Three Poems

Abstract

photo : kishore nagarigari 38 WLT JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017 poetry The abandoned British Residency in Hyderabad, India WORLDLIT.ORG 39 Three Poems by Shahilla Shariff Author’s note: After my mother’s death, I struggled with the meaning of legacy. Mother Load, the collection from which “Pieces”is extracted, recalls my mother’s voice, her presence as well as her absence, and invokes the rapture alongside the despair. Our narratives are inevitably filtered, reimagined even. So long as they are not lost. Pieces I In her drawing room on the Avenue Foch, a newfound friend serves my children caviar on dainty Limoges. I wonder what your mother would have made of it. Live a simple life, she extolled. My grandmother came to English late in life. We spoke in dialect – Kutchi, her mother tongue. She reserved Gujarati for her husband; it was more formal, felt more correct. She also wrote her recipes in Gujarati. My mother translated her mother’s chicken curry recipe into English and copied it for me onto an index card when I left home. She wore a sari when she drove her peacock-blue Morris Minor to Nairobi City Market for her weekly supply of papaya. She resisted wearing trousers – until biting winds prevailed on one of her visits to us in Canada. I never understood why she ate alone. She used to make sure the ayah served my grandfather as she waited in silence in a separate room until he was finished. She taught my mother the importance of duty and patience. She also arranged for my mother – just past her teenage years – to be married to a man she barely knew. Sukh and dukh – happiness and suffering – were intertwined, she maintained. After she married, my mother moved to Dar es Salaam, the acacia-fringed, ocean-faced city of her mother’s birth. A place of many minarets, sparkling white, with muezzins all vying with one another in their call to prayer. She knew it from her childhood – it was the first time she caught sight of the sea, and it changed her life. My grandmother’s father lived above a butcher’s shop on Stanley Street near our mosque. The heat always felt oppressive as we climbed the dark and narrow stairs to his house each week. I used to pinch my nose to block the stench of fresh blood and defeated flesh. He always rewarded me with money for sweets. On Eid, there were envelopes stuffed with shillings, bolts of new fabric for matching dresses, and trays of sugary treats from the neighborhood confectioner. My mother remembered on her last Eid. We were in the dungeon of the hospital, wasting away in the half-dark of that fetid underworld. She was noticeably bony in her oversized regulation gown of indeterminate blue. Her hair, normally meticulously dyed, was now shot through with prophetic streaks. There is a time for everything. With her suddenly prominent eye sockets, the shocked shell of her face, she reminded me of a lost little sparrow. I tried disinfecting the floor with white flower oil – pak fah yeow. The smell only multiplied our tears. The road forks at Assisi. Barkat. Blessings fly. She wishes me abundance in a time of scarcity. Despite a childhood by the sea, my grandmother never learned how to swim. I always thought she looked like she was floating when she prayed lying face up on her bed surrounded by deepening shadows and smoky agarbatti. I imagine she looked the same when they lowered her into her unmarked plot at the Nairobi cemetery. I was not present to see. Even if I had not been a world away, I would not have been permitted this final farewell. We, women, are barred from burials. We pray from afar for our dead – for our grandmothers and our mothers. In a sense, I am spared. I have no daughters who will be forced to mourn me from a distance. 40 WLT JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017 II Earth aches. You preferred your tea in bone china. Tea tastes different in terra-cotta cups. Earth is baked and tried. You can taste its ridges and layers, not pebbles, sand, the detritus of oceans...