Illustration by Upasana Agarwal
These days I write nothing
except my eyes, why share
my drugs of angst or absolute
godlessness when the price,
they have said, will have to be
paid in blood, why speak of meat
or beef, when the aftertaste of talk
is not just a threat of televised gang-rape,
but a village gathering to slaughter a man,
again, why force fit my words to capture
the state, its terror, this state of terror
when friends who planned to read Marx
had prison cells waiting for them, so why
risk, why run for dear life, why rage at all?
“What cannot be said must be suppressed.”
“Why show the scar on your thigh to strangers?”—
Lessons I once learned in my bedroom
are lessons for life.
So, in lamp black, I only write my eyes
in the ritual way some Tamil women
draw a kolam each day, rice flour
out-sparkling the early morning sun,
rigid dots anchoring snaking lines, all discipline
a deception to hide the wildness, all symmetry
an excuse for keeping count.
Watch a woman’s hands
dance an intricate design,
learn that it’s her desire
that she is pouring out
on her doorstep. Like her,
this woman in the mirror
is a woman who pretends
to know her place. Each
night, she washes her eyes,
unwraps her word-wounds,
takes them to bed. At daybreak
she applies a fresh dressing.
Rape Nation
In Hathras, cops barricade a raped woman’s home,
hijack her corpse, set it afire on a murderous night,
deaf to her mother’s howling pain. In a land where
Dalits cannot rule, they cannot rage, or even mourn.
This has happened before, this will happen again.
What does that fire remember? The screams of satis
dragged to their husband’s pyres and brides burnt alive;
the wails of caste-crossed lovers put to death,
the tongue-chopped shrieking of raped women.
This has happened before, this will happen again.
Manu said once, so his dickheads repeat today:
all women are harlots, all women are base;
all women seek is sex, all they shall have is rape.
Manu gives men a license plate, such rape-mandate.
This has happened before, this will happen again.
This has happened before, this will happen again.
Sanatana, the only law of the land that’s in force,
Sanatana, where nothing, nothing ever will change.
Always, always a victim-blaming slut-template,
a rapist-shielding police-state, a caste-denying fourth estate.
This has happened before, this will happen again.
