Urvi Kumbhat | map of flowers | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

“My birth is my fatal accident” — Rohith Vemula lately I’ve been drawing flowers on everything: hibiscus on the pots and pans that rise by the sink awaiting the touch of a woman gulmohar on a ragged newspaper declaring the Bengal Left is dead purple sprigs of chrysanthemums crammed in with centuries of rubble lotus spreading on my hands a pale and desperate ghost of the mehendi I insisted on a tiny girl no weddings in sight bouquets erupt around my clenched fist let me tell you something a secret I’ve been practicing politics we dare not say it my flowers are for absences holes yellow tape where a warm body should be ours is a border built on unnamed ghosts lately dense clumps of jasmine and bougainvillea and birds of paradise on all the beef in India maybe they’ll cover the stink if you know of a flower that’ll do the trick send me a note (you have my address) till then may every dead man dislodge the soil as blossom may he glut himself on meat with his loved ones may he go to bed still breathing my relative calls a woman he hates a Muslim though she is not calls our Indian fascists the rebirth of god though they are not he goes on to rail at Trump we sip our chai I throw garlands at our incoherence a woman in Haryana imagines graveyards full of her sons I draw a limp bush of marigold on Ragini Dubey’s body necklace for her slit throat garden of graphite bloom a crown of flowers for all those who watched offering themselves to silence that too is a kind of dying for years I’ve been meaning to trace Rohith Vemula’s suicide note with amaltas tree of golden showers something truthful for a man who was made of galaxies sunflowers tall unafraid of light something unapologetic that wants to say this was murder that we killed him lately I’ve been drawing flowers on all of India but in truth I am running out of buds and leaves and blossoms so if you can will you send for help?

This might be the hardest poem I’ve ever written. How to honor and remember those who were killed too soon, and so violently, either by the state or its inaction, which basically amounts to the same thing? Some part of me desperately wanted to juxtapose the beauty of the country I know with its horrors, and in that way, reclaim it. But part of the answer lies in accepting the impossibility of such an endeavour. The growing tide of a dangerous, Islamophobic, and patriarchal Hindu nationalism in India worries me sick. I wrote this to grapple with the senseless lynching of Muslims in India. With the horrible killing of Ragini Dubey at the hands of her harassers, a young, brave woman with dreams of the sky. With the suicide of the Dalit scholar and radical activist Rohith Vemula, denied support and dignity by his community, whose death incited a new wave of political struggle all over the country. I wrote for them, and for my people, but this poem is ultimately also a reckoning with its own futile attempts to make an ugliness beautiful again, and an acknowledgement of deep, abiding grief.

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