Sudden visions of engagement rings chained together in the shape of a noose. Leaving lives behind. Ten thousand years of externally controlled thoughts and decisions, hiding my revolutionary nature, expressing creativity within confines of marriage, motherhood. Forced subtlety, sublimation of passion into calm, accommodating delivery. Slavery of the body, soul negotiated then promised to another. Bengali woman, show yourself. Lower back pops as I type this; releasing sexual histories engraved with my name, old healing projects and emotional ties, the familiar desire to spend my years building against the crumbling structure of a broken man. When I finally choose a whole lover, I will have learned to revere life as well as death.

I slide back into old patterns, wanting control, wanting to own the one I will love, the ones I have loved. Paralyzed in the place between the programmed self and freedom. I still long to have changed, transformed into the robot that would have made it possible to continue with disturbed lovers. Indian woman. Indian woman. Indian woman. Why is self-destruction so easy? Lingering fear of being thieved, cheated, interfered with. Not just colonial disruptions of our narrative, but the original narrative — bones and joints turned arthritic, brittle and cracking in response to foreign influence. The body still believes in arranged marriage — love as mechanism following naturally from the promise and intent. Stabilizing with time, effort, force. My history lied to me: the one who loves me will never fear my absence, will never attach to me in order to avoid loss, will never press me into a wall demanding forever.

Indian woman. Indian woman. Brown daughter of genocide. Who are you beneath your fear? Your control? Your black and white, your learned habits? Can you love without chains, without promises? Does slavery always beget slavery?

Should I decide to die an ever unmarried woman? I am not yet 32; my body still belongs more to those around me than to myself. Some never fully claim their flesh as their own. If I had made my choice when I thought I knew what I wanted, if I chose now, I would change my mind soon enough; will divorce, certainly, if I marry before 33. My hunger for stability wanes, waxes alongside my evolving manner of living. Painful myth to release, that we are the same tomorrow, will without a doubt love the same lover next year. Even if I never free myself completely from my own falsehoods, I cannot imprison myself as before. Not without consenting to abandon my worship of an unchained existence.

© 2011 Tahminah Zaman

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. cells and jail cells. 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 palm flickers with certainty, invisibly building through my fingers.

© 2010 tahminah zaman

copper-lined veins
remembered fragments welded
coiled promises

death of before,
breath forgotten in waves
broken
divide unto themselves, double
helix tomorrow drawn
as fired chariot

© 2010 tahminah zaman

i have a strong urge to pick up my cell phone, scroll down my list of contacts and find someone to talk to. i reach for my bag, then pull my hand back, remembering how this hour, the sixty minutes between 12:53 and 1:53 this Saturday afternoon, is my only time to draw. my three-year-old son is with his mother a few blocks away, she may call at any moment to demand i take him back, to say she’s feeling tired, sick, fragile, who knows what her excuse will be today.

should i draw my eyelashes as they really exist on my face, or less dramatically? they’ve always been too long for my taste, and straight and unruly, crashing together at unpredictable angles. i look over at the woman, she is lying on her back, using her gunmetal gray purse as a pillow for her head, reading a book. on the cover, the name Salman Rushdie, she’s a polemic. her beauty is unsettling, strange–her features are small but intense; the jawline gentle and understating the wide brown eyes, their corners upturned, grave and discerning, the nose a tame enough shape but its endpoint unmistakably Indian. the lips of medium fullness, pink and quiet, mouth relaxed and resolute. she wears a wine-colored dress, an intoxicating burgundy, and a necklace of raw, roughly cut garnets. her hair spirals in tendrils around her face, a blackish copper under the white Berkeley sun.

she knows i am looking; she ignores my gaze, my charcoal, my moving hands. as if a glass wall stands between us, impenetrable to sound or sight.

this woman is alone, why? royal in her red dress and gems, her wind-mussed raven curls, reading a thick volume in the center of a college town, why has no man, no woman joined her Saturday outdoor reverie? the heat rises in me, my hands stop their charcoal dance, i stare at the eyes, the hair, the lips that promise seduction and certain satisfaction of mortal desire. the space around her curvaceous body, trapped in its scarlet dress, is so open, so empty. i am a man, i am subject to this type of musing. weak to the injustice of a woman this whole, this timeless, having only the company of an old Rushdie book on this first Saturday in June. anger buzzes around my head, dizzying and red like the garnets along the curve of the woman’s neck.

my cell phone, sitting beside me on my bench, erupts into its pop-rock ringtone, loudly shattering the moment. the woman glances my way, unaffected, immediately turns back to her reading. it is my ex-wife, calling at 1:29, reminding me not to be late. not to be late, which means, in her language, come early to take our son away. i put my charcoal back in its box, feeling suddenly drained of inspiration.

i look one last time at the Indian woman in red, her eyes blink as she turns the page of her novel. she gives me a small, unencouraging smile. i push my sketch pad back into my bag, get up, turn my body in the direction of my ex-wife’s apartment. as i walk away, i close my eyes and try to recall the stranger’s face, her spiraling hair, her supine posture, the blood red of her necklace and dress. next saturday at 1:53, my hands will have time to bring her back, in charcoal lines, to the People’s Park, lying in the shade of a large poplar tree. alone, so alone.

© 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

poems written and covered in leather
leaves bound in gold thread
high on laddered shelves

syllables cocoon around bodies
into a language of refuge

each new-soldered word
fighting the others for audience

whose history do these letters recall?
On whose grave does the tongue
of a speaker step?

What do beautiful words do?
Shelter us from outside view.

The key to any locked tower
is a word;
enclosed spaces promise privacy

if I learn your dialect
will you include me?

© 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