the wet air.

Sleepless, tired, she curses,
wails to the open sea like a dog being butchered;
but soon no voice comes to her.
She’s turned into a mad statue,
forced to wait for the impossible
come back.

First published in Qarrtsiluni

***

Tammy Ho Lai-Ming is a Hong Kong-born writer currently based in London, United Kingdom. She is an assistant poetry editor of Sotto Voce Magazine and a founding co-editor of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. Her website is http://sighming.com and she blogs at http://tammyholaiming.com.

Ad 1: A little girl whines about how her hair isn’t as long as her mother’s was in her childhood. The mother apologetically mentions that she has to work while Nani (her own mother) was “at home all day.” As she drops her daughter off to school in a car driven by her, the girl whips around and retorts in Hindi, “Then don’t go to office!”  The situation is resolved by the mother saving the day, her job and her relationship with her daughter by producing a satisfactory solution, namely a bottle of Clinic Plus shampoo.

Ad 2: A schoolgirl, not much older than 8 or 9, boasts to the camera about how her mother is special because she lost oodles of weight on a Special K cereal diet that requires one to eat two bowls of cereal, twice a day as one’s only form of nourishment. The mother comes in at the end, smiles indulgently at her and then the audience and fondly asks “Bahut bolti hain na?” (Speaks too much, doesn’t she?).  And the ad ends with them sharing a cuddle.

So let’s think about this:

1. Mummies must primarily attend to their children’s every whim, to the point where their own needs/career aspirations must be sublimated. Vanity and shimmering hair over all else!
2. Little girls think it’s okay to be terribly proud of not-so-skinny mums turning skinny (so if they didn’t, would they be unhappy or embarrassed?)
3. Even if it’s half-jokingly, a girl who speaks “too much” must be chided, especially by her own mother.

Some ridiculously naïve part of me kept watching in the hope that the mother in each ad would rectify the daughter’s misconception but really, are the folks selling shampoo and breakfast cereal listening to a feminist rant? Three guesses, people.

On a more heartening note, take a look at this post on Saffron Tree. As a preschool educator, I constantly struggle with poor female representation in narratives and often create my own stories to compensate. But of course, the telly will keep beaming what it will as long as cereal and shampoo sell. Knew there was a reason they call it the idiot box.

Anyone want to get me that yummy t-shirt in red? 

Iris thought of the sun as a stain
on the sky; it spread so keenly
when it set, perhaps the lake
was blotting paper.

Why she paid to sit in a boat,
no one knows. The oars scratched
at the surface — relentless nibs –,
disturbed the hulking dusk-yellow

ever so minutely, and nothing
was written that night.

*

Ragini to ex-lover

I am now underground.
Earthworms and roots fuss
about me. But I’m not dead
yet.

To get by I watch the moss;
I think of your green dress
and the rain
and how it conjured a Venice
on your body; the runnels — canals;
my fingers — gondola people
smoothing the ripples.

You must visit now you
know where I am.
I’ll bring the chrysanthemums.

***

Aditi Machado’s poetry has appeared in both Indian and international literary journals. She won the TFA award for creative writing in 2009 and is the non-fiction editor for Mimesis. Aditi lives in Bangalore and blogs at Blotting paper.

I drive by narrow lanes called eda
in colloquial malayalam, the walls hoarded with large
posters of Mohanlal and some teenager heroine
(who won the National Award for Best Actress,
I’m told, for carrying on precariously well
as a mother of an eighteen year old, when
she herself had but known eighteen mango- textured
summers) with wisps of curls over elephantine
ears and a big, red bindi on her forehead. The car
rumbles over dead brown leaves, to be
composted; more leaves that’d borne
mid-life crises and just breathed last
beneath the tires and the smell of wet
earth rises to my nostrils. There’s
another smell that’s common in these
towns. The smell of unsmoked bidi leaves
caressed by nimble fingers of women, young
and old, in factories overloaded with
women, for they’re cheaper, more reliable
and don’t drink. All they do, is work
and smile and save money for their
daughters’ and sisters’ weddings to be
held under thatched, nameless roofs
with indistinct tharavad flavors. Their
smiles burst out, like pomegranates when
cut open. They must’ve known my grandparents.
Why else would they smile at me? My city
lips creak open like a two hundred year old
frozen fossil. A scarlet-less smile,
aching to be shed.

***
Divya Rajan is a poet and artist based in the Chicago suburbs. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Foundling Review, Gloom Cupboard, Poetry Friends, Lily Literary Review, The Times of India, Femina and other literary publications. Her artwork has been carried by a local gallery and she is Poetry Reviewer for Sotto Voce magazine. She blogs at Ponderings of a Porcupine.