A Cape of Memories: Three poems by Bharti Bansal
Photo: Karan Madhok
Poetry by Bharti Bansal: ‘My house has always been a little too ambitious to become a home / People came and went, like whiffs of air’
Home and other things
The windows of my room are this house’s jaws
Always reaching out to bite things into submission
The sun, the moon, air
Everything, just leftovers stuck in its teeth
Waiting to be spat out on first chance
The walls of my room, painted yellow
Like a multani mitti paste to hide the scars of time
Always screaming of their remnants
The cracks, the box scars in dermatology here,
On my skin, on this house,
Living here has become a ritual,
Supposed to be broken when nobody’s looking
My house wears a cape of memories
But it can’t fly away
It stays where it is,
Hiding behind a mask of history
Camouflaged with past
Time never stops here to take rest
It has watched me grow up
Seen me pop the pimples on my face
Whose blood still lies intact on these walls
I believe this is how human marks territory
With a wound
My house has always been a little too ambitious to become a home
People came and went, like whiffs of air
Sometime, we were the ballrooms
Sometime, a ground of mourning.
Grieving, then, became an act of preparing lunch
My mother and her mother
Everyone gathered around the dinner table,
We spoke about how our hearts must never break
My house, a seance
Its wall paints, a nostalgic welcome to the grandparents
Who never got to see it,
It has withered slowly,
Just like a mask does after a while
It bares its teeth in rain
The windows clatter
Its eyes, the shape of two exhaust fans in the kitchen
This is how my house views itself in the mirror
Of our gaze
It hides beneath its own skin
Its bones, the crumbling pillars
Have begun to house a sapling
My house never complains of where it hurts
It smiles and welcomes the sun
With hands clasped together
Like a wound being stitched back
Like a house trying to realize it was never alive
Its memories of us were ghosts
That lingered for a bit too long
Like a wound infected.
*
My father says
I walked barefoot, my father says Not because this is the only history every parent shares
But because his father knew how to make shoes
And he didn’t like the sound of it
My mother says she was scared If her teacher came to know who she was; A room full of leather shoes And grandfather tanning the leather, She knew nothing of herself but the way her birth was a mark on her skin
A huge scab of something that would gradually
Develop into dark moons of wounds
My father asks me to be proud about it And I try
Before I fumble, I try but with a silent whisper
Things have gone too far,
My father tells me
As he reads about a man with his thumb cut off
Or a groom killed because he decided to ride a horse to his wedding
I believe people are scared of dalits and horses
And them together
Or perhaps a student who kills himself
Because friends can turn into haters any day
And one must be aware of the repercussions of strength
My father asks me to be strong As we are denied a house Because Gods don’t like a touch of dalit nearby As if he is scared of our breaths mingling with his As if it will dethrone him
Because history knows of storms better than religions
The owner scared of our touch to the sweets distributed in the temple,
Says she doesn't want to offend God My father asks which God
And she answers back with a mute nodding
Gods and their mute disciples
My father searches for another house
With walls strong enough to take in Dalit air
He asks me to be strong As I visit a temple nearby Wondering if they can see dalitness on my face Because dalits and their appearances, they mock, and I hear my friends laugh
At how their grandfathers laugh At us becoming doctors,
Says they can’t treat us
Until their grandfathers become too weak to breathe, And a dalit helps them put on their oxygen masks, Because dalit and their identities don’t interfere with air Or their grandfathers’ moustache
My father tells me to be strong
Says his father told him the same
And I try to mimic him
Get up, make tea, have my breakfast
And pretend as if nothing can kill me one day, suddenly, without my preparation
The sun goes down as usual
Not knowing that I am counting on the eight minutes of light travelling
Just to believe that I can change its mind
With my belief of us.
I carry on and nothing changes
The beauty of ordinary is that it comes back
And so is the horror of it.
*
Forgive me
The language I speak in
Is not mine
But given to us as a consolation for being trapped
A child beaten for incomplete schoolwork
Soothed by chocolate at the end of the class
Forgive me that I have no knowledge of words
I make mistakes
I do not know whether in or into decides
Where I am at this moment of time
This life is already a rabbit hole
Forgive me
I am inside the world, a heap of mud covering me
Presenting me as a land of sorrows
Of sacrifices
Of promises to my parents
But mud is mud
And I am beneath it
No truth can change me into a person with correct grammatical connotations
When I say color
I am still a foreign land
Is my language a mistake or my empowerment?
When I say color
Am still trying to be worthy of it?
Make it my status
So when someone asks me where I live
I can proudly say
Some place where the “u” doesn't exist
When I say colour
I still don't know how oppression can be carried through tongue
How it can become blood
I have lived in this mistaken language
A home without any tenants
A concrete structure with history etched into its walls
Forgive me
This isn’t the language I think in
When I dream about flying
***
Bharti Bansal is a 24-year-old student from India currently pursuing Data Science. She lives in a small village called Hatkoti. You can find her on Instagram: @bharti_b42.
