Nandini Dhar -- Nirma Memory
Long before we became twins and sisters,
we were dolls: carved
in our mother’s noonday dreams.
Uncle says, we were both heavy.
Like welding machines, the last
hour of silence before dawn.
Mother smashes a medicine-bottle against the wall
because grandfather has called her a goddess.
The liquid red, like fresh blood
on the kitchen floor.
Any other woman
in her place would have brought
the house down
with her shrieks. Would have shouted,
I am not your fucking goddess.
But Mother believes in silence,
in the language of fingers.
Our older cousin on her hands and knees
sopping the liquid up on a white rag. She’d
refuse to wash the scarlet away.
When the adult-badgering became
unbearable, dear cousin tied knots after knots on the scraps,
and hid it in between her old textbooks.
This piece of torn cloth, with stains of fractured red,
was her gift to us: for our first birthday.
A souvenir of our mother’s incomplete rage.
A lump of silt in between Mother’s fingers: a row
of finger-sized women along the wooden cabinet.
Half-squatting, their saris hitched up,
needles in between their thighs.
Mother kept her hands tied to the bed
when she slept. A ceramic replica
of an aborted fetus enshrouded our welcome: