‘Where I Come From’ & ‘Bespoken’

by Vinita Agrawal

Where I Come From

I come from the sands
where words sprout like cacti
when girls are born.

I come from ochre, autumn-hued earth
baked dry under a fierce sun.
Where grit and wind needle the eyes,
where storms compel women
to live inside tombs of veils.

I come from a place
where dusk turns into a seductress by night,
lying velvety warm on bohemian, linen charpoys.

I come from the land famous for making puppets
both from wood and flesh.
The wooden ones entertain children.
Flesh puppets entertain men – for life.

I come from a geography
where girls embroider silence,
unfurl quilts of wordlessness,
vast, like star studded desert skies.

Their quietude as deep as the space
where tears are born,
high as the walls that keep history in,
subtle like the rivers that roamed these plains once.

Gurgling, buoyant ghaghra-clad girls
now untraceable, lost forever.
That’s where I come from.

Bespoken

So many nameless daughters lost
that we cannot begin to look for them.
Their absence encased
in the prayers of those who survived.

The sun shines for the ‘master’ of the house
while ‘she’ remains twinned to darkness;
small barred windows
hinting at far off blue skies.

Some days, she makes it to adult literacy classes,
her face bruised.
The ellipsis of a veil
bending her story into the archives of flesh.

Victory does not lie in silence,
but in speaking up.
Mitigation, in rubbing the blood
off the morning mirror,

and feeling it throb in veins
like a train ploughing tracks.
Her battles fought −
word by word, act by act.

Woman, girl, female foetus…
the world stands hushed before you
like the air of stillness before a storm;
say whatever it is that you have to say.

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