Mariyam Fatima- End Term Assignment

                                                                      Prompt-2

The car smelled of heavy perfume, the kind that settles inside your lungs when you breathe and it suffocates you. I pulled the handle of the door and threatened him that I will jump out. We kept yelling at each other. He kept speeding up. “I am nauseated” I said, “Can you stop?”

I fidgeted like a little girl, holding my gut that might spill out like an unattended honey jar kept on the edge of a table. Ammi sat on the oldest chair in the house. Abbu was over sentimental about it and had refused to throw it away even when its back fell off and the ropes strung together could hardly take anyone’s weight, “it’s my first clinic chair” he used to say. She sat on the backless chair reciting verses from the Quran, her Friday ritual on a warm early afternoon. I could not interrupt her; I sat there going over my confession over and over again. The verses surrounded me, going round and round into my head through my ears like a bull running in a mad house. I called her out “Ammi? Ek masla hai…” she pulled up her finger and dismissed me, turned a page and continued reciting. There was my chance, it was gone. My lungs could not breathe and asked me to find more air. We live on the ground floor, the sun hardly comes in. All I could do then was get up and leave “Allah Hafiz!” and walked out of the door, descending slowly as tears gushed out of my eyes. I walked faster and faster throwing salams here and there to familiar faces who probably did not even care. The phone kept on ringing, when it stopped the screen showed 27 missed calls from Ved. It was Jumma. I knew I would not pray; I had places to be. Maybe my faith was dwindling. High school is when it all changed and I fell from regular prayers to jumma prayers to no prayers at all. The last one took everything out of me, slowly steadily and suddenly. I took an auto to J-block Saket.

A narrow staircase, wide enough only for one person, lead to the four walls of his dirty apartment where lipstick stained whiskey glasses laid on the black slab of the kitchen with dried liquor at the bottom and dust settled everywhere. One, two, three neat glasses of Blender’s Pride were pushed down my throat as I heard the Azan. I weighed forty seven kgs, three pegs were too much for my body.

“Uth kar baith!” he said, I tried to get up as much as my body allowed me “dekh, ye dekh” he said showing me missed calls from my mother. “I need to get back” I stuttered. “Chal phir” he said mocking me, taking my socks off. “Give me my phone” I said, he held my face forcing my braces to dig in my cheeks. Blood came easily. Alcohol spared me the pain; it only hurt when I was sober. A plastic chair with no personality of her own held my clothes helplessly every time it happened, like it would speak as my witness when I would need her. “No, please!”

I slammed the car door and walked towards the metro, the ground kept moving as I tried to step on it. I somehow always managed to keep myself firm on it. The stairs were the hard part. I blinked a lot, trying to keep my eyeballs in place. I was always scared that they will roll over to the other side; blinding me. I went in security check and came out. I took the train from Saket to Central Secretariat and then Jawaharlal Nehru stadium. My phone rang again “Ji ammi, class mai hu” and I hung up. Classes didn’t start until three. Evening college made the day seem longer. I didn’t know if I will be sober enough to sit in class. College was crowded all the time. My lungs always complained for more air. I always blamed my sinus. It didn’t differentiate between seasons. It was active all year round. I thought about the early afternoon again, ammi covering her head with a yellow rubatta smelling of fresh shampoo. The heat made me dizzy as the professor talked about the garland wedding of Shakuntala and King Dushyanta. Shakuntala’s fate seemed unnecessarily hard to me.  

“I am not afraid.” I said looking up at him as he sat on the desk looking down at me. “I am not afraid of you.” My cheek stung like a hot iron was pressed against it, realizing only after moments that he slapped me. “aur ab?” All my schoolmates looked at me with eyes wide and lips apart. He repeated, “aur ab?”   

I came home, knocked at the door. The doorbell has been off for years, no one cared to fix it. I knocked again. Waiting for the door to open seemed like there was a little hope for change or escape. Bhai came with ear plugs hanging from his ears, talking louder than necessary “Arey aapa aagai aap” in a squeaky voice that he made up whenever he teased me. “I will cut you if you call me ‘aapa’ again” I said latching the door behind me. Everyone was sitting on the dining table. I washed my hands and retired to the washroom. Slowly I took my clothes off, washed in between my legs ignoring the feeble pain in my abdomen. Abbu yelled from the table “beti ke liye kurri haddi bacha du?” I shouted back from the washroom “haan abbu please, thank you!” I ran the shower to let it wash away the day from my memory to accommodate more. Ammi shouted “Jaldi karo, salan thanda ho raha hai”. I wore abbu’s old kurta that was too oversized for me. My thin hands hung from the sleeves like two bare branches which can never grow flowers. I sat at the table and ate half a tandoori roti with gravy, forcing every bite down like glasses of whisky, chewing like a bull with no mind. My mouth burned as the gravy stung the cuts inside my mouth, I blamed the braces. Ammi said “kya accha nahi hai?” I chewed a little and said “accha hai, Alhumdulliah”. Ammi collected the dishes, as everyone returned to their phones and laptops, and piled them up in a corner. I could see chewed bones sticking out form the sides and left over salad mixed in gravy. I shifted in the chair looking at the bones wanting to throw up. I finished my meal and went to the bedroom. Abbu was talking over the phone, telling someone how admissions through AIPMT were not easy and the score was not good enough and that maybe he should reconsider sending his child into medical. I picked up my book and read on about Shakuntala’s struggle as she lost the ring that would help her identify herself as Dushyant’s wife. Abbu asked me “din kaisa raha?” “thik tha” “dost bane” “nahi”.

“I don’t think I am ready for this” I said annoyed by his repetitive proposal. “par ye he toh next step hai” said Ved “I don’t want to” I said. “mujhe toh koi bhi mil jaegi, Russians bhi. But you love me so I won’t do it with anyone else.” Ved replied half drunk. “But you can if you want to, seriously just do it if you want I don’t mind.” I insisted with indifference. Ved mocked me and my sobriety “Phir tumhe kon pyar karega?”

Ammi stood in the kitchen as a ritual for every night stirring a pan full of chai, where the tea leaves shivered with pain, it looked like a masquerade ball of misery. Sweat dripped from the back of the neck and slid down to her kameez darkening its color. I bit on my lips with no appetite for confessions or conversation but a desperation that was eating my skin from underneath reminding me of the four walls that moved around tired me. As I became more and more intoxicated on forced whisky, Ved satisfied his idea of love which sought no permission. I opened the water bottle and drank half of it hoping it will clear the alcohol in my system. “Jumma toh padha nahi aaj” Ammi said stirring the chai. “mmm… nahi padha” I replied with sincere apology in my tone. “galat baat hai” Ammi complained with her back towards me continuously stirring the chai as if her life depended upon it. I looked at her back now with new sweat patches forming thinking about how I was just like her. I inherited her ways, her introversion and she passed on her passivity as a gift to survive in this world. I wondered if I would survive at all with no tongue to express my situation. Did she survive at all? Endure it. She poured the chai in three cups and said “kya masla tha subah, batao” wiping the spilled chai with a kitchen towel that could barely soak anything. Everything came to me in jumbled sentences and my lungs screamed for more air. The water in my stomach created tides that could come out of my mouth with elaborate images of intoxication. The feeble pain in my abdomen cried a little asking for this favor. I came back to myself as she arranged the cups on a tray placing it in my hands. I said, “In Sha Allah, phir kabhi”.

Self - Reflective Essay 

When I took this course I thought it might not really make a difference to my writing style but nonetheless it will be fun to try it out. I was very skeptical about seeing any change in just four months of time. This course actually did more than I thought it would for me as a poet. The problem that I always faced as a poet was that I could not write bound under prompts. What this course offered was how to explore my creativity even when kept inside a box. The exercises that were done in class to understand the techniques of writing was the easy part, that hard part was to engage with them on paper as I wrote my own poems. After a while of trying and failing to inculcate those techniques consciously in my poems, I pushed myself into reading a lot of poems outside of the course and tried to make sense of how a poet engages with such techniques without actually losing the intention of writing the poem itself. This was my biggest fear that maybe in order to indulge with too many line breaks or repetition I will end up being a wannabe. But to my surprise I realized that these were actually refining my work. It helped in creating the effects that I might otherwise fail to enhance. The poem that I wrote for midterm assignment called “Dragon fly” I tried to follow a set pattern and really put myself under that condition where I followed a set of twelve lines in each stanza. It seems like it is easy to do, but it was way more difficult than I thought. I learned a lot with that struggle. So I decided to try that for another poem “From Sylvia”. About this piece, I always wanted to write about Plath but could never really bring myself to do it probably because I was always intimidated. The prompts played an important role in achieving this. This course also made me more critical of my work and actually provided tools to dismantle my own work and view it objectively. Some of the poems that I did for the midterm bothered me a lot in term of how I applied the techniques I learned in class that I would otherwise miss.

The two days of workshop, brought a lot of perspective with free writing exercise done in class. Since then I have tried a lot of free writing to bring fresh ideas on paper and it has been working well for me. So I think this is really something that I am going to practice regularly. I have learned to go back to my older works and work on them with fresh perspective. I have made some changes that made the poems better in some ways. I have always been that person who writes something and then never goes back to it, so this course really pushed me to read my work again and again to see if it can be made any better. It also pushed me to be more comfortable with new techniques that I was to use deliberately. It really put me in a position where I willing jumped into the more uncomfortable form of writing which I have never attempted before – prose writing. I was petrified to attempt the fiction and non-fiction prompts, absolutely dreading them. So I thought I will stick to poetry. Half way through writing poems for the end term, I realized I need to do it even if I do it just once. This is one major achievement that I see that came with this course because I could never see myself writing prose even in another universe. The use of two or more languages being a crucial part of the prompt I tried to make a fair use of it to the best of my ability.

Another important thing is that as I was going through was a writer’s block after under graduation; this course really pushed me out of it. I was forced to see things from different perspectives. This helped me suppress the dystopian side and try to bring in hope a little bit in my poems. I also channeled the impulsive writing into a habitual writing. I tried to make my poems more structured rather than a splatter of different thoughts in just one poem. I think I have a lot to look back to and work on now that I am more comfortable with myself as a poet.