The Dinner Table

(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.