Chudiya pehen rakhi hai kya!?
Have you worn bangles!?
screams the Hero, angry and young.
His voice nimble with permeability
as time echoes his note — adding one to many.
Amused at this timeless dividend now ironed to perfection,
our Hero’s winter of bother is squirreled away.
History hearkens back to the bloody bluntness of force.
This
is their cry for war.
In reply,
it is anjoriya raat.
In this light of the night, the women lace their wrists
with reds and greens of glass bangles.
Glass:
sweated sand turned invisible,
making visible the prising of tensile beauty.
Glass is hard, rock-solid, becomes The Shard
and then shatteringly amorphous.
Lilting over the edge,
The women toy with sharpness that brittle brings.
Each gesture in the disquieting wind rings
like holding a wind-chime in sway.
They salvage kameez out of sarees, old and fray —
the gossamer a fishing net,
dredging out the bobbing, belated o’clocks
which warn against the iron heart.
This is an everyday rebellion – the terrible effort of safety-pinning hearts to sleeves.
Nursing, tilling, cutting corners, patching up,
when jaws of iron-handed fists hack in a heady fit.
Learning, often with difficulty, to try mending before tossing it away
Learning, often with difficulty, how sometimes easy does it.
The women huddle together
all body and all soul,
like women can.
As they offer their saheli a glimpse of paisleys glittering on glass,
which now hardly corrodes or dissolves or burns ill,
The bangles softly chime, as if answering the old question —
“yes…won’t you look how it blooms still.”
