It took me a while to understand that
People caged in charcoal outlines
Have more blisters than
The stomach of a coal pit
And when I did, I wanted to go back
To being six and fanatically drawing
Clouds on walls despite my mother’sS
uperstitious admonitions
That my graphite burnishes on the concrete
Would bring debts to my father
When I asked papa what debt meant
He sharpened my pencil
And placed me high on the dresser
In front of an unblemished patch of beige wall
I moved to paper after we relocated to a place
Where the paint unpeeled with each
Stroke of my pencil and the clouds
Smelted into depressing sludge
And after years and years of drawing
Periwinkles sprouting from cracks in the walls
And tailorbirds involved in lovers’ quarrel
Flanked by paint smudges smelling like ammonia
I discovered charcoal and bodies –
Unclothed and unclouded and
Caged in mineral frames of toothed timelessness
Bodies that are material and potted
And thawing and wilting
And bodies that require
Mapping the distance between the eyebrows
And counting the pleats between the thighs
For imitating the allegory thrusted into
A woman’s statue baring her breasts to a comatose crowd
The walls are naked now
That I understand what debt means
And I hold onto the perennial faith of
The body and its jagged edges
And wordlessly practice drawing hands on the breakfast table
Of my father’s holding the morning newspaper
And my mother’s
Holding something invisible
Her grasp unsecured
But never an outstretched palm
And yet I have never seen my mother’s clenched fist
So I stealthily place the rage into her hands
Knit her hands in a mesh of protruding veins
The joints of her fingers distended
And whiter than the air of reconciliation
And the outline so darkened
That she refuses to recognize it as her own
Is that a mountain? A valley? She asks
Yes. It’s yours. I have a stack of them
And I have named them all after you
And when there are no bodies around
I rub charcoal on old newspapers with my eyes closed
That’s the void –
Paper-thin and laid to rest under my pillow
Pushpanjali Kumari is an English literature student, illustrator and trilingual poet from Jharkhand, India. Her work explores lasting encounters of her own rural Indian life.