SPECULATION ON প্রতিমা
Suppose it is such that Baba remembers Diya’s birth as the death of his own. Orange embers curdling the milk teeth of my girlhood. My girlhood threshing the grain of myself for what little feeling still remains. So many nights of the oil company merger he stalls the car by the roadside, headlights blinking, falling asleep at the wheel on the NH8, heavy moths brushing tungsten streetlamp beating mercurial against the light. The climate at home is a daughter I mean disaster it pushes at his nerves he is never around after sunset. Months, perched on a wicker chair outdrinking every other salaryman in a club called मचान. Fatherhood vying for space in the glass where regret stales. Raucous of boys cheering. Cricket ball whirring. Spectacles smashed into eye. Daughter-puppet leaves science. Diya learns to write. The future all moonlit pillars in a grey dream. Suppose I have known all my joys to have been his afflictions. Whichever direction you try to wrench your reflection, it all breaks the same each time. Suppose I quantify all inheritance a failure of interpretation. I want so badly to know nothing of being carved into the image of another. Still live despite.
Dipanjali Roy is a writer from New Delhi, India. She has been a recipient of the Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize For Poetry, placed at The Rialto Nature & Place Poetry Competition, longlisted by the Sappho Prize for Women Poets, and featured in The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English, among others. Her work can be found in Wet Grain, SPAM Zine, Abridged, SAND Berlin, Gutter Magazine, Prototype, wildness, LUMIN, Wasafiri, and others. Her work has most recently been performed at the Jaipur Literature Festival London, hosted by the British Library.