Lazarus of the Iril Banks

‘Silhouette of people and a boat’ by Anamitra Ray

(After Santa Khurai and Sylvia Plath)

A shawl is a refuge when fabric fails— 
Haophee, wrapped at the waist, warm as a mother's palm, 
a substitute for the soft fall of a phanek over her lap. 

And a hanging cloth, a flag of slight defiance— 
Phadi, dangling like a comma of a flag over her flat breasts. 
A she-symbol improvised from poverty’s silent wave. 

A rag, yes, but a pronoun she could wear. 

She gendered herself into a secret syntax, stitched with laughter sharp as reed grass. The world tried to conjugate them into shame, but her cackling undid the entire frame. 

We thundered with jokes sharp as rusted machetes hidden in lullabies. 
Humour, a guerrilla perfume. Wit, a border we could cross freely. 
Intelligence, a lantern kept beneath shawls. 

Outside the window of our era flared the insurgent sky— 
nights swollen with patrol boots, check-posts, tax-demands, sudden vanishings, everything is armed, except us. 

So we fled to the only state that never legislated bodies— 
Iril River, 
where we sun-bathed against the river bank like abandoned deities, 
drying ourselves after floods of naming. 

A place where the rubble of dead bodies would meet their Gods, a corner where trash would be incinerated to meet their graves— Lukhak Heidokpham. 
Water as witness, water as lover, water as the only society that touched her without question. 

The bridge above ferried men like rumors carrying heartbeats. 
We drank their outlines, discreet thirst. 
To love from a bank is to learn longing’s liminal alphabet. 

Do you think exile tames a girl? No! It distills her into the weather. 

Once, we were docile empresses of the dark. 
Now, listen— ash does not stay polite when burned.

From funerary smoke, I rehearse my return: 
not flesh this time, but fume, filament, fever. 
I raise particulates, unclaimable, inhaled and not seen. I expand in lungs, not rooms. I travel through throats the way prophecy travels through flame in my mad dance. 

And the men—ah, the men— 
they will not notice the moment I slip inside. 
They will breathe me in carelessly, as one breathes dusk, as one swallows the sky without chewing. 

But when I arise again, electro-mystic, disrupting wind itself, I will climb without stair or apology— a defeathered bird still kicking its wings above boiling water, 
a banquet of atmospheric teeth, devouring desire into power, power into vapor. 

And in my final incarnation I will become undo-able. 
the burning horizon, the oxygen after being buried alive, 
the element that enters hunger-mouthed and leaves no leftovers, 
the draught that feeds on conquerors who cut my beautiful hair, 
the thing you draw in once, unwisely, and cannot exhale or undo ever again. 

I climb not from ash, but as ash un-ending— 
the breath that hunts back, the wind that feeds itself, 
the vast, invisible famine that needs no weapon, 
the ascent that turns the lungs of men into altars, 
and makes them kneel simply by breathing. 

I return as a cosmic force, 
I consume the atmosphere of abandonment, 
I am the fire after the fire has spoken, 
the storm that drinks the storm-makers when they whip my hands, 
the breath that learns appetite when my father leaves me starving, 
the appetite that becomes breath when someone vanishes forever. 

I rise not to scorch the world, but to cover it in my haophee, and wipe its skin flakes with my phadi.
I console myself with my invisible hair turned into the Iril— 
unmeasurable as far as the eye can see.