Poetry: “Family Histories” and “Bombay Floods” by Lavanya Arora
Lavanya Arora’s poems are perfect examples of how much place and description can ground a reader in the speaker’s world, and even within a speaker’s family lineage. What makes certain descriptors so enchanting is their contrast and saturation—river water in a Campa Cola bottle, “folklore / and Pokémon,” a relative bubbling with disdain, and tears sold by the kilo. There’s a persistent, overwhelming metaphor of flooding in all of these poems as a way to depict overarching familial emotions—a kind of collective set of feelings about the world and what’s happening in it. However, the speaker doesn’t always fit neatly within the annals of Family Histories; despite being taught not to eat certain things, they still crave partaking in that “sin.”
Read Arora’s poetry below.
Family Histories
1.
In Haridwar, hawkers sit on footbridges across Ganga / selling sanjeevani ten rupees a piece. Dried moss, grey-brown, peeking from a bag made of sapphire / cut-tarpaulin. Lifelessness transforms into abundance in a Campa Cola bottle / flooded with river water. “Take it home, keep it in tap water / for a day, and watch the magic unfurl.” Still believers, followers of folklore / and Pokémon, we take home the entire heap. If it could save Laxman from reaching the great beyond, logic stated / a family’s necrosis was a paltry thing. All of us kids were excited for a while. In the ancient slate green / Ambassador, we flung one-rupee coins into the river across bridges. Maybe it was the harshness / of our hometown’s water or the plants’ defective trehalose. Maybe the slick hawkers, like magicians and chefs’ / mothers, never reveal their secret. Maybe our thumbs were green just for show.
2.
After Sylvia Plath’s Fever 103°C
I was taught to hate the smell of eggs / in lunch boxes, not the ones who brought them. One day / on a whim, I ate a spoonful of sin. Cognitive dissonance / I learned on my own. It’s important / to sublimate the contemporary interpretations of insular parochialism. Pure? / What does it mean? Moral superiority disguised as a choice / to stand one step above others, always looking down. No wonder / when I met a relative after a decade, they bubbled with disdain. The indelible smell / of prejudice. Chants of seething rage. Temple bells at ghats / of all the worlds that ever existed. The Great Indian Kitchen. I wish I had my own / vessel brimming with lemon water, chicken water, water from the sink. Brown hate / wild rice, taking ages to soften and still unpalatable. I was told / not to eat onion and garlic for nine days starting today. Yesterday’s leftover / chicken biryani, enriched with glutamate in the fridge screaming, the sin, the sin.
Bombay Floods
After Su Cho’s Ode to the New York Heat Wave
Your friends lost themselves in an office after a monsoon / spell. The ten of them in the flooded building, hesitant / to face themselves, with muffled heartbeats, floating / further away from the centre / of the open floor seating plan. Dheeraj was the oldest, always / laughing. In a letter, when letters used to be a thing, he told you he was born rich / of heart. He could give this time / away for free anyway. They cry, mourn / him, unable to hide their smaller dissociations. On the days / following his death, his mother cooked beef biryani, prawn biryani, an unusual / chicken, and sent us all a few chilled bottles of buttermilk too. Throwing their glass feet / empty and loud, the mourners sold tears by the kilo / like the portrait of a family dispersing across the world, ejected / from the seed pod for the first and the last time.
