SMITHA SEHGAL

Anatomy of a Fountain Pen: Four Poems

Anatomy of a Fountain Pen

at the flaming dragon/quarter past two you say/I climb the stairs /an orange flag of figures multiplied by figures/ driving license of my old self lurking/ woman with a bleeding nose/ as glass walls come down/ordering rice tossed with prawn and mushroom with chicken in oyster sauce/for dessert we call for fruit with slab of ice cream which I slice/fruit more like flavored ice cubes/I place the lone red cherry on your bowl/we talk about unfaithful women and flirtatious men/a quick movement of lips/ you spit out a cherry stone on the white laced table cloth / skin bursting through seams/sleep torn between segments of earth/yet it is only the brilliant blue sky that I breathe/a whole night I slept with lights switched on/fear sitting by the edge of my cot/when the dawn arrived sun draped colours on my skin/ a fountain pen with silver cap/ that has fallen down multiple times /each time I thought it’d break, braced my heart  /blinding the nib /these days my throat goes around the corner of water spout/deep sigh accumulated in nonexistence space of mind/ a gloomy sky, the hysteric terror/of waking up to an indiscriminate dark morning/ losing sun forever/in a tropical country I become stone fruit on the nib of a fountain pen rasping to become a word.

Hoi… hoi… hoi… bride-groom fish.

Saffron gill, half-moon eyes piled in wooden crates, Rasheed wraps them in the sun of Malabar coast, skin taut in recent memory of salt, the damp smell of sea algae. Years later I learn the name; Red Snapper. Interval years of bruised absence cuts into catacombs, plucking white strands of declension. Pamela, the stern mistress of Eden is restored to a grey-rose Irish country (how I spat lemon Poppins before the first bell in kindergarten). Of the seventy-five lovers who wandered by Magdalene Jennifer’s rusted gate, survivors plant gardenias in the backyard, feeding alley cats. A mole on her chin and a bounty of Tintin on bookshelves, sleepy Ms. Oar sprays rose water on her sunset cheeks. Haijiar is a flapping seagull in the grocery offering Suleimani each time a guest saunters by like a wayward wind. In the many linear equations, unfurling smiles and frowns at doorsteps on our coast of Malabar, we stroll back once a year as father drifts to sleep in Alzheimer’s moon and mother grows more pepper than roses on her algebraic tongue. Cloud bursts anchor depressions in the sea, landfills squint in hyacinth lakes.

If Gauguin had painted Siberia

The light of the Black Sea brightens. Silence of Carpathian Mountains peaks beyond Moldova. Dear fellow traveler, when the night dwindles into the aircraft which is now flying approximately thirteen thousand feet above sea level and eight hours ahead of us, Krakow and Warsaw on our far right, pancakes and coffee at Prague sky, Anne Frank House droops consumed by guilt, the octogenarian shadow of  Nuremberg behind us, I must confess my tribe has not seen wars, we are a peaceful people beyond Sahyadri, the sea threatening to reclaim us into its fold.

My blind great-grandmother tended to coconut palms staring ahead in a moth-eaten daguerreotype, sunken eyes narrow lips, petitioning the late Queen Victoria for a strip of land, we walked past the near-war grief-turned-motion pictures, the war translates to being less valorous, distracted by poetry, wielding a scythe of words castaway tropical sun. The large screen weeps the Ukraine war into second year, and there’s bread and wine on the table, Christmas went by the corner, and his world flees from a cold surf that warps solstice at burial grounds, the ice crusting around the mouth of Winter.

If Gauguin had painted Siberia, he would have bridged purple shades of mist, his wound riper each day, on a lone boat in Tahiti he made love to me, painting a sunflower behind my ear. When the plane nosedives that is the memory I shall take into the ocean, I clutch your hand when the turbulence becomes our blue shadows, mooning upon each other in thoughts yet I say, dear fellow traveler, my tribe has not seen wars, we are a peaceful blank verse, we die to live beyond the exodus in a callous world lying supine. When ashes rekindle the fire, log wood splinters in deep ache.

Pandara Road, Delhi-110003

Pandara Road was borne from faux pas jab of keys of an ancient typewriter. Run your index finger along the letters, they are pebbles corralled under the song of a river, fading white stars tangled in the inky sky. The room washed in the torpor of yellow, myopic windows overlooking a patch of wild grass, a weary clerk typed away into noon, arching over the tombs, languor in old veins, siesta of a coastal town grows into his iris. Mynahs gossip on mango trees, missing sharp curves of ‘v’ obliterating the memory of five brothers, scattering sheaves of slave history on the tiled floor. Pandara Road we swing by, the shadow of ephemeral days, stopping over intervals before code numbers are called out, by crows perched on Jamun branches. Amidst rising laughter and the clink of cutlery, you touch a freckle on my right eyelid. Rummaging through the 789 pages of fate, gliding on tip of a pencil, surfing the sea, underlining the most important paragraphs, I lose my thread, going back and forth, sooner or later, coming to the ratio decidendi of my life. Coating myself with thick paint, I pour wrath into the ink of letters that I would never write, if I did, the day they arrived in your city, there would be an orange alert to quash the charge sheet on Summer, bail applications would be heard, handing over baton of seasons to monsoon. Crossing over the street I walk into an alcove of books, wondering whether that grumpy old man selling home-baked pies by the balustrade railings, had ever fallen in love with a child woman or painted her earlobes with words. The scent of my tomb, discovering home, the lament of five brothers, fugitive, unlit senses are enchanted with the riotous colours of the desert. In the decay of summer evenings, we swing by Pandara Road, soft neon in the sky, honeysuckle ice cream, gluttonous dogs sleep on the curb and half-clad children hold out rose bouquets gathered from the adjoining cemetery.

Smitha Sehgal is a legal professional and poet who writes in two languages-English and Malayalam. Her poems have been featured in contemporary literary publications such as Usawa Literary Review, Madras Courier, Panoply, Shot Glass Journal, Marrow Magazine, Ink Sweat & Tears and elsewhere.