Smriti Ravindra

Posts

Resistance

If we hold this world in the hollow of our palms Even as it tumbles down the drain Being dug outside our window, If we catch, somehow, this rolling world, and stall its descent To the underground of capitals and parliament houses, If we keep it, somehow, in our hearts And away from streets that lead to hungry, material traditions Of nation-making, history-building, news-creating, Then perhaps tonight Our party full of dinner and songs Will roll with laughter That does not constantly check on the drain Being dug outside our window. If we carry in our pockets the world like a bunch of keys that sets free Larders, pantries, godowns of silenced histories So that the banquet is full again With tastes we must have known once but have now forgotten, Then you and I, my friend, Can go on a long walk after the party With the world on the dip of our collar bones like a sparrow unthreatened by the hawk Of fear. What say you, my friend, that upon return we read a book together ...

Jai Santoshi Maa!

In an era when walls were adorned with calendars of gods and goddesses, my mother and her siblings pasted Madhubala and Dilip Kumar cut outs from painted movie posters in their rooms, an obvious side effect of the fact that my grandfather managed two cinema halls in Darbhanga, and brought home free tickets for his wife and six children. My grandfather was a Meena Kumari admirer and a bitter love-triangle starring Meena Kumari, my grandfather and my grandmother ensued within the house, with my grandmother feeling terribly slighted because no matter how hard she tried, she could not cry as beautifully and tragically as did Meena Kumari. My own mother, who my grandfather named Meena after his wonderful love, looked a little like the actress, but bloated like a pumpkin the moment she cried, and my mother, like her mother, considered her inability to cry beautifully highly tragic. When Ma married and came to Sabaila, a small village on the outskirts of Janakpur, ...

Spider Webs - a short story

All day from the dusty couch—no jumping on the couch, Kristy said to him—Arya watched the pig. It was black like a bottle of paint, its nose flat like the bottle’s cap. It crouched behind the door, bunched against the point where the door and the wall formed a triangle, and made pig sounds. Arya watched Emma coax the pig with a banana, but it stayed in its corner, squealing. Jayden tried to pull it out by its legs, but Kristy came in just then and sent Jayden on a time-out. From the couch Arya listened to Jayden cry and waited for Kristy to pick him up, but she did not, though she was Jayden’s mother and Arya knew then it was better to let the pain he felt in his chest stay in his chest. All day he wanted to pet the pig but was afraid. He was afraid of the pig and of the dog running outside in the yard trying to jump onto the trampoline, of the mouse that sometimes sat on Kristy’s shoulders and went in and out her jacket, the birds Kristy fed sugar water to from a dipper because they...

Locker Room

The first few times in the ladies’ locker room in the US were a shock, to put it mildly. Coming as I did from Nepal, I was not very familiar with nudity. What familiarity I had, came from Western movies, Sidney Sheldon novels, and my own imagination. In all the years I had lived until I entered the US ladies’ locker room, I had never really considered the possibility of standing before a live, nude, female body. What strange occasion would make space for such a possibility? And so, when I did encounter naked women in the locker room, I was surprised, confused, and terribly embarrassed. This is not to say the rooms were full of nudity. There were, at all times, more clothed women than unclothed ones, but the unclothed ones did not seem to notice this, and it was this casualness, this disregard, that had me nonplussed. I remember her still, this woman, middle aged, averagely sculpted, somewhat distracted as she applied lotion upon her bare b...

A slightly Bastardly Place

Passengers, Mumbai’s taxi drivers tell me, come in blocks of time. The ones in the morning are perpetually late for work and impatiently command drivers to break signals and bombard the streets with relentless honking. A fair number of morning passengers finish embellishing themselves within the confines of the taxi: men comb their hair, women dab their chins. They talk on the phone. Afternoon passengers are more sluggish, drunk with heat and tired of the world. They stare out the window and don’t mind if drivers softly play old Hindi numbers on the radio. The sadder the song, the better matched the music to the mood of these passengers. “But the most colourful ones come at night,” this one driver tells me. I sense a story coming and lean slightly forward. I am the atypical morning customer - punctual and all set for a slow conversation. “One evening this person asked to be driven to Bandra,” the driver begins. “I was thrilled because Bandra meant over ...

Those Left Behind

I step out the waiting room and out the building housing the Intensive Care Unit. It is dark already and there is a chill to the air. I have been at the hospital for nearly eleven hours and should be tired but I am not. What I feel instead is gratefulness for the cool Pune night, the trees the hospital has planted in its compound, and the readily accessible tea at the canteen. I get myself a cup and settle down on a broad platform built alongside the building. Before me there is a man – so tall, at least a couple inches above six feet – walking up and down, speaking into his phone, murmuring. I cannot make out his words but I can see he is distressed. I half drink my tea, half watch him. In the ICU my aunt, who is the centre of my cousin’s existence, is fighting to survive. I worry for my cousin. Away from home I miss my son. Only eleven. The centre of my life. How fragile everything is. The man ...