Category: truth

OP-ED: THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM – Part Two

On By Mahvash K. M.In feature, mentalhealth, opinion, Pakistan, socialissues, truth, womenwriters, writing1 Comment

Picture this: a young woman of 24 gathers the supreme courage to flee her abuser – her husband. Her father then cajoles her to return because his honour as a man is dependent on this young woman going right back to her abuser. She complies because social norms still far out-weigh the personal wellbeing of a woman. She returns to what she almost certainly knows is the end of a brutal road for her.
And sure enough, she is murdered.

The men put their blood-stained turbans back on their criminal heads, while #GullaanBharo is interred into the blessed earth. For the sane amongst us, Gullaan Bharo’s courage and grace is exponentially greater than the fickle honour that is carried around like a lodestone by all the men combined of her family.

So there she continues to sit, the Elephant in the room. Prominent and present even as she shrinks into herself; even as everyone looks right through her. Why? Because it has become normalized to not acknowledge the appalling state that is the state of the average Pakistani woman. She is beaten/ flayed/ deprived and caged into submission. Even as we approach the middle of the 21st century and men send rockets to Mars, there are other men that continue to create entire realms of abuse within the 4 walls of their caveman fortresses on our very earth.

Every other day, we hear of unspeakable criminal abuse against a daughter, a sister, a wife and a mother. And now, even the transitory burst of outrage has disappeared as this bullying of one gender by the other has become normalized. Here are some statistics from Pakistan that we as the educated/ empowered/ aware demographic that waxes thick on social media should at the very least, mull over.

  • 40% of married women have experienced spousal physical, sexual, or emotional violence. Some reports suggest 70% to 90% of married women in specific regions (e.g., Punjab) have experienced abuse from their spouses.
  • 86% of women reported at least one traumatic event.
  • HONOUR KILLINGS: Thirteen women are reported murdered daily in the name of honour. It is important to note that almost 90% of cases do not get reported at all. So this statistic is exponentially higher.
  • SEXUAL VIOLENCE: At least 11 rape cases are reported daily, with over 22,000 cases reported over six years. Again, this statistic is only the tip of the iceberg.
  • CHILDHOOD TRAUMA: A study on rural mothers found that 58% experienced at least one Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE), commonly home violence (38%) or neglect (20%).
  • CHILDBIRTH TRAUMA: A study in Sindh found that 97% of women reported at least one form of disrespectful or abusive behaviour during childbirth. 
  • ECONOMIC INEQUALITY: Pakistan is ranked among the worst countries for women regarding economic participation and opportunity, which limits women’s autonomy and increases dependence on abusers.

Other interesting global statistics:

  • There is a 21% rate of abandonment if the wife falls terminally or seriously ill, compared to only 3% when the husband is the patient.
  • 90% of single parents are women.
  • 80% of organ donors are women. 80% of organ receivers are men.
  • Rape Incidence: About 1 in 4 women (approx. 25%) has experienced rape or attempted rape in their lifetime.

I look at these indices and I feel numb – a self preservation tactic in a world that has become dismally imbalanced. We are floating so low at the bottom of the barrel that expecting any reforms in the manner of decisive legislation aimed at the wellbeing of women seems like a pipe dream. But speak we must, despite our anesthetic bubbles of privilege and security, hoping that somewhere, at some perfect inflection point, things will begin to change.

(I wrote the first part of this op-ed in September of 2020. You can read it here: https://theroamingdesi.org/2020/09/15/opinionthe-elephant-in-the-room/ )

VERSE | PARADISE

On By Mahvash K. M.In Faith, poetry, truth, verse, writing1 Comment 
I have lost the rituals 
Of faith. But my devotion has 
Become stronger.  I no longer 
Am afraid or confused by questions that
Whirl around in my head
Never to be brought into existence 
Their very substance damning
Pounding, hammering a path to (h)elsewhere
I now wear a cloak around 
My shoulders.  It holds a super power
A texture all its own.  When I’m alone 
It reminds me of who I am
It fosters my introspection
It champions who I want to be 
And then I feel 
No other burden of pretense
Or suspense
No fear of consequence 
For being so much more
And ritualizing less
I have no dire need to find my 
Hallowed steed to gallop on with 
Me holding on, bound for paradise
This life, this blessed life is mine 
To treat with such passion
Such tenderness, that earth
Our beautiful earth 
Itself becomes the Eden I seek
My paradise is under my own feet.

VERSE | THE DELUGE

On By Mahvash K. M.In Emotions, Humanity, Pakistan, TheNews, truth, verse, womenwriters, writingLeave a comment 
Wars rage across the globe
Black tender weaponized, legalized, expedited
Back into western folds
Pockets lined with silver and gold

And the rain falls

Billionaires wearing t-shirts and jeans
Their assets splitting at the seams
Go to the moon 
To float around in zero gravity
With their mugs of civet coffee

And the rain falls

Priests and rabbis and the clergy
Preach from pulpits blood-streaked 
With people sacrificed, ostracized, cast aside 
As God is their witness, we all see

And the rain falls

A woman takes in an elder drenched
In torrents that wrenched
The next meal and rent
From his shaking hands
He cries without a sound
His tears surge into the floods
Rolling down
Crimson-hued carrying blood
From the mountains to the sea
As the country drowns.

Image generated via illustration software

VERSE|DUST IN OUR EYES

On By Mahvash K. M.In poetry, truth, verse, writing2 Comments 
Inspired by the vastness of our universe, and the impermanence and fragility of our own little blue green planet. 
The moon hangs low like a key lime pie
In a firmament strewn with golden gleams of zest
The sky like a cosmic porcelain platter
Holds this sweet perfection in a state of rest

I sip on my tea as I sit back in my chair
And look at the glimmering stars up on high 
My mind is a telescope of infinite scale 
My soul, a radar that amplifies

I see nebulous orbs dancing around
I see their frigid friends standing their ground
I see the little ones and the gargantuan greats
I see the middling ones jostling for space

I see luminous worlds move in grandiose arcs 
Leaving star dust in their celestial wake
I see comets race into indigo depths
Gleefully chased by their blazing tails

I see weighty old stars in their twilight of being
Collapse in a mighty roar of ultimate endings
I see embryonic knots of vital masses
Heating up at their core in hopeful beginnings

I see torus-shaped, shard-textured asteroid belts 
Circling around an oblong of planets
I feel the formidable power of gamma ray bursts
As they cannonade up vaults of ink-silver granite

I see pulsars and quasars whirling around
Solar winds spreading out in feathered plumes
I hear the happy hum of the cosmos above me
Like a foetus hears her mother from inside the womb

I collapse the telescope of my mind
I shut down the radar of my soul
I look back down into the eyes of our Earth
Now blurred and smudged with eventide kohl

I don’t hear the hum of her kinetic voice
Nor feel the tenderness of her warm embrace
I don’t smell the bouquet of her fragrant skin
Nor see the glow of her beautiful face  

The cosmos continues to dazzle and shine
To skip and to leap, to dive and to fly
While our own little world continues to be
The storm in our teacups, the dust in our eyes.
“Earth’s crammed with heaven…
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes.”
Elizabeth B. Browning
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FREE VERSE|LETTER FROM AN AFGHAN GIRL TO HER TALIBAN CAPTORS

On By Mahvash K. M.In Afghanistan, Politics, truth, writingLeave a comment

This is a tribute to all the women in fact who are oppressed, reduced and shamed in the name of religion, and who still find the strength and dignity to go on another day.

O Talib*, O ye self-professed Learned One,

I have something to say to you. 
You can whip up monsters from the air and call them your Shariah*. 
You can torture and mangle “your” women, break their spirits and their bodies and call it the Word of God. 
You can wear your imperious lungee* and as it swishes around in the wind, you imagine the very angels dancing around you. 
You grow your hairy beards, and hide your malevolent grins behind them. 
You rumble and you roar and that is your devotion. 
You maim and you kill and you call that Divine intervention.

But then secretly you also glance at your reflections and you see what we all see: imperfect, angry, reviled men trying to validate their existence in the only way they can - by wiping the planet clean of the scourge of the Double (H)Ex*. But then you pause with the greatest effort known to the Men of God and you think:
How can we annihilate this evil, garbed in soft flesh if we are to propagate and procreate? How else are we to add to the rank and file of Allah’s soldiers? 

The conundrum is excruciating. So you continue to brutalize and ravage just short of pushing her six feet under.  Just so you can crush her under you instead and make her pay for staying alive. To bear and to beget your many sons.  To nurture and feed your rabid army of the Men of Allah.


O Ye Men of Allah,

I have something to say to you. Hear me.

I am the Daughter of the Universe; the Yin to your Yang, the ultimate balancing act of God’s will gone wrong in your hands.

Hear me. We will be who we are: the proud women of Afghanistan. Our honour lies serenely, supremely, completely in the depths of our own eyes, not in yours. 

Look at me. Don’t hide behind your fragile male bravado. 
Look at me. Don’t turn your suddenly shameful eyes away. 

Look at me. Look at me.

Look at me as I rise like a Phoenix from the ashes that you kicked aside. 
Look at me as I look at you. 
Look at me and see what you have become. 
Look at me as your heart Drains … Shrivels …. Breaks …. Burns in its own hell.

Hear me, my voice will echo through my sisters even if mine falls silent. You will Hear me.

Look at me, even if it is at my corpse as I go to meet my Maker. You will Look at me.

For Allah hears me. For Allah sees me.  

Allah stands behind me as we both look at you. As we both await you.
The “Where is My name” campaign. Laleh Osmany campaigning to have the mother’s name included in the birth certificate.
Her study centre was bombed. But Shamsiya, a Coal miner’s daughter still tops in Afghan University entrance exam
“A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done.” – Marge Piercy
* Double (H)Ex: Word play on the double X chromosomes that all female mammals possess.  Hex is a spell or a curse.

* Talib: Scholar; Learned one.

* Shariah: Islamic law derived from the teachings of the Quran but mainly from the Prophet Muhammad. It is not a list of rules but rather a set of principles on aspects of life, including marriage, divorce, finance and rituals such as fasting and prayer.

* Lungee: turban/ cloth worn around the head.

VERSE | INERTIA

On By Mahvash K. M.In poetry, truth, verse, womenwriters, writingLeave a comment 
I wake up today
There’s a keening in my heart
It sits there familiarly
Waiting for me
To take its hand and walk with it
Feel its ardor, talk to it 
Make it wholly, soully mine

But the lethargy that is life
Has been pulling for a while
At my seams, they’ve come undone
I cannot find it in me now
To acknowledge this someone 
This something that looks at me
With glowing eyes, dark and deep

I stay aware of it
But like a balm 
I keep it topical
Let it rouse me for a while
With dreams of higher things
Dire things, of touching lives
Even a few, maybe just two
Or even just one …

But now I have also learnt 
To preserve myself 
That strain of goodness 
Stands no chance 
In the dulling sludge of circumstance 
And a will that’s willowy 
Bendable, collapsible 
And so when it stares at me
A cosmos of possibilities 
I look away
But I stay aware 
Of its unsettling symmetry 

It’s easier this way
As the days spill
Into each other
Unremarkable 
I tell myself at least I’m not
Doing anything to hurt the lot
Humankind, neighbours, the child
Snotty-nosed running wild
In the streets where a mother sits 
On the pavement resigned
Circled by dead dreams and things 
Spaces that once gleamed with hope
And all the while I tell myself 
At least my intentions are good.

Image: Mia Lane

VERSE | STARRY NIGHT

On By Mahvash K. M.In poetry, Sadness, truth, verse, womenwriters, writingLeave a comment 
The blue-purple sky today 
Has spent its moisture-ladenness
It is now cloaked in quietness 
Its sadness it has put away
In some clouded corner that
Will hold it, hide it tenderly
For now it wears a lighter heart 
Star-smeared, it now gleams
Wetly with nostalgia
A tender melancholia 
I look at it as it glimmers
Stalwart in its eternalness
Its timelessness, its ceaselessness
I yearn for that serenity
That noiselessness, that peacefulness
I take in a ragged breath 
All my grief sits in my chest 
Heaving, cleaving achingly
Endlessly, relentlessly
I look at the resolute sky 
At its crush of dewy stars
Valiantly twinkling at me 
And I look away 
Tonight I don’t feel brave enough 
To let the shimmering cloak of night 
Take me into its embrace 
Away, away from my sad place.
It moved its glutted grief today
The sorrowing, water-laden sky
And I have in my wretchedness
Made it my own this starry night.
Image: Getty Images

VERSE | SENTINEL TIME

On By Mahvash K. M.In poetry, truth, verse, writingLeave a comment 
Oh look at that beautiful dragonfly 
It’s turning somersaults 
Its peacock coloured gossamer wings
Perfect, without fault!
But you didn’t catch the fleeting glimpse
It bestowed upon this scene
You were on your phone lost in
Digital worlds upon your screen

Did you see that butterfly
Just sit upon my arm
Brown and orange-yellow wings
It was full of golden charm!
You missed its quickening beauty
As it said hello and went
You were caught in your own loop
Eyes down, heart still, head bent

I had to hold my breath there
That scene was so sublime
The grand eagle swooping down
And then soaring back up high!
Where, where? you ask me now
As you look at an empty sky
You were fretting, agitating 
As nature sprang her wondrous surprise

Glittering dragonflies, murmurations
Eagles in majestic flight
A shower of blossoms, a ladybird loveliness
Nature exulting in life
Magical, mystical, shimmering marvels
Surround us at all times
Some of us get to revel in their beauty 
Some stay trapped by Sentinel Time

VERSE | THE ROSE

On By Mahvash K. M.In poetry, truth, verse, writingLeave a comment 
I looked in rapture at the rose 
As it waxed in the sun
A bold and brilliant orange 
In its emerald column

It was absolutely perfect! 
Its beauty was sublime 
There was little reason 
In the soil to bide its time

I felt a maddening urge
To pluck it off its stem
To put it in a vase
To covet that lovely gem

The sunset-coloured rose
Would glorify my room
The garden would do without
This one splendid bloom

The yen turned to despair
That rose I had to have 
And so the stem that held the bloom
Felt the force of my bare hands 

The break, it was not clean
Nor did it cleave in two
The stem that bore the rose
From the part that bore the roots 

The rose hung limply down now
Its head grazing the ground
Its petals seemed to fold in
As it moaned without a sound

I watched its resplendence 
Its spirit and its mirth
Flow out of it bit by bit
Back into mother earth

A lancing stab came tearing in
Somewhere around my heart
I had mauled and ravaged
Nature’s precious art

I can still see the rose 
As it lay waning in the sun
Like a little cut that never heals
The memory of it still thrums.

VERSE | THE GIRL WHO NOW SLEEPS

On By Mahvash K. M.In poetry, truth, verse, writing3 Comments

Dedicated to the memory of all those young people who struggled to fit into the norms dictated by their communities and who lost that battle. May the second wind in your sails be glorious and joyful. 

LISTEN TO THE POEM BEING READ AT: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZSde5UerP/?k=1
I’m going to tell you a little story
Of a girl who loved too much
Lived too much, hoped too much
They said, she was too much!
She was a queen, a young one
But she had that zest for life
That is so rare and beautiful 
That is also so ominous and direful

The story goes that she was born
In the wrong place at the wrong time
Nothing seemed to feel right in fact
She was told to be someone that
She wasn’t. She was taught, against her will
To be the clone of a fantasy
That had persisted for centuries

And so the queen crumbled 
Atom by atom, bit by bit, little by little
She fell apart like a young sapling
That has been buffeted and knocked about
By righteous winds whipped up
By those who were afraid of her
Of our queen getting out of the box
That they had so faithfully built for her

She finally broke into a million pieces
And she plummeted
She had once known how to fly like an eagle
To soar up to the top of the world
But that memory was gone, pounded out
And so she fell
Hitting the ground six feet deep
And that is where she now sleeps.

VERSE | VEINS

On By Mahvash K. M.In poetry, truth, verse, womenwriters, writingLeave a comment

Note: This poem was long-listed in the 2023 Plough Poetry Competition

She looks at the leaf 
Its serrated edges holding together 
A cosmos of possibilities 
Of alternate realities 
Of burgeoning opportunities 
She looks at a vein 
A cholorophyllated pathway of dreams 
A vital, verdant, emerald seam
Running like a stream 
From the heart of the leaf to one serrated edge

Nearest
To her wrist 

Where her own veins have seared a path
Specific, stark  
Chiseled from the magma of predestined fate
Pre-blessed, pre-set, per-fected
Once a rolling ocean of fluid dreams 
Now quiet, grief-stained, shadowy seams 
Of still water that never skips
Never dances, it stays gripped
Even as it drips
In the finite space of one blue-purple vein

VERSE | TUNNEL VISION

On By Mahvash K. M.In poetry, truth, verse, womenwriters, writing4 Comments

Literal and Satirical definition: defective sight in which objects/ other opinions/ other people cannot be properly seen if not close to the centre of the field of one’s view.

It grips me in its narrowness 
Blurring out everything else
The serrated edges of my self
Fade, become invisible 
I only get to feel
One urgent, solitary reel 
Of fickle life at a time
Drenched as it is in endless
Waters of love or rage
Seas with no horizons
No frontiers, no boundary lines
These swells take over me
In my entirety
I can barely breathe
The deluge almost drowning me
My heart and mind
My tears and smiles 
In that moment are replete
There can be no more
In my stores
Of pain and joy 
They are empty, hollow, done
The universe too
Knows when it’s enough 
And that is why I then see
Only a sliver and no more
Of life’s excess, its extremity 
Its climax, its nth degree
Through the narrowed and diminished lens
Of my shielding, sheltering tunnel vision.
Image: Kay Adonna