How Inconsequential It Is To Be Angry at the Stranger Who Grabbed My Breast and Remembering Loneliness

By Anandi Kar

How Inconsequential it is to be Angry at the Stranger Who Grabbed My Breast

For the first time I felt the rush of time spraying all over my body like a broken garden sprinkler when a man touched my breast and ran. The fridge, at home, glowed with the yellow of the cream cheese cookies and freshly washed clothes glistened like grandmother's last surviving teeth. I smelled internet flowers and built a Lego bathroom for a quick shower to wash off a man's quick violence. The bar soap was not lathering, obstinate like the formidable contours of an ill-matched blouse. My anger loosely hovered around my body unable to latch itself to a face. My anger was as pulpy as the cloth with which mother rubs my spectacles before I leave home.

A little girl at some point of time in her life is told that she is the Earth's daughter.; that she can crawl under pea pods to chase leaf-hungry insects; that the sky will always keep a watch over her. What is not told to her is the sudden jolt of tiny anger that will crease her ironed clothes, the tiny anger that she keeps hidden inside her jeans-pocket alongside an old candy-wrapper because it won't be able to latch itself to a face.

An anger that faintly pulsates like terminal fireflies.

Remembering Loneliness

My days are contoured by specks of loneliness,
inchoate thoughts form the muzzle of a gun and
I am scared to write a line.
This loneliness is shaped like a pyramid. 
It points a hole in the sky from where
the half remembered rhyme from childhood
dangles its feet.
I long for conversations with friends 
sitting at the edge of terraces
hanging over the cold, emptied town
like a longing father.

I watch a strand of my shampooed hair
crisp in weak sunlight,
flakes of my dead skins
set out like astrological charts
on the jute mat woven by 
my mother in her youth.

Like my mother
after laying down a humble breakfast
for Sunday,
My loneliness is always lonely,
very purely lonely.

Anandi Kar is pursuing Masters in English from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. As a young poet, she has already drawn significant attention from readers and critics. Some of her poems have already been published in journals and magazines like Indian Literature, Scarlet Leaf Review, Indian Review, Poems India and Muse India. She reviewed some works in translation for the Antonym Magazine. She has also co-authored a play. She has worked as a content writer for the popular Instagram page, “Chai and Feminism.” Kar was born on 19 May, 2001.