Nandini Sahu

New Delhi, India

Sisterhood

“Women instinctually know how to nourish each other,

and just being with each other is restorative.”

– Tanja Taaljard

 

Thus, I talk a lot about solidarity and sisterhood.

My sisters and archetypal sisters may hear me out!

I have been accessible yet peripheral,

non-judgmental, non-indulgent

beyond all glamour, glory and the social scanners

getting into reckless and pointless things yet.

I fancy my sisters to appreciate, in spirit,

that I live alone in the company of others living alone,

each one fortified by a lone ache of the heart.

The fact that I was born in July,

the volatile time of the year—

they need not categorize any much of my temperament.

Now there are mornings when I wake up but

I don’t like to get up. Lying on the bed,

I regret my squandered years that I have been that type

who fits in anywhere. Ahh, why I have been just so perfect!

Full of campaign and stratagem, I still believe that

it’s possible to change the world, this planet.

My sculpted sisters often look at me and sigh,

‘I want to be a woman like you, bold and independent.’

My sisters, I am that imperfectly-perfect-woman,

take me as I am, maybe with a pinch of salt?

I wish they saw some tiresome apprehension in there.

Some enduring experiences utmost.

Why only sisters? Even my mother’s isolation

is getting into my nerves. It’s a detrimental amalgam.

Some kind of panic of an avoidable panic, some fright.

Yet, the gulf between me and my ‘sisters’ has told me,

seclusion has its own goodies to offer --I cheer up myself,

which some of them make-believe not to make out.

Seclusion has become my only discipline,

my skill, my dexterity and my mental state.

These days I live in a new home, a newly

constructed house, that is, where no one lived in the past,

no one made love, no one died

nor none got exhausted. Just that,

the highlighted nature of the house makes it look

paradoxically alive and animate.

I call it, ‘the power of white!’

Here, in fact yet elsewhere, I sleep poorly,

for forever I am sleep disoriented.

I boast I swank that I take its advantage, to become

so prominent and,well, such distinguished!

I heard that the female combatant

knows how to fight with the world even without a fight.

She discerns when not to raise her sword,

but as a substitute she holds up her heart.

A sister’s safeguard is not a resistance

to counter others, but a sanctuary for a wretched heart.

If recuperative of each other is the case with sisterhood,

someone please refurbish, revamp me, be my

special kind of mind-and-body-double,

no matter where and what.

Letter to My Unborn Daughter

Tiny limbs smeared with my fresh enflamed blood

oozing out of the womb, gushing in fact.

I knew. I had lost you. Then and there. Shattered.

The sadomasochist burped, then casually farted, and snored

in a short while, when the maid rushed us to

the local hospital. I heard what you never uttered.

Ahh heal ‘us’, protect ‘us’, you and me, me and you,

Mom and her little girlie, wish to take the world in their stride.

Today, a letter to you, my unborn daughter, after

long two decades of quiet travail

telling our tales to your younger brother,

with a bleeding heart, I smile with exuding tears.

Smile to see my dream daughter alive in

her brother little; so full of love and compassion, so much a

feminist-humanist male, so strong to hold Mom’s head high,

so much you, so as I would have you.

Ah! There was such rage over a female foetus

growing up to be a girl of power and conviction, like Mom dear.

Or like the Pancha Mahakanya. And the marital rapes, the threats

to snatch you any given day, if I dissent; and then the termination.

If at all there is a next birth for you, my little fairy,

come back come back to my womb, life minus you is such dreary.

You need not play the games that the heart must play.

Pledged before birth, you are not to be the woman of clay.

Like Ahilya, never fall prey to Indra’s trickery; and if ever you do,

do it by your choice then, not anyone else’s, neither Goutama’s nor Indra’s.

Your penance need not be broken by Lord Rama, the one who

judged his wife; you need not regain your human form

by brushing his feet. Remain that dry stream, that stone,

till you find a way to my womb again, in another life, another Yug;

you need not be condoned of your guilt, you never were ‘guilty’.

Let Indra be cursed, castrated, exposed by a thousand vulvae

that eventually turned into a thousand eyes. Or like Draupadi, take your

birth from a fire-sacrifice, be an incarnation of the fierce goddess Kali

or the goddess of wealth, Lakshmi; but never be the sacrificial goat

to accept five husbands just because someone else deliberated.

If any Yudhishtir  drops you at the Himalayas because you

loved Arjun more, look in his eyes and declare, loud and clear--

it’s your right to live,love and pray. While never deriding

the Duryodhan and Karn of your destiny, live laudable my dear.

Nor Kunti be your role model; but if ever you propitiate the sage

Durvasa, who grants you a mantra to summon

a god and have a child by him, then take his charge.

Don’t you recklessly test the boons life grants you by haze

nor invite the Sun-god,Surya, give birth to Karna, and abandon.

An unborn child is better than the one dejected, forlorn.

Or if ever you are Tara, the apsara, the celestial nymph,

who rises from the churning of the milky ocean

be the Tara, Sugriva’s queen and chief diplomat,

the politically correct one, the woman in control of herself

and folks around. In the folk Ramayans,

Tara casts a curse on Rama by the supremacy of her chastity,

while in some versions, Rama enlightens Tara. Be her, the absolute.

Or be Mandodari, the beautiful, pious, and righteous.

Ravana’s dutiful wife who couldn’t be his guiding force,

Bibhishana’s compliant wife, the indomitable grace.

Be you, the elemental, candid, real woman who is my ideal.

Don’t ever let another female foetus be the victim of

sadomasochism, unlike your fragile, fledgling Mom.

Be all that she could never be, be her role model.

I send you my prayers, the prayer before birth.

Moon, rain, oceans, and the blue firmament,

shining stars and a sun aglow are all that I have--

you must call them your own, my unborn daughter.

Forgive me my love, for you died with all the petals

falling from my autumny breast, the breast that you never suckled;

you rain on my being and burn my heart, but calm my soul

like simmering snow slowly concealed yet revealed.

You will stay indomitable, taking new lives every single day

in Mom’s prayers, poetry, social responsibilities, ecofeminism,

messages, voices, layers of thoughts and action. My girl,

I am what I decided to be after losing you, that’s the euphemism.

I am not just a woman since that fateful night, but entire

womankind. Now I am a woman of full circle, within me there is the

power to create, nurture and transform. I rediscover pieces of myself

through your unborn narrative, in the resonance of my quirky confluence.