Cantaloupe Carcass

*Summer 2008*



You’ve carved out

Any flesh

Clinging to the lacey,

Pink,

Walls

Of my melon hopes,

Gourding my insides

Ravages of pulp

Splashing on the floor,

Lines of life

Following

Veins in tiles.

I need a thicker skin

To kiss here.

This flimsy farce

Of protective pricks

Turn inward,

Puncture brutally,

So-called roughness

Betrayed

By excessive bruising.

I’ve drained my respect

To wet too many lips.

Craving fleeting romance

Because it flees

So I can lay alone afterwards

Suffering,

Drying my penetrated sanctuary

With salt and endless sun,

Too petrified and hallow

To be vulnerable

To intrusion

Anymore.

Untitled

*Summer 2009*


At age ten in my basement bathroom, I still needed to be reminded to clean myself. Already in ten years I had attracted layers of dirt, wearing sin like double skin, wrapped in the poison of the past, awaiting purging. But as my mom settled the metal loto in the drain dip of the sink with a rush of bubbly water rising to the brim, I knew this cleansing could not penetrate the permanency of scars. Dirt would grow back in clumps as scars taught them to, to make immorality seem washable.

My mom gripped the silver half moon handle of the loto carrying it from sink to toilet and cold water that mimicked its container’s reflective curves spilled over edges. At one end was a spout extending from the base of purity to reach my raw folds, source of defecation, of shame, of intrusion. I sat ready, accepting duty, on the edge of my seat and my mind wondering how to begin, what she’ll think, how she’ll comfort me, how she’ll fight for me.

My mom mistakes my unwillingness to inherit and make routine this ritual outward, superfluous washing for inability. She leans the loto and the laser liquid stream hits at an angle making me numb, drowning the random assemblage of skin I haven’t yet learned to name, or look at, or touch.

From the top most point of my creases the stream travels an arc with a triumphant gleam of success. I am fit to be inspected by my family, my society, and my God.

I acknowledge the victory over perceptible sin but then let trauma surface from the core of anxiety through pores of now regenerated dirt so that my mom can perceive of the impurity even ritual cannot dissolve.

Wrapped in Piano Strings

I sank into the sea
Wrapped in piano strings
Few words could open me
But you knew them all

Tripping Over Contradiction

From the moment I tie the strings of the ridha under my chin and position the hood carelessly over my hair, knowing it will slip down in minutes, and step out into the wilting Ahmedabadi street, I feel like I’ve draped my body in resentment. Its instantaneous and it builds. Each step I follow, each step I mimic feels like a betrayal. I’ve become a following body, empty of sentiment and sincerity. I walk over to the rickshaw, fumbling with the gaagra, either hiking it up too far and revealing the hidden legs that carry me reluctantly or tripping over the thick, border band of beaded flowers and weight. I feel clumsy. It becomes impossible to guide the me that prefers kids to adults, cannot sleep to a ticking clock, has never felt as free as when on my bike, and the one sloppily layered on top and conjured from past persuasion to keep others happier than myself. Entering the small gali leading into vohradom, my masi and mamu’s muscles untensed as they’re ushered into an environment that happily absorbs their matching wardrobes into its homogenizing herds, I want my only exposed parts to radiate the difference I won’t articulate. I wear conformity awkwardly, the zipper of my gaagra driven open at my hip, my hair refusing to be matted and flattened, poking out in short unruly tufts, my arms often undone until my elbows, because it is hot, because the fulcrum of generosity should not be invisible, because I don’t know how to connect tucked into passivity and passing and pardah. There are no connections to be made here, at least not with the living. Except the occasional met glance of a child, performing just as I am but without the cognizance of contradiction. These moments are pure relief for me amidst the graves. Spotting some careless subversion, some accidental and unknowing deviation from the crowds, in a dance, a rally of bouncing laughter and puffed out cheeks and teasing tongues, not meant to be here, soon to be disciplined back into the collective temperament of mourning, draws out the revolutionary within me, draws out forbidden joy and freedom. So that within a scene of solemnity I can recognize my body and my thoughts are distinct and my own. Such is the powerful transgression of hide and go seek in a place where people come to honor the dead with garlands and maim the living by decapitating consciousness.

            I’m struck by the beauty of this place. White gleaming marble underneath us, rows of inverted protruding coffins, reinforced by and reinforcing a steady stream of pilgrimages so that they’ll never sink into earth as they should. We touch fingertips to stone and then forehead and then lips, rapidly, mechanically, repeatedly, sometimes using two hands and increasing speed and coverage. We have a battlefield of living dead to cover. We skip the qabars without red stars because in our resurrection of distant deaths, there is a difference between lives lost and lived. Some deserve prostration, others indifference. Others, still, deserve height. Platform. Stairs that I see a woman ascending using just her arms, grabbing at railing and heaving her body with devotion, the crowd barely clears for her when she reaches the sculpted silver doorway, struggling. I take queues. Bow, bend, kneel and kiss. I skip steps on purpose, miss contact, rush through worship, to plant tiny rebellions by never fully resigning to ritual. With careless contempt, I endure. If I could slip into observer, researcher, as I’ve been trained to, erase the familiarity and my complicity in it, hold my heart high, at arms length from meeting the tragic realization: my thoughts and actions are estranged from each other. 

                  And in a most desperate moment, I look up from guilt and see a peacock. Symbol of resurrection, transformation, gatekeeper of death, immortality…I gaze at its proud pronounced neck and say, “Some things should die.”                                                        

A Way to Begin

*April 2011*



We left an empty, echoey Gandhi hall, filled with more pillars and respect than people, and in a shock of dust and sun, boarded an auto rickshaw to meet Rihanna. With just a thin skin separating us from the street, we were lifted by every bump, jarred by the vibrations of metal sewer grating, aware of every near collision as we barely spared or were barely spared in frantic movement to arrive. I loved the rickshaw. All window, all bodies, all cramped corners and dodged disaster. I felt the city heave around me and was carried by its pulse. We took a quick turn towards the veggie and fruit stands, away from the 6-lane street, inside living. Vendors lining dirt paths, people carefully proceeding, methodically even, no surprise or disruption in their faces as motorbikes weaved chaos and the slit of movement grew more and more narrow. Thopies and ridhas and ornas never slipped off their heads, in haste or in heat. This was the Muslim quarter Yasmine told us about. Dad and I got off at the pawn novelty parlor, shrunk in between some shade spotted in the overlap of stand, store and sky and waited for Rihanna and where she would lead us next. Rihanna came towards me, bright, a sturdy and beautiful definition outlining her eyes, they spoke at me and took my hands in their reflection. Her face at once rough and taut and completely unapologetic and yet smoothing over self-doubt and lack in its brown persistence. Every movement direct and with purpose, she quickly turned in the direction of her office, my dad and I following, with his right hand on my left shoulder in its usual place of support, his staggered, labored walk needing a companion in confronting constant pain. I like the way it feels to have his hand cup my shoulder, sometimes I linger in front of him in anticipation for his hand to seek stability and my shoulder to rise up and grant it. There is a steady balance the pronouncement of that dependency reveals, one that keeps my eyes protective and my steps cautious and proud. I need his surrendered weight just as he needs to relieve it.

We come to an office, one wall pure door facing the street, with no reason or desire to be shut. Rihanna points to two seats at a back table next to three women seated facing each other but seeking a fourth. Rihanna signals patience to me and the women and suddenly I’m unaware if we’ve arrived or if this is just an incidental insight on the way to deliberate confession. Straightening her pant cuffs and draining a metal cup into her throat she begins. Han Bol. (Yes, speak)

Between the mission winding around the top of each wall and the women’s urgent negotiations, I tried to locate, to decipher, to take in this atmosphere. One woman turned to me unexpectedly and began enumerating her visits to this office, full on compassion and empty on knowledge I offered what I could. Rihanna dusted off a calculator with the edge of her khemis. Dirt settles and is unsettled quickly here. Designating a group leader they arrive at a sufficient loan for this month and its layered on top of the small and large tragedies of the last few years. While signing a stack of requests Rihanna glances up long enough to tell me she’s taking me to Anjum colony, one of the buildings where displaced Muslims were relocated after the 2002 riots.I know I'm not ready but have no idea what preparation means. I brace myself and say, "It's a way to begin."

Excerpt from "Love in the Old Cities"

*November 2010*
         I played in ruins in Balad Ash-Sham and traced my fingers along the cracks of history while my tongue was infused with ancient modern phonetics.  While Said and I stood, huddling above a ridge of green rocks at the convergence of Lake Tiberias and the borders of Jordan, Syria and Israel, as goats sped past in herds and stopped along the olive orchards to stand on hind legs and graze at low branches, Amira and I wandered through black stone in Bosra and lounged on the steep steps of the amphitheater watching dead stages crawl with life once again.  We sat in the back of a Syrian taxi cursing in two Arabic dialects.  We refused to be suckers.  We wouldn't budge, it was all we were prepared to pay for a 10 minute ride from the bus station to the ruins.  I knew the fares.  And I knew the onslaught of guilt soaked language that followed.  God protect us for cheating him, and his family for not being provided for.  Taxi drivers in Syria were vehicles not only of transport and of impatience with the crowded and less stealthy microbuses, but of social mores and social monitoring.  As cabs would always be needed so would their drivers' comments about society and religion and sexuality, though not always solicited, ring in passengers ears long after the fare was calculated with the old 'adad and the government regulated increases due to the rising price of mayzot.  I had quick journeys by cab in which I hardly acknowledged the chauffeur's chatter and dreamt out the window through long gazes at the squares we passed and swaths of government propaganda lining the city like government commissioned seran wrap preserving its essence and its flavor from the West.  And then there were poignant conversations about life...about lives.  The multiplicity of lives lived on the same planet but with such differing conditions and differing opportunities that even though these taxis represented freedom of movement for others, represented an alternative route, the excitement of reaching destination, these same taxis to the drivers themselves meant erasure of their humanity, meant imprisonment to the fate of embodying freedom and mobility for others yet ironically, monotony and repetition for them. 
            We talked about Fairuz, the beloved, the most loved icon and the most cherished, whose songs could unite all in a moment of joint nostalgia in a moment of joint hope for an altered landscape where justice and the materialized beauty of her lyrics reigned.  We talked about George Bush.  About government.  About loving people but always detesting the governments that exploit the power to represent them.  We talked about family.  Ages of children, ages of nephews.  Youth.  Childhood.  We talked about it with joy dripping from our fond descriptions.  We talked about India.  About Bollywood.  Of the fantasy that painted the screen in turmeric and red and floated images of coordinated dances laced with the jingle of anklets spicing footwork.  We talked of travel. Travel.  To escape.  To see the world as I have and was doing in that very moment.  To sit in strange taxis in strange countries and speak a strange language and hear about a strange culture.  To exchange views.  To embrace these views.  We spoke of fantasy I was living.  We spoke of me.

Silence and Disbelief

*November 2010*



Silence and disbelief. “You’ve got that good hair, look at it, not hair like mine.” I was next to a freshman at Georgia Tech who I had ran into as I wandered out of the subway and picked a random direction and found her lost too looking for direction, feeling safe enough to approach me. So we took the same meandering course, chose a direction to pursue together and walked side by side. She had black leggings on, black and grey, layered tanktops and a hoodie, a black and white bandana folded across her hair. I noticed her hair, maybe because I was trying to narrate her life, explain to myself why she gravitated towards me, whether she was desperate or found kinship. Whether we were the same, whether her skin color was mine, the exact hue, whether that was an indication of shared origins. Was she South Asian? Could I claim her? Could we reminisce and could I look at her as if she were my youth and I was guiding her through a conflictive self-defining journey? One I was still on. Which is maybe why we found each other. I saw her hair and saw it pulled tight against her scalp with fly away frizz curling over edges of her bandana. It was coarse. It was thick. It was not mine. We walked and we asked how the other was settling and talked about the distance from home. Her family was Ethiopia and her exile was going on two years. I also felt exiled but it was not entirely related to my relocation from Ohio to LA. We walked the slope and were derailed by inertia. It brought us to a stop at the bottom of the hill though we would have never chose that intersection, would have never chose for our random relating to be intersecting by that question. We were edging off the curb, hesitant, inching forward moving back, mixed signals causing confusion. From our left, a black woman dressed in brown, brown sweatshirt, darker brown loose pants, spit out a question and I didn’t ignore it this time, didn’t turn away from the speaker with closed ears before her articulations, and instead received her comments, engaged with her question.


“Do you all know where Osama bin Laden is?”


“Hmm?” I was either shocked or unable to process but either way asked for clarification.


“I said, d’y’all know where Osama is, is he dead or alive?”


I was caught in between words and worlds and walked into assumptions colored by racism. “How would we know?”


“Because you’re the same color as him.” As if that was the connection she had been coming to make, the reason her legs compelled her towards us with urgency, the reason she chose our complexions, to reduce our brownness into a soiled puddle of following, of stigma.


“And you’ve got that good hair, look at it, not like mine.”


I had my red, plastic sunglasses on, not dark enough to block out the shock and sadness in my eyes. They were visible through the tinted veil and so was my locked look, directly penetrating her eyes, that squinted at me, grew wrinkled around edges, looked through me defiantly, assessed me, targeted me. There was a curled up smirk in her stand-off stare, one that tried to baffle, tried to silence, fed off my silence as if that was her objective, to leave me silent and crumpled down to a mythic threat. I became instantly embodied, bound by body, aware of my slim fit dark jeans, black and white sneakers, the deep green v-neck shirt, the black short sleeved blazer I wore to evoke professionalism, remnants of the conference I had just attended, the Mexican necklace dangling in beads of green, yellow and golden amber down my throat. It choked. It contracted. It inverted.


And my hair. Tied back in a loose ponytail, my bangs draped over my forehead, short and thick and semi-wavy. My curly strands intertwining, tangled and weaving, dark brown and black, shiny in the sun, polished by praise. My shoulders were opened towards her, the woman I assumed was homeless, whose words I definitely prejudged as being innocuous and perhaps even tinged with anti-reality, with unintelligibility, who I expected was teetering down the concrete floating on delusion, who had no solid grounding of reasoning, even the kind that makes racism possible and materialize into acidic claims.


I tried to dismantle the hateful breath, clouding my mind and vision in swarms, cut through it with a penetrating look of disbelief, of pain, of disappointment. Like a laser beam shot of my humanity. Hoping it was perceptible, visible, past the virulent stench of hate, of alienation, of disassociation. I looked at her. Looked deep. Searching. Confused. I knew I would keeping looking until she turned away or I found answers, whichever came first.


She walked through me, an invisible brown person for so long, benign, model minority, not a target, not accused of the decomposition and degeneration of society. A non-suspect. She flung at me the ugly tool of hate used to incapacitate her, keep her silent and shocked and standing so many times throughout her life, she stole that tool, clung onto its deep grooves in metal flesh, its spiked body, slender and insidious, and propelled its sharpened tongue towards my sense of safety and passing and rattled all that, tore up my insides and my out. Hurled at me was a barrage of paper airplanes with self-guided missiles, aimed at civilians and foreign accents, aimed at turbans and hijabs, at beards and fists of outrage, at turned backs and pleading fronts. Was I dangerous or envied? Was I outcast or insider? What inviolable, unspeakable, implied and disguised law did I defame, did I trespass? To justify her trespass. Her violation. Her doubt. Of my humanity.


“That's what I thought.” was the last razor blade she spit at me. But my skin was already in tatters. She abandoned me to silence, to thought, to internalization and confusion.


My African kin in disorientation and I stood facing the crosswalk and froze our eyes at the white man steadily blinking, inviting us forward. We followed straight prescriptive lines and couldn't help but meander and weave past its boundaries, in and out, wavering, unsure what borders defined us in clarifying, rigid, solid white paint, and which ones confined us, confused us, trapped the bodies of our identities from expression beyond built institutions like this cross walk. We walked on silence, thick and muddy, trudging through the normalcy that continued around us, unaffected.

Nishaani/Place Marker

*May 29, 2010*



It was a marker that that helped us keep our place,


Keep our pace


Amongst an ornate assemblage of


Teethed and looped and dotted and voweled


Letters that spoke their two way connections


From our prophetic puckered pronouncements


Partial, imperfect


To a perfect past


Carved in ears and passed and passed


To present


Gathering sentiments like petrified tears


That we now pluck from pages


And paste onto our cheeks.



And this synchronic mourning


That melts each individual into a mass movement


Of self-deprecation and discipline


It is the antithesis of freedom.


Taking my file within rows of pastel hoods


Trimmed with sequined flowers and embroidery


My body numb


Legs folded


Folding layers of sweat and petticoat and gagra underneath them


My feet diagonally pushed to my right side


Staggered


My left hand propping up my weight I feel imbalanced


Teetering


Aching and surging muscles that flash on and off with blood choked and draining


Imprints made in numb skin I’ll find later


Of patterns sewn into hem lines


By women who make sure its placed just right.



Under the rida


My right hand still,


On my chest


Rests against my heart and cups it in warmth


As if to say


I’ll never muffle its expressions


And irregular murmurs


Or beat it with viciousness


To extract empty empathy.


But I see past my obscured periphery


And detect the mechanics of the mass


In rhythm


Elbows cranking and rotating


Becoming a fulcrum of abuse


Jolting peaceful chests into palpitations


Guilt, pity, poison, punishment


Contrived sentiment


From hijacked and exploited memories


A denial of human pain


A valorization of suffering done for divinity.



Hands, brutal


Clap chests in unison


And wring out sobs


Alienated from our bodies


And each other and


Especially our God


We beat out beautiful beats


And forget to mourn


The loss of ourselves.

It's an opening (to be performed)

*October 19, 2010*



Its an opening


An opening


To a lost muscle


That’s withered


And frayed


And whose tendons


Have disconnected to the minds


That control movement


It jerks phantom jerks


Attempting to


Regain or replay or feign


Agency


But all this is


All this is


All this is


Is aftershocks


Tremors


That are not empowered


That tremble


But not out of any emotion


That they own


But a post movement


A post movement movement


That follows a script


After it has run out


That doesn’t know its character


Independent of the roles around it


That mold and guide its action


Jerks


Spasms


Its cries out for more life


A reconnection


To a consciousness severed


The muscle flops


And sighs


And smokes


And hopes


That by going through


Motions past prescribed


Maybe it’ll find


Its own grown


With arteries pumpin somethin’


A flow


A flow of intention


In its practice of life


These channels


These channels that house fluid and water


And current


They’ve dipped


They’ve somehow dipped their truncated edges


Tattered and weary


Into pools of community vitality


A blood source


Of thriving, aliving, jiving


Bodies


That will lend consciousness


When its drifted away


That will ease away the stigmas


Associated with its name


And take broken muscles


And massage truth not impose it


And find fully formed and ferocious phrases


Ready to add their wisdom


To dialoguing tongues.

Guthli

*August 11, 2010*

 

Cupping in my hand
I’d press
Its taut skin to my nose
Trying to feel its insides
Through my palm
And wrap my fingers around the green
Yellow and red encroaching
In patches
And pick up its breath
And inhale its migration
Its journey
And feel around for bruises
For internal rotting
Now surfacing
And maiming delicate skin
In dark contagion
I’d slide the slick blade
In contours
Trying to preserve
As much fruit as possible
Dripping turmeric exposed in my hand
I’d shift
Cut large segments to the bone
Feeling the grinding resistance
And rough sawing
As I’d get too close