Confessions of a dutiful daughter | Rangona Bandyopadhyay

Winter dissolves inside my mouth
I bite on it as hard as I can
Trying mighty hard with a shovel in my hand 
- negotiating with the dead;

What we wouldn't do
to know if we are lost on the one
we offer our love to, 
hoping they would chime in someday,
mewling like a cough rattled in our throat
but they never do.

I watch the news like a thin-lipped parson on Sundays,
papers pile up on the desk
like barrels of smoke from the past
making their way to the bin and back
like a love affair off the rack
moments before the telephone interrupts;

Back to the building I grew up in- 
Last December, a little too late. 

Death was supposed to be an angry visitor
on its' way to someplace else
as the morning unfurled on my lap
I tried to mow the lawn
smoked a cigarette instead;
like it was easy to have Maa gone

And as the lights wilt like dry orchids
I hear her as the tunes mock :
‘ye kagaz ki kashti’ – her favourite song
I dream of all the waiting in her eyes
tucking on my eyelids, locked down in memories
Descending. 

She did that to herself; I think
the stony bones in the name of a face
I had outgrown

The last time we talked on the phone
I saw the little girl again;
the one I hid under the kitchen sink when I was nine
licking all the love she was offered of off a tiny spoon
feet gathered like a lamp;
life’s superlatives hanging by the thread
as you outcried father under the shelves

I remember asking you, Maa- ‘what is your game?’
your voice whistled. you said,
''It's like they can sniff it, you know?
it's a disease. I am never the one''

Little did you know.

Rangona has completed her Bachelors in Literature from St. Xavier’s College and can be found watching Modern Family or cooking white-sauce pasta in her spare time.