Riya Ray
SURPANAKHA
So here goes, my epic love story never heard, never told. As clichéd as love stories get I fell in love with you as you fell in love me it never gets better than this I loved you and you loved me too. In a forest, dark and dense like your hair ages and ages ago in times when the world was different in the times of gods and monsters we met in times when there was no time for love stories like this They call me surpanakha. A monster, woman too ugly for love stories You are the queen And I am another king's sister. Like it often happens the men in our lives are going to fight over us In a forest, dark and dense like your hair ages and ages ago in times when the world was different in the times of gods and monsters we met in times when there was no time for love stories like this I looked at you and you looked at me, called me meenakshi, a name long forgotten I have eyes like that of a fish, I look like a fish, I glide around you like a fish You. You called me meenakshi, and I stood there shedding all my scales embarrassed and blushing. You called me. I did not know what to call you goosebumps on my body we let our skin do the talking. Forgetting you are still a queen, you are married you have a husband and I well I have a brother who hates your husband who hates my brother You belong to him and I belong to someone else. But in that moment, we belonged to us. We belonged to only ourselves we belonged to us But like most love stories the stuff of the legends told never end in happy endings My love always races after a waterfall head right to the rocks, shatters always. One sultry summer, they pulled me away from you pulled me by my hair mutilated my nose my ears your husband and brother like good men and kings drove back home questions of honour and monstrosity and left me to face my monstrosity quite literally splattered blood in my face I am a monster, I don't know why being different, unnatural always ends with blood in the face even now even now I spin my days with madness Sita. You, did you spend your days the same? Was their sadness in your wait? Did you wait for me? They always want to avenge us, my brothers your brothers these men always fights battles tainting our names
HOW TO RIGHT WRITE?
I never sat down to understand the form and grammar, grammar or grammer, the correct
sentence, the right tenses, I always used to write God as Ogd and Love as Lveo, and many
other small stepping over over letters, words taking space of my thoughts my thoughts made
up of words and I am losing it while jotting it down. I don't want to be a poet, but I write, I'll
write, I remember the first thing I wrote on a sad morning with pencil under my bed, while
running away from home inside my home, I jotted down, the letters I wrote to the grandmother, no one knows
what happened to her, I have no sense of time, I'd want to call
you at 4am and tell you I had half a dream of you sleeping next to me and I feel like telling
this because we never really slept together, so I never understood tense because what I felt, I keep feeling and I
cannot count how many mistakes are there in this thing that I am writing
now present fucking continuous. I re-write my college work minimum three times before
submitting so when you ask me how you think so fast, write so fast, I had many holidays of
failed English classes to teach me to make mistakes and reduce them. I never really did learn how to write I am an
Literature graduate (English is E so there is an before literature, my language is like that) but trust me I did it, I survived it because I fell in love with Bertha
Mason. I never understood the length and measurements of poems, the different types, when they taught the
romantics I became only interested in the politics of it. I do not want to be a poet, that is very hard work and my
bones ache from long language classes. I never learned how to write but "I write only because there is a voice
within me that refuses to be still." Still I write because I know no other way, I have painted every inch of my skin
fighting my thoughts, covered too many walls now I feel like drowning not in baths but showers, so I
shiver and with tremors I write on spread open cigarette packets and receipts of metro cards
and I know I lose most of it everyday but there is a voice inside of me wanting to sit beside me on dead papers,
how can I not give them that?