Mapping Wrinkles | Shirin Bismillah

Home is where one starts from.

-T. S. Eliot

She is delightful — hair hennaed under a

cloak of secrecy; mother inherits but a

faint luminosity. A litany

of complaints are in the

making – yet soon lost on the wind.

Prone to corpulence – invalided by Irq Un Nisa¹ –

she has been plucking reasons from the air

to erase the map of

New Delhi in arrogance.

Sunflower in abundance – drying, fatty unctions.

Two kilometres away, sepulchre of Ghareeb Shah

is still veiled in verdant green– sisters had circled it

years ago for my

birth, recalls she.

Miles of golden thread in the shanty of

Maina – a fair slice of neighbourhood gather to

see us every afternoon,

but her anklets — sleeping deaf.

(Unadorned palanquin of her two daughters;

the wind had heard her throated restlessness.)

Some streets are exiled for miles here.

Fists are up again, ready to pummel some

minced meat; Kitchen awash in silver and

copper utensils – She is also the last speaker

of her language… — marrying the town with honeyed mud huts.

(for Wazda Begum)

¹Irq Un Nisa: numbness that starts in the low back and travels down the sciatic nerve in the leg, causing pain.

Author : Shirin Bismillah

Indian Review | Author Profile | Shirin Bismillah started as a hobbyist writer but is now completely devoted to it and has plans to pursue a Ph.D, later. Shirin’s works have been published, or are forthcoming in Transcendence Magazine, eFiction India, The Periphery, Earl of Plaid (Royal Purple) and brown critique.

Mapping Wrinkles | Shirin Bismillah

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