Ambala
She burst into my room dancing, humming,
a force of nature, her dark skin gleaming,
cleaving me with her beauty’s pulse.
I sat face-masked, half-naked, waxing my legs.
Seeing an apology spread large on her face,
holding back the waterfall of words from her lips,
it’s alright, I said, thought I’d locked the door.
You can walk into my room any time, she sang –
her statuesque body folding in on itself in a greeting,
my homesickness banished by her peace offering.
Life in a female student dorm was full of surprises,
teaching me how difference makes us human.
The day I knocked on her door, but did not wait
for her regal Entrée summoning me in,
I was unprepared to find her in front of a mirror
peering deep inside herself. Is this a new tantric
yoga posture I was ignorant of? But the stain
on the patterned rug, the agony on her face
told a different story. It hurts, she whispered,
her legs splayed as if giving birth.
I get cramps and back-pain too, I sympathized,
thinking she was suffering from period pains.
No, this is different. A most brutal and unkind cut,
nothing like a male circumcision,
she sighed as I caught sight of her excision -
her wound, her shame, her secret laceration
revealed as she lay writhing on the floor,
unable to mask a life of pain and humiliation.
Can I do anything? I asked, aghast,
thinking there but for the grace of God.
Hold my hand, be my best friend forever.
Apart from the women in my family, no other
person has seen me naked, mutilated.
My ordeal is nothing compared to the horror
of pricking, piercing, cutting, sewing, scraping –
I’ve survived, placing my faith in life, in change.
Her head resting on my lap, our fingers locked,
we stayed there dreaming of a world unmutilated.
SHANTA ACHARYA
****
This week, we’re revisiting the poetry of Shanta Acharya, who has recently published her seventh collection, What Survives Is the Singing. The narrative sets off jauntily, recollecting a slightly embarrassing encounter between the speaker and a fellow student. Ambala bursts into the room where the speaker, “half-naked”, is busy with face mask and leg-waxing. The protocol demands a theatrical display of apology. Ambala seems to bow, “her statuesque body folding in on itself in a greeting”. Like her accompanying song, this is a bit of burlesque, performed with grace and humour. The narrator, too, is suitably magnanimous: she explains her reaction as one of surprise, because she thought she’d locked the door.
We’re particularly aware in these opening stanzas of the dazzled admiration the speaker feels towards the vivacious African. Her breathless tone (we know it’s “her” because of the reference to “life in a student female dorm”) could even denote a crush. The metaphor in the relative clause, “cleaving me with her beauty’s pulse”, is difficult to unravel. It works best if the “pulse” of Ambala’s beauty is imagined as a sound – the heavily amplified drumbeat from a live band, filling the listener’s whole body with thrilling but disconcerting vibrations. It’s only retrospectively that the reader will connect these initial minor intrusions, suggested by the unlocked door, the sensation of “cleaving”, the mask-wearing) with the horror of female genital mutilation (FGM).
In stanza seven, the two characters exchange roles, as if in a folktale or fable. The narrator has learned from the first encounter that social taboos may be trivial, and their breaking pleasurable rather than traumatic. Boldly, she enters Ambala’s room after a brief knock at the door – and her confidence is extinguished.
Ambala sits on the floor in front of a mirror, naked, legs splayed, “peering deep inside herself”. At first, the narrator tries denial through humour – or perhaps it’s not denial, but a genuine effort at an interpretation: “is this a new tantric // yoga posture I was ignorant of?” When she notices the stain on the rug and Ambala’s agonised expression, she’s led to a new misunderstanding: she thinks Ambala has period pains.
“No, this is different. A most brutal and unkind cut, / nothing like a male circumcision.” The way Ambala talks about it demonstrates how unassimilable the experience has been for her, and is perceived to be for others. Ambala mixes fact with literary language and euphemism. The speaker herself descends into a tangled of harsh echoes: “excision”, “laceration”, “humiliation”. The nouns, like the verb-list in the penultimate stanza, chafe against each other. While the speaker is helplessly “aghast”, Ambala, now that her secret is known, abandons her previous sophistication: childlike, she pleads, “Hold my hand, be my best friend forever.”
The young Indian woman in Shanta Acharya’s novel A World Elsewhere searches for self-fulfilment, hindered by cultural restrictions that begin early and fail to prepare women for autonomy. The character in the novel and the speaker in the poem are different, of course, but the poet creates a persona for the poem who has special insight into Ambala’s ordeal – “there but for the grace of God,” she thinks. Constraint is suggested in another way, too, by the diction: the two characters struggle to find words adequate to the experience.
Both undergo change after the second encounter. The speaker re-orientates herself, away from her idealised Ambala to find the wounded and fragile woman under the extrovert social masks. Ambala, exposed, resists defensiveness and, in an act of profound trust, pleads for a vow of friendship. Despite the melting dreaminess of their concluding embrace, there’s a flicker of revolutionary hope in the phrase “a world unmutilated”.
A lesbian-feminist poem would develop this further. But it’s also satisfying to read Ambala as a poem of warm female solidarity. Its impact registers through dialogue (notably, Ambala’s change of voice) and through certain images – especially the stain, cruelly visible on the patterned rug, and the women’s motherly-daughterly embrace, a bodily integration silently defying both the patriarchal and matriarchal power structures around FGM. It’s only at the end of the collection that a note tells us that the meaning of the name Ambala is “scar”.