Claiming Myself

Someone told me I write well
But when I write about the things I know
 And that is mainly Manipuri in character
 Whole lives are lost
 Lost in translation.
 English was never suited for the tongue
Of people struggling with life
Amidst bullets and floods
Obscure, forgotten people speak
Their own obscure, forgotten language.
 For how can you translate warouba ;
The kind you feel when the person
 You gave your whole life to
Forsakes you to please people
 He once claimed didn't like him much?
Can you say pendaba is a sub-part of warouba;
The kind when your nights are wet with hot tears,
Visited by convulsions of sickness,
A life which has spiraled out of control?
What in English is called the leihou
 Barring from some ugly scientific name?
Nongjabis drive away the rain,
They paint the sky red, merry orange.
All I have with me are words now,
 Words of a language I neglected so long
 Which I am now tasting, swallowing,
 Slowly claiming myself.

Politically Born You Are

Politically born you are

 Your head is counted

 Twice over, maybe thrice

There is fear that we are

 Declining in numbers

There is fear of being swarmed

 Over by foreigners

You, my child

 Even as you learn to speak your first word

There are tensions soaring

On your chakumba numit,

Unknown assailants

 Murders two non-manipuris

In broad daylight at the bazaar.

 You, when you took your first walk

 From me to your father,

 There was the demand to secede the hills of Manipur.

Your bedtime stories are of good girls

 Who win over giants by their sheer kindness

Maybe I should tell you of the Manipuri lores

Of hingchabis, of baneshees,

 The ones my Imabok told me.

 Because good is scarcely found,

I want to arm you with courage,

And maybe some words,

 Incase you do find 

Those giants who might listen to you.

 

In the right they fight over boundaries,

 In the left over love

In my country,

 They fight over Gods,

 Over some young people who ran away 

To get married for love.

 Love is a crime in places,

 You have to pay for it

 With your life.

In my own house,

 Some fight over unmarried daughters

Some over why last night's food

 Wasn't thrown away and left to rot.

 Over misplaced badges of my father's

 Ima says she saw it a few days ago.

Grandmother says you shouldn't laugh

 On your own wedding,

 It's unbecoming of a young woman

But her own daughter giggled

Throwing flowers over the groom's koiyet

I sometimes cry when I read poetry

 Or read about Aung San Suu Kyi

 News flash that Ratko Mladic is on trial at the Hague

He ordered the Srebrenica Massacre

 It seems personal somehow

 I lived in Bosnia during the aftermath.

 I tremble a little with anger.

There are dreams of beaches,

 Of French towns on Indian shores.

You come to me now

In your blue jeans and white shirt

 You tell me your secrets

You whisper your life,

 Things lost, people found.

I search for you in crowds

 Searched for you in six lives

 Found you in the seventh.

I want you to know

 That I love watching you

 In the kitchen

 That I love it when you swing me 

 And sing me to sleep,

 When you pop a whole bunch

 of gems into your mouth

 Like a greedy child

 I found you, found you 

 In your blue jeans and white shirt.

I want you to know that

 It is worth six lives of search.

On writing a story

I start off with a girl.of sixteen
 Halfway through I realize
Her frivolity, her extremity
I am not pleased with her lines
 Her clothes are too perfect
In stories, clothes are badly worn
Perfect clothes belong in runaways
 In stories, fashion disasters are the norm.
Then there is the issue of the mother,
The father, How Do I deal with the parents?
 Too kind, too rigid, too affectionate, too strict?
The conversations flow,
It's the only thing which has dragged on
 While the rest have become sluggish,
 And then finally left to lie cold in the snow
 But there is no snow where the story is set
 Only rains and mud strewn roads.
There is a beautiful woman,
Like in all stories, we must have one too,
Caged in an unhappy marriage,
 There is the husband who is cold and grim.
 There are books and poetry,
 Garcia Marquez, Orhan Pamuk,
And there are weddings on the cards
 But you see....it goes one way and then
When I wake up the next morning
 Quite another way.
Who must suffer, who must laugh?
 Someone has to die, surely
 But which one?

Scaling a nearby hill

Everyday I suppose some persons come

Charging up this hill

 Like I am doing today

Why I chose today 

I don't know.

 Maybe there was nothing else to do

No company to keep

 But then again I never have company

No friends to drag me to car drives

 To some land far away

Nor to the waterfalls of Leimaram

Soaked in wine, soaked in carelessness.

Here, when I reach the summit,

 I tell myself it is some ancient place,

 Place of the Meitei Gods

 And I must tread carefully

 Or I might awaken them

 From their long slumber

 And test their patience.

 My mother told me

 There are waters where

 You don't see your reflection.

That there is a boulder under which

Someone was buried.

 A demon? A temptress?

I see the glittering lights of the city below,

 Where it has its own demons unleashed.