Remember the time our mothers tagged our body parts
with our fingers as pointers
we learnt that the white space with black clots
were not the Yin and Yang but eyes,
and the bony fleshy button was the nose.
then 2 lips that will taste life.
2 arms- left and right
that moved swiftly in fights with my sibling
and those which are lay down are the feet.
and they stumble a lot.
The magically folding chairs are the knees with no nuts and bolts. and then there is a space left,
the flesh between the thighs.
My mother termed my clit and vagina.
Shame Shame.

Neither I nor her knew that this repetition was to become
a metaphor for the rest of my life.
It was embraced, betrayed, mutilated, dragged.
touched when asked for and touched when I didn't knew what a touch meant.
In store rooms at family gatherings,
In parks with dreamy memories.
It was seen and commanded.
With eyes I don't remember and eyes that I wrote poems about.
I don't know where it began
and my consciousness refutes to note. but the body remembers.

So I scrubbed its cells for years thinking a touch could be removed.

My 8 year old self was growing up everyday with a sense of pollution - colonised and captured.
Till I was 18 finding a release from this invaded body,
a messiah whom I crawled towards on my magically folding knees.
He was the Messiah but the cross was my love. So when he left..he left. He left.

One was a past the other a desired future. one was a trespasser the other a guest.
Both didn't stay Both took something
Both made me realise that my body wasn't my own.
That it becomes a public claim open to access and opinions when I walk in social gatherings
and a menagerie to be looked at on Night roads.
that my body is not just healthy functional blessing
but a connotation of patriarchal centuries.

Their is a Tamil Epic where Goddess Kannagi burns the kingdom in her lamenting anger through her breast.
Are there kingdoms enough to be burnt by the anger a woman holds? the anger of being walked over,
of being invisibilized in committee meetings
and being gazed at in breaks.
the anger of being the carrier of family honour
and being snatched off one's own honour.
the anger of not being what all one wish to be because we are reminded everyday the 2 shames we carry in between our thighs.
So when you find a girl 8 or 18,
tell her she is born free.
however untrue that maybe.

Author : Anchal Soni

Anchal is a literature student from Delhi University who is perhaps walking around the tomb or Humayun or Lodhi road searching her next muse.