Hortus malabaricus

daughter of ezhuthachan,
verse of kamala das,

here is your body

here is your skin

here is your mouth
spitting apologies in the language
the white man narrated
to the ghosts of your homeland.

here is your tongue –
a vessel of your soil’s riches

a sack of peppercorns,
a pot of cardamom &
a fistful of tamarind
for the summers you spend hiding.

lullaby of irayimman thampi,

here is your heart
here are its fragments –
smaller and bigger halves of
bloody hibiscus flesh.

here are your hands
your palms

your fingers
tracing lesser known stories
from your father’s family line

stories of your becoming –

of how you learned to apologise
before you learned your own name

of how your body became foreign;
political before formed,
desperate till decay

of how the oil on your skin
and the fallen neermathalams
are sisters in their fragrance

of how love in your home
is a boiled blend of native herbs
from the yard, picked by a mother
with tulsi leaves in her hair.

plot of mukundan, prose of basheer,

here is your wrist &

here are its veins

here are the cuts,
the wounds, the scars –

fairer than your people’s brown
/ your cinnamon clove,
your ancestor’s treasured soil
that yielded pride and gold.

here are your ribs

here are your teeth

here is the bone & here, its fracture

ruined by the white man
who baptised the coast of malabar
to eternal apology for being.

here is your home, child of dravidians,
turning into a birdhouse

you into a worm, your sister into a claw
and your language into a feather
writing escape notes on your folds.