My mother's voice turns to iron in my mouth.

My father's stories fill my head with distant dreams.

My mother is a song, a few stray couplets, emerging from the staticky radio of a rickshaw puller.

My father is the mirth in the laughter of men standing at chaurahas.

She is in the reprimands of the preschooler's mum, dispensing tough love in exchange for education.

He is in every panel of every comic book (or graphic novel, as the grownups prefer to call it), in every speech bubble, in every stray line, in the corners.

In my corner.

My mother is a rock, a hill, a mountain, a pond, a lake, a river. Sometimes in spate, sometimes arid.

My father is a forest, a branch, a tree, a banyan that has towered for thousands of years, knowing only the sky and the ground.

My father is a sapling.

My mother is an echo that sometimes trips you, leaves you puzzled, a mirage chasing its origin.

My father is the wind weaving through a flute, a melody that brings you to your knees.

My mother is the sizzle of mustard on a hot pan, the spice of a dry red chilli, the flavour of a thousand generations.

My father is the crunch of an onion, a tall stack of rotis, hunger that is raw, raw, raw.

My mother? She's the delightfully green patch of moss growing in the basket in my window, cushioning fallen lantanas.

My father? He's skipping along the curves of Urdu that your tongue trips over. He's cresting those rises and falls, like a surfer of language.

He's nestling in the nuktas summoned in vain from the epiglottis.

My mother is in the biting wit of grandmothers, in the savagery of words meant to cut you down to size, round those corners, sand those edges.

My father is in the bell of a bicycle, tinkling along a winding road that mimics the river next to it.

He is in the anticipation of fried grape leaves.

My mother is in the window. Waiting.

My father is on the street. Whistling.

Me? I'm watching.

Bouncing back and forth, like the reflection between two mirrors, made infinite.

Someone wrote this for me, once.
This is what I imbue. This is what I ascribe to.

"Prehensile, an emptiness in my broken-cup. Not that I'd need to go through hell, to meet some bitch-craft-angel-Ghalib in thought upon a page of light, I'm just too blind to see je, Ambarin. Sagacious, with wisdom for sale, I'm too drugged to buy your sanity. Splurge, in both art and beauty, she's just like a Nirvana writing the last lines of my incomplete poems, on my own green pasture. I'm glad to have je known."

'Cuz there will come a time
When time goes out the window
And you'll learn to drive out of focus
I'm you and if anything unfolds
It's supposed to.

~20
In your absence
I converse with you
when you are there
I converse with myself


TR: from the original Persian by Samin Hashemi (1 to 10); Karim Emami and Michael Beard (11 to 20).

 A Girl Named Love

 

A girl named love met a boy named peace. 

A girl named love met a boy named anguish. 

A girl named love met a mirror. 

That goes on and on.  

In that mirror, 

everything repeats itself. 

A grotesque parody 

of the circles we try to escape. 

Nothing changes, 

Droplets fall 

Ripples are born, and die

By the millions. 

A girl named love met a boy named rain. 

Circles

Ever expanding 

Taking in lives along

the grooves 

of neatly scored 

Lines.

A girl named love met a boy named chance. 

Two sides of a coin, 

Two faces of a die,

Ever rattling, ever rolling 

Roll, roll, roll, 

Till it stops. 

A girl named love met a boy named death.

The knell sounds 

The bell tolls 

The churches weep 

The sea sings 

The birds flit

The wind wanders 

The leaves fall 

The song crests 

The wheels wear down 

The clocks stop

Tick. Tock.

A girl named love met a boy named hope. 

And it quietens

The noise is lulled

to sleep 

on the back of a melody 

Roaring.

A girl named love met a boy named faith. 

Water rises 

To meet the wind.

The ground awaits 

The breaking of the 

Sky. 

Light awaits 

The clouding of darkness 

in corners 

that are endlessly lit. 

A girl named love meets herself. 

And ah, how they weep. 

You thrum through my veins like newfound poison.
Sleep is drawing my eyes shut, but a slow thrill is coursing through me
Languorous. A word you can roll around your tongue.
Something is blossoming slowly, in a soil I thought entirely dry, entirely parched
There is a cresting, a surging. My fingers have found new music.
What a strange song you are. So unlikely, so distant, so devastating.

There is silk to the rustle of time.
There is dew in the mouth of life.
There is gravel in the wind's sigh.

You're doing to me what spring does to the blade of grass hiding beneath the rock.
You're doing to me what summer does to the kite's flight.
You're turning me into Neruda's cherry trees.

Stop shaking me awake. I'm afraid of what I will find.
Don't stop waking me. I'm afraid of what I will forfeit.

Let me open. Unfold like a ear of corn, like the morning glory, like the mogra and the chameli.

Let me, oh let me dance with this stolen glance.

Let me steal this wayward kiss

Let my lips brush against your destiny

Let me learn how to burn again.
In your raucous silence, let me, oh let me find my name again.

Uncivilised

I don’t know how to sit
or walk
or dress

What should a girl look like?

Does anyone tell men what they need to look like?
Yes? Why?

Why does anyone tell anyone what to look like?

What if I wanted to look like a potato?
What if my attire reflected my state of mind?

What if the makeup reflected the reinforcement I need?
What if the lack of it reflected how I couldn’t be bothered this morning?
And how the mirror seems like a thing that hangs behind the basin.

Really, why is it even put there?
Do I need to see myself aging in the bathroom?

Do I need to wake up and still seem
Sleep-deprived, eye-baggy and just
old?

Washing my face and wiping it clean
Just makes it look like my cheeks have a bright pink rash
Lipstick looks awkward on me
Rouge makes me look like a clown
Yup, the depressive one.

Suddenly, all the tropes about mania
and scrawling red and purple lipstick over my face
Sound like a good idea
As does messy mascara.

Yup, I went there.

Except, lipstick is too expensive to use as facepaint,
and the mascara, comes in several varieties of unaffordable
So I’m left with ignoring the mirror.

Sometimes, days pass and I realise I haven’t looked at myself a single time.

And when I do, I shock myself.

How old.

Who is this?
Who are you?

Smile?

My god, that looks awful.
No wonder I have no friends.

Dissent

Don’t speak out loud, you say
Don’t write this on Facebook
Don’t say that on Twitter
What will people think?

What will people think…
Is it... important?


Is it more important than my finding a release?

Should I care what people think?

I, who have spent nearly all three decades of my existence

Trying to validate people’s opinions of me

Trying to either prove them or disprove them

Should I care what they think?


Should you care what they think?
Now they all know I’m crazy
Battling the demons in my head
Maybe there are no demons
Maybe there is no knight either


And no day

Only night

Silent.

Essays of Complaints