Rings to play or to die!

Tummy Ache

Purvi was screaming – long and shrill, all the way to the hospital. Her parents, and mine were gabbling, loud and confused. I was just very quiet; I hadn’t known that when my wish came true it would be so painful for her.

They wheeled her away as soon as we brought her because nobody could hear or say anything over her screams.

The white corridor turned into a tube of speculation as we waited for the doctor to return. Food poisoning? Amoebiosis? At one point, Purvi’s father asked me if she’d swallowed a G.I. Joe, and I told him that she stopped doing that 9 years ago. Anyway, she would only gobble the heads.

Then doctor returned, his face blank and frozen. We all looked at the offering in his outstretched hands. My father fainted, and so did Purvi’s mother. I took the ugly, wriggling red monster into my arms. My baby looks nothing like me. I looked up at the pale doctor and wondered if girls are called daddy, too.

-Ajooni

I can’t quite get the flow right and this is the third rewrite (the other two being double this one’s length!) Any advice?

Two poems by Anita Sivakumaran

Two poems that I found on Ultra Violet that I fell in love with! Thought I should share them :

- Geetanjali

By Anita Sivakumaran

My Never Naked Mother

I

There are such things to a child
As there is the virgin birth to a Christian.
My mother, I always imagined,
Never took her clothes off.
For sex she merely lifted up
The skirts of her sari, the fold
Upon fold and exposed
Blameless legs, fuzzy in my
Imagining or fuzzy with hair.

I could think of her urinating -
The gurgle splash of brown yellow piss.
It was not indecent.
It was sensual as a cat’s purr.
Bathing was another matter.

They were hung one by one on
The blue plywood door – the crumpled length
Of the sari, the soft inskirt, the sweat
Blotched blouse and the white bra, its
Bereft looking cups: one squashed
One holding the shape of the breast.
Even with the evidence atop the
Soap streaked door I draw
A blank for a body; my mind
Still contrives an image of her
Still somehow clothed.

II

When she slapped me, dragged me in to
The bedroom and pleaded with me not
To talk to boys,
The worst thing was not
That she thought I was hungry
For sex at seventeen.
The very worst thing was that
My never naked mother
Should have a filthy picture in her head.
That she saw me in her mind’s
Eye cavorting with a boy like
Those whores in America on TV.

*

Under The Glass

The doctor pointed down at the photos
Under the glass of her tabletop.
The trapped lives pushed up
through the honey light glaze,
tapped me on the shoulder.
Husband, two sons: pride and joy.

Their tapping was a nail knocking on my numb head.
The doctor, her deep red sari and bindi
Proclaiming fertility, preserving matrimony,
Was talking me out of an abortion,
Was presenting to me, in words and pictures,
A future I could have. Her life could be mine.

Earlier, she had insisted on showing me a screen:
The primordial murk out of which all life sprang.
‘Look, the dot,’ she pointed. ‘There,’ she flourished,
As if at her own creation.
A god showing off. A stick holding Brahma.
A swirl of black and white is all I saw.
And all were dots, swirling,
Between my ears, and in my throat.

‘The dot is the baby. The dot is the baby,’ she kept saying.
But I drew a blank for baby.
A blank in which I settled, and thought
About small, needful things:
An exam that loomed,
toast and contact lens, and laundry, and pens.

The doctor, staring defeat in the eye, wouldn’t meet mine.
And I asked for the small, needful thing.
I asked for those little everyday sips of poison
That make a poison woman.
Clasping her palms, she said to the wall,
‘Abstinence is the best contraception until marriage.
After marriage, one can plan, give intervals.’
‘Intervals?’ I said.
‘Between babies,’ she said.
I could hear the sob catch her throat.

Then she handed me to another, less fastidious, lady doctor,
Who wrote me a prescription without comment.

***

Anita Sivakumaran grew up in Madras and now lives in London. She has published short stories in Riptide Journal Volumes 4 and 6 (forthcoming) and is writing a collection of poems about the urban woman’s experiences in India. More here: www.redpolkachaddi.blogspot.com

Smile on Repeat

I’ll be high on your smile,
If you’d only let it extend a mile,
Slowly let it tip-toe into your cheek,
And off your dimple, let it leak.

Ch: If really I could,
I really would,
Oh baby,
You know me,
I’d clean it up and make things neat,
Just to play your smile on repeat.

Come on, fair boy,
Play your demeanor a tad coy,
Loosen that brittle,
And smile a little.

Ch: If really I could,
I really would,
Oh baby,
You know me,
I’d clean it up and make things neat,
Just to play your smile on repeat.

Bridge: If you’d try to put that smile
in your wallet,
I can bet,
I can promise you,
that it’ll say, “no can do”
Baby, my billionaire,
Do that thing, that makes me stare.

Ch: If really I could,
I really would,
Oh baby,
You know me,
I’d clean it up and make things neat,
Just to play your smile on repeat.

 

-Esha Hegde

Hmnn

Hullo, so where are we at, now? I need that book proposal from you. Next week, so that it gives me time to meet you – however briefly – to discuss the portfolio. Later, I’m going to put up a note about how to write the proposal, but don’t depend on it, you know how I can be.

Take a look at this thing below, and tell me what you think of it.

K

I Dance, Therefore I Am

Momus 12.13.05

One evening last week I got up from my computer — I seem to be on the damned thing all the time, using my body so little I might as well be a brain in a jar — and went to a party.

It was a birthday party at the apartment of my friends Xavier and Anne, and it turned out to be pretty fun. Actually, when I think about it, what I did all night at that party was exactly what I do at home all day: interface with a computer. But Xavier’s computer knows something my home computer doesn’t, something important: It knows I have a body.

Xavier’s “computer” is a Sony PlayStation 2 hooked up to a USB camera called EyeToy and a video projector. By pointing the cam toward your body and the projector toward the wall, you can see an image of your body interfacing with various game environments. We started with a simple car wash environment; the screen is covered in soap suds and you have to scrub them off by stretching, pushing and gesticulating. Although there are no real suds around you, when you see yourself, almost life-size, on screen with the suds, that becomes “reality.”

Ah, “reality” … it’s an emotive word. Perhaps it’s time for a little philosophical detour. The body doesn’t really get to represent reality in Western philosophy; just as Christianity privileges the soul over the body, so Western philosophy has tended to privilege the mind over the body. In his Meditations on First Philosophy, for instance, Descartes tries to imagine that all his experience is a mere trick played upon him by “a deceiving god.” In those circumstances, he reasons, his only certainty would be that he exists, and his proof of this would be that he is thinking: cogito ergo sum.

As I sat with my back to the wall, watching Xavier prancing around like a delusional lunatic (in fact, he was watching himself dispatch ninjas in a karate game called Kung 2), I couldn’t help thinking of Plato’s famous metaphor of the cave, which occurs in The Republic and is, in a way, the ancestor of Descartes’ idea of the deceiving god. How do we know that everything around us isn’t a deception? Plato asks us to imagine people chained in a cave in which a fire throws flickering shadows against the wall. Never having left the cave and seen the sun, these people (prototype video gamers, perhaps) would believe that the shadows were reality.

Plato’s higher reality, though, turns out to be as cerebral as Descartes’. It’s a realm called “the ideas” (or “forms”), and it turns out to be suspiciously similar to a linguistic conception of reality. Every physical horse is different, but the word, idea or category “horse” is unchanging, and therefore “real.”

It’s this conception of reality — which elevates mind over body, the universal over the particular, and the unchanging over the changeable — that has informed (too much, some might say) the development of computing up until now. I have the evidence right here at my fingertips; the main way for me to interface with this machine I sit face to face with all day is still through a keyboard — a linguistic tablet, an alphabetic abacus.

In his Letters to Milena, Kafka wrote: “One can think about someone far away and one can hold on to someone nearby; everything else is beyond human power. Writing letters, on the other hand, means exposing oneself to the ghosts, who are greedily waiting precisely for that. Written kisses never arrive at their destination; the ghosts drink them up along the way.”

It’s this ghostliness, this non-corporeality, which is the hazard of computing, too. Sure, you can switch the thing off, go for a jog, cycle or swim. Personally, I’ve bought a pile of chi machines and vibrators to keep my circulation going, to shake up my blood after hours hunched over screen and keyboard. But these measures still separate body and mind (now it’s body time, now it’s mind time) and I want them to be united. Thinking, after all, comes directly out of a body: Nietzsche could only write philosophy by going for vigorous walks in the Alps. (Some say his crazier ideas came from an advanced — though never proven — case of syphilis.)

Brian Eno, interviewed by Wired magazine in 1995, said: “Do you know what I hate about computers? The problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them. This is why I can’t use them for very long. Do you know what a nerd is? A nerd is a human being without enough Africa in him or her.”

Instantly, of course, you can hear angry nerds throwing testy accusations of essentialism against Eno. What is Africa? Is it all the same thing? Is that thing something to do with the body rather than the mind? The now rather than deferred gratification? Spontaneous expression rather than planning? The concrete rather than the abstract? Will Africa always be these things? Are we, by using “Africa” as shorthand for these things, helping condemn it to failure?

But, there at Xavier’s party, working up a lather punching out pixelated spotlights in the dance game Groove, I understood exactly what Eno meant. Finally, this was a computer with a bit of “Africa” in it. A computer that understood the bit of “Africa” in me.

“I dance,” I thought to myself, nudging a new high score as friends cheered me on, “therefore I am.”

//