There were lessons this year, my numerological year of 8 — manifestation, achievement, miracles. Magic. The success to prepare me for year 9, ascension. Fulfillment of spiritual prophecy, the promise coming to fruition. What the Universe gives birth to, my hands are extended to receive.

Survival secure, but the world’s chaos multiplies. Throwing everything into reevaluation. Maybe it’s a year 7 for Earth. 2012 to arrive so soon, the very numbers seem to shake with anticipation. Rebirth.

Love is becoming deeper, more flexible and durable. I can feel the loosening, the quickening, the thickening of karma. Concentrating and dispersing time. We are almost still; it is as if the whole of humankind is meditating at once. Space is also dissipating as a construct — wherever consciousness exists, the cells experience fully from a distance all the ecstasy and suffering we are co-creating. The interconnectedness is now obvious, in plain view even to the blind. Too loud for any slumber to take place. The dead have been awake for so long, the living can no longer ignore the volume of their chatter. The veils have grown thin, pierced by the nails of the unborn fighting to arrive. We are giving birth to history; we are giving birth to Time.

Zaman. A new era. My father’s shortened name echoes against the languages it recalls. Meaning and sound hidden in a word’s root. If each present moment is erased to make room for the next, Time doesn’t exist except Now. Like power, depends on immediacy. Like language, only as effective as what is expressed. Like the body, cannot even leave the moment, is trapped in the constancy of transformation. Unable to ignore the miracles at hand in order to travel between notches on a manmade timeline.

Before, I existed too much in transit. Give me today.

© 2011 Tahminah Zaman

as if I am sculpted
by your hands
I become new
to myself

a fresh vision,
unfamiliar
mirror
or lens

you refract me
differently

show me my
light from a
sideways
horizon

“I’d like to draw
your eyes,” you said.

“I would love to be
painted.”

And you laughed.

I am a Picasso
but rarer,
the goddess Justice
but fairer,
in your eyes

I am better

purified by unseen waters
the way you look at me
stalls my departure
feeds me a flavor I haven’t
tasted
teaches me something I should
have known, or knew
but forgot. You remind me
that tomorrow is today

the details don’t exactly
matter

if

love that went wasted,
love that faded or waited
too long to speak,
love that disappointed,
that lied by not disclosing,
love that neglected our origins,
love that belittled and bruised,
love that was refused,
love that liberated
has recycled itself
at the very center of the earth

to give birth
to this

© 2011 Tahminah Zaman

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

words jump from page to page like migrants attempting to find their place. the body is here, too, the whole body’s force, manipulating their song, fingers exchanging, transforming, sliding their currency of meaning. a wealth of music, extravagant choreographies of thought and sound. soundtrack of death and living.

the expression itself becomes the retreat, reclusion into the flesh; feeling the blood, the bones, the sinew and heat of pain, resistance, release, power. there is no one alongside me, i am not isolated. only an invisible film around me, penetrated by all i allow myself to experience. walls are unnecessary now, natural boundaries suffice to regulate everything necessary. food, water, speech, thought, breath.

as the cells rebuild themselves, sleep eludes me. when i dream i am announcing myself to the world as if my voice is only now being heard. surrounded by reflections of my inspiration, artists in celebration. and in the background, my two enraged, subdued sisters watching from a distance, their eleven children scattered into the joyous crowd.

two sisters my elder and estranged, the loss that made these creative works vital, grief that could not be expressed except in the abstract, explosions of syllables and rhythmic exaggeration. my words are not angry but punish with truth. by the time i am done talking we are alone together, the three of us, without the disguises, without the other people we use to draw distance between ourselves. the silence is louder than everything that came before.

identities strung together by genetics, blood tangling history’s limbs, birthdays and personalities repeat to incise the inherited fear of self we mirror in one another. circles of time go incomplete, spiraling into uncrackable codes, unreachable meaning.

put one foot ahead, turned out at the toe. fly.

© 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

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

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

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