Anu Elizabeth Roche
SATI
Your grandfather was the Creator of the universe your sisters were named Rohini, Bharani, Ashwini, Ashlesha twinkling in the night sky you called the moon your brother the great Shiva your lover The gods were favoured guests in your father's house but when the flames finally licked your feet, neither man nor god dared follow suit Now women tremble at the sound of your name It doesn't matter that no one chased you to your death No one adorned your charred body with wedding finery or blessed your corpse At least she died a sumangali* When the flames scorched your hair and melted your flesh, it wasn't for the honour of your father or the memory of your husband or the lusty cries of a mob of people you once considered playmates, brought up in the belief that a woman's mere existence was a knife that could slice a man's lifeline in half It was to exact vengeance against a father you thought you could trust by desecrating a space he held sacred But they wouldn't tell us that, Sati They were too busy building temples in honour of the charred bits of flesh you left behind Sang hymns of your illustrious death because it was the only memory of you they wanted to keep alive Drowned your name in definitions that never existed Made your story the fuel that would set the bodies of widows alight and drive married women to pray for early death Perhaps they have forgotten that you were once the rebel they warned their daughters not to be. You danced to the beat of your own damarukam* Rejected instructions from your father and your husband if they didn't make sense Didn't stop chasing the man of your dreams until he was finally yours Perhaps they needed proof that even their gods believe in love because Sati in this country and this age, your story would have ended long before you entered your father's sacrificial pyre When a man and a woman considered their love sans matchmakers, sans horoscopes, sans parental approval just love as reason enough to be wed, you called it gandharva vivaha Today we call it Love Jihad Today love is reason enough to kill We have painted our roads crimson with the blood of lovers, made the sharing of stolen kisses in public a crime and the private violation of a wife's consent legal Sati, they use your name now to lampoon women who grew up biting down on their tongues and gift wrapping their spines to be broken by the first man their family came across Don't be such a Sati Savitri they say except that some of us already are We don't even know we've taken on the roles you made your own One of you embraced Death in your rage the other fought Him and won Both of you lived only by the rules you set up for yourselves but your stories were too smothered in whitewash for us to notice How were we to know that every time we married against the wills of our fathers, got down on bended knee and told our paramours we loved them we were invoking the two women we spent our whole lives trying to ridicule Sati when the fire crushed your bones and turned them to ash did you ever dream of the shackles we would bind to your name?*Sumangali: used in most Dravidian languages (Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada) to mean a married woman whose husband is still alive
*Damarukam: small two headed drum that is used by Lord Shiva
*Gandharva vivaha: instant marriage by mutual consent of both participants only, without even the presence of a third party as witness.
ENDYMION
O silent invisible lover The moment you lay in eternal slumber, the blessed Archer shot star tipped arrows across a black expanse of sky to fashion the moon's bridal veil But your eyes would be forever shut to the warmth of her gaze Her nonsense words would leave unheard, like droplets dying on earth made damp And then, she would turn Your smile would forever glimmer its welcome and this moon would glow again If this is not love, she said, I would rather not know What love is O silent invisible lover You are alive yet dead to her Your silence is her bare slate Your ignorance, her freedom Her whims lie in the vast golden ripples on your skin Her love drugged sighs in the muscles unfolding beneath your thighs, in the slumbering silent broadness of your shoulders Her gaze will brand you forever with her name. Her desire will mould you to be what she wishes every man to be She says Be and you become You are clay in her hands: voiceless and sightless, your form changing to the shape of her needs; your languorous breaths the only indication that you are alive You are both her fantasy and her fear that the fantasy was a lie so she robs you of your ability to evolve Silent invisible lover, you will never have the chance to know how this feels but I do I know what it means to have the words I love you breathed over and over into the shell of your ear and still feel absolutely alone. How it feels to watch everything you once were slip away through her fingers and know you could do nothing to stop it How it feels to wake up one day knowing that what you wanted will never matter and nobody will understand that just because you can't feel the crushing weight of all her denials doesn't mean it won't hurt I know better than you ever will the pain that is just begging to emerge beneath that frozen smile: that last living proof that you were once a free man If this is not love, she says, I would rather not know what love is, and she has stolen from you the ability to tell her that if she really did love you she would have just let you be
Gopika
Mother did you not
hear him laugh?
Laugh as he watched us
rent the river apart
for our clothes
Clothes he had gripped
vicelike
in his hands
Laugh as he broke our pots of milk,
let it pool over his feet,
let it pool over mine,
let its silken whitness
leave darkened spots
over our clothes
Laugh as he crushed my wrist
in his hands, his amusement
spilling in bursts of hot air
snaking 'round my throat
He didn't laugh like
the boy that he was
He laughed with the confidence
of a man who had captured,
in the palm of his hands,
what he had wanted
before he could even ask
Mother his laughter
followed me
wherever I went
I could not breathe
without the winds carrying
the flute like sway
of his boundless mirth
but mother,
how could I scream,
when my friends were with him,
laughing back?
When they wept the moment his laughter
had left them?
When my daughters
begin to have daughters,
his laughter will haunt me again
So gentle
So teasing
So sure
He will look down from the heavens
The men he sees
will be dots of sparkling dust,
a woman's cloth crushed
in their python grip
One of them begins
to strike his thigh
The others laugh
Krishna! she screams
This woman whose flamekissed feet
now struggle
to hold their ground
Smiling, he will
raise the hand that had
once clutched the clothes
that I had worn
He will lift his palm in a court where
no one dared lift a finger,
and cloth will emerge
as flames
from sacred pyre
She lifts her eyes in gratitude,
knowing he will smile back
He had kept his word
as a brother would
All her life
she will remember
those hands
Krishna! I screamed
He laughed
and refused to let go
Mother,
How should I
remember this?
Gopika was put up as a blogpost in the popular feminist blog UltraViolet in March 2013.
The link can be found here: http://ultraviolet.in/2013/03/27/gopika/