This is My Story

Four years old, plucking white jasmine flowers in a tattered, tiny wicker basket

Hoping to spread a fragrance into the slowly rotting lives of a fighting couple

A year passes by and now visuals include broken beer bottles thrust just an an inch away from flesh

Threats, tears and fights as she sits by the courtyard door, gulping down fear

Wondering when she will see them hug and smile again.

At seven, life becomes about fooling the creche nanny into believing she is asleep.

Forcing dreams to come to her, asking the mind to play movies as she does even today.

Teenage meant DOS games, cheap English music and telephone conversations held in incandescence

In a hot study room, far off from the main house where grandmother fought off asthma to cook a square meal.

School meant making chart drawings that could never compete with the straight lines drawn by mothers.

Embroidering with vengeance, for an extra grade, knowing deep down she was the only one in the classroom doing this alone.

Silence would come naturally, the only alone time coming in the toilet where she spent hours scanning newspapers for happy stories.

Stories became essential to living, they still do; except now, she creates them to bely reality.

Invitations to birthday parties were joyous occasions; Junk food satiated the need for a mother’s love

And yet, she drifted away from the biological mother—wanting to act cool when she visited as the whole classroom stared in confusion and relief at having their own mothers back home.

Homework was about individual struggles and when a teacher got her homemade cookies, she lit up.

Food was so essential, and still remains; except now she cooks with a vehemence—my child will never suffer this.

As the years passed, sports became the punching bag against bitterness, drugs and alcohol.

Each “takk” of the ball against the racquet, raising up dust and tiny hairs was revolt.

Stories became so essential, she sometimes altered her own reality and smiled when people walked away intrigued.

Pity was hated, pity was scorned. So were those that gave it to her liberally.

This is my story and I am not ashamed to share it anymore.

Moving to the mountains because

City noises were so loud she thought she was shrinking.

In poems, came out words, expressing feelings she never knew she really had.

In crowds, she still stands in a corner, puzzled at moving jaws, hidden smiles and open politics.

She cringes away from all of it—social behaviour, not something she ever grasped.

She can’t sing or chant or speak with the rest, in unison.

And she wonders, why it’s so. Her voice never matches that scale. Perhaps, its nothing.

Perhaps, she is only tone deaf. To voices too.

She spends hours gazing at people, wondering what stories lie within and around them.

She needs to be alone to express and the air around her is all that listens.

So do her dogs. She likes to talk to them. Their responses, unworded, speak more to her

Than the daily phone calls of her father.

Deaths have taken away people from her and now?

Now, she only shrugs and says “all right”

Is that rude, she wonders?

She feels most keenly when she is alone and yet she craves human touch, human love

Human words that whisper to her, “it’s going to be okay, I’m here”.

She wants to walk away and yet she is drawn in.

Peace lies in puppies and walks and staring blankly at the wall.

This is what life is about now.

Instead of work presentations, heels and thoughts of “settling down”.

She’s okay with it, but are you?

This is my story and I am not ashamed to share it.

Life is a snow flake and you’ll never see its million shapes till you really open your eyes to it.

Life is a tree—standing still but really, constantly changing, moving.

To her, life is this and this is what it might remain.

This is my story.