Memorare

This letter will forever be unlike any you will ever receive. It is contaminated by longing, despair and loss. It’s more a collage than a coherent whole strung together by the logic of language.

You took away my words, stripped me off my voice.

That morning, when you undid my clothes, you unraveled every syllable and reduced my to silence.  And now you’ve gone and even the silence is fading and my body is now mute. Here, but not present. And you’ve become a phantom. Absence without form.

I want to inscribe my body within this letter. I want to package every inch of skin, every seething muscle, every gnawing pain, unshed tear, un-bled wound, every unfinished, unformed molecule.  I want to send you the woman that is walking up a stair inside my head. A woman I inherited from a Wong Kar Wai film I recently saw. She who made the violins come is part of my body, too. So are you. You sit inside my soul like a seed, slowly taking root, ripening my fields, preparing for my harvest yield.

I wish I could arrive at the essence of my being. The quintessential me that I could deliver to you in this letter. Framed and ready-to-use, an unwavering, unchanging, typical me.

I wonder if I am who I am when I’m alone with myself. No one to overhear the symphony my body is conducting. Feet pounding against the ground in an eerie solitude. Fingers taping against the silence of a summer breeze. Heart slipping out of its shell when nobody is in sight for a quick, giant sip of the universe.

If I am who I am when I am alone with myself, then this is who I am: A vision on wheels. A breath-taking, blurred-body, speeding downhill on a bicycle that’s much too big for my five-feet, seven-inch body. The ends of my hair twirl on the edge of the wind and my breasts jangle from frame to frame within the rhythm of a metronome – tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock-tick. My skirt flairs inches above my thighs that peep through cloth like spies.

I’m a black magic woman with a black bandana cloistered over my head. My eyes: black coals on fire. My black magic cunt rubs against my black magic seat and sighs.

If I am who I am when you are watching me, then this is who I am: a half-dressed woman in a half-dressed dream. Bra missing, nipples pointing north, towards Old Delhi. You capture my moving body with your lens that can only frame me when my skin clashes against the light of day and not when it blends into the dark of a moon-less night. My hair is ruffled, my skin, crumpled. I can barely stop smiling at how you look at me and how you make me me.

Last night we were strangers. This sun-drenched afternoon we have already loved each other and several lifetimes have begun and ended and begin again, anew. I do not know the shelf life of the video you made of me. My body oscillates within that frame. Tick-tock-tick-tock, hair rustling, tick-tock, smile waning. Tick-tock, smile waxing, tick-tock, tick-tock.

How must I reconstruct all the spaces we unraveled. All the distances we traveled with our wanderlusting feet? It seems like years have passed and now we move through spaces in our minds. We haunt them as they haunt us and we will never live again in the pure lifetime of a single moment. We are condemned to move back and forth in time like a pendulum oscillating between past and future, obscurity and eternity. All that came before you and all that is to come.

How do I recover the moment and pin it down? Make a collage of collected memories?

You said I was a good girl and patted my cunt You took your throne on the back of my thighs and watched me heave with your touch You smelt the trickle that ran through my legs and spilt over the bedspread my leaky faucet that you refuse to fix You turned me around and fingered me in search of my scent I watched you repeat this again and again just to leer at my face contorting into a moan and then a sigh You crumpled my smile, made me weep made me beg for mercy tortured me with your soft fingertips till I could stand it no longer I was weak with pleasure You took advantage of me you came into my mossy cellar and you refused to leave

I had my revenge I stroked you, inscribed elegies on your flesh sang sagas to your skin dedicated myself to your salvation I resurrected you from the dead built my church upon your rock made a disciple of your tongue my cunt recited gospels I was your evangelist and you begged me to have mercy on your dying rising soul. Tick tock tick tock tick tock your cock wont let me stop drawing in drawing out my fingers on the clock tick-up- tock-down-tick-tock tick-tock tick-your face paused tock-your ass clenched tick-your eyes static, tock-your cock ecstatic-beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful boy, beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful boy.

You are who you are when you spilled into my palm. Dense. Warm. Scattered. Full-bodied.

You are a stain that refuses to vanish; stain I will never forget; stain that I’ve carved on the palm of my hand.

I am flesh of your flesh, bone stolen from your own.

I am what you left behind when you left for that place in your mind called home.

You are all that I have lost to circumstance.

I cling to all I remember. All that we said and did and all the spaces we unraveled, the distances we traveled with our wanderlusting feet.

In the end what will matter is not what we will have remembered but all that we forgot. All the details that slipped so silently into eternity, all that vanished before we could understand, all that we can never recover first-hand, in word or thought or deed, all that passed before we learned to read with our ears and listen with our skin, all that was never spoken, all that we let in but never heard, could not feel, all that we left undone, unanswered still.

We are all that we have lost.

Yours

In that loss.

Genesis

Fingers locked inside my cunt, eyes transfixed on the ceiling, I search for epiphanies. If you were here, I’d tease you with my tongue. I’d mouth your name and listen as each syllable turns to song and I’d roll each note along the edge of your ear.

I’m searching for that definitive orgasm, one that will spur me into words. I’ve been sharpening my knives and I’m going into battle today. Words are my only weapon against the world. It’s been a lifetime since I unfolded, laid myself bare. My fingers have been on strike for too long. Only explosions now. And little deaths.

This one’s for you and its fuelled by all my lust. You kissed me on the edge of the bed. The stubble of your beard grazed against the nape of my neck. You pinned me against the wall, struck me with your hunger and your longing, sprung a leak in my soul. And then you devoured me, broke me into slivers and swallowed me whole.

Take this waltz danced by my fingers on the floor of my cunt, spinning in circles, starting a fire. A fertile fire, a little death.

I’m building this two-inch grave to bury all my past and I’m stringing little wreaths with exquisite bursts of flowers, clusters of orchids and roses and tiny sprigs of lily.

Come smell me. Come watch me burn. I promise to intoxicate. Inebriate. Woo you with my flames.

No. I am not meek or humble, pure in heart or selfless. And I don’t want paradise with its happy endings and countless beginnings. I want a feast of sin and flesh. I want this world, not the next. I want this body with its cellulite and its sensuality and not some untainted other. I want this weight. These lines that stretch across my skin, the rings that mark my tender age, the scars that mark my experience, and all the wounds that never healed.

I am neither virgin nor whore and my story changes each time it’s told.

I was born from no cold breath of dust. From no stolen rib was I made. I have no beginning other than myself. No gods that went before me. This is how I came to be; my tallest finger rubbed against an ark. I came from spark. I am the messiah you prayed for but will never recognize. I will baptize you with fire.

Printer’s ink

A few ‘proems’ have been published online, in the latest issue of muse india which has been edited by GJV Prasad, writer and critic. Pay a visit, if you have the time and the inclination. And if you know my name.

And do browse through works by Keki Daruwalla, Tabish Khair, Rizio Raj, Nitoo Das and Meena Kandaswamy,  writers I respect and love. There’s also Neelam Saran Gour and Priya Chabria who are both brilliant.

http://www.museindia.com/focus12.asp

Any form of critique will be greeted with a warm mug of tea, coffee or spirits.