Ultra Violet is a place for Indian feminists. It’s a place for sharing stories and views and questions. It’s a place for exploration, opinion and information. It’s a place where we can come together to understand what other feminists around the country–or around the world–are saying.
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August 26, 2010
By Divya Rajan
Your scarf spoke nine tongues.
I failed to know the purpose, seek the language
of splinters, shards, lazy salsas.
I thought the skies bowed to you even
as they turned mauve. Awe
filled my lungs, I breathed.
Shards slow danced, I felt your smile.
It smelt of something else.
Your ducking shadows traded with liquid limelight.
*******
“You were born to silence”, sang [...]
August 04, 2010
By Sumana Roy
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. [...]
May 12, 2010
By Trisha Bora
The Lonely Grave of Paula Schultz
Tonight, there’s been a burial.
A careless hammering of nails into a dry casket –
by men drunk on moonshine – breaks the night,
scattering the weevils and owls into the rising moon.
They’ve taken my words, my amour, my knife and
left me here to fill the lonely grave of Paula Schultz.
This [...]
February 18, 2010
By June Nandy
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 [...]
January 19, 2010
By Janice Pariat
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 [...]
January 01, 2010
By Susan Kiguli
Mothers Sing a Lullaby
(after the 1994 Rwandan genocide)
Mothers sing a lullaby
As the dark descends on trees
Shutting out shadows.
The sensuous voices swish and swirl
Around shrubs and overgrown grass
Hiding mountains of decapitated dead
And the glint of machetes
That slashed shrieking throats.
In these camps without happiness
Mothers maintain the melody of life
Capturing wistful wind
To sing strength into [...]
October 29, 2009
By Lalit Narayan
Miscarriage
A curtain of rain separates
My verandah from the hospital.
On any other day a hundred
Silent patients would pass through
The OP clinic. Each of them
Allowing us doctors to listen
Feel, touch and question them.
The warmth of their fever would
Make us uncomfortably hot.
Today the air is chilled downpour wet.
Water roars in the stony river.
Five nurses, Gi and [...]
October 16, 2009
To Get Myself Some Water
~Translated from Ellen Lai’s ‘Grassland’, written in Chinese
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 [...]
September 14, 2009
Iris and the sun
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 [...]
August 28, 2009
By Divya Rajan
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 [...]
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