PANKHURI SINHA

 

PANKHURI SINHA

 

Shopping Mistakes

 

Shopping mistakes

Blunders

Discovered

Upon reaching home

After walking home

A walk that was meant to accomplish it all

Close the shopping list

And that too walking

Before the snowfall

Before the snow fell

And took her walking space

The proudest of all walks

The longest walk of the season

The last walk of the year

Discovering

After it

The shopping blunder

Completely caused

By people’s strange behavior

By people strangely talking about her

About things from her life

Facts, figures, numbers

No doubt

About her

Even the way in which

The girl was calling for her mother

Yes, absolutely

She would get her papers made

Get her mother here

She

The lonely sad woman

Among the happy families

In the ethnic store

In the tightly spaced

Tiny store

Warm with airs of the festival season

Festivals that were now

Only about the display of wealth

Majorly a show of wealth

Festival she had come back to

After years

Yet the aisles were so packed

She had picked the wrong boxes

By mistake

So full was each lane

Of people

Just standing really

Quite frankly

Eyeing things

With a confidence of too much cash

In their pockets

Or the air of it

Under a roof

Where money brought prestige

And a social clout

That made all other things

Including the ease of standing

And surveying goods

All of it was boosted

By the reputation not even of buying

But simply of having cash

All of them

Knowing her

Beyond the point

That she was broke

Knowing the extra famous allegations

Around the doings of her job

All the arguments

Knowing all about her settlement woes

Troubles with suitors

So called lovers

The deadlock

The stalking

The broom discourse

The brooming when she went to eat out

The brooming as she came to read

Somebody just stoops to pick up brooms

To buy them

Two, a deadly number

Two, in the sense of double

Had been chasing her

Chaos, clutter, mess

She picked up the wrong boxes

The smaller ones

Instead of bigger

And caused herself

Grave financial loss

With no remedies in sight

For fatal were the implications

Of paying

A dollar and a half more

They would have understood

Had they walked in snow

On pavements that almost

Made you skid

In freezing rain

For there were no sunny days

In sight.

And the awesome balance

The beauty

Of that deadly walk

Taken away.

 

Coming Back To The Alliance Statement

 

Coming back to the alliance statement

After such robbery of rights

In broad day light

The robbery of credit, merit, opportunity

The great big thrill

Of doing it yourself

The thrill that in the modern day

Has been solely accepted as the individual’s

Stolen, brutally

In the making of an unnecessary alliance

Consisting of marriage, social forces

Nationality, all kinds of identities

Even the question of an ongoing affair

An extra marital affair

Made into the central issue

And put forth at the centre

Preventing work

Preventing progress

But primarily

An alliance

Made up of a proximity

Between work and family

Most undesirable

Never permitted

An alliance

That has still eluded

Still outpaced you

Still resisted being busted

Like a drug trafficking racket

Wearing the mask of righteousness………………….

 

What I Was Told To Stand Up For

 

What I was told to stand up for

Were value systems

I did not necessarily believe in

And in not fiercely clinging to them

In opposing conservatism

In principle

In not critiquing divorce

In principle

I was robbed

Of the love of my life.

Espousing liberalism

Should not be turned into something so tricky.

Young girls should not be recruited

Into the job of defending

A rusty old order of thoughts

Because in the course of championing women’s lib

There is a danger of loosing

The lover.

  

Playing The Politics Of The Automatic

 

Playing the politics of the automatic

Was a clever thing to do

It needed just a little push

Just a little coldness here

And a warmth there

Silence on some very urgent issues

The ones you had tried to open

Deliberate evasion of them

To get you to the point of

Standing up

Face to face with everything

Owned by him

To get you to the proven point of

Everything owned by him

Or was it

Could it all be challenged in court?

Proven half yours

Jointly owned

But driving you away from these righteous stands

Into the arms of other men

Yes, other men,

Deliberately keeping you there

Waiting patiently

Waiting till all time was over

Meeting you very cold,

Each time you came back to him,

Waiting with a joy building up,

The joy of getting away with murder,

The pleasure of it

Emerging victorious

Emerging as people’s king

Emerging a man

Out of all your affairs

Dear suzannah.

 

PANKHURI SINHA

 

PANKHURI SINHA: Bilingual young poetess and story writer from India.  Two books of poems published in English, ‘Prison Talkies’ and ‘Dear Suzannah’. Two collections of stories published in Hindi, called ‘Koi-bhi-Din’ and ‘Kissa-e-Kohinoor' with Gyanpeeth, one of the most prestigious publishing houses in Hindi, and two more coming soon. Five collections of poetries published in Hindi, and many more are lined up. Has been published in many journals, anthologies, home and abroad. Has won many prestigious, national-international awards, like the Girija Kumar Mathur Award for Hindi poetry while studying for her Bachelor’s in 1995, Chitra Kumar Shailesh Matiyani Award for her first collection of stories in 2007, Seemapuri Times Rajeev Gandhi Excellence Award in 2013 for outstanding writing, First prize for poetry by Rajasthan Patrika in 2017, Pratilipi Award for poetry in 2018, Mathura Prasad Gunjan Award for her second collection of poems in Hindi in 2019, Kumud Tikku Award for a story in Hindi in 2020. Her script for the UGC documentary ‘Cobra-God at Mercy’, won the best film award in 1997. Her poems have been translated in over twenty five languages, and some translations have been published in magazines in Serbia, Romania, Spain, Czech republic, Macedonia, Peru, China, Bangladesh, Nepal, Italy, France, Venezuela, Tunisia to name a few. She has also published her original poems in English in magazines and anthologies in India, in the UK and the USA, Romania, and the world over. She has set up an international group of poets called ‘Poets Without Borders’ and regularly organizes theme-based poetry readings. She won the best correspondence prize for her short story in the first Chekhov literature festival, in Yalta, Crimea in 2019. She has received awards from Albania, Romania, Nigeria, Tunisia, among other countries for her writings in English, and won the special jury award in the Premio Besio International Poetry contest in Italy in January 2021. Most recently, she won the Galateo prize for poetry in mother tongue in Italy on 3rd June 2021, ‘Sahitto Excellence in Literature’ Award in Bangladesh on the 30th of April and 3rd prize for her poetry ‘Chekhov in my Heart’, in the category, geography of Chekhov’s places, in the Chekhov Literary festival Yalta, Crimea. She has been regularly participating in zoom reading events in the UK, India, and other places. Her writing is dominated by themes of exile, immigration, gender equality and environmental concerns. After doing her BA from Delhi University, and PG diploma in Journalism, from Symbiosis Pune, Pankhuri did her Master’s in history from SUNY Buffalo, and has an unfinished Phd from the University of Calgary, Canada. She has worked in various positions as a journalist, lecturer and a content editor.