
there's this old tradition in my house
where, when we sit down for dinner, the
noise of the grief-stricken creaking chairs
overpowers the sound of our heartbeats
maa cooks curd rice and french beans for dinner
with her hands engraved with baba's violent love
it's her anniversary and she's wearing her
favourite golden-yellow kanjivaram saree
she serves me apple custard with a melancholic
smile dying to yell till her lungs give out
"i am hurting- i am hurting- i am hurting;
please save me, my child" and a cavity begins to
form in my molars; i hear a bone inside me break;
my shoulder blades mourn my futile existence
baba stays late at night watching bbc news
and on most nights, drinking cheap alcohol and
smoking in other woman's silhouettes at bars
when i tell maa that he is not in love with her,
she frowns as if it is a god-given lineage—broken marriage
imprinted on her scalp like desperate teen tattoos
she sends me to sleep while decorating her
dead dreams on nani's unfinished woollen shawl
didi is an audience who has been visiting empty
stadiums for years now; hoping for a less painful
defeat; helping maa wipe out her salty tears before
they mix up with the dough and i, a rebel with a taped
mouth and rope-tied hands wanting to scream
into the monotonous sky and make stars go to war for
my dying mother; i want to untangle every
constellation and send them on a mission to shut patriarchy, make it bleed till it sobs out humanity
and pukes chauvinism out of its trachea
so when an Indian woman goes into media
to let the world know how fucking doomed she is
and people shame her for projecting her voice
for wanting to not just be heard but listened to
i want to say—s c r e w y o u society for imposing loveless marriage down naive women's throats; romanticising guillotine like a fancy French art that needs to be
gulped down in order to adapt to modern culture
when we say we have been hurting, what we need is your hand reaching out to us for uplifting us
we need you to intertwine your heartstrings with ours
until empowerment becomes a new language
and a female infant learns it like the back
of her tiny chunky hands while plaiting
her Barbie's hair with fresh blood
reeking of subsumed toxic masculinity
we can stand and trip-walk ourselves
just don't tear the bandaids from our scraped knees
our wounds are our recovery stripes—our identity
don't shush us and tell us that womanhood
is a generational curse
that womanhood disgusts you
because we know you are terrified of us—
that we might nail our bindis on the parched walls
leave our bloody footprints on costly maple floors
carve revolutions in slum streets with our burnt hands
strangle prejudices with our kanjivaram sarees
undrape them to make your deathbed look aesthetic
and watch you bleed in crimson red
with Maa Kali's laughter
we know that the only reason you buy a ticket for our dying exhibition is because you don't want us to die
you want us to suffer and womb your ugly stereotypes and rotten misogyny
we know that when you call us weak,
what you mean is that
our ribcage houses your strength
and you're afraid
of your dead life
in us
One can define Smita Singh as a 19 sunflower-old poet who finds godliness in everything humane. She consumes what drives her soul, and poetry is the 'thing of beauty' that turns her blues into yellows. On days Smita is not writing poems, she might be living it.
