I sought you out, you seek I did Your sort I ardently sought out In movies on my Netflix screen Your type I read in pages typed And bound in pale lilac string Lying deep beneath secret things Amid beloved, unpublished things Your form I conjured in my dreams From lovely, daytime fantasies You lived in my gleaming realm Of poignant impossibilities Your mold I formed in my head Gently the mould spread and spread Amid beautiful, decaying things Covered in gossamery what-ifs In golden morns and velvet nights I looked for you, I sought you out
Until yesterday
When I saw you clear as day You looked through me and then away The likes of me you didn’t like You sought a whole new other sort I was no part of your reality But I looked and looked silently Seek you still, I do sometimes I still urge for your bewitching kind But now doubts riddle that enterprise Few are the days when I look for you Fret-free, with stars in my eyes Those days are still the most sublime But sublimity is not for me Its glittering garb is too profound Peace is now what I seek out Still, old habits of the heart Are damnably hard to put down So keen for you my secret love And seek you still, I do sometimes.
(This piece is about limitations, both physical and mental on women. It is about a woman dealing with the biology of her own body in an environment that has disgraced and stigmatized it.
This piece has also been accepted as part of the 2024 Women Scream anthology, a platform that unites voices for violence against women and is celebrated on international women’s day across a number of countries).
Give me something to sleep Just for a while, a few hours maybe
What’s bothering you? This thing, this ungodly thing I’m sullied, impure again
Impure again? My insides are bleeding anew
Why are you whispering? Because it’s this dirty secret bound to me It keeps violating, assaulting me With such ravening regularity I have to beg my sister to visit (She has that freedom, that liberty) So she can come bearing these Brazen packs of sordid things The stigma! the cruel savagery Of having my womb constantly Bleed and weep and shame and sting
I see the look on my husband’s face When I can’t make his meals In Ramzan, or on eid (I can’t even iron his prayerful shalwar kameez*) I still recall - I cringe and I cry at the memory I couldn’t attend my little one’s very first Ameen* I had taught him his Alif Laam Meem* I couldn’t say I couldn’t tell them to move the day How could I! I hid in the shadows while my mother-in-law Did everything Hugging my child Lavishing him all the while With maternal love, where my love should have been Mine I had put away, hidden, unclean Until I was done with this bane But the occasion has gone like so many others When I was stripped of the soul of a mother That precious moment passed me by Even my father-in-law watched from jaundiced eyes His expression… such disappointment - such contempt The embarrassment! The torment! I wanted to die
The first fast is tomorrow and I bleed again I’m wretched, repulsive, tainted But I’m tired of hiding, melting away In the darkest recesses of the house I’m tired of playing cat and mouse With my dignity, my sense of self I’m tired of becoming invisible For a week every month, ceasing to be A mother, a wife, a human being I’m tired of fading, becoming a wraith I’m tired… I’m tired of this unholy plague
Give me something, something to sleep Give me something to fly me away On the quiet wings of eternal release.
Image: April Mansilla
*Shalwar kameez: tunic and pants worn by men and women across the greater Indian subcontinent.
*Ameen: term used to signify the event/ celebration when a child has finished reading the whole Quran.
*Alif, Laam, Meem: Alphabets that occur in the Quran. In this context, teaching the Quran with all its semantics.
I see the swing again Not the same but very like The one I used to fly upon A lifetime ago, I’m caught In a clutch of rememberings It was my first day of school I was the quiet one, so shy The teacher would be inclined To ask another little girl To take me under her fledgling wings A few minutes before The 11 o’clock bell would ring All kinds of dreadful things Would grip my little heart It would hammer in its cage As time closed upon the break Even as I rushed towards her desk Don’t forget! please don’t forget! To pick a friend for me today!
I’d come back home tired out My little head would pound and pound I couldn’t understand it then But I would go out and reach For the sturdy ropes of the swing As it rocked gently to and fro Waiting to hold me in Its reassuring cradling I’d swing and swing and swing up high Chase out all the daytime angst With every forward rush With every surge up to the sky I’d breathe in anew and fortify Until my sore heart soared again I couldn’t understand it then This self-soothing, this consoling
Life went on, its ebb and flow I duly shifted to my swing That I always found along the way Into its vital comforting The whoosh of the wind a lullaby A hypnotic whisper in my ears To let my troubles fall away To just fly and fly and fly up high As I kicked off into the liquid sky
When you went away I stopped looking for my swing That hollowness, that grief Those are things the lulling breeze Could not fill and cannot ease Their echoes ring, as they wring At heartstrings that pull them in I will not let them fall away Steeped, replete with memories I now carry all of these Forever and eternally Unwilling to set them free Upon a beclouding and benumbing breeze.
The day you went away Something died inside me too I thought that with time In the pithy wisdom of poets And cure-alls of self-help books In the endless cycle of the days That I’d come back to life To some semblance of pulsing life But I didn’t And that’s ok Isn’t the end of self the next terminus anyway?
The formidable ego that relentlessly keens For fantasies of euphoric times Trapped in snow globes Frozen for life Crashing like cannon balls Into raw hearts that survive That part of me died But that dead part of me Buried somewhere In the thick of my atoms that ricochet And my lungs that tirelessly inhale Is now also my quiet side A stoic, eternal, abiding thing Cloaked in The resolute infinity Of ceaseless serenity
In that sepulcher of my being There is no distraction, no noise No daunting end-times tunnels of light The lifeless part of me Is nerveless, unfaltering Impervious to everything Everything but the little flame You left behind when you went away Glowing softly just beyond The stillest, deadest part of me For me to gently find my way.
For my beloved sister who is swept in the constant tides of farewells and then meeting-again-for-too-short-a-while. And for all the other parents whose fledglings have taken wing, may you continue to find your joy and serenity.
They are the quickening parts of you That you bestow upon the world Beings that become other people Independent. Adult Then there’s the anxiety and tumult Of letting them go From the safe radius of the home From the proximity of your everyday touch From the protective circle of your sinewy arms Each muscle a testament To years of being superhuman A perpetual hero, a champion And now you also have Your own growing pains to bear Of them not being there As they make their start In places you can’t be Coming back to rest To lay down tired heads On other pillows, other beds Their childhood rooms Stirring softly with their scents But my dearest, don’t despair These aches pass, they morph They bloom into other things A kinship deep as all the seas A bond of care that is more even-keeled Conversations, confidences, the sharing of dreams
They are out there now Let them live and love With all their might You’ve done your part They know the tree The orchard, the seeds That they’ve sprung from Now let them go Let your fluttering, bursting heart Give them wings to fly Fly, fly, up, up high Into the vastness of the sky Let them whoop with joy Let them go Where the soul moves them Out into the brilliant world To take a little bit of it Make it their own Let them imprint it With their hearts and their minds Let them be quirky, let them be kind Let them be funny, let them be full Of passion, of hope, of tenderness Let them roar and cheer and also tear up At life’s beauty, excitement, its bruises and cuts Let them show all their own shades of loveliness Let them add to the shimmering throng Of all that’s vital, new and strong
And you, dear beloved With your empty nest Now filled with books Or paints or pets You who have begotten them Stand fast and true and wise Behind them. Cheer them on As they sing their own songs In the great choir of life.
The amalthas wears its yellow cape again I’m reminded of beautiful, bountiful things The gulmohar too dons its fiery crown The summer breeze feels cool on the skin
I sit here and watch nature frolic around me The fullness of life in her every glance She whispers of tender young roots in the earth Of new leaves on the banyan sashaying in a dance
I sit and I watch this surfeit of life And I hold my breath as I take it all in There’s a feeling inside, a low murmuring Telling me that summer will too soon end again
And then …
Where will I look for the amalthas bowers And the russet blooms of the flamboyant tree? Where will I seek those warm golden hours Cooled by the kiss of the summertime breeze?
My throat feels like cardboard My eyes are a-brim My breath comes in tatters I’m loosing my grip
But the amalthas shimmers, she pulsates with joy And the gulmohar bobs her flame-coloured head They’re humming of moments immersing me now No one, they sing, has seen forever yet
So hear me my universe, my cosmos of love Help me to ground myself here somehow Let me find my today, let me be touched Grateful and gladdened by the here and now.
Life goes on wrapped up in days Amd months and years And then something small, inconsequential Peeps out of a grainy abyss It emerges unshrouded, unexpected And the fragility That is also life, folds up The soft blanket about us And we feel the chill Of new news, the icicles Of probabilities, plausibilities Pierce benumbed flesh The fragility of life Touches us with light fingers, it tries But our hearts beat like the delicate wings Of butterflies at the end of spring We feel, we reel we come undone For a while or longer and then The chill settles into our bones Wistful companion for a season That somehow takes root While summer and autumn flit past in their time Winter settles into our boots In the lines of our palms And behind our eyelids like iodex balm Tearing now and then at flesh and veins Amid the dead quietness it brings Of endings, a resting in the dirges it sings Winter becomes our climate within And we toughen our skins With hope, nostalgia and other things And somehow we survive, we go on Wrapped in hours and days and years Until it happens all over again.
I heard it on the news Not the mainstream kind, no Their stories unravel to a sepulchral beat Where the truth lies buried under bones and teeth This was another source I read the caption and my heart Burst again Those men, women and children Were shot, sniped to the floor Because they’d gathered to collect Food, that had been plentiful before Growing in their fields and in their groves Now razed into cavernous holes Bleeding crimson into bare soles Into bare souls Bearing souls of loved ones gone On hearts and shoulders cut and torn Holding on to hope for one more hour Budding gently like a flower Reaching for a little flour For loved ones that still breathed amid The glowing flitter of their dead They reached for hope spattered in red They reached for hope pockmarked with lead They reached for hope among their dead They reached and were shot in their heads
Vermillion petals drift again in the wind Blooming in the ether of Palestine.
Mahvash Mohtadullah 