THUMBELINA-CHARIT

i. pro-logue

two decades and three years inside
the walnut bed, he begins to wade
into her memories, surreptitiously.
and not so surreptitiously, she begins
to unravel unlock unwrap the crumbs
left in the blue-bottle tree of her
backyard: the morning dew, the feathers
abandoned by sparrows and ravens. her
re-collections threaten to transform his.

in the days of slipping into the terrace
to name each and every brick after her own,
she dreamt of a knight, or at least a prince
to sweep her off her feet, and hold her,
her, right in front of him on the saddle of
the horse. more than anything else, those
hands she craved. hands which will let
her lean on them. sitting-up straight for
too long taxed her eyes, backbone and hairs
a little too much, as it would, for everyone else.

a balladeer sometimes masquerading as a
calligrapher, he dreamt to etch on one
single tea-leaf the epic of the indigo-choked
land, lost under the hold of the ship. the plots
and meters of which would provide the coolie-
boy water-clean crystal bowls to locate and
finally discombobulate the swelling blisters
of his face. his lips spoke in blue. an odorless
azure embedded in the upturned mangrove
roots. dust-specks became disobedient ink
beneath his finger-tips with an effusiveness
she was scared of imagining for herself.

and he himself, pranced into the spleen
of terror, and named it beauty.

		so she decided to lend him her skills:
persistence, patience and pursuance.
and assumed his as-yet 
             unwritten epic would take care,
almost effortlessly, of  the names on her bricks. 
	
she saw in his  face the imprints
of a knight, and didn't hesitate 
                    to mount his horse.

ii. the auto-ethnography

what if I look up and a corpse dangles?
what if the nail sits tighter around my lips?
what if your kiss makes me lose the words?
what if your love takes away my breath?

i have a name for the town—civilite-

ville. here the king appoints the dolphins
as court-poets. friendly fun-loving athletic-

acrobatic  critters they are.
            by default, flexible. and although carnivorous,
		do not much look beyond squid and lab-grown  fish

in short, dolphins, forever eager for 
patronage, make good court-poets.

court-poets forego the events 
they considers minor. memories 
in all their moments are not citable 
for them at all. so i will be rather 

       prosaic  about it.

the court-poets are at a loss when
it comes to him. as they are about
me. the ghazal-garlands they braid
to adorn the thorn vacillate between
the sonorous clouds and a sequined
sun. the lipstick-smeared saga of a
land being recently trained in the
art of manufacturing. taffeta- spun.
silk parasols.

		 how does  one enjamb

the moments of a warrior-poet
committed to the craft of manufacturing
un-washable ink?

	this was the riddle they could never solve.

and therefore, let the palimpsest-villages take
refuge behind face-paint and phantom limbs

i believe in leaving them alone. instead,
i look for forms that wouldn’t regard
anything that has ever happened
inside the walnut -bed or my dreams

as lost for history.  that's why, 

for once, i want him to look straight into
my eyes and tell me, indigo-tattoos are
no guarantee against an inordinate love
for butter-yellow demure apparitions
who walk in to clean his room using
their nipples as broomsticks. or, the
coffee-table puritanism, which attempts
to touch his scars with her corset-edge,
but never wants to read the rohstoff

that constitutes it all.  they  claim 

that he had blown them dusk. shed tears.
for there is none to buy his wares. although
in the attic of his exile, he no longer has
anything to sell. and what he had, once upon
a time, when lieutenants’ daughters happily stayed up
to copy for him lines from worm-eaten manifestoes,
he had no desires to adorn the auction house with.

yet, like the court-poets, he stumbles
over certain things. most specifically,
the fact that geranium-blood bruises can
indeed fit the shade of cane-lash stains.

nothing that

i didn’t already know. consequently
i am learning to bite my tongue and
make it bleed during those crucial moments.
when he tries to nod his head in rhythm
with the flash-fiction wit of dolphin-poets
and apparition-librettists.

iii. la histoire

in the littlest town called libertyville,
they have named the newest arrivant
thumbelina. the astrologers have predicted,
three hundred twenty and five-and-half moons
later, she will find the prince exactly her size.
but for the prince to be prince and for their
living happily ever after to happen, and for
the court-poets, to sing about that happily-ever-after,
he has to be at least one and a fourth inches taller.

 that's common-sense, after all. 

iv. the facts.

since the astrologer could not be proven
wrong by any means, thumbelina planes off
the topmost part of her head where it resembles a pea-hen egg.

the flakes come off, become chameleons in their own right.

but thumbelina, herself, from now on,
must learn not to find the hairline-cracks
within the court-poet’s story. a little more trust
is what she needs after all, to fit herself within the walnut-bed.

v. the autobiographie

amnesiacs look beautiful embossed on beds,
kitchen-walls, drawing-room couches. what
word do you use for someone who never had
any memory to begin with, pray? all said
and done, i am an extra-ordinary confabulator,
too willing to create memories in places where
none has ever existed. my tongue, that’s why,
goes awry every time i try to dredge into the

etymology of my name.

these days, my eyelids seem to know
the long-whispered tale. sleep is an alphabet
broken in the middle and on nights my legs
turn into firewood, walk all by themselves
inside the hearth and cook, without waiting
for my directions, chicken soup with pieces
of carrots, spinach, bell peppers and chillies,
i know i have earned for the night the right
to wade through the soporific fragments.

perhaps.

since i have sat through too many operas,
where epic-less warriors keep resurrecting
corinne in the thick of the kitchen, i yawn
at the prospect of yet another story of a man
turned into an insect overnight. the stench
of the history books burned to ashes over
the turbulence of a long-ago spring can
only give you so much.

so

i keep the story for myself.
and blow
the moral away.

someday, i know.

the ink will find its own reticence.

vi. the epilogue

since dreams have that capacity to
turn into myths, then superstitions,
and then finally into truths, she
ignored the fact that for the palimpsest
to be mutated into a manuscript, one
needs to renew one’s name on the
bricks on regular intervals. what is
more, bricks need to be re-named from
time to time just so that they never lose
sight of the necessary annotations,
editions and re-combined compilations.

to him she had handed over a perfectly
carved lily-bud rose, recollections of
touch-memories yet to come and the
appellations she had created out of
her own. she, herself, dwindled, in
between the cracks, before being
swallowed by an amplified silence.
two decades and three later, she has
nothing but her own finger-nails to
prick her into wakefulness. her
re-collections, framed in irregular
couplets, breathe storm and dust
into his. he chooses to stick

to his familiar syntax.

BITTER ELEGY

(Or, a requiem from one of Cinderella’s step-sisters)

I.

I suffer from the redundancy
of those who came late. With
no last notes from comrades
who left, nothing I write, say,
or tell would be seriously
annihilating, disassembling
or plain old new.

generally, one is for my sis
and one about me my own self.

II.

My sis is burlesque-size.
The stage, the velvet curtains,
the lights from above, that little
closed space

they fit her well.

For years she has hid
the names of her loved ones
right under her tongue. Until
they grew to be rice-shaped
little clots, which gave her
the lisp apposite. A small
price to pay for being

the princess

obviously, for every one
of those names
she left un-said, there is a story

which did not always make it
to the Saturday best-sellers’ list.

III.

Yeah, dearie, that’s my sis.
So to speak. and these
days, I go around
repeating her tales. The clot behind
her tongue, I must admit, is really
also mine. And while it doesn’t let her
catch the winds with her tongue, jaws
teeth and all, it makes me thick,
chunky burly and stiff. Unfit
to be fitted inside a glass, cup,
tumbler or any other silly pot
that you might wish.

Or, a step-sister to the world, as they say

IV.

On nights the clots begin
moving inside her mouth
a little too quickly
and far too many times,
she thinks if she herself
would have been the same
Cinderella if she had made
a fuss in the ballroom, right
under the noses of the princes,
knights and their ladies.
what if she had confessed
that the little glass shoe really
doesn’t fit so well. In fact, she is
keeping all her toes neatly
curled up and hell, what do you
expect, every time she walks, she
gifts herself at least three blisters
right on her heels, ankles
and the skin leading to her sharp little toe-nails.

Obviously, like her own fettered
epithets, Cinderella’s screams too never
showed up
in the weekly best-sellers’ list

V.

My sissie is a pain in the ass
she really is
and she is, in one way,
or the other, is in love
with her clots. This, these days,
I am beginning to believe. That’s
one handful of stinky thoughts
but what is worse she craves
the glass-shoes a little too bad
for me to ever understand or have
sympathy for. As you might guess,
dear one, I want to say, I prefer

a princess is never born, but made.

*

Note: “Daini” and “dakini” are words used in Bengali to refer to a witch.