THE FOLLOWING POEM WAS SELECTED IN WINGWORD POETRY PRIZE 2023 LONGLIST.
The wedding wasn’t the worst of it.
A precursor of love, wind-swept,
weather-beaten and threadbare,
begging for alms before it stepped through
the temple door threshold.
My husband and I just barely bobbing
atop the waves of guests we rode that day.
A negotiation between airborne crests
high on a love that rivalled cheekbones,
eyes waltzing with each other ever so briefly,
and the deafening roar of the troughs
that would render us strangers
at our own ceremony.
(Shush) an unspoken reminder,
the history that everything is never
as dandy as it seems.
A mother's largesse accentuated
by a hot pink and lime green sari,
tacked with a six inch,
broad pearl cummerbund (suggesting a waist)
that paired with the multi-string necklace
spanning her under-bust.
My birth mother was the ornamental
overstuffed of stress, eating
her way through an imposed second wife.
Me, as equally plump.
Facedown, tongue out,
eating out of a step-mother’s
ruinous palms too.
As if our extra weight
deep planted our feet in a place
that didn’t make sense to stay.
A step mother trained in Paris,
her beauty parlour was the
ball of yarn animating my kitten paws.
Making them pounce and spring on
the fruity face packs, hot rollers and
French manicures strategically used
to reel me in.
My naïveté springing on anything it could catch.
Hers was an intentional spell,
to distance me from a birth mother swirling
in the emotional orgy of betrayal.
Punished for her only "misdeed,"
sticking around to avert a broken family
and secure her children's needs.
I was blind to the orchestrations,
a step mother hoarding ancestral silver,
heirloom property and my grandmother's
jewellery in her name.
The fudging of daily cash accounts for
cash bonuses.
Leaving our original family
my father’s first, unable to collect
a rightly share of wealth.
Truth, this isn’t really a poem about
my wedding day or my step-mother
and her conniving ways.
But more about grave mistakes
we cannot change and the regret that
lodges itself in their place.
About the look on my mother’s face
the day she was giving me away.
My face averted from hers courtesy
a step mother’s tactful brainwashing.
The heartbreak of gullibility or naiveté
Believing my mother could hurt me this way.
Keep a family inheritance from me,
when my step mother had looted it for me to “see”
how little my mother loved me.
A landslide victory, for a woman who
wanted more than just my father.
She wanted everything (for keepsake?)
or was it security?
I was ill-equipped to deal with the level
of deceit my blood mother had proved incapable
of intercepting.
More like her, myself,
than I cared to admit.
Every Hindu parent's journey
of a girl child's wedding,
culminates in a too- tearful, vidaai.
A farewell ritual I thought over-dramatized
and cloying, until I wept through my own.
Embodying the goddess Lakshmi,
a wedded daughter fills her hands with
raw grains of rice and throws them
over her head in gratitude of her birth family.
And a promise of their fortune
standing intact despite the departure
of her bountiful feet.
I sat behind the fragrant jasmine and
rose veneer purdah in my palanquin,
my wrists jangling with the golden sparkle
of kaleere ornaments,
when my mother parted the flower blossom
curtain and peaked in.
Contrary to custom, my mother surprisingly
gathered the rice I had flung in her
pallu (the loose trailing end of her sari)
and poured it back into my lap.
Her eyes softly locked with mine as
my father’s own grew wide, his jaw,
a dropping protest to her inauspicious actions.
I wanted to apologise to her,
but instead we observed a palpable minute
of silence, time having run out.
Or rather taken from us to feed my
step mother’s jealousy.
In those sixty seconds, we were the unspoken
love of mother and daughter,
collectively the richest we would ever be.
A switch flipped the first day
I overturned a pot of rice in my marital home.
A home where I live in conjunction with
a mother in law.
My concerned mother religiously
checking in on me
and my step mom once
and for all washing her hands of me.
A truth so painfully revealed.
My mother, an ally, one with a deeper
understanding of how complex it is for
two women to coexist (or compete?)
under the same roof.
At the mercy of three too many mothers,
I precariously navigate
how to cook my own eggs.
A hope in hell crockpot of unconditional love
to shakshouka a hold and heal.