(Lately, I have been dabbling with Spoken Word poetry, and here is a recent one)
A divorce would have curbed
the bickering at 60.
Trust me, a divorce would have
curbed
This bickering at 60.
The day’s follies
with
too spicy a rasam
and
an unsealed pickle bottle
douses
her mutterings of cardiac pain
she is rambling, anyway, I can hear him
think
from
across the dinner table
And
as the daily ritual of muttering
Under
the breath begin (that I have long back stopped caring about),
The
dinner table is filled with bowls of hatred,
anxiety,
disappointments,
dreams
gone to the drains,
complaints,
the
day’s weight of waiting for nothing,
and
the angry faces of the mundane and monotony
And
suddenly they talk about going to the grave, my mum and dad
My
curious ears perk up-
A
family trip is foreign, you see
I fidget
in my seat, remembering Ammi cackling
to taxidrivers
where she is from
the
one time I took her to Hyderabad
She
actually told the auto-wallah
she
wouldn’t trust him
As
she’s alone with her daughter in a new city
I
wriggle myself away from the clasps of that
Embarrassing
Memory
My
mother… she’s still learning
How
to talk at 60.
I
see her picking words
Like
napkins, one by one,
Pressing
and folding them
Until
they are fit to be placed at the family’s dinner table
And
she swallows her words in silence,
sending
each syllable down her foodpipe
The
years of marriage have taught her one phrase though,
and
she asks me that all the time, “What would your dad say?”
and
I want to ask her, “what do You say?”
and
she asks me back, “what will I tell him?”
You see, the anxiety demon inside
her head
makes her cave in even before
My father sets the question paper
And I give her the answers and she’s
not even
Memorizing them.
Her anxiety is the reason I never
run late
Her anxiety is the reason I don’t
talk back to my father
Her anxiety is the reason I eat when
asked to
Her anxiety is the reason I have
always hated him
Her suffering time has
sharpened my claws that I once
chewed with silence.
Everytime
I wonder why she is more
Mother
and wife than a doctor
I also
wonder if I was the tumour
Growing
inside her she never operated upon,
Letting
me consume her whole…
Tonight,
words fell thunder, and tears fail
to
douse my hot flushed cheeks
I
watch nonplussed the drama
Wearing
Ammi’s night gown
So afraid
I might turn into her one day
But
for now, all I know is that,
I
the fevicol,
I
the bridge,
I
the in between,
I
the conjunction
is
tired of holding up,
Holding
together Mercury and Pluto,
fire
and ice,
love
and anger,
screeches
and silence… all
under one single roof,
that I scream.
I
scream to the people who’ve been deaf so long.
Knowing
they’d not hear me, I tell them
A divorce would have curbed
the bickering at 60
because love, here, in this house,
is neither warm nor smells like
a family dinner.
For me, love smells of
Amrutanjan
On my Ammi’s pillow
For me, love smells of
Amrutanjan
On my Ammi’s pillow.
