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

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

of course, a lack of readiness. the last time around i was coerced into silence, into behaving within the chalk outlines of unforgiving rules. obedient. then, i returned toward the sign of sagittarius, overturning all i obeyed before. turning principles on their heads, watching the reversals of gravity and matter, documenting the movement from tradition to freedom. it is natural, to some extent, to fear that which we do not understand; easier to dismiss the unknown than to admit fear; simpler to explode in frustration than submit to humanness.

so many cycles of birth and death, rebirth, i’ve forgotten the knowledge i carry from before. the remembering is jarring, i find holes torn in my being from another time, another body i don’t recall. was my skin the same wheat brown, did my eagle’s eyes stare red into sun then? did my nails grow square into claws i was not allowed to use for self-defense, as i do now? hundreds of years spent learning a single lesson: the journey of self-discovery blooms from within. a thousand opened doors but he doesn’t enter. temple of desire, close your gates now.

within the stillness, between lessons, i sit alone. lost and gained, the principles and rules change. moving into the future, there is always a mark on that which is left behind. hurdles transcended, fading with each forward step. what kind of lover does a priestess, a sorceress, a magician take? the next destination, here. an instant suspended midair. no longer waiting but knowing.

© 2010 tahminah zaman

what about the nonverbal? how we spoke before words and sounds were formed, bengali syllables resounding of my roots, their many origins and places beneath chocolate soil. so much is unspoken; even the body silences itself, a pig plugged up with cool mud, unexpressed.

how far back into sound, into color, into flavor, will this tongue take me? how deeply are these roots enjoined in earth’s crust? there is a ball of blue light stuck in my throat; sound is absorbed there, disallowed exodus. i feel it spinning, tossing, bouncing against my vocal chords, rolling over all i was told not to say. like yarn, the unraveling is slow, unpredictable.

i take one end of the yarn, the one loose end i can find, pull it from my mouth and see its electric blue between my fingers. tie it to the base of an orange tree, walk away from the grove in which i was born, leaving a thread of cotton memory behind me.

© 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

you, my love, are trapped in mumbai today, thousands of miles away from the fake turkey meat and pear cranberry sauce in my mouth. you are there for a wedding whose four-day-long grandeur has been shaved down to just a small ceremony and reception at the end of this long weekend. thanksgiving day for you meant seeing the streets, schools, and city buildings shut themselves away beneath a blanket of shock. and, after all, weren’t you supposed to go to that fancy hotel that night, the night they started taking hostages and killing people for being born in the wrong countries? your family was to go there to celebrate someone’s birthday. something got in your way, and you didn’t go.

i watch the prayers written in arabic on the pages of my holy Qur’an, i imagine they are spelling your name, your family name, the gujurati syllables of your signature. the lucky name your parents gave you. i know you are there, in your bed, somewhere in mumbai away from the rooms where people are hiding and lying about their origins, trying to save their own lives. where lakes of blood and purses litter the lobbies of hotels and the hallways of hospitals, strewn with the bodies of people murdered by men who called themselves muslim. they knew about this yankee holiday, those men who chose to punish those they decided were responsible for what’s wrong in the world.

all this outside your door and yet i know you are safe, in bed, your hands searching for me, invoking me across a thousand national borders, across the ten hours of dragged time between us. feeling my body cover yours, breathing my flesh around you. i know you are listening, looking for an opening into peace, into hope, gripping yourself against all your memories of me, wanting me. your desire brings me into your room. you touch me, finding my face against yours, breasts pressing into you, my hands reaching for the parts of you that miss me most.

“on monday,” you say, “only ten more days.” until you are home. until the space between us dissolves into one long memory of separation, recalling the miles of telephone wire that bring your voice to me, these nights alone in a bed that’s grown too big without you. the single line that connects yesterday to today is a gash through which you will slip back to me. this leaving and returning a rhythm of loving, the illusion of separation to be disproven one more time.

© 2008 tahminah zaman

that

affects what a person considers himself to be while facing the

mirror”

–Shyam Divan, attorney, on Section 377

–

four hours after midnight

i wake for water, wine,

whatever is beside my bed.

–

i am alone.

–

a glass of shiraz.

–

books stacked

like vertebrae

on an altar clut

tered with pic

tures

of lost ones;

casualties in this

struggle for determination

of self

knowledge

of self

sustenance

of self

–

speechless photos

of sisters and mother

brother and father, all estranged or dead

and for this

difference

–

their children remember

the shades of this war–

quiet telephones

unsent letters

words thrown and sound

of empty background

in my reflection–

this mirror that inquires

every day

into the risk of speaking

my name

© 2008 tahminah zaman

i can taste my mother’s special bengali-style sharbath, sugared water full of sliced fruits, on my tongue. after a lifetime of being turned off by their roachlike exterior, i began eating dates, the prophet muhammad’s favorite way to break his ramzan fast, a few years ago. even the most expensive organic medjool dates don’t compare to the ones my mother brought home from hajj in makkah in 2004–their pits so soft i wondered how they had grown almonds in the center of the fruit.

my mother. all the flavors, scents, sounds, and gestures of ramzan that departed with her. her faith that slowly moved from blind to awake during the latter years of her life. the last moment i touched her body, preparing her for burial with my sister and cousin. the hundreds of people in a las vegas mosque who faced her coffin, lying eastward, on the day of her funeral. the visions don’t leave and i don’t want them to. two and a half of the longest years of my life, a life without my mother’s voice, her tender brown flesh, her nicotine-stained smile, and i wonder how i can possibly carry this burden of solitude. how i’ve lost my family in the course of this migration. how tired i am of struggling. how ready i am for changes.

a month or two ago, i had a dream visitation from my mother. only i was the one visiting her in the next world, reading a book beside her while she crocheted quietly. after awhile of sitting in silence, i gestured for her to come closer to me. “are you leaving now?” she asked me, and i said no, that i just wanted to hold her for awhile before going home to my other dreams.

i think part of me lives in the next world, sitting at her side as she rests after a short, hard life of 62 years. i’d like to think i keep her company there.

sweat from direct light
blankets nude shoulders
thighs hairy like porcupine
and exposed

every time i say i don’t need you;

we shouldn’t have
come here;

i lost too much in the course of this migration

i wake up again to
this nakedness

a single sacrament
against
nostalgia

© 2008 tahminah zaman