The Mother-in-Law

My mother-in-law, a stranger to me had been brought to her son\u27s home. The years between us had been barren years, sterile with the desert of silence. I had tried many times to traverse this desert, in search of that illusory oasis, but it was only the mirage that led me on and on. I ended up gaunt and starved, parched with craving for that which would never be. Here, finally I had stopped, with the barriers of dunes before me and the sand prickling against my skin. Those conduits, those springs, those lost oceans were dried up. We were strangers to each other. Yet we were both women to whom this man, her son, my husband, belonged. She, my mother-in-law, who was once a matriarch, who was proud in a sense of her hierarchy, with the pride of possession, a caste, a name, six children was now gradually losing everything. A tree that was being denuded of fruit, leaf, flower. I was the daughter-in-law who had desired more than anything else to know who they were, this family, whose lineage made them a people apart in their village

I Am an Innocent Man

I often cycled past the prawn farms with a friend on the way to school in the village where I was teaching. There were great ponds on acres and acres of land in the coastal village in this Eastern part of the island. On these lonely roads in their deep silence my awareness grew of the life that was evolving in these ponds as the crustacea emerged from the spawn, creating concentric ripples as they swam beneath the water\u27s surface. A subtle movement seemed to stir the expanse of water, breaking fragmented slivers of light, scattering them on the ponds. I was not able to observe these forms of life minutely but there was this feeling that the ponds were seething, alive, and that the prawns were trapped in their aquatic prisons from which they could not escape until they grew large enough to be caught, netted, packed and sent away to titillate the appetites of the wealthy gourmets who could afford them

Checkpoints

Two poemsDos poema

The Crossing

I began my journey at dead of night. In pitch darkness. Set out from Nallur where my home is. A voluntary journey. I come and go from the South to the North of the island. I return as often as I can to see my father and my younger sister. My only sister. I\u27m studying for my engineering degree in the south. The only people who matter to me live in the Peninsula. I have to assure myself of their safety. They long to see me too, my father and my sister. That\u27s all they have to look forward to. My arrival. A journey fraught with risks and hazards. To reach the mainland the crossing has to be made across the lagoon in a motor boat or fishing vallam. We can no longer take the accustomed routes. It is a time of war. But the crossing grows familiar with these repeated journeys

Why I Write

I want to stretch the world as wide as possible to accommodate my ideas. I want to sling those words like jewels across space, to let them fall and acatter everywhere. When I look out of my window, nature is a map of greens, blues, yellows. There are innumerable mutations of colour and I let up my own landmarks on the pages of this seasonal atlas. I shift frontiers and boundaries to give me the freedom of a limitless territory but I do this without causing death and violence or displacement to other Inhabitants or living creatures of the universe. I can people that world with all the characters that I encounter from day to day, not only the real with the nuances of individual human speech but with those fictional characters sometimes much larger than life who I create. The journeys I lake are never straight journeys. They are often allegorical. I speak in parables and fables. Reality alone is insufficient

Puestos de control

Two poemsDos poema