1. I dreamt I was gliding through a large resort with my best friend
on roller skates. She was a member but I felt wrong, like I was not supposed to be there. We weren’t good on skates and we sat on a bench to catch our breaths. A little boy was dressed like a unicorn. He had a purple and gold outfit and a headband and little wooden horn painted dull gold. He spoke into his phone, to his father, the dream told me with absolute certainty. He said, I went into the neighbouring country and slew the monster. I wanted to tell him everything would be okay. Instead, I turned to my friend and said, I think I stopped talking to my parents today, and woke up on a long sob.
2. The day my first novel is announced
The publisher posts a trailer, my fat heroine smoking, Pride Month in rainbow colours,
a moment I’ve waited for all my life, okay, literally half my life,
I mean, I wasn’t specifically waiting for this trailer, not even this book, just a book,
my face is flaking.
I’m recovering from a flu rash
I’m peeling myself like a clove of garlic, emerging new, green, thin-skinned.
I have broken out from my egg, my female pronouns, my invisibility, they lie
in shards that prick me.
I was safe inside, and bored. Invisible and with nothing to see.
I haven’t yet learned to crawl holding my soft belly to the ground. My scales are coming in.
Sling your stones. I will never be ready.
3. Wedding Album
After Bhanu Kapil
I always thought I’d get married in a white mekhla-sador, the paht soft and warming, so in cool weather please. But I refused to go back, go “home” but it wasn’t home, I refused to let a committee of relatives decide how I should be married, to let my mother spend money on a ritual display my body recoiled at, to have my boyfriend and his family surrounded by people who spoke in a language they did not understand. Instead, I got married in a pink and green sequinned sari my mother-in-law sent me, a sari I’d never have bought for myself, in which I glow prettily, my young flesh like a ripe fruit, in photographs I pore over trying to recognise me. In a room of bureaucracy with old desks and files a brisk woman asks us to repeat the vow in a language neither of us know and my boyfriend, husband, does and how is that different from uttering what the bamun tells you to in Sanskrit and when it’s my turn I ask, Hindi or English please, and I repeat after her in Hindi I take this man as my husband from today, and we sign an official register in this official room and when we step out my mother hugs me and cries ritually, just a little, and my husband, new husband, gives me his hand to shake and says, congratulations.
We go home to my flat. I don’t remember if he had moved his stuff already. Most of his stuff was always here anyway. They make us wait in the parking lot – his mother and sisters – and we make jokes. We are allowed up, finally, to rituals we had planned to avoid. Sindoor, mangalsutra. Look at the photo, a demure bride wrapped in a red sador.
A veil is red, so it is not a shroud. Now his family knows he lives with me. But I have lost something, something I’m still missing, eighteen years later.
