Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry

SASHA KAMINI PARMASAD

SASHA KAMINI PARMASAD Sasha Kamini Parmasad was born in Trinidad and raised in both Trinidad and New Delhi, India. As a child, she was actively involved in the performing arts (poetry, calypso, story-telling, and Indian Trinidadian folk songs) at a national level in Trinidad and Tobago. In the late 1990s, Parmasad moved to the United States, where she received her undergraduate degree from Williams College, followed by an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University in 2008. She is currently an essayist, video artist, and painter in New York City, where she teaches creative writing. Her poem “Memory of Sugarcane-worker Off Duty” won the 2008 Poetry International competition, while her first novel, Ink and Sugar, placed third in the national First Words Literary Contest for South Asian Writers in 2003. Her art has been exhibited at the Commonwealth Institute (UK) and MASS MoCA. A South Asian in New York, I am also a sixth-generation Trinidadian, descendant of jahajees; I think of the Caribbean as my blood, India, my inherited bones. Burning for Soobratan The twelve o’clock sun sizzles like onions and garlic the grandmother pitches into a black iron pot rubbed with butter. Trees are stingy with their shade. Moth-winged morning flowers wither on stems. The girl stands before a dusty window blinking sweat from eyes, scraping muck from neck. 91 A squealing hog gallops into their road roiling begging for mercy it does not receive from her father who, cooing like a dove, plunges a knife into its back. Throws a wire noose about its neck. Drags it writhing back to the slaughtery.— Pig’s blood staining the macadam road forever. The onions burn like skin but the grandmother continues to stir, slowly sing a song; then thick shriek of a hog and silence, far as the church spire. Gnawing lips the girl unlatches the kitchen door, walks outside, barefoot, sniffs air before stooping in bleeding gravel to observe lines of ants marching oblivious, and whisper, Fetch me a hose. Sugarcane Farmer for Selina We visit her after thirty odd years winding down ribbon road straddling 92 SASHA KAMINI PARMASAD sugar plains; bitches in heat beneath milky ocean of ripe cane-arrows. Barrackpur cantonment, India, 1857— Cartridge cases greased with beef and pig fat the last straw, sparking revolt. Barrackpore, Trinidad, 1975— Place of her parents, grandparents, five generations talvar-bearing sepoy folded into her, and she leaping cutlass in hand, onto bison cart, seizing reins, charging past brandished police butus to occupy No. 4 Scale, Valley Line, push gun barrel from her face, barefoot, anger thick-bitter rusted, invisible hunger-chains strapped to her ankles— Ashes in the water Ashes in the sea We all rise up With a one, two, three! Afterwards the consequences: her cane refused by the Company for two years. Rotting, stinking sugar-stalks. Nothing like that smell. “Give me a drake, come clean my front step,” a big farmer said. His yard was dark, reeking of drakes. She scrubbed, he bought her dying cane. SASHA KAMINI PARMASAD 93 “We heard you were dead.” “No, sixty-six years and still struggling,” she says, shoulders torn bosom pinned mahogany feet too hard for shoes. She coughs, offers us coconuts from a tree. Does not tell us, No money for my operation or to make groceries this week. We cool our throats, toss hard nuts into soft bush, talk about blood, her sepoy inheritance. Laugh make promises depart. “Not in vain!” she waves, “We struggle hard together in a loving, peaceful way.” We do not call her. We forget. She waits. To dust, she waits. The Old Man He tells me about Tamil Tigers. Enough is enough, says he: It go take just one crazy coolie to strap bombs to his heart walk into the middle of this Carnival-land and mash it up forever. 94 SASHA KAMINI PARMASAD One crazy, mad-ass coolie, chest too full of clotted blood, swollen like an over-ripe mango ready to burst ablaze with love for snake-infested rice fields rotting mangrove swamps sugarcane plains watered with generations of sweat, muddy rivers made holy by ashes of the dead, every ravine tree stone bird to let him stand, frigid and hear them say again in the noon hours of a second century: Stay in your place, Mr. Coolie-man. Go...