> Creative > Poem
A few poems by Shalim M Hussain
A Lesson in History
My grandmother’s only fear was that she would lose her children.
Have many children, she said
To anyone willing to listen
If you have one child
And if that one child dies, what will you live on?
She and Dada did a good job.
Fertile for thirty five years until menopause
She had fifteen children
Four of whom didn’t survive childhood
And whom she rarely mourned.
Like all sensible children of the river
She made peace and pancakes for the
River and the tremors.
In ‘50
When the earth shook like a bull on heat
She prayed to old forgotten gods
She prayed to the energies of the universe.
When the ground beneath her bedstead cracked
And spat out boiling fish, she steeled her nerves.
Stood on her doorway and waited for the wriggling and writhing to end.
She waited on the doorway for flesh to fall off the bones,
Then collected the dried heads,
Hung them on the jute reed wall
Beside a poster of pink roses
And a framed embroidered handkerchief
Passed a thread through the spines and made a cummerbund
Wore it for the rest of her life
Until almost four decades later
dying of a rot in her ovaries
With her children witnessing the wasting
She knew she had
At last defeated the earthquake
And broke the thread.
Golluckgonj
After a long ride down a road newly raised
And porcupined against the river
We unload our cameras on a rice field half-India half-immigrant
Its two weeks past the 26th of January-
And they are celebrating.
The rain came first and let me tell you it was cold, cold-
We had to postpone the Republic. His lungi is muddy, his ganji crusted with
Sweat. Looks like the map of Bangladesh, he laughs
Then asks if the camera is on.
I stand on the raised border- two endless lines of concertina
Four strings on each line, the space in between
Heaped with more coiled wire.
I wonder but don’t ask if they are electrified.
The border policeman on his bicycle stops, eats his lunch on the grass
He has never cycled across the lines.
The air from the other side filtered through the metal screen should
But doesn’t smell different.
I had more expectations
From my first international border, I guess.
There, on that raised mound
Where four lines of betelnut trees mark a rectangle
And still ripen every March, inside that was home.
Our phones catch the signal from the other side.
He feeds us country chicken and fish. We sit on his wife’s furniture
Five years old but the varnish still glossy. The false ceiling, an old sari-could have been his late mother’s. And the door I lean against
Looks old, so old that it could be
The last remnant of the home across the lines.
Birth Certificate
The last time I arm-wrestled my father
He made me struggle
Against his strength
Against a granite palm-print
Against the bamboo knots on
His fingers
The familiarity of which I had
Almost forgotten.
And just when
I had almost brought him down
He gave one last push
I gave up.
His back on the floor,
His skin and the thin layer of concrete
Almost the same he asked
Son, how old am I?
Forty eight I said
They printed the same on his death certificate.
I protested: boys went to school late in the ‘50s
There were always the younger ones
To care for, the cattle to feed
The famine to survive.
My aunt opened her father’s Quran
Against alif lam meem were the dates
Of her birth, the three after her that
Didn’t survive and my father’s
My plan to give my father a few more years
Came to nothing.
A little Shopping for Father
Seven years before he passed,
The old man
Thrust a hundred rupees in my hand
And whispered that I and I alone
Should buy the ten metres of plain white cloth
For my father, his eldest son.
Someone scolded him,
You fool, they said,
How can you make him do this?
But Dada was not at fault.
He didn’t own his mind
And worse, he didn’t own anyone’s trust
Some kind soul took the blood money from me
But later in the afternoon when the burial was over,
I walked between the mosque and the hardware store
A polythene bag wrapped around my brain
And a passing stranger asked if I was hungry.
He walked me to a sweet store,
Almost gloated as I sat silently
My cheeks puffed with too much crying
My lips burning with sugar syrup.
The stranger left me his handkerchief
And money to pay for the meal.
Navigations 
Quick Contact
Subscribe Us
Quick Mail
