Anima wakes up Tejimola
Now is the hour for Tejimola. She is back from the dead. From the many deaths. From the blood in the pumpkin vine, from the splintered limbs in the rice pestle, from the torn ligaments tangled in the branches of the trees. Now is the hour Tejimola walks the winding path back home, along the winding hills. She rides the sky-ferry across the tossing bend of the river of life. The pumpkin vine grows in the belly of the evil mother. Once eaten, the seeds splinter and splutter, become thousand eyes. They see through the belly skin. They peek through the navel. They hurry out in the blood stream and scream. The rice powder from the heavy pestle falls like dew at night. The river mist settles in to the slums lining the road she takes. Tejimola has walked through the check points. Tejimola has stood along the truck routes with her face painted, her limbs akimbo on a car bonnet. Tejimola is dreaming of the faraway sea, right off the country liquor shop, left of the hutments where women still scream in terror. Sea, a sea, many seas. The ship is not coming to take her back soon. The vine is not going to flower again. The mortar will not fall asleep. I, Anima, can feel Tejimola waking up inside me. Across acid fields, shanties, human dumps, torn dreams, electric wastes, I walk on. If you hear someone saying life in a sunrise voice, you must know it is us. Two women gone to three and four and more. We're waking up to take on the tangle and the tide.
Anima traces a pestilence
The air breathes heavy. The girl watches the pestilence rise with the vapour to mingle in the air. The girl stares inside the washroom mirror marking the minutes of the passage of breath. Each breath licking the glass, then trying to slip out of the window, sneaking out of the heavy door. The girl continues to breathe, the mirror marking a rhythm her heart is trying to remember. Something is dropping in on her, either the disinfectant spray from the inner ducts of the air-conditioning, or the outspilled soap bubbles still carrying the synthetic fragrance in the washroom air. Is it peace, is it reverie, or is it the simple feeling that language is mostly vowels when you lose your tongue, or teeth, or lie hungry and battered on the roads? Pestilence is our inhumanity. Our own bone-crushing apathy where limbs are tendrils gone to infection. The mirror reflects it. A selfie of the world around. The girl watches, the world breathes heavy. I, Anima, am today a reflection of all thorns inside the rose-blush lungs. I’m the blue mask of our times, the choke spreading in our throbs. I’m also the flow that folds in all hearts, a spring water the girl facing the mirror is searching. There’s a Swan Lake unfolding, the wings taking swipes, water and particles falling in bits and pieces like grace. I, Anima, will cleanse her tarnished hands, the crinkled brows, the breaths gone awry from our own squander.
Anima re-arranges a nostalgia
Shoes, old clothes, dismembered plastic cutlery, torn leaves, upturned buckets, caved in hutments, hole-punched asbestos roofs, shredded blue tarp sheets against the rains, and a sniff of autumn that feels like a perfume from another time. Even the sun is caught in the crepuscular sickle that shears all our pretence. The slow grace of caterpillars, the mayfly roosting on pores of algae growing like our myths, that one leaf dangling by its petiole from a bark too dark for us to see — all just a punctuation in the human clock. Ek bagal mein chand hoga ek bagal mein rotiyaan. Why is there a blood soaked train track and half-moons of our follies garlanding the times? What are these dreams of food bags showering down in stale petals over gaping mouths? Where will the road take them, how far, when there’s not a shirt on their back? Where is home, where is hearth, where is warmth? Shoes, tattered clothes, plastic life in smithereens, rotten leaves, broken buckets, roofless holes, the flightless imagination of a time wrapped around like the blue tarp — slowly becoming artefacts of our failures. I, Anima, keep rearranging the pieces of this nostalgia. No one will remember because nostalgia is a flower that dies at dawn. Because nostalgia walks miles along the highways. Nostalgia falls in broken pieces over our homes, news screens, print fonts, crumbling facades of what we call shame. There will be a day when each half-moon will come alive in hungry stomachs. Ek bagal mein chand hoga ek bagal mein rotiyaan.
Anima of the river's arm
Evening falls. The big bend of the river has everyone in its thrall like first virginal blood. The sun has also shed its vermillion sap in the deep-deepness of the water's pull. The blueing of the faraway hillocks has my thighs shiver where your mouth left the half-moon marks. I walk, walk the path of fireflies till the great river bend subsides with our passion. From Luitporia songlines to the edge of our soft consonants. From our sounds uttered in repose, halfsounds of di- di-di or ti-ti-ti that reverberate like first words — all river-words when the rains meet the waves in rhythms of di or ti. And we become like the night, yet to be born into the day. Our syllables roll like unsplattered drops on lotus leaves. Shadows fall on my face like the whirl of the river dolphins grayed in love and grace in their little eddies. And then the dawn-call of fishermen stirs my hair, the char silt sifting its grains through each strand. I rise from their ecstatic jikir: Ali, Ali, ya Ali. I exist here, in this air of no fixed prayer, in this vast swelling of no divinity, in this lover's arm of a river where no invocation is needed. I walk past the canvases of jakois set in the shallow water where the fish dream. I, Anima, am of no mantras, no deities, no one source. Come walk with me and be my roots, come swim with me and be the in-between mist of the Umananda mornings. Come be the goddess who jumped into the river and raised a fist before she swam away.
Nabina Das is the author of five books — poetry collections Sanskarnama, Into the Migrant City, and Blue Vessel; short fiction volume titled The House of Twining Roses, and Footprints in the Bajra, a novel. She's a Charles Wallace, Sangam House, and Sahapedia-UNESCO fellowship alumna. Published widely, Nabina is a NYS Summer Writers Conference alumna, a Commonwealth Writers correspondent, a journalist by training, and a Creative Writing teacher in university classrooms and workshops. The poems in this issue are from her forthcoming poetry collection Anima and the Narrative Limits.