Preface
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:
first, yours.
Then – mine.
Doll Museum
Bury a secret into the abyss of the gabion –
it floods out from amongst the quarry
as a doll: plastic hands, porcelain face.
Pretty as the Murphy baby.
Bewitching as the mannequins in the children’s clothing store.
Delicate as the pink swell of the mosquito bite on Mother’s upper lip.
Last year’s calendar flutters on the wall:
buoyant, riddled by the marionette
enticement it holds in its chasm.
Watch Mother gut out its entrails.
Ventriloquism
little girls: chewed calendar
delicate girls: china saucer, pink tutus, red polka dots.
she who is of the girls: the painted rainbow
little girls: chewed mannequins, ruffles in white
china saucer: pretty little store
delicate plastic: she who is of the rains.
And the rainbow.
Little girl fingers: the pink teddy bear
in the store window.
Nirma Memory
The shards of the rainbow are bones
gutted out of Mother’s ribs;
Abiding: the perfect raw material
for play dough.
An evacuated ocean, waiting
for the slightly scratched
early morning invocation
from the radio.
The soap suds on the tip
of the little girl nose: a rainbow
without the rains. Trapped,
circling along the radius
of the soap bubbles.
Two mother-hands
carving little girls
out of rainbow dregs:
seven,
What pleasure in depletion.
Little girls who love butter,
though, demand deletion.
Amul-Girl Wants to Become A Doll
The first night our older cousin gutted her out
from the wrapper, our Mother was busy dreaming
of all the dolls she would buy for us.
How the Amul-girl danced on the burnt toast.
How she lured our cousin to swallow the hard
crusts of the bread. How she murmured
in our cousin’s ear her deepest wishes.
As if they were the bestest of friends.
Mother kept thinking – how she would drag the dolls
across four rail-stations, their eyelashes trailing
on the railway-tracks behind them.
Our cousin giggled loudly – Listen, a doll you’re not.
A doll you will never become.
Mother thwacked her niece on her head –
Behave yourself.
A rhinestone nose-ring was unnecessary;
as was a spatula in deft hands. A
canister of cheap talcum-powder
was enough to redden the cheeks.
Cousin learnt that our deepest wishes are also
always the simplest ones. In the kitchen,
Grandmother was flipping a roti – round
as a globe. And cursing
no one in particular.
Cousin sniffed, flicked a blob
of phlegm on to the wall with her index
finger, showed her tongue
to our mother and grandmother. Amul-girl
who had neither a nose, nor snot, shook
her hair, her ponytail loose on her shoulders.
Jealous, our cousin rolled her eyes. Amul-girl,
whose hands were forever pre-occupied, couldn’t
speak back. All she could do, was to cluck her tongue.
And smile. Smile as if a chocolate chip
was chanting in between her teeth. Our
cousin, who was forever experimenting with things
laying around the house – empty bottles, a handful
of mung beans, kerosene and match-stick – released
her on the grandmother’s skillet. Amul-girl
winced in pain, yet did not know
how to stop smiling, her
red polka-dotted skirt flapping
like a peacock’s tail around her thighs.
How her scorched skin would belch
inside our Mother’s belly.
Our cousin lies with her ear on
our mother’s belly, whispers: this
is how you gift a myth
to who has none. Inside our mother’s
belly, we learn: even the Amul-girl
must walk several alleyways
before she can become a doll.
Fabrication
A thimble spat out of Mother’s tongue – the orchestra
of wooden hooves, smashed teacups.
A forsaken guava on the porch: half-eaten.
Its fetor, a brick room
in its own right. Around the maggots,
the map of a bulbul’s peck.
Long before we became twins and sisters,
we were dolls – carved
in our mother’s noonday dreams.
Nandini Dhar is a bilingual poet who writes in Bangla and English. She is the author of two full-length poetry books, Historians of Redunant Moments (Agape Editions, 2016) and Jitakshara (Aainanagar Prakashani, 2016). She is also the author of the chapbook Occupying MyTongue, as part of the FIVE chapbook project, undertaken by the online little magazines Aainanagar and Vyavaya. Nandini hails from Kolkata, and divides her time between Sonipat, Haryana and her hometown.