Henna

The bride emerges, a swirl
of vermilion brocade and silk,
silver bangles and golden sequins:
an oriflamme of virginal wonder,
stepping across the threshold.

She watches her sister smile,
those eyes a trajectory of Diwali sparklers,
as cousins and friends, all the girls
from the neighborhood, run to her
across the brick quadrangle.
They cluster around her, giggling and shouting,
with trays of incense and garlands of marigolds,
turmeric and attar and sandalwood paste.

The young bride sits down with them,
her diamond necklace and pendants
iridescing in the crisp sunshine
as spring runs riot in the flame-trees.

The little girl watches those eyes, sun-struck,
marrying her adolescent yearning
with the promises with which
the future is seeded.

Her friends are crushing
mehendi leaves with pestles,
and the paste of henna is ready;
her sister eagerly spreads out her hands,
palms upturned, fingers splayed,
for the designs to be etched on them.

The colors will come soon enough,
but only after
the invisible layers of time evaporate.
And it will not be long before
an intricate pattern appears on each palm,
locking its tracery of zigzag lines
into symmetric swirls, striae, whorls:
the claustrophobic walls around the courtyard,
the in-laws, the indifferent husband,
and all the children to come;
the entire inevitable alphabet
of being woman.

*

 The Summer I Made the Headlines

A white building, with windows
set into typefaces on its façade --
cells of bold fonts studded
on stucco walls grained like paper,
their borders yellowed into newsprint.

Everyday it was the same old storeys,
convoluted sentences of stairs
parsed up and down in reporters' copy.

This is where I first came to know
the lies of the land --
in that summer, summer of '92,
working as a vacation intern
in the newsroom of our local daily.

I learnt to cut corners of clippings,
bleed the edges of inkjet printouts,
trim down paragraph constructions
into false premises, all true to type.
My fingers were soon smudged with
non sequiturs and ad hominem slurs.

Then the night shifts started.
The office, like my temples,
was soon throbbing and pulsing
with the migraines of press machinery,
the gong of a tropical sun beating
inside its cranium much after dusk.

I dropped off everyday at my desk,
between 60 pt NewsGothic Heavy
and 30 pt TimesRoman Bold.
Tossing and turning sheets
between Wingdings, Webdings
and ZapfDingbats,
I would try Braggadocio
till the captions creased
into Perpetua lines on my forehead.

The kern between the fonts
came too close for comfort;
between shoulder and strap,
the girl next to me dropped
innuendoes into the message box,
into gutters that spilt too wide.

Inside my head, rape,
murder, and arson ran riot
with the scrabble of Reuters takes.
Slipping, skidding, between deadlines,
I hit the space-bar rather too often
between tedium, Valium and espresso.
Now I was news myself!

Between AvantGarde and Utopia,
it was the late edition
before sleep arrived.
By the time I woke up,
at next noon's Meridien,
the truth was dead and buried
between Myriad Tilt and Futura Medium --

the heavier the slug,
the deeper the grave.

Srinjay Chakravarti is a 34-year-old journalist, economist and poet based in Salt Lake City, Calcutta, India. His poetry and prose have appeared in numerous publications in nearly 30 countries. His first book of poems has received an award from Australia.