By Rinku Dutta
“In exile, you are an uprooted tree. Naked.
Leafless.
Bloomless.
Barren.”
She drops words, like tears,
Into the urn of our silence.
“Look!” she thrusts forward a tattooed wrist,
“In exile, you are a ghost tree:
No cicadas mating on your bark. No birds nesting,
No birdlings vying to fly. No squirrels scurrying.
No soil.
Hugging your roots, no solacing
Moisture.”
“In exile, you are a fish flung from water,”
She rolls up her sleeve and reveals
A tattoo of a fish, its skeleton.
“In exile, you have been picked to the bone
By Grief --
Grief has gouged out your pink flesh.
You have no skin.
You are left with spare spine
And bones;
Bones, hanging from your backbone.”
Turning, she pulls up her shirt: “But see!
Here’s my real secret.”
Nestling in the curve of her back,
Another tattooed fish;
A whole fish this one, shimmering silver.
“See! She’s alive! She’s swimming up the river.”
Says Hanan (whose name means the warm-hearted one)
“Like salmon,
She’s battling upstream.
She’ll return one day to her spawning ground.
Trust me. She will.
Never doubt that. Ever.”
Rinku Dutta is an educator writing about her experiences. Exploring the Roots of Harmony: India and Pakistan Conflict Transformation is a monograph of a selection of her essays. Her poems have been published in RIC Journal.
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