'Fat'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi3bc9lS3rg


As a little girl,I always wanted the texture of skin like a watercolour painting,
a fine china nose,carved out like dainty flower  on a bone china teacup,
I wished and wished that my name would be 'Rose'
and I dreamt of running as fast as other six year olds could.

Pink was the colour of my whole,entire wardrobe,
slick,straight hair,adorned forehead,babydoll fringe,
and my little feet fit into a Mary Jane collection I took pride in.
Everything Barbie, and tea sets and dolls defined,swimming pools
and cartoons and colouring books- all I ever wanted from life.

My sister and I,we dressed almost identically,
except the identical outfit colours contrasted-pink was a colour only I owned.
Soon,I was 'too big' to fit into pretty clothes anymore,
my feet outgrew the junior section size,'not for you',
 the look on the salesman face read.

Hurt was my precious world,tainted pride,
my parents shushed my sentences that came out
like a lisp,tongue stuck to palette,they scolded,
'no longer a child',I was doing it for attention.

They made me a circus clown at five,
 I walked the stage feeling wronged,
hating me for being too tall for a ballerina,
Thinking,"those dainty little girls are so lucky".

Once I found a transparent pink bead in my shoe,
that looked like a diamond to my naive eyes,
I treasured it,but  lost it too soon,
like all the broken shards of bangle and broken teacup glass
I picked from the sandpit at school

I missed being carried,lifted up by my parents,loved
before I was too tall,too heavy,too much
of a fuss I knew not how I had become..
'fat' was the new word for me.

The youngest of the lot,annoying baby sister,
life is a bully,and I learnt the better part of this,
the night I waited an hour at my only friend's doorstep,
because her mother thought me a waste of time and mine,
screamed down at me from the balcony.

Names,what's in them,many given to me
"orange" and "lemon" in games played,a buff,
never taken seriously,"pregnant" because I couldn't run fast enough,
"unhealthy" when we were first taught what it meant.

This predilection meant,Love was not meant for me,
In a futile future,he said "no" because fat and ugly is all he could see,
no poem I wrote,no beautiful dream I dreamed
could justify this harsh reality.

A child,I did not understand the meaning of most of what fat meant,
but it sounded negative,the tone it was hurled at me in,
hurtful and mean,so I believed,believed,
that it was all I could ever be,"a disease",

Like that doctor said,the one who said "obese",
Walk it off,don't eat much,
unhealthy.Cry now,hope you feel bad about it.
No one ever said to me"don't take this shit".

What remained?
An identity?

Fat.
A broken record on repay.
Sometimes,
I still feel it so strinkingly,
a joke to others,but just a shape it should be,
why can't I ever be good enough just as you see

Why do most not choose to say just pretty,
over "pretty for a fat person,she" ?

December Daze.

Whoever said that a house was not a heart,
that it wasn't growing up and going  back to the start?
A living things,it grew on you,with it's walls that bore the same warmth  of pista green,
and the tall Neem outside the window,that stood through many heartaches and monsoons.
The indigo sky that merged the same with the tar roads,and you counted them,flights-
In their rush hour,leaning against the grilled railing of your balcony tower.
Was it not also home to your first real book read,
the first poem you thought up,and your first heartbreak.
And it still feels like the good warmth of chocolate cake melting away in your mouth,
on a Sunday morning,in essence and memory?
And the odd sounds escaping walls paper thin,from houses that grew up with you.
Standing small facing the facade of the building,shouting out for your friends for a game of hide and seek.
And warm and small,it's spirit lighted the  one inside you.
Only two Decembers ago,you realised how it had become a part of you,so indefinite.A part you left behind with the old life,one that dwells in dusty corners of your mind everyday,still.
You want to think of it with what you call warm remembrance,but all you can wonder is if you would be someone different still living in that house?
Would it have moulded things in you to something better? Do you believe that  houses hold the ability to  shape and change one?

In The Shoals of dreams.

 

Eight years old,she's in her white summer dress.
She's looking at her tiny feet in shoals of water with brilliant orange fishes.
It's the usual Sunday morning swim at the river.
Little kids everywhere,women wash clothes..the sun boils down on the rocky beds.
She's excited,but she's afraid..she's not too familiar with the tingling feeling that the underwater weeds and tiny fishes leave against her feet,submerged.
Songs and folklores fill her mind this morning,and thoughts pouring in like July rain.
She imagines herself in another life,a whole new person.
A new perspective,a different bunch of days and nights.