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janaknandini-singh999 · 8 months

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Chapter 4

"Shl- umm ugh damn you're a mess, honey. Here." Manika offered a tissue to Shlokaa in the washroom but she just glared at it

"Well, at least you took care of that dyke." she smirked. "Now for that autistic bitch. Your friendship standards did go downhill, girl. I mean, I was here the whole time plus we've known each other since we were kids. There's one bitch who ain't into men and one who'd just cry and shake uncontrollably while being fucked by one. What has the world come to-"

"Shut your goddamn mouth, Manika. If you dare say one more-"

Suddenly one of the stalls' door unlocked and Aditi came out, sobbing. Shlokaa ran and hugged her.

"Oopsie." Manika looked at her, then at Shlokaa and finished washing her hands

"Get out. right. now." Shlokaa hissed

Manika raised her hands in mock defeat and left, eyeing her and smiling before she did

"I'm so so sorry. She was talking nonsense." Shlokaa kissed her friend's forehead

Despite it, Aditi laughed "Nahh, don't make it look better than it is. I am autistic, let's face it. But not severely, unlike unfortunate ones who are. There's still so much stigma and I-"

"I know, sweetheart. I know." Shlokaa held her tighter

"But one thing she got right. Crying and shaking uncontrollably? Why, that's just great sex and I want that, come on!" she laughed "But if you don't want to be friends anym-"

"Of course not, shut up!"

Aditi smiled wistfully "Speaking of friends, poor Vilasini."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Vilasini had been crying for a while now, curled up outside the little pooja grah.

Good for her she was a silent one, she'd be breaking down and nobody in the house would know. Right now, she just whispered

"Where am I going wrong, Kanha? I.. I thought if I could be as charming as you, maybe... I forgot your life was not easy either. It was everything but that and I feel you, bestie. Sometimes I feel you're the only one who gets me."

As if to contradict that right away, her phone rung. She slowly went to her room where it was and cleared her throat before answering.

"Hello?"

"Crying?"

Vilasini sighed and rolled on the bed, exhausted

"That evident?"

"Uhmmhm. You know, we could pull a Baazigar on her. I make her fall for me then kill her and throw into the sea hehehe"

"That's one big vendetta, R. But if she couldn't fall for a pretty face like me, how would she for an ugly ass like yours?"

"Even in this condition, you're roasting me! Talk about coping mechanisms."

"True. But thanks for the thought. What would I have done without you, mY saviour?"

A knock. "I'll call you back later, Raman."

"Complicated" would be an understatement for brown households. A girl and guy can't just be 'best friends'. Same sex ones can't be more than friends.

Vilasini opened the door to see her mother.

"Rakhi toh pehnaa do apne bhai ko." She came in, dressed impeccably in an orange sari and then whispered "gift bhi toh milega."

"Arey, ussi se koi meri raksha kar le. Paise main hi de du phir." Vilasini mumbled but went to change before coming into the living room.

"Meri favourite behen!! Where's my mithai and rakhi?!" Vilasini's brother squealed and then lowering his voice "should I tell mummy on this auspicious occasion that you're gay?" and chuckled

"Laao, mummy thaali. Yeh zyaada hi bol raha hain, iska muh mithai se band toh karu!"

"Hey! No fighting on festivals! Also, I have something to tell you both. We are shifting."

Vilasini's brother groaned and went inside his room. Vilasini came closer to her mother.

"What? Waapis? Mummy, you know how much it took for me to adjust to being your perfect girl and make this many friends. How many times do I keep doing it?"

"I know, beta but your papa is in such a job. He's in the army, we've got to respect that. Life is all about adapting and army kids have an edge because of this. But there's a good news. We are shifting to your favourite cousin Aditi's city! Khush ho na, beta? I made the arrangements so you'll be in the same school as hers!"

Vilasini's world tilted. Aditi's school is also Shlokaa's. That meant seeing her every day.

"The other day at didi's reception shaadi-" Vilasini thought about how she would tell about the incident to her mother. She finally said firmly "mummy, I have something to tell you."

"Jaanti hu. Tumhe ladkiyan pasand hain, na?"

Another shock. A greater one. It was a surprise how she was standing on her feet right now.

"Mum-"

"Shh. Kuch kehne ki zaroorat nahi hain."

"Did he tell-" Vilasini's mouth opened, pointing to her brother's room

She shook her head "Mujhe toh pata bhi nahi thha ki usse pata hain. Does everyone here know but me?"

"Aisa nahi hain, mummy. Maine toh abhi baba ko bhi.. he toh wouldn't even."

"Shh, fathers worry too but mothers are mothers aur main mummy hu tumhari. Mujhe nahi pata chalta toh kisse chalta? You know, there was a time when parents used to decide everything for their children, including careers? But only the child knows where their true passion lies. So, we shouldn't force our perceptions, our identity on them. Same goes for everything else, including who they love. Even if people decide for their children, they don't end up dealing with the consequences themselves, the child does. Journey sabki alag hain."

"Oye hoye, meri chalti phirti self help book." Vilasini couldn't help herself and embraced her mother, crying

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Didi, I want to tell you something."

Shlokaa turned around "What is it, Jai? Get your Rakhi tied fast I have work to do."

"I.. I don't feel like a boy."

Shlokaa sat up and blanked out "What?"

"Please don't tell anyone, didi. Please please! I just had to tell someone. I've been.. it's been a long time. I.. almost tried to. But then I realized I don't want to end my life. I want to live. As myself."

Dreading it, shlokaa held up her hand and touched the kid softly "It's all ok, my love. I'll be your sister regardless." and got a hug

"I love you, didi."

"I love you, too- um"

"Jaya." her sister's eyes twinkled with so much happiness Shlokaa thought she would cry

"Jaya, my beautiful sister."

Jaya sobbed in her arms and suddenly sat upright "And oh, I want to tie Rakhi to you. I've realized gender and love, romantic or platonic, never matters. All it takes is for it just to be there. And you've always protected me."

"Jai, Shlokaa! Come, let's do the Rakhi now." their mother called

On being called her dead name, Jaya grew sad but Shlokaa held her hand, mouthing "Don't worry, we will handle it."

"There you both are! Also, Shlokaa, a new student is coming to the school tomorrow. Help me with her files and to get her settled."

Shlokaa's mother was a teacher and very serious about her work. She had her files open even on the table right now.

"Oh, it's Aditi's cousin Vilasini. She'll be in your class."

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pwpoetry · 4 years

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Q&A with Pascale Petit

M: There is a family narrative that runs through the collection, as well as the underlying theme of environmental catastrophe and extinction. Can you speak to how these two concerns parallel or amplify each other? P: I write intuitively, guided by images, the song of the line, its dynamic, and by my excitement towards the subject. The draft has to feel true. When I write well, I am playing with all these elements, it’s a serious play, but I am in a childlike tranced state. The themes that emerge in the book appear almost as a by-product – they don’t lead it.

Tiger Girl reveals the cruelty of human beings in their treatment of non-human life, and each other. If I look back on my books, I suspect that most of them are asking this question: are humans essentially good or bad? Perhaps that’s why I’m driven to examine the way that people in power treat the powerless. I’ve tended to do this by holding a magnifying glass to my dysfunctional family, in particular on my parents and difficult childhood. In Tiger Girl I focus on the benevolence of my Indian grandmother, who took me in as a baby, then later, from the age of seven until fourteen. She didn’t have to do that, so in Tiger Girl she is a force for good, and the book is in a way a series of grandmother love poems. She is this saviour, who herself was saved. Her origins are a mystery, but I’ve been told that in Rajasthan where she was born, she was taken in by her father’s white family, while her real mother was the maid. I wanted to explore her heritage, her country, but most of all – I wanted to see a wild tiger as she had done as an infant, when one walked into her tent. So, I went to India to experience the wildlife, and fell in love with it; the national parks are brimming with animals and birds!

Going into the tiger forests in open jeeps is addictive! I’d wake at four, and be at the forest gate by five, waiting for it to open. Then the rush to find tracks, to catch a tigress patrolling her realm, the theatre of alarm calls that we’d be in the centre of, a sensurround of barks started by langurs at their treetop lookouts, and taken up by the deer. The tiger hidden, but there! But I soon realised what an immense struggle it is to keep the tigers alive, as well as all the other fauna – elephants, sloth bears, mongooses, owls and Indian rollers. Poaching is a constant threat. The parallel with my family story – how my grandmother was saved by her father, how I was saved by her from more years in an orphanage, and from the “poaching” of my parents on my body and soul, is a testimony to kindness and love. It’s kindness, love and empathy for wild animals that can save them from cruelty and abuse. We only have to empathise with them to know they suffer, and to stop the suffering. The situation in India is complicated, as in many wild parts of the world, by poverty. I’ve heard and read accounts by poachers who became forest guards, who went on to protect the tigers they once poached. Their guard-work is informed by their poaching experience; they know when and where incursions into the forest will occur. But what struck me was the indifference one guard divulged in his former life as a poacher. My account of his poaching methods is recorded in my long poem ‘In the Forest’. He needed the money for food. His need killed his empathy, his victim was just a means to make money, not a companion suffering being. The animal/human predicament echoes the dynamic between a person with power (such as a parent or president) and the powerless. M: That makes a good deal of sense given how I read the book, one image layering over the next in an intuitive, almost subconscious way. What was your revision process like, and how did you determine the arc of the book? P: I started writing Tiger Girl just after the Brexit referendum. My anxieties about citizenship and possible expulsion – I eventually applied and got British citizenship – reminded me of my grandmother’s situation, and how she’d had to conceal the fact that she was Indian. I hadn’t been aware of it when I lived with her as a child. All I could really remember were certain mysteries, her tiger stories, her speaking Hindi in her sleep. I started researching where tigers were in India, and read every tiger book I could find. I planned my first trip to Ranthambore National Park in Rajasthan, followed by Kanha and Bandhavgarh National Parks in Madhya Pradesh, the tiger heartland. I went over twice, and would have gone more, but Covid-19 happened. I had no idea there’d be so many animals and birds – imagine discovering your heaven then realising it is under threat of vanishing. This is the situation we find ourselves in on this planet: the wild is a place of awe and wonder, but it’s vanishing even as we discover new species. So, what set out to be a personal quest for identity and heritage, became a story about the forests and their fauna. Of course, now, because of Covid-19, there are new threats to wildlife, not least because it’s a zoonotic virus that it is thought originated in bats, passed through a mammal such as the much-poached and probably soon-extinct pangolin, to humans. My personal experience of cruelty at the hands of parents gave me empathy with the animals that are tortured and killed. Are they the childhood of the planet? I’m terrified that we will end up as the only large mammals on Earth, our companions gone, their homes destroyed. It’s unbearable to imagine a world without forests or animals, so, throughout Tiger Girl, there are flashes of hope, clearings with sunlit birds or rare deer. There is also fire threaded through, simmering in the first poem ‘Her Gypsy Clothes’, becoming a roar in the final poem ‘Walking Fire’. None of this was planned, but as I was finishing the manuscript one year ago, our world seemed to be on fire, from California to the Amazon, to New South Wales.

My revision process varied wildly, some poems wrote themselves whole, especially ‘In the Forest’ and ‘Green Bee-eater’. Others needed many recasts. With ‘The Anthropocene’, I had the moving image of the planet as a bride wearing a peacock dress as soon as I saw the news items of the Chinese bride in hers. The image wouldn’t let me be, so those lines hovered on my desktop. But the song of the poem came later, after I’d read The Night Life of Trees from Tara Books, featuring art of the tribal forest artists, the Gond from Madhya Pradesh. I kept looking at the trees they’d printed, and reading the captions from their beliefs. One tree is called ‘The Peacock’, and the caption said “when the peacock dances in the forest, everything watches, and the trees change their form to turn into flaming feathers”. And that gave me my song. The stepped form on the page felt right and might suggest a bride’s train or poised waves. There was a particularly violent hurricane season last year as I was drafting it, so that became the theme, of climate change.

M: As someone who writes about animals--and who is enamored with them--I share your pain and terror at the thought of a future without them. How do you see the poems in Tiger Girl speaking to the poems in Mama Amazonica?

P: Tiger Girl features my grandmother and her tiger childhood, and Mama Amazonica is a portrait of my mentally ill mother as the Amazon rainforest. These two women hardly spoke to each other in the last years of their lives; they are in many ways opposites.

Both books juxtapose a family in crisis with the natural world in crisis, and link abuse of women and children with abuse of animals and forests. But I don’t set out to do this, it’s what the poems reveal. If I take the central poem of Tiger Girl, which is for me ‘In the Forest’, and compare it to the central poem of Mama Amazonica, which for me is ‘My Amazonian Birth’, Mama Amazonica is more hopeful of a human’s rebirth in the pristine rainforest, even if that rainforest is sick and broken. What happened between the writing of the two books was Trump’s increasingly anti-eco politics and the rise to power of Bolsonaro in Brazil, followed by the election of Boris Johnson in the UK and a general global rise of fascism and contempt for the natural world. Yet, the personal story in Tiger Girl, of my Indian grandmother saving me from my abusive parents, is hopeful. And there are splashes of hope throughout the book. There has to be hope. The human psychodrama is hopeful, because what my grandmother did, taking me in for two years as a baby, then for seven years as a child, passed her strong spirit on to me and supported me all my life. Yet, even there, there is betrayal, the story of her returning me to my mother, twice, while Mama Amazonica is both my abused and mentally ill mother, and the abused mother-forest. The human drama mirrors the drama that’s unfolding on our planet – a struggle for the oppressed wild to survive. In India, that struggle is an old one, where the plenitude of charismatic megafauna is in conflict with the dense human population and poverty. The only relatively safe forests are in national parks, yet even there, there is poaching. As for my writing journey – the ‘tiger girl’ of my Indian grandmother is a character I’ve rarely written about before, though it is she who opens my very first collection Heart of a Deer, published in 1998, with the poem ‘Mirador’, that also tells the story of her death on fireworks night. In Tiger Girl I wanted to explore her spirit, how nourishing the older woman figure was, who appeared “like a goddess to me”.

M: Are there any particular texts or works of art with which you feel the book is in conversation?

P: Tiger Girl is mainly in conversation with two artists. As I began writing the book, I discovered installations by the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, and felt very excited by them. I was first attracted to his work because of his installation Inopportune: Stage Two, of nine life-size replicas of tigers leaping through the air, shot and transfixed mid-leap by bamboo arrows. I almost felt at this stage that his work would dominate the book. I wanted to write my equivalents of his firework events. In the end, only two poems remained in my final cut: Ethereal Flowers, which I turned into ‘Her Flowers’, and Sky Ladder, which became my ‘Sky Ladder’. That he worked with gunpowder and fireworks and a ladder made of fireworks that explodes into the sky, felt a direct link to my grandmother’s death on Guy Fawkes night. I watched his film Sky Ladder, and my poem came out of the way he dedicated the event to his 100-year-old granny. The second main artist Tiger Girl is in conversation with is the late Pardhan Gond painter Jangarh Singh Shyam, founder of Gond art, whose tribe know the Central Indian forest secrets. Like him, I’m obsessed with deer and their antlers and how antlers mirror a forest. He died tragically early, but I wanted to honour him, so I wrote a poem for him, ‘Barasingha’, about the endangered twelve-tined swamp deer and how his life was changed after coming face to face with one. My cover art The friendship of the tiger and the boar is by him and I love how my publisher Bloodaxe has wrapped the Gond tree around the back cover. As well as these two artists, a poem early in the book, ‘Surprised!’ is a response to Henri Rousseau’s painting, Surprised! (Tiger in a Tropical Storm) – I love his work! Other poems, such as ‘The Umbrella Stand’, were influenced by Jim Corbett’s tiger hunting books. William Blake hovers in the background of ‘In the Forest’ and ‘Wild Dogs’. ‘For a Coming Extinction’ is a response to the same titled poem by W. S. Merwin. In the poem ‘Her Staircase’, I managed to write about my grandmother’s fatal staircase through a re-imagining of the installation Staircase III, by the Korean artist Do Ho Suh, which I’d spent hours sitting beneath while tutoring poetry courses at Tate Modern. Two poems are even dedicated to my first love John Keats and his forested worlds.

#interview #poetry #Q&A #pascale petit #literature #Poems

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