Editor’s Note
When we are asked to “suppose” something or “imagine” something, it is difficult to make the departure from our reality. We are prone to lurk in our imagination close to what we know, what we have heard, what we know or believe as ‘truth.’ To “suppose” is to be reminded that the alternate, the possible, the supposition, is not so easy.
Shlagha Borah’s poems reawaken the dead we know, the women we know, the dead and hurt women we know or have heard of, those surviving around us, and for a moment, these poems open a possible world where they sit together as an “echo of two lonely women laughing.” In ‘Bandit Queen,’ a poem for Phoolan Devi, instead of repeating the violent language of the film, Borah’s poem describes a density of silence before ending with the tragic ease of a repetition like ‘took & took.’ I wanted to keep repeating those last three words like an echo, undoing the density of silence with the pointed consonance of a word as simple as ‘took.’
In ‘A girl is a poem,’ it is difficult to not read the words on the page as imprints on a body, it is difficult to not read Borah’s suspended ending with the word ‘Suppose’ as similar to the ending of ‘Bandit Queen,’ hinting that poetry and its work is an ongoing project, as much as the horrors, the frustrations, the lessons, the echoes these poems are inspired from. A poem is always writing.
—Devanshi Khetarpal
The Bombay Literary Magazine
My mother scratches and scratches all night. Educates my father on menopause. On desire. Her aging body. He nods and goes for a walk. She boils rice, pours steaming pieces of local chicken over it. He mashes the charred eggplant. The fork leaves its strides. He shuts his bedroom door after dinner. Her lights remain on till 7 a.m. She tosses and turns until the neighbour’s rooster blasts her ears off. Hours later, she hears a commotion. The neighbour is found dead in her kitchen. What kind of woman breeds such negligence? For the first time in weeks, my mother’s room is dark. The soft sound of spring. The dead neighbour appears. They sit together, deboning. Echo of two lonely women laughing.
For Phoolan Devi
When the Rajdhani train passes through Chambal bridge,
the compartment gets quiet. Army veteran in the berth
above stops mid-song. On the edge of the sliding door,
food trays rattle against each other. The busboys lean
against the entryway, latched shut, alarmed. Winter smoke
greys the windows. Roar in the distance, this is how we
twelve. You’ve been long gone. In Behmai, the corpses you
shot sing your song. You were once a girl, then a rebel.
The river so still it became the night. How they taped
your mouth, how they took & took.
For Laxmi Orang
“How do they expect a woman who is being stripped
and molested on the streets to keep her eyes open
and look at the faces of men molesting her?“
Suppose
you don’t leave the house on Saturday. Suppose
you never leave. Doors double bolted, windows uncracked. No bruise on your chest, no blanching. You are a girl before you become a ghost. Suppose
the city burns hours before you arrive. You don’t get on the bus, don’t arrive in the city. Suppose
you don’t stop picking tea leaves. You don’t stop Jhumur dancing with your sisters. The Dhol-Taal blasts your eardrums. Suppose
you cannot hear yourself scream. Your skin is your robe. Your Kambang still cloaks your body. Suppose
you aren’t sixteen. Your parents forbid you from joining the protesters. Suppose
the streets of Beltola aren’t covered in gasoline and the mob isn’t unruly. The Tribune and The Telegraph don’t call a riot a turmoil. Suppose
you looked more like their mother, sister, spouse. Suppose they show you mercy. Suppose they place your name in their mouth like a pearl in a spoonful of water. When you think of nakedness, you think of girlhood. Suppose
you could be unopened.
Suppose you weren’t terrified. Suppose you thrashed them back. Suppose you didn’t have to run. Suppose one of the Ajanta Path residents opened their door instead of looking from their 2nd-floor window. Suppose they handed you a shawl. Suppose we stopped asking you if you were indigenous. Suppose
a girl disrobed wasn’t sensational. Suppose
you didn’t have to be in the same courtroom as them. Suppose you didn’t recognise their faces. Suppose they were convicted. Suppose
we listened. Suppose
we remembered. Suppose our tea stopped brewing. Suppose we stopped using passive voice. Suppose the Supreme Court didn’t keep you waiting for fifteen years. Suppose the national newspapers didn’t stop reporting. Suppose
you weren’t named after the goddess of fortune. Suppose their stares stopped. Suppose memory erased itself Suppose
Acknowledgements
Image credits: © Guesswho. Reproduced here with the permission of the artist.
Graffiti on the wall, text on a page. The artist who goes by the nomen “Guesswho” bides us to look and not look away. As do the poems, we believe.
Author | Shlagha Borah
Shlagha Borah is from Assam, India. Her work appears or is forthcoming in POETRY, AGNI, Quarterly West, Poetry Northwest, SWWIM, and elsewhere. She is the Valentines Editor at Honey Literary and Deputy Editor at The Offing. She’s a 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship finalist. Her work has been supported by Tin House, Brooklyn Poets, The Hambidge Center, The Peter Bullough Foundation, VCCA, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, among others. Her work is available at www.shlaghaborah.com. [Text source: Shlagha Borah]
