The Lover: New Delhi 1965
- The Lover: New Delhi, 1965
Odd this hotel privacy. Married and living as I did in North Carolina— dorm girl in her dorm room. I took the train from Patiala, left the girls with Ayah, and lied, I’m with Faye and Daisy. Had to say what he’d approve of. Go then, Kiran said, crushing large rupees in my hand.
Have I been here a week? I’ve slept so long I can’t remember for example who was with me last night alone in bed. Who was that figure leaning against the door? Did he leave me this gold bangle? I can feel its heft around my wrist; the intricate pattern of knobs and crests, a design from the high Mogul period of Aurangazeb. Who will believe me?
I have come to our capitol, Delhi, to remember our ancient past—so much and so little, a gold bangle, what else can I tell you? When it slid over my hand, I opened myself like a book is open and you hear its private pulsing. In the quiet he said, Put your hand here like a bookmark to save your place. I put my hand on my heart, and he pressed it. He sat with me a minute, and he went away, left something like knowledge to hinge me in the wind of myself, to calm my legs when they shook up my precaution, the Asiatic kind I’m deep in. Empire is a large land and I can’t touch it. A smile is a root my mother said don’t bother. I am dark. I am small. I married a dark talent [End Page 853] from a small world. This is my parcel. The dark parent who. The British voices who. I became those who bent me. I am dark. I am small. Until he asked me to drop my shawl and slid his finger on my shoulder, let me taste our leisure. It required my defiance of the small world. He asked would you, and I said I would. I read him. I drank up my history and peeled back the glossy lies. I had harped on former grandeur, but the Taj Mahal and Rome are a fantasy. What’s left is my darkness. I had found it dreadful. He spoke to me simply of skin and I touched it.
For so many years I kept my mantra: they are great and I am small. I disowned myself as some have disowned me by departing. I’ve slept. I’ve tasted my own milk. I am dark. I slept in darkness. I feel a circle on my wrist, it’s surplus of hours, more today, more tomorrow. I’ll raise my girls, then I’ll be back. I’ve tasted the drink and crave these minutes. If I never sip this again I already tasted the morning.
Reetika Vazirani is Margaret Banister Writer-in-Residence at Sweet Briar College, where she teaches poetry workshops and a seminar on the novel. She is author of White Elephants, a book of poems selected by Marilyn Hacker for a Barnard New Women Poets Prize. She has published in a number of periodicals, including Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Partisan Review, TriQuarterly, Agni, and Callaloo, and received a 1999 Pushcart Prize.
