In a series of flash forwards and flashbacks, Ritamvara, following the stream of consciousness legacy, talking about a haircut. And through it, she dwells on the complexity of relationships and associations.
My hair has grown long, as dark as the double standard generosity, not greed; sugar, not spite. I decide shall let it away. I think, ‘what has made me grow its sustainable endurance’. ‘Cynthia, you wanted to touch the navel of the Universe riding my lush dark’. Once you whispered, ‘I want to travel eons riding your sacrificial dark, knee deep to trance mnemonic verses into sacrificial chants’. I decided to grow my hair since then. You rested your russet mane against my thick curls and sniffed my perfect egg shell skin. It was a curtain against your pock marked face. Sometimes a word or only silence snarled between our black and russet.
I see the autumn rides, swells our bellies, loops my hair into a tangle, stretches our uterus, loops our stories and rides my womb. (Yours is blurring). The dust corners in my room descends like a hill through your zephyr skin and is now lying a corpse on the bank of my thirsty river. Remember, Cynthia how maa used to hate my dust on the little feet that I accumulated from our garden after we played with the sweat and desire of your not born skin.
The kitten with the colour of bushy brown sometimes kept us playing with our blood coloured lips. It sometimes pondered our ‘inseparable twin’ stories, sitting in the dark kitchen and looking into the depth of the sky from the small window that only spoke of the shed of the Earth. Maa used to prune its fur that made and unmade your birth. The dust in my room is of an obstinate character, which fails to gather order of our stories. It misses the broom, puckers its mouth and rides the deep navel of the unborn Earth. It darkens the chambers of visitation with its intruding ears. My hair sometimes gets that and you never like such afternoons breathing dusty fields of my hair.
I decide to curtail the map of dust that finds my hair for a place of birth. I visit the salon. It is criss-crossed with faces, who find this place like a watchman to their beauty or maybe they visit this place to call off another place for their wondrous watch. My motive is clear. I want to clog the dust that tends to ride me. I want to trample its throat of a gutter. I am silent among all eyes. I conceal my eyes with the mascara of our deep drunk nights of riding my hair. I see a girl just like our doll, Cinderella with her green puberty as pale as that of the parrot’s skin. Her lips a bit twisted red of the parrot’s beak but her mouth is dumb. She speaks in gestures like us, screening through the eyes of the world to become a reclusive us.
Finally, I am summoned by one of the man, who decides to tame my dust ridden thick hair. He observes my hair like a tug of weed caught by hands. He asks me the manner to uproot it from its blossom. I look into his cornea to utter, ‘as short as it can be’. He digs his hand again into my hair, does it for another three times, plunders my dark with its turbid yogurt hands.
He touches the scissor and I seek your eyes…were you pressed this way, with efficient hands, to remain silent; did they use scissors or what tools to eat you up just like the bird that was shot down the Casuarina tree. We were the only witness of its death. Who witnessed your death, Cynthia? Ah! He chops my hair like baby noodles, sometimes he peeps into my forehead of thoughts with his gentlest touch. He asks me peering into shredded off black.
‘Are you fine with the length?’ I nonchalantly declare he is doing the right way. A streak of sadness guides my confidence into constipated bowel movements in my stomach. I long for my hair, he tunes the FM with a loud song. I am mad with the volume, lick the bark of your tongue. It tastes like uncooked salads. The cucumber of your eyes is a molten heat, the onions of your armpits are a stench and the tomatoes of your tongue are shrivelled.
The man is over with my hair. He dries it, forays his hands to shape my hair. I can feel his touch grow like a lot of heat and dust through my pruned hair. He does it for several times as if to ask my hair of its name…he decks my hair with thin ribbons of rainbow. I want to get away off it, but he wants me down. I protest but he freezes me with the enormity of his decision. I am out now. The world greets me like an eagle circling over a tall tree. I decide to visit the washroom, a look into the mirror of the schizophrenic loo…the sun births me. I am out. Another man, another road touches my dark iris. I navigate to explore. You smile a small mouth. We turn no old. You are the young seed of the deep drunk stained mulberry fruit.
©Ritamvara Bhattacharya
Pix from Net.
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