}} The Gift That Keeps Giving by Manjiri Indurkar |

Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










The Gift That Keeps Giving by Manjiri Indurkar

My therapist thinks I am maladaptive,

when I tell him I sneak up on Aai

and check for her breathing

night after night.

One time when I was alone at home

watching television the way Azoba had

warned me against—for good reason—someone

walked into our house and never left.
 

The night of horrors remains etched in memory.

A thief smiled at me, and stole our blind

tenant’s hand bag. The next day she slipped

and cracked open her head.
 

Worms were eating her eyes from

the inside. They threw wet mud in

her skull and planted some apple seeds.

Some worms are nutritious for the soil.
 

When my Aai’s Aai died, I was alone, dreading

she might insist on meeting me. She smelled

like water in her death, a deep blue scar

glistening on her forearm. She was hideous

like poverty, like stench of piss in government

hospitals. Aai recalls her Aai’s apple cheeks,

her long hair, as we fight over a

made-up game of whose mother

is the prettiest. I bring up her Aai’s buck teeth
 

but don’t say it out loud. I spare her feelings.

My therapist asks me, were you always this

sensitive? And I nod in agreement, vigorously.

I once cut my five fingers for revenge
 

and blamed them on a friend. He cried a lot

so I went to him and fed him snacks,

with my bandaged fingers. And told him horror

stories, sitting on his dead azoba’s chair.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Manjiri Indurkar is a writer and a poet from Jabalpur. She is a founder and editor of AntiSerious. Her chapbook of poetry Dental Hygiene is Very Important was published in 2017 as a part of FIVE—a boxed set of chapbooks brought out under the collaboration of journals Vyavya and Aaina Nagar. Her forthcoming memoir on mental health will be published by Amazon’s Westland Publication in 2020. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in places like Cha: Asian Literary Journal, Missing Slate, Scroll, Indian Express, Sangam House, Action, Spectre, Arre, Himal, Skin Stories, Indian Cultural Forum, and elsewhere.