RUKMINI BHAYA NAIR
Quartet
I. Hindu
Washed floors glow like
children
Wiped clean after a muddy
tackle
Earth-torn, weary, Sita
rattles
Her way through the job, a
queen
A lotus poised on emerald
sheen
Broken-stemmed mother,
bent over
Work, and girl-births,
rebirths
She sweeps away the
Ramayana -
Easy as rubbish, and not half so real.
II. Muslim
Perfect single-breasted
dome
And four minaret
phalluses, which
Woman is more adored, and
more
Restricted? This is
Allah’s door.
Salma knows she cannot
enter
Woman within concealing
burqua
Ignorant of Koran and
Kaaba
Many prohibitions bind
her.
No and no and no, a
jointed arc,
But, one night, she wraps
the dark
Round bundled child and
bad naseeb
And walks away. The id moon sparkles!
III Buddhist
I had thought to leave
this space
Blank
For those women who do not
speak
But the gesture stinks! It
is twee
Surely nothing can be more
weak
Than comfort parasitic on
sorrow
My sister Shakti
Frail sparrow, flaps
about, chatters, is free
And Shanti? She cleaves
the narrow
Universe in two. This
space is hers
Not she in it
For all my precious,
bourgeois wit
I dare not leave that
blank unfilled
Because Gekkutsu Sei,
Southern Sung
Has scratched
With a thirteenth century
quill -
I set down the emerald lamp
Take it up – exhaustless
Once lit
A sister is a sister.
IV Christian
Who is Sylvia? what is she
that all her swains adore her?
Plath is not in the poetry
trade
Gentle, moronic,
retrograde
Harakiri warrior, she
disembowels
Deft as mishima - fetch
the towels!
When the mess has been
cleaned up
Gouged from the page is a
pin-up -
Everyone’s Best Woman.
Rukmini Bhaya Nair is Professor Emerita of Linguistics and English at IIT Delhi, received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and was awarded a second honorary doctorate by the University of Antwerp in 2006 for her work on narrative theory. Her earlier poetry collections, all with Penguin India, are: The Hyoid Bone (1992); The Ayodhya Cantos (1999); and Yellow Hibiscus (2004). A fourth volume, titled Shataka, is being published later in 2021 (Speaking Tiger Press). Nair’s first novel, Mad Girl's Love Song (Harper Collins, 2013), was placed on the ten-book final list for the DSC Prize. Often called “the first postmodern poet in Indian English”, she does research for the same reasons that she writes poetry – to discover the possibilities and limits of language.
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