Portrait of Thumbelina As A Poet
Like ducks, she moves in circles: old tattered lamentations, same
fears to excavate, this eternal wait for fingers other than her own
to hold open the book. A loss of faith in what the city knows. The
scent of the rickety lemons on the sidewalk, the rains from under
the streetlights,the palimpsests of the potholed sidewalks. Assurance
of scripted disobedience, the maroon ruptures in the city’s maps.
She writes the names of her other lovers on her wrists, her palms–
places from which her husband won’t be able to avert his eyes. In
this city where poems flow like snot, where poets infest both
homes and gutters like mosquitoes, she is just another housewife
striving to be a poet. Unable to tear apart her quilt of slumber, afraid
of severance. An incomplete rebellion, a collage of cliches: in loss
of new rhymes, rhythms, plot-lines. A pencil inside her freezer. An
over-abundance of stories in the catacombs she inhabits,and she
doesn’t know how to gather, collect and sift. The moon doesn’t stop
to shade its light in her rooms, walks right past into the alleyway.
When her room lights up, it does so with the glow of the tv-set:
the mundane ceremonies of accustomed discordances.
The First Real Fallout
A disagreement with my sister about what a book is:
the cacophony of harmoniums in the attic. It has rained last night,
the wood has grown. There are worms within the keys
and the fake ivories are coming off their glue.
On the tips of my fingers are specks of wood dust– crushed,
white cloud. A grackle-wing morning, and the neighborhood
is beginning to be owned by little girl voices. A light
like spiderweb over the houses, and the keys
are coming off on my palms. All little girls
are taught the same seven songs. The same notes,
and the papaya leaves outside are choking on them.
I know more than seven. I pump faster, pressing
on to the keys harder and harder. The keys come off
with every nudge of my fingers– bones from an untrodden
graveyard. I leash out a song from the box. True
that my sister had broken my harmonium before. Revenge
for disagreement over what behenchod means. But I
who know more than seven customary songs,
have something to teach my sister. And this is what
I tell her without my voice shaking.
A book is not a house. It is a graveyard.
A book is a graveyard which needs to be dug in. Periodically.
The bones retrieved and the dead nudged to talk. A book
is nothing but a conversation with the dead. Ghosts
do not know how to rest in peace. Neither do books. Sister
does not mind setting up a tent inside a graveyard. As is it,
she likes the company of anyone dead much better
than other little girls. Only the tent needs to be green,blue and black.
This is the first real fall-out we have. From that day on,
my sister hardly speaks to me.
[Home],
Mother says, is the shadow of an over-active quill. A silenced
sun hangs over the neighborhood. Nazia Hassan
blares assurance from the next door uncle’s stereo. I repeat
disco, disco, disco. Like a scratched record. My sister,
always and already alert about words, whose meanings
she does not know, is reciting nashelee hain
raat, nashelee hain raat, nashelee hain raat. Home,
the sisters suspect, is their mother’s skeleton sculpted into walls.
Nandini Dhar is the author of the chapbook Lullabies Are Barbed Wire Nations (Two of Cups Press, 2015). Her poems have been published or forthcoming at Whiskey Island, Eleven Eleven, PANK, and elsewhere. She divides her time between Miami, Florida and Kolkata, India.
