Excerpt: This Kind of Child
Mustard seeds sought in vain: only death is found. The body's frailty,…
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From ULR
Issue 6 – Freedom
Last Rites (for Natasha and Mahavir Narwal)
Grief spills from a floating house, a towering tsunami offered for last rites.
December 1, 2021
We have entered a house that floats on water.
This is where we must live from now.
We write poems. We tweet for beds and oxygen.
We call each other, the dread in our voices a flutter of pigeons.
A young girl has been in prison a whole year. Her father lies dying.
I hope she’s not in jail so long she doesn’t see my face.
We write poems. Uselessly. We fall mildly ill. We check our oxygen levels.
We hope to live, to tide over.
We hope our children will live, tide over.
Whenever she comes back, she should find her room in good shape.
We offer prayers to nameless gods,
find lightness and solace in movies from the seventies.
For a while, we are okay. We hold up.
This house that floats on water is in a containment zone.
But, in the end, our grief escapes it. Spills out.
Wave after wave.
A tsunami of a poem towers over the sickness.
This is the only way. Who said cleansing is easy?
This tsunami of a poem is what we offer
that young girl now on her way
to perform the last rites, to look upon his face
one last time.
📖
PART OF A COLLECTIONThey Help Themselves to Many Things (for K. Satyanarayana) and 2 other poems
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K Srilata
K SRILATA was writer in residence at Sangam house, India, Yeonhui Art space, Seoul and the University of Stirling, Scotland. She teaches Literature and Creative Writing at IIT Madras. Her debut novel Table for Four (Penguin, India) was long listed in 2009 for the Man Asian literary prize. Srilata is the c0-editor of the anthologies The Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry, Short Fiction from South India (OUP), All the Worlds Between: A Collaborative Poetry Project Between India and Ireland (Yoda) and Lifescapes: Interviews with Contemporary Women Writers from Tamilnadu (Women Unlimited). Her book The Other Half of the Coconut: Women Writing Self-Respect History was re-issued as an e-book by Zubaan in 2020. She has five poetry collections, the latest of which, The Unmistakable Presence of Absent Humans was published by Poetrywala, Mumbai in 2019. Her translations include Vatsala’s novels Once there was a Girl (Writers Workshop) and The Scent of Happiness (Ratna Books, 2021). A multi-genre anthology on the disability experience is forthcoming from Amazon/Westland later this year.