I recently self published my first book, it was an offering of quotes and poems, a first of its kind - the publishers bracketed it as a Self Help genre book. I had nothing of that in my mind, I was just wanting to let the world read my thoughts as they meandered and found meaning in everyday life and living.
I realise poetry comes easy to me, the blank verse is my language where it falls freely drifting like the snowflakes and blanketing emotions ... sometimes warmly with an inner view that's totally my picture of situations of the mind, place, emotion and experience of others. Its maddeningly easy for me objectify and subject issues that plague each one of us and make it mine. Like the poem that I have Archana, the other face of Ma - I bring to depiction, the woman Archana rather than her role as a prostitute or a mother or Ma. I first met her in my line of doing a story of Sex Trafficking ... she shocked me out of my stupor of thinking (like everyone else I presume) that she was just a sex worker.
Every time she preened and spoke ... I think I bled. To know, that at age 34 she was dying of cancer and all she was being given was a pain killer and an aspirin, even though death seemed a better option than her life, but she wanted to live. Live with the knowledge that she had been child bride kidnapped sold and prostituted all by the tender age of six, when twelve she had escaped back home, beaten to death almost by her in-laws who thought she had whored herself and come back home. Life still carried on and by age sixteen she was a mother of a boy and then soon after a widow. Now being a widow is worse than death in parts of India ... even though her husband was a sickly boy of 17 and had died naturally ... she was blamed, cursed and then sent back to prostitution. This time she was not kidnapped ... but sold by her in-laws, who did not want to take care of her, but they took her baby and told her that if he was to be fed and given a better life, she needed to earn bread and in a hurry.
As a woman, she did it all ... as a mother she did it all ... and today, she stands a mother and a whore. The son comes to her to get money, he is married and lives decently and makes sure no one knows she is his mother. She is however proud that he is doing so well. I don't know how I can still write about her and not die a little inside. But every time I think of her, I remember her saying "
‘I once was as fair
as this piece of
unlined white paper
my hair a string of
mogra, that swung men
to passion and shame...’
She had then continued on to say :
'i have now cancer
you know of
the breast and
tears pour out
how many lovers had
admired these'
I have no idea if she is dead or alive now ... but I have made her and her type immortal with my poem. I hope I have. I love her, her spirit and though I was laughing when she described herself as being paper white ( the Indian obsession with fair skin colouring) for she was all ebony and unless had the discolouration like that of Michael Jackson, she could never have been that white. And so for me she stands as a woman first because she was conscious about looking beautiful whether in the past or present. Most of all, she had the inherent beauty of being selfless and being a mother at all times, through hardship and not once feeling empty that all her loved ones did her wrong, the thought never arising in her mind. She minded not that her son came to see her only for money ... and yet, all she spoke about was that ' He is in a society ... he is married ... he is not suffering like me'.
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