Portrait in White
Sambhu Ramachandran
About the Author:
Sambhu Ramachandran is a bilingual poet, translator, short story writer, and academic from Kerala, India. He is currently working as Assistant Professor of English at N.S.S. College, Pandalam. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Bombay Literary Magazine (TBLM), Wild Court, Madras Courier, The Alipore Post, Muse India, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Setu, The Chakkar, Ethos Literary Journal, Every Body Magazine, and Sextet, among others. You can reach out to him on Instagram: @sambhuramachandran
Portrait in White
smoke from the pyre clouds my eyes, my tears
unbidden guests. my husband burns without any fuss,
his bones crackling like a slurred apology. the fire parts
like a butterfly’s wings & I see him turned into a line
of ash, sifting & sacred. intact, his awe now
carried over into an afterlife of annual rituals
where invocations of his name will root his absence
in a presence more concrete than mine. I take off bracelets
wedded to my pulse & break them upon austerity.
a handful of water serves to wipe off the delta
of sindur on my forehead. the droplets thread
through my hair, dragging away a zigzag of red
into discarded memory. ripples widen in the pond—
concentric rings dancing out to erasure
& I am held by unbangled hands as my head
dips into the numbness of widowhood, the water
enfolding me like a benevolent sister. to the world
of colour, I bid farewell. the alta on my feet
fades into censure. folded away into the promise
of disuse, my desire. I drape around me a saree
whiter than premature death, its pleats cocooning
my seclusion. then the barber’s scissors.
snip, snip. they speak
the staccato language
of severance.
my anointed locks untwine like separated lovers
& fall away, a few hairs grabbing onto my shoulders.
blackest night lies dismembered at my feet. my head
is stubbled with loss, a charred plain unvisited
by lightning. my son stands waiting in the doorway,
his eyes strips of linen soaked in honey around
my unseen wounds. flowers— heads caught
in the wind’s chokehold—exhaling hurt. sunlight.
earth. my face, inauspicious, ready to be put away
like a scandalous secret. out of the way.
don’t inflame our men with passion. words
in pickle jars of tomorrows already piquant
with abuse. how grief becomes second nature
once you develop a flair for it. my throat bulging
with muri & the names of gods that won’t quite
go down.
*The poem was inspired by my reading of Sarah Lamb’s White Saris and Sweet Mangoes, an ethnographic study on how aging and the cultural practices surrounding it construct womanhood in Mangaldihi, a village in West Bengal. Among other things, the book discusses in stark detail the rigors of widowhood rituals that Brahmin women had to undergo in the region.