Women's Day: Little Poetry, Little Pondering

It's Women's Day today. Women colleagues at the office were cajoled to treat us with some dhokla and gulab jamuns. But there must be more to this day of the feminine. Wife is away, so the second-best thing is to celebrate it with poetry. Maya Angelou's "Phenomenal Women" is a hit with most women. I am immediately drawn to few poems of my own liking. I think of Nissim Ezekiel's "Poet, Lover and Birdwatcher" in which the "woman slowly turns around" as "myths of light/With darkness at core" or twists frantically in pain as the mother in the "Night of the Scorpion", who is grateful even after having been bitten by the scorpion when she says "Thank God the scorpion picked on me/And spared my children". The sensuousness of the former, in particular, has transfixed me every time I read it. This to me is one of the ultimate "woman" poems, besides some Neruda.

But then, also follow lines from Jayanta Mahapatra's "The Lost Children of America" (the text once available online is now only found in fragments), in which the poet makes a reference to a horrific event:

In the Hanuman Temple last night

the priest’s pomaded jean-clad son

raped the squint-eyed fourteen-year fisher girl

on the cracked stone platform behind the shrine

and this morning

her father found her at the police station

assaulted over and over again by four policemen

dripping of darkness and of scarlet death.

Oh! I wanted to concentrate on the positives. But tragedy is quite inextricably woven in the acts of reflection on contemporary times. How I wanted to identify with Ezekiel the aesthete but am not able to shake off the crude reality of violence that's so much a part of men's psyche. Wait! Why only men's psyche? Sujata Bhatt interrogates the revered figure of mother in "Voice of the Unwanted Girl". Extracts from the poem follow:

Mother, I am the one

you sent away

when the doctor told you

I would be

a girl – In the end they had to

give me an injection to kill me.

Before I died I heard

the traffic rushing outside, the monsoon

slush, the wind sulking through

your beloved Mumbai –

I could have clutched the neon blue

.....................................no one wanted –

No one wanted

to touch me – except later in the autopsy room

when they knew my mouth would not search

for anything – and my head could be measured

and bent and cut apart.

I looked like a sliced pomegranate.

The fruit you never touched.

Mother, I am the one you sent away

when the doctor told you

I would be a girl – your second girl.

These are the first two paragraphs; the actual poem is slightly longer. It is from Sujata Bhatt's anthology My Mother's Way of Wearing a Sari (New Delhi: Penguin, 2000).

As I had a baby, a son, recently I can in a strange way relate with this poem. The instinctive actions and reactions of a child (my mouth would not search for anything) are so vivid in my mind that it breaks my heart to read this poem. I am also aware of unspoken yet tremendous pressure created by family, society and part of our inner selves to bring forth a son, that I think I will always feel tender for a girl child.