only unborn children can create this much suffering. dressed as lovers they invade my senses, making me nostalgic for that which i have conquered: empty desire and shallow lust. prey to inferior men, to the structures programmed into my bones, my wheat skin. myth of loneliness, destroy yourself. i betray my ancestors’ prescriptions unto my life, the light of a million indian women fueling my rebellion. slavery, forced sex, coerced marriage. a brothel fantasy played out, mongolian-style, at bengali weddings. how much money will be enough to win the bride behind the gilded door?

the promises i made in exchange for this body. i must break them now in order to keep them, to stay on course. dealings within the bounds of bloodlines, my lies of loyalty born of sly innocence. my need, sated outside the enclosure of marital duty, evokes their revenge: headaches and my flesh drained of fire. i leave my body when they strike; the pain dulling, tangible enough to evacuate the spirit.

the skin, peeled back, reveals muscle. the power of my body to diffuse and gather energies, to move and direct their flow, subjugates my environment. transforms it. sorcery of my birth, cunning of my arrival into this place, this time. all was desired and manifested according to my will. and to what new forces will i become mother during this visit? the center of each hand flickers with certain ability, invisibly building through my fingers.

© 2010 tahminah zaman

the curiosity of your lips–pink ambassadors to a mouthful of white capricorn teeth, beautifully square and even. your knees beneath my fingers, as if there were no denim between my fingertips and your skin. knowing those joints, the hardness of their bones, would fall victim to my touch. maybe i loved you, after all, for your helplessness against me.

i regret nothing, certainly not the lesson in futility. a hundred lifetimes spent hearing words that stabbed like knives, acid raining into my growing heart. that first saturday, your breath tasted of nothing more bitter than coffee, no pain had yet been delivered from between those white, even teeth. that, like so many other realities, came later.

eight weeks after i leave you, i sit alone in bed under a down blanket, hoping it doesn’t storm tonight. praying sky’s tears don’t drum against the roof. i don’t want another reminder of those nights, last december, when it rained hard for twenty days in a row, a painted wood ceiling above us, making love to the man who lied to me, who said he wanted to live his life by my side and father my children. who convinced me that distance and my own deficiency were the reasons i had never seen his family, his hometown, his true self.

the sky is black and clear, the night cold and the moon new. a light shines in a neighbor’s window; i am not the only insomniac grieving at midnight. it is tomorrow; the sun held back for another five hours, but morning here. keep the darkness still; let the sweetness of loss absorb completely, let those wasted lifetimes coagulate, echoes of a single utterance — one that could not be silenced. speech unable to resist the temptation, the glory, of sound.

© 2010 tahminah zaman

there was the one who loved me before him, who walked away only to return two years later to say she made a mistake, you should have been my children’s mother, now there’s no return from exile. clarity came too late, too much had changed. now a lover who lacks that fire, she said, raw passion. the flame that threatened control.

you left so many times i knew the scars would be stubborn to fading. now your silence, your quiet resignation to this bitter outcome, almost drowns away the sounds of your voice denigrating me, a bracelet i built for you hurled and exploding against our bedroom wall, its bloodstone jasper pieces lost in beige carpet. i gathered those bits together, put them in your jewelry box full of my creations, to remind you of your promise to string it back together. then i left the keys on your bar, pulled the door closed behind me.

one day will you remember this: that my love alone could never heal you, could not replace your fear of your father nor compare to your mother’s worship. will you call your error, your reluctance, your regret by name? or will you deny your heart’s logic completely? to whom, if anyone, will you speak those words? in my absence, only Ganesh and Kali remain, inert atop your bureau next to that broken bracelet in its carved wood box. and will you transfer your grief to their forms? or will you stay the same: hold everything within, wondering why you lie apart from the world outside?

© 2010 tahminah zaman

dear salman rushdie and elizabeth bishop,

what a breadth of work is included here! the narratives are tricky, heavy, humorous. so many voices speaking from their corners of existence—an “osteo-warped” young man in a wheelchair (“Trying to Grow”), a calculating woman who marries and drives her family into the economic class above herself (“Shakti”), a male indian doctor’s terrifying visit to Nashawy, Egypt, where he is derided for not performing clitorectomies in his homeland (“Nashawy”). there is a thrilling global shape to this anthology despite its seeming confinement to “indian” writers and you manage to make this text varied, multifaceted, and beautifully sequenced. i read and reread “In the Mountains” because of its courageous representation of a woman unsocialized to her upper-crust family’s consumptive, social ways. the mother idolizes the daughter who defies all that is recognizable about being an indian woman, an unexpected and real turn to the narrative. the queer male desire visited in “Trying to Grow” is a risky intervention into two marginalized spaces—the queer and differently abled worlds. many of these stories inhabit multiple rooms of class, gender, migrancy. the thread unifying the works presented here is the tenacity of the characters and the grounded storytelling employed by the authors. sara suleri’s “Meatless Days” shows up here as well, proving the most-anthologized ‘south asian’ short story i’ve seen, as i’ve read it already in Our Feet Walk the Sky: Women of the South Asian Diaspora. didn’t you read that anthology? maybe you wanted to bring it to a wider audience — a men’s audience. provocative, expansive, confident. a successful collection.

thank you,
Tahminah Zaman

© 2010 tahminah zaman

my dear shani mootoo,

these stories are weird. “Out on Main Street” is the jewel of this collection, reflecting the complexity of the indians in the caribbean in a funny, smart, thorough manner. the queer factor is brilliant; the queer women’s culture that permeates the space of the indian sweetshop over the course of the text fully centers the women’s presence in a normative space peopled with first-generation married indian couples. the sweetshop is an illustration of crossing between multiple realms; gay and straight, first-generation indian immigrants to the west indies and the ones born and grown up there, female and male, normative and oppositional to the norm. the story is well paced, the timing measured to deliver the jokes throughout. there is much to learn and analyze here.

i asked myself why you exaggerated the characters, sketching them in black and white in some of the stories, especially “A Bright New Year’s Eve’s Night,” in which the man and woman characters are caricatures of a patriarchal, heteronormative world. at first they seemed less believable to me as a result of their over-the-top characterization and i saw too starkly the unforgiving lesbian lens that positions Tanya and Bobby in a diametric opposition of power—Tanya’s only agency is to kill Bobby to stop his physical and psychological abuse. after a few days of reflection, i remembered your background — west indian. these points are exaggerated in order to make the scene, the moral, the outcome of the story unmistakable. this, along with “Lemon Scent,” is a cautionary tale.

“Sushila’s Bhakti” isn’t deep enough. the painter loses her edge as a result of internalizing the orientalist criticism of her work. she loses herself and needs the labels of indian food coloring and basmati rice to make her feel authentic and free again? the narration is choppy, unintegrated, forced. the logic of this story depends too much on Sushila’s unquestioned sense of exile.

while your work could be described as somehow less conciliatory than jhumpa lahiri’s, for example, because you write through that lesbian-feminist lens, it still operates as a series of distortions in these writings. but the voice is there, and while i think you’re better suited to novels—Cereus Blooms at Night is among my favorite south asian diasporic novels—the short stories need more layers.

thank you,
Tahminah Zaman

© 2010 tahminah zaman

dear reetika vazirani,

what works in these poems is the tangibility of your details, the theme of dichotomy of visibility and invisibility, showing the remnants of coloniality and life and consciousness within it, the presence of the body, and the ways you use language and place to dislocate the tongue.

the details are disorienting in their precision; the flowers come alive, embodying a woman’s separation from her homeland, dramatizing the work of mothering children along with the neighbor woman, the “wandering Jew she’d / rooted on her windowsill” (“Gardening: Hollywood Lane”, page 53). there is some pain in these objects, there is a resistance in the telling, a sense of weight and risk involved. the stories within the poetry is more believable for that heft.

the language is a sword with two edges, at once making objects and sentiments visible or shrouding them in subtlety. it is what isn’t said directly that makes the reader work to assemble the poems’ pieces — a woman in exile is written through her actions, rooting a “wandering Jew” where she can keep it close. the feeling of exile is relayed by the crowdedness of objects and by the woman’s busynesss.

“Nikos of Caravy Street” (page 89) is a one-on-one conversation between a speaker and Nikos. the intimacy expressed in this dialogue is awesome; there is a heightened sense of something being at stake. the speaker’s voice is naked, while the exact story is shrouded by the speaker’s tone of exasperation and authority. the body speaks an indirect language, the tongue of object and action and location.

funny, bright, unexpected juxtapositions in this book. Maria Callas and the goddess Radha inhabit “Emigration” (102) and leaving feels lighter than exile. you play with sound and silliness: “I meant to call but lost myself at the mall” (103). what are you doing here? these writings are an intervention into thinking, into quick judgments. there are multiple facets to the stories, each story a facet of the telling.

thank you,
tahminah zaman

© 2010 tahminah zaman

my dear sara suleri,

before i forget — i have begun to pick out shifts in your memories that show me what you have done. that is, given us your family. your love for each member is singular, yet strings together all the rememberings permitted the body. you inhabit your work as a steak or cornish game hen inhabits a plate. carnally. there are hundreds of metaphors here, wordy substitutions of one body of meaning for another. your project may have been simply to remember. triangular dialogue (you, second person in your story, then you again) gives me traces of the poeticism and banter by which your narrator measured the aliveness of the other speaker, the listener, the other. the lingering flames of the lost elder sister and mother are telling their own stories through the narrator, who shares the stage with the other characters. these personal stories reflect a sense of the narrator’s extremity of emotionalism in her relationships with her ‘intimates’ and with herself. the remembrance, ridden with the anxiety of needing to capture one sentiment in succession with many more, brings the flesh, the gestures, and the words of the dead into being. the fierce closeness between the narrator and your family members recalls the inevitability of loss, of death, of time’s racing and crawling by, of death. how to beautify the truth of death? you recall with laughter, by evoking those imprints of emotion that still sting — sweetly, perhaps, or not at all — that once stung. so it is joy and courage and the ability to autotransform that justify the telling of the dead’s stories, justify the inclusion of their voices; the women whose voices must have rung in your head since your conception. and it is your sense of humor, after all, that redeems the roller coaster of your grief — that process into the purification of love.

as memoir, you turned personal into universal. somehow the huge, tightly wound nerve that dictator’s the narrator’s train of sensory discourse radiated away outward, toward the reader. ifat’s face, a portrait refigured and revisited within the narrative, is positioned and presented as an eternal image in the psyche of the narrator, a reminder of loss, a testament to the reality of ifat’s (short) life.

another thing you gave was pakistan. karachi, lahore, sialkot. the overlap with India. Pakistan in both name and flesh, its politics raining down on your family, the war-torn brother-in-law ifat brought back before she died.

and the content and craft: there were long paragraphs incorporating dialogue, crowded and overflowing with metaphors streaming as consciousness does. the metaphors and analogies substitute objects for one another, underscoring their tangibility; that of people and emotions, too. each thought is translated into a self-contained paragraph, a vignette revealing the life and death of characters. remembrance is an effective theme, taking effect through a sense of carnality. you struggle to reconcile life and death. the personal logic you draw from that difficulty makes the emotion completely transparent, universal.

thank you,
T. Zaman

© 2010 tahminah zaman

and borrowed land to feed you
falling bloodily away.
where they touched earth,
they were named
Bangladesh and Pakistan.

surely you recall
your mother’s final exhalation;
the ulcered belly
whose memory of bearing, once
–a world away from her birthplace–
your baby flesh,
was buried with her
in her grave.

down the front of my body,
the tearing of Punjab
into two
leaves a gash, stapled over,
crusted with the salt of red tears;
i do not weep as my daughter
washes away the used tissue,
i do not cling to what must
be released.

my children’s feet will step
across the scar
that made–unlike nature–
three from one:
pieces whose forms fit
snugly together
each unclaimed by the other,
abandoned.

© 2009 tahminah zaman

my key lets me into a huge manor, the heavy oak door swinging inward to welcome me. on my right is a raised living room, walled, with arches cut into it. one of the arches has a cloth hanging, a transparent cloth. once i open the door, i feel someone inside the house. i tense, expecting to see an intruder. rather than removing my boots i wear them into the foyer, dirtying the polished wood floor beneath my feet.

through the first archway, where the cloth hangs, i see the moving silhouette of a woman. her back is to me, dark hair flowing against her long tunic. she is walking away from me. i take a few more steps and look through another archway, open and unclothed. i see a brown woman picking up a prayer mat, a jah namaaz, rolled up after use. it is my mother, my muslim mother who has been dead for almost three years.

she is wearing her glasses, her tunic is a deep gray-blue that reaches the floor. in a moment she is before me and i embrace her, kissing her cheek and descending to my knees. her feet sit in platform sandals, the kind she wore when she was alive because she said she couldn’t walk without a little bit of heel anymore. i kiss each of her toes, starting with her right foot. i don’t know why i start with her second toe.

do i rise and embrace her again after that? i don’t know. the dream stretches on and on, one of my sisters enters the dream, the one i grew up with. the one i was a baby with. there are others around, other women. during one moment in the dream, the three of us are together and i can’t stop crying. my mother, after all this time, is still telling me not to cry, not realizing that the coming together of this world and the next is overwhelming for the living.

i was sleeping next to my lover when my mother visited me in this dream. i had been praying for a visit from her, i had been praying for a beautiful dream to interrupt the obscure, twisted ones that seemed to be filling my mind every night and morning. i had blamed my mother in life and after her death, i had promised when i washed her body before her burial to forgive her, let everything go, and yet some resentment remained. it pushed her spirit away. she stopped her visits during my waking hours because the ghostliness of them scared me. it was like living in a ouija board, like i did when i was younger. fascinated by the power of calling spirits to me. but i prayed for her return, i asked for a peaceful reunion, and i was granted my desire.

i recall the tan cowboy boots against the pavement, the happiness in my step as i heard my lover’s voice on the phone. i turn the key into an unknown mansion, and the dream begins again.

© 2009 t zaman

this song makes me miss you so much. how many thousands of miles are you away, traveling, somewhere in the motherland. the place we both got our brown skin. you say that each trip you make to india changes you, reminds you of our imagined hardships here, renews your love of our origins. i hope the tropical dew nourishes you, not like the cold oakland winds this time of year. when you return i’ll make sure to cover you in shea butter, i’ve been practically bathing in it lately, the air is becoming so dry. this weekend felt like summer during the days. it scares me that the seasons switch places.

it’s almost monday. ten more days without you, my love. my heart counts the hours down, i can hear it in my chest. ticking. can you feel the bones of our ancestors holding you up in that homeland? we’ve covered the earth over, it’s true, but we started somewhere close to where you are now. even the thick pollution of mumbai air, i know, can’t keep all the energy in the ground. i hope you are relaxed, dear one, i hope your soul is refreshed by that presence.

when you come home, when you get back to oakland, it will have been more than three weeks since our last kiss. in a sense, time has stopped here without you. there is no one to love without you, no one to whom i can give myself, no one i want to touch. it’s during your absence that i feel this lack i can only celebrate because it means that finally, we have found one another. all the little terrors of everyday life, the dangers of existing are more difficult to bear without you here. i must have been more used to them before i met you. the knowledge that life is temporary, momentary, won’t leave me. what if even a lifetime together isn’t enough? twenty-two days without your hands, your lips, your eyelashes, your touch–the unthinkable has arrived.

it’s nearing midnight and i imagine you waking up from your deep sleep. i make a cup of tea, pull a teabag from the paper bag inside a box with a striped bengal tiger on the front. the body of the tiger is lithe, its black markings slashed over orange and white hair. in the background, the leaves of a palm tree, a brown woman in a sari walking a gourd of water down a dirt road, tall reeds flanking her moving body. in the foreground, huge bowls of the nutmeg and chicory to be ground into the chai. Bengal Spice, that’s the name of the flavor.

my love, i am waiting for your voice, your words, to reach me again.

until then,

your goondi

© 2008 tahminah zaman