Such A Good Husband

you saved my skin from the harsh sun

behind my extravagant purdah

you helped fight pimples on my skin

with the steam from the stove

you made my arms and calves muscular 

with the cleaning cooking scrubbing

you prevented my hair from greying

with the soot from the tiny kitchen

you maintained my hushed coy voice

with the coughs from burning the firewood

you surrounded my eyes with thick lotus petals

when i'd sew your buttons under the kerosene lamp

you let my baby fat be chubby and cute

with the marks from birthing five children

you let my feet remain curvaceous

from the long walks to fetch water

you let my toes blush pink and red

sore from the rust iron that would sneak in

you made me shudder, shiver, moan, cry

when you'd return drunk, with a thick vocabulary

you gave me round red chubby cheeks

with your palms slappity slap slap on my face

you are such a good husband

Touch And Go

the sun wriggles out

of the blue-black-blue blanket

the crowd of clouds

begin to jump their own jumps

he opens his eyes

and his pillow turns crimson

he touches his blanket

and it warms up in saffron

he looks up at the wayward clouds

they blush pink in awe

united in solitude, they traverse

across the blanket -- sea-like

they will now run, jump, glide

the clouds will now not hide

for they have heard of his tales

of how he wriggled

out of a dark blanket

to bring to us this morning

burning, he smiles,

emulating his light, the clouds fly

Bhagat Singh

Didn't they garland you this morning?

My Hands Can Still Plough The Fields

The non-existent loud voice of Haro Jamunda of Kalinganagar, Odisha.

He was a teacher, my younger boy

He taught me to write my name

Suddenly for days he lay on the bed

Malaria in the brain, they said

We waited for a miracle

To take him to the hospital

No bicycle, no bullock cart

The primary health clinic was 10 kms afar

It was getting eerily dark.

Soups of lentil and basil and yeast

And prayer by our native priest

But you know, he died: my little prince.

Was this a punishment for my sins?

My taller boy missed his little brother

But soon Aati matured into a robust farmer

Soon the rice field was his bed of dreams

Soon he dreamt of a season of rice in heaps

He laboured, we stocked

And thus ticked the sand clock.

Boom! Bam! Boom! The steel factories howled

"Steel factories over our land!" our Ho Munda kin bawled

"What about our crops?" 

"All gone!"

"What about our livelihood?"

"All gone!"

"What about our ancestors' spirits?"

"All gone!"

Boom! We heard it again, but

Aati ran to see, for its sound was different

Gamcha on his shoulder, the gait of a deer

It was the boom of the guns that we could hear

Minutes, hours slipped through the barrel of the gun

Women, children, men wailed for those long gone

"Where is Aati, my young man?"

"They put his body into a van!"

First, there were no hospitals, no development

Then they said steel meant development

But I lost both my sons.

I am old, I am angry.

I cry. No answer to my unending 'why'.

My hands can still plough the fields.

[This poem was first published in Montreal Serai (Vol. 23 Issue 4) and was also recited at the XIII International Conference of the Indian Association for Women's Studies (IAWS) held in Wardha, Maharashtra, from January 21-24, 2011]

Some Activists Said

On October 1, 2009, some men in fatigues walked into the village of Gompad in Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh, and fired at the people. Nine people died. Among the dead was Kanni Kartam, roughly about 20-year-old, of the Dorla tribe, whose body was allegedly found to be in pieces, with her clothes lying around her. Her year-and-half old son Suresh was found wailing over his mother's dead body, with three of his fingers chopped. Kanni's younger sister and parents were also killed. Her husband had gone to the jungle when the attack took place, and that's how he was saved. While a fact-finding team visited this village -- the only way one can get to Gompad is by walking or taking a bicycle from the nearest town which is 40 kms away -- the chronology of events and the facts of the incident were misleading. A petition was filed in the Supreme Court of India with 13 petitioners, but contrary to the Court's order to have the petitioners (including Kanni's husband/Suresh's father) protected, there is no information of their whereabouts. This poetry is an ode to Kanni Kartam, the victim of the Indian government's Operation Green Hunt. 

Some activists said
my breasts were sliced
like ham
      slapped on a slice of bread.


Some activists said
my breasts were chopped
like potatoes
      to be tossed on a hot pan.


Some activists said
my clothes were strewn apart
      around my body, except for on my body
like strands of noodles lying scattered
      around the pan, except on the pan.


Some activists said
my chastity was infringed upon;
       that I was raped.
That the axe cut me leaving my muscles in shreds
after multiple male ego projections pierced through me.


Some activists said
I was the face of Operation Green Hunt
except that my body was decomposed.
But nobody remembers how I look.


Some activists said
Suresh wailed to see me wailing in pain.
That he was dropped on my dead chest.


Some activists said
His baby fingers were grounded
when he held my breast
     which nourished him.


Some activists said
They were at peace that I was dead
     what with my body dissected
        what with my womanhood dissected.


But all I ask is:
Will just one activist
trek to my abode amid Ram's Dandakaranya?


Will just one activist
stop asking questions and
find out what was done to me, my village, my family
on that October morning?


Will just one activist
stop asking
     stop negating
         stop dissenting
but instead start walking
     towards finding my bloodied grave?

[This poem was recited at the XIII International Conference of the Indian Association for Women's Studies (IAWS) held in Wardha, Maharashtra, from January 21-24, 2011]

Not One to Wage War

(This article first appeared in OPEN Magazine Vol. 02 Issue 43, dated January 25-31, 2011)

On 24 December, Dr Binayak Sen was sentenced to a life term on charges of waging war against the State, sedition, and for colluding with Maoists. I saw a very different man on my last visit to his house

I had called him a day in advance to check if anyone from his family would be in Raipur the next day. I knew his younger daughter Aparajita would be in Mumbai till the Christmas college vacation. “We three are in Raipur. We would love to see you,” Dr Binayak Sen had said, with a certain higher-pitch emphasis on ‘love’. I arrived in Raipur the next morning at 7 am, and hesitated to go to the Sens’ residence at such an early hour while the sun was still struggling to make itself visible through the fog. But the cold winds had attacked my spine through the night on the bus from Jashpur, and I desperately needed some warmth. On my way to the Sens’ on a cycle rickshaw, watching the capital city of Chhattisgarh straining to usher in the new day, I found myself cutting back and forth to memories of my acquaintance with the Sen family. I had first met Dr Sen’s elder daughter Pranhita—a 25-year-old budding filmmaker—in May 2009 to interview her. The interview was published, and my relationship with the Sens had dropped root. It had strengthened in the past 18 months.

I rang the bell and waited. A minute later, there stood the man at the door, in his vest and pyjamas, looking confused. Soon realising it wasn’t the milkman, he hurried to unlock the bolts. He waited for me to drop the bag off my shoulders, and then wrapped his arms around me in a long embrace. After the cold night, I was home and warm.

Dr Sen’s wife Ilina walked into the room and the warmth was superfluous. I apologised for arriving at such an early hour. “I was up at 5.30 am, and made tea for Ilina,” Dr Sen said, while Ilina looked at him lovingly. “Tea or coffee?” Dr Sen asked. I said anything would do. “But give me some indication which of the anything you want,” he requested.

Sipping coffee, we began to talk of the government’s undue attention on the family—Ilina had been called an ISI agent in the Raipur sessions court the previous week, during the course of Dr Sen’s trial. The family had been through much in the past three years; controversies seemed to litter their path like glass marbles. I joked only Rajinikanth could intervene, given his unusual powers to sway opinion. “Isn’t he the Tamil actor?” asked Ilina. Dr Sen and I exchanged a look of disbelief and laughed aloud.

Pranhita was up by now and soon we got into a girly banter. She wanted to see how much my hair had grown. I loosened my bun, exclaiming, “Now, there I look like a woman!” Dr Sen, who was making breakfast next door, peeped in as I let my hair dance. Pranhita and I screeched like adolescent schoolgirls caught talking about boys.

Sometime later, I spoke to Ilina about getting my bus ticket to Nagpur. Dr Sen, meanwhile, was dressed in his jeans and kurta, ready to go to court. The good doctor’s relationship with the courts and cops began in 2007, when he was arrested on charges of being a Maoist sympathiser. Now, as he paced about the house, he looked confused: “Who will buy the ticket? How will Ashwin buy it if he has to be with me in court? But he can’t buy it later at noon; tickets might not be available then, and it is already 10.30.” Ilina interjected to allay his doubts. He turned to me, “Won’t it be cold on the bus?” I assured him I would be fine. It was finally decided that Ashwin, a law student who has been helping the family with minute details of the case, would buy the ticket on the way to court.

We had a lunch of Bengali fish curry and rice grown on their own farm on the outskirts of the city, while watching an animation film on TV. The discussion among us women (with their dogs Safia and Dottle playing earnest listeners) veered to reality shows on TV, and the palpable surge in India of a generation devoid of soul.

Dr Sen returned from the court and got into a discussion with Ilina and another guest about the case. Meanwhile, I poked around the many bookshelves that house everything from Victorian to Bengali literature, to medical journals, to all manner of human rights reports. I remembered what Pranhita had told me when we first met in 2009, a few days before her father would be released on bail: “The Chhattisgarh police took my sister’s algebra notebook; they suspected it might contain Maoist code!”

The sun had set and the dogs were trying to find a comfortable warm corner. I prepared tea for Dr Sen and Ilina, while they began to arrange the papers for the court the next day. “You are staying tonight, right?” Dr Sen asked me suddenly. I managed a smile and shook my head. Ilina was on the internet, looking for citations to be used from a decades-old case. Fifteen minutes and a few phone calls later, she’d found what was needed. Dr Sen left the TV remote—he was trying to fight sleep while watching news updates on the latest developments in the 2G scam—and ran to see what Ilina had found. As I stood over and watched, Dr Sen put his hand on Ilina’s shoulder and said with a proud beam on his face, “Among other nice things, my wife is also an internet expert.”

Dinner followed, and I began to gather my stuff to catch the night bus. Ilina noticed I was sticking my nose into a book whenever I could, and asked me to just take it with me. Mother and daughter decided to drop me to the bus stand. “Bye, Baba. Take care of yourself,” I said, and he embraced me in a ring of safety and love, for one long moment. “When do I see you next?” I shrugged my shoulders.

“Come back soon or I will fall asleep and won’t be able to open the door,” he shouted out to Ilina as she descended the staircase. I looked back to see him one last time, not knowing that ten days later, he would be made to walk into jail once again. “They will be back in just ten minutes. Please don’t fall asleep,” I said. “I was just joking,” he chuckled.I hugged Ilina Ma and Pranhita as I walked towards the bus. The gush of cold wind was unbearable.