Part 1: Body Missing
My father walks from door to door,
hands held together like he is doing dua.
They are covered in blood.
He splutters
‘beti’ to anyone who will listen,
blood spraying from his grieving mouth.
He is covered in blood,
Jummah salwaar kameez
bleached white before.
(I wonder how my mother got out the stains.)
A blood vessel has erupted
and my father thinks he is beyond repair.
I wonder if my mother bothered scrubbing the stains out
or if she buried the whole thing instead.
…
My mother is a suburban English village;
quiet and collected,
she has not made a sound yet,
Tasbeeh against her chest.
I think me and my mother found Womanhood that day.
In her absence
and in mine
I felt like she was praying to me.
I heard her words as clear as the call to prayer on a Friday afternoon,
yet the congregation sat at home and wept.
The muazzin answers questions from police.
Later I find out she was praying
for me.
She rebirthed me that night
as part jawan, part still child, still nine.
The string of her tasbeeh beads is fraying
with the dampness of her hands.
Her blooming chest has lost count of the
Alhamdulilah
and SubhanAllah
and Allahu Akbar’s
but here she is,
still praying for my return.
Body
This body is woman. Grown woman. Doesn’t wet the bed
anymore, Mother, woman. Ready to baby, woman. Will not
fetch her brother his drink, woman. This body is touched like
woman. This mouth is all woman with its no-thank you’s and
dryness and gobbled up greed dreams of wanting to write
about being woman.
Your first girl
When my mother birthed me, I wonder if
she smiled. Or thought about chores instead.
I wonder if she hugged me that night, the
next day, a week later in secret, in the
middle of the wheat fields, at the side of her
bed, in the middle of the night. Her first girl.
So much trouble to be born with this girl.
Passport photo
In Big Mom’s kitchen,
in the cupboard with the tea and sugar and cardamoms,
you’ll find a small passport photo of baby me
sellotaped on the left.
A tiny, screaming, alien toddler -
slightly resembling Frankenstein’s monster.
A tiny, alien me
ready
to fly over to England
for a better life.
Sisters
My little sister is 10. When we leave the house, my mother says
to her put on a longer dress! My father says where is her scarf?
Where is your scarf, girl?
They are getting her ready to woman when her woman body
is still curled up foetal, like, let me sleep forever. Her belly
and cheeks plump with Girl, with reading Jaqueline Wilson
and experimenting with the neon pink free lipstick from Girl
Magazine; she is not ready to woman, with her cherry peaked
breastlets, her ears unpierced, unsexed. I do not want her to
ever woman. She is already looking for the power of woman
and my parents are already telling her that woman needs no
power. Has no power. When she was born they were telling
me the same. My body ...