camphor and control

i’ve been struggling to write about my father for as long as i can remember, like any other woman, any other daughter. then i saw a reel video by sarga_mmm [just some time ago while doomscrolling under my soft covers while spying on my mother snore hoping she doesn't wake up]. she captures the essence beautifully (soft, naïve even; i would’ve said it betok-elaan), but still, it caught the whole alphabet of my inner child’s begging, a to z. maybe that’s why it hit me the way it did, not as a poem or performance, but like a mirror shoved in front of me mid-breath. 

how strange that simple, uneven words can unearth what’s buried. i’ve written about love, and loss, and freedom, but never about him, not really. i always stopped just short of the truth, as if my pen got scared. maybe writing about him is like unlocking a room sealed years ago: air heavy, familiar, still smelling of camphor and control. 

that video made me notice how many versions of me lived inside his silence: the girl who waited for footsteps to fade before exhaling, the teenager rehearsing bravery in whispers, the woman who pretends she doesn’t flinch when someone raises a voice. ridiculous, patterned, real. i wonder if he knew... the tiny rebellions, the swallowed sentences, the high marks that weren’t pride so much as safety. and why, after all these years of living alone, paying my bills, choosing my life, my chest still tightens when someone says “papa.” 

maybe forgiveness isn’t a grand event but a slow undoing, one layer at a time. maybe this is me trying. not hating the fear, just acknowledging it, tracing its edges, learning its name. and somewhere between ache and understanding, i still want to ask him; softly, without trembling; “papa, कैसे हो?” not for an answer, but because saying it out loud feels like reclaiming the part of me that was too afraid to speak.

maybe the fear didn’t start as fear. maybe it became a habit, like folding bedsheets too neatly or rinsing cups twice. the house trained me to hear mood in the clink of keys, the weight of footsteps, the way a door shut half an inch faster. i got fluent in that language. i still am. some evenings, when the light turns the color of old brass, my shoulders climb on their own. the body remembers what the mind negotiates away. 

there were good days too, which is what makes it knottier. a mango sliced just right. a new pencil on the first day of term. a ride on the scooter where the wind slapped my cheeks and i forgot, for ten minutes, to be careful. these little mercies confuse the verdict. they soften the outline of the man and blur the edges of the rules. you’d think that would help. sometimes it does. other times it feels like a trap inside a kindness. 

i keep circling the question of fault like a stray dog around a closed bakery. was he cruel or simply unequipped. did he hold the world like a hammer and see every noise as a nail. nobody trained him in tenderness; men of that era were given belts and budgets and silence. i know this. i also know my knees learned the choreography of apology before my voice learned to say no. both truths sit in the same chair and won’t make room for each other. 

what i want now is smaller than forgiveness and somehow braver. i want the right to enter a room without shrinking. to speak a sentence to completion without scanning faces for weather changes. to laugh at full volume and not feel disloyal to an old version of myself. to put down the tray of chai, अख़बार, sugar in a steel katori and sit. simple verbs. sit. stay. breathe. 

today i tried something ordinary. i made tea and didn’t rush. let the kettle sing. i watched steam curl like handwriting i could almost read. i said “papa” into the empty kitchen and waited for the alarm in my chest. it came; prickly, fast; then loosened. i sipped. too sweet. i sipped again. no disaster. only the dissolving peppermint crystals getting louder. it felt like cheating fate. it felt like nothing. it felt like a door opening a quarter inch.

i’ve been thinking about the girl i was, the one who perfected invisibility. i want to take her to a fair and buy her that stupid neon balloon shaped like a rabbit. i want to let it go on purpose and watch her cry and then laugh at how silly it was to hold so tight. i want to teach her a better trick: hold your own hand first. 

if i ever have a daughter, i won’t be a saint; i’ll lose my temper and burn the dal and forget sports day. but i will not confuse fear with discipline. i will not call obedience love. 

somewhere in the middle of all this inventory receipts of pain, receipts of care, i find a thin place where the world softens. i don’t know what to do with it except keep standing there. i can’t rewrite childhood, but i can edit the margins of today. call it reparenting, call it late learning, call it me growing a spine that bends toward gentleness. i think of the women before me who stitched their mouths shut with duty and still sang lullabies. i think of the men who swallowed apologies until their throats turned to stone. i am tired of inheriting geology. 

so i will practice small sentences that make room in the air. “i’m not comfortable.” “please stop.” “i need time.” “i’ll visit next month.” “no.” i’ll let my no be a full stop, not a comma leading to an explanation. i’ll let my yes be chosen, not extracted. i’ll keep the old photographs because history matters, but i’ll put them in a box that doesn’t open by itself. 

and if a day comes when i can look him in the eye and ask, steady and clear, “papa, कैसे हो?” i hope i also remember to ask myself the same question, first. maybe the answer will be simple on that day. maybe it will be a paragraph. maybe it will be silence that doesn’t scare me. i can live with any of those. 

for now, i’ll end here, not because the story is finished, but because i am. i’ll wash the cup, switch off the light, and let the night be only night. tomorrow i’ll wake up with the same face, newer by a breath. and in that tiny newness, i will try again.

~ Oizys.

Endnotes:

1. “papa, कैसे हो?” — “Papa/Dad, how are you?”

2. “chai, अख़बार, katori” — chai = tea; अख़बार (akhbār) = newspaper; katori = small steel bowl.

OctPoWriMo Day 18. But They’ve Seen It

OctPoWriMo Day 18. But They’ve Seen It

Every so often some critic announces that poetry is dead. As if centuries of oral and written traditions had a heart attack and couldn’t be resuscitated. Of course, they’re wrong, but someone will say it again anyway. In a way, poetry is a cryptid: an extinct creature that manages to survive in the wild by hiding from most people. But the people who discover it, are very adamant about its existence.

Example Poem: “Mother Talks Back to the Monster” by Carrie Shipers from Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection

Mother Talks Back to the Monster

Tonight, I dressed my son in astronaut pajamas,
kissed his forehead and tucked him in.
I turned on his night-light and looked for you
in the closet and under the bed. I told him
you were nowhere to be found, but I could smell
your breath, your musty fur. I remember
all your tricks: the jagged shadows on the wall,
click of your claws, the hand that hovered
just above my ankles if I left them exposed.
Since I became a parent I see danger everywhere—
unleashed dogs, sudden fevers, cereal
two days out of date. And even worse
than feeling so much fear is keeping it inside,
trying not to let my love become so tangled
with anxiety my son thinks they’re the same.
When he says he’s seen your tail or heard
your heavy step, I insist that you aren’t real.
Soon he’ll feel too old to tell me his bad dreams.
If you get lonely after he’s asleep, you can
always come downstairs. I’ll be sitting
at the kitchen table with the dishes
I should wash, crumbs I should wipe up.
We can drink hot tea and talk about
the future, how hard it is to be outgrown.

~Carrie Shipers

Prompt: Remember your childhood monster. Did it emerge from the closet, or under the bed? What did it look like? What sounds did it make? What did it sound like? When did you grow out of it, or how did you overcome it? What would you talk about if you met it now?

Possible form: A narrative poem

~

But They’ve Seen It

When the power cut slid over the lane like a lid,

I counted the ceiling fan’s halted blades: three knives

pointed at the cot where my legs refused to straighten.

You lived in the inch between wardrobe and wall,

in the breath of naphthalene balls and damp notebooks,

your fur the color of dust bunnies and old chalk.

You announced yourself with the latch of the steel trunk,

that soft clink becoming footsteps if I listened wrong

and the pressure cooker’s hiss from the kitchen,

rising to a whistle I was sure was your name.

On the calendar Krishna kept playing his flute;

your shadow dog-eared the month and would not turn the page.

Some nights you were only a palm at my ankle,

hovering, patient, until I forgot the rule:

blankets must armor the shin, toes tucked like contraband.

Other nights you were the geometry of fear:

right angles of the study table, the gulf under the cot,

the theorem proving I was small enough to vanish.

I told Ma I needed a night-light; she gave me stories.

“Monsters hate numbers,” she said, “count to a hundred.

Monsters hate ginger,” she said, “breathe like tea.”

I learned to name you into fractions: half breath,

quarter scrape, a remainder of nothing at all,

until morning solved you with crows and school bell.

I grew taller than the wardrobe, left behind the street

with its neem tree and hammock of power lines.

I learned other latches: email, HR portals,

locks that open at a thumbprint and refuse to know me.

My monster, I outwalked you; or said I did;

into apartments where under-beds are storage, not abyss.

Tonight, after doomscrolling the usual shipwrecks,

I catch you again in the shiny emptiness of a screen,

in the pixelated static when the router blinks red,

in the quiet that follows a message I shouldn’t send.

Your breath still smells of damp and test ink.

You still lift the corner of everything I claim is firm.

Sit. The kettle is louder than we remember.

I won’t pretend you weren’t real; you were my first editor,

crossing out the easy endings, making me revise the dark.

Tell me what you do when children sleep:

do you keep the rules of blankets and counting,

or have you softened with age like old rubber bands?

I will tell you what it’s like to be outgrown:

how love tangles with worry like earbuds in a pocket,

how success has a hunger you recognize as kin,

how closets are cleaner and minds are not.

I’ll pour you tea, let the steam fog the mirror,

and we’ll watch ourselves appear, then fade, then appear:

until the fan hums back, until the router steadies,

until someone in a nearby flat laughs in their kitchen,

and we agree on this small truce:

you need the dark to stay mythic,

I need the dark to keep honest,

and both of us, for once, can share the bed.

~ Oizys.

[Some thoughts: The “monster” is fear: specifically the shape-shifting anxiety that starts in childhood and matures with you. As a kid, it’s under the bed and behind the wardrobe; as an adult, it morphs into email latches, HR portals, and the red blink of the router. By the end, we have to stop denying it and negotiates a truce: fear won’t vanish, but it can be named, managed, even… talked to. As prompt mentions, critics say poetry (or monsters) are dead; insiders insist they’ve seen the creature. I argue both are real, but mostly visible to those who look in the dark. It’s also an answer to: why keep writing? Because the monster (anxiety, grief, vigilance) keeps returning. Writing makes the visit civil. We never fully “outgrow” fear; we outgrow the story you tell about it.]