 This poem is titled Repair and Maintenance. Repair and Maintenance. My father euphemizes going to poop as vacation. An average trip inside the loo is 35 minutes like a nice spa for my body, he says. Unless his phone rings inside and it is an aunt's son's friend's uncle's second cousin inquiring about the what, why, where, how, what now of a certain cancer. And through the bathroom door, I can hear him croon addresses of hospitals rehearsed, doctors memorized by first names and specializations and a chorus of home remedies, as if treating cancer is his long forgotten hobby. Come stay with us. We'll fix together, he says. This body trapped in your mouth, chest, lung, stomach, colon. Then he pauses and paces in a retreat of his own inadequacies, trying to redeem what he lost. As if a stranger's life lendend is my mother being reincarnated. As if becoming a bed and breakfast for cancer is injecting grief with morphine. As if opening our doors to another's suffering is my father testing his voice like a tourist at the edge of a hill called Echo Point, whispering, I tried, I tried, I tried. I'm from Bombay and I realized halfway into whatever this manuscript was becoming that I don't ever write about the place, so I tried bringing it to life and the one thing that you need to know about Bombay more than anything else is that it rains a lot. It rains a whole, whole lot. Like the monsoon usually brings the city where it stands still for a week and we're all just cooped up at home and we know who the boss of us is. This one is called water logging. I think about the mornings it saved me to see children splatter the Bombay monsoons with paper boats. Their miniature palms folding into their mothers, two sizes too, baked their raincoats with dewy edges hanging at the mercy of pastel plastic clips. Zigzagging through a row of chipped roof huts, the wiper of my second hand purple car, outstretched, groaning its rubbery groan to drive away water from my view. The road ahead, cloud gray, washed out, slipping into its own bends like a body being reborn when it lets itself break down in full public view. Each hawker and beggar negotiating their wishes under the tick-tock of limited dry hours. This city, flooding like my heart, this city, a closed island with 18 million impulses, stirring, pumping in and out of crevices to find refuge under the radii of tin shelters or the hemline of an umbrella. Inside, a water cooler sweating itself in the waiting room, the slow drip of glucose reaching my mother's veins, my hand turning another blotted page. As Kundera says, love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost. One abandoned shoe floating in the slight rainbows of puddles, the doctor shaking his pen as he talks to us about options. Does the sky know of all it lets go and all it holds back? And that's my memory. Walking through it always deep, students wading with backpacks over their heads, every lane and bilane, a canopy of escape routes. A 12-inch flat screen TV being banged from the side in her hospital room, intermittent cable service and flashes of a news anchor lady asking the weatherman for a statistic on the level of water harvested thus far. This is a longish poem. It's titled Genealogy. It's kind of like a summation of everything that I think I am. Genealogy. My body is a collage made with all my little toes, swollen and rough like ginger. I come from my mother's mother, last scene falling off the edge of our balcony, or did she jump? How everything changes when a door is gone. Some conjure Alzheimer's and some depression, but to my tinder date I say I come from a family of uncorseted women. I keep on running into the alleyways of my arthritic folds and whisper to the unnatural bends of my elbows and knuckles. When I was one, I came unscathed by a fall, the thud of my skull against our floral tile breaking my grandma's nap. In the hospital she shook my head thrice, yes, thrice, no, to force a cry. I hide myself in the clench of my jaw and talk about my pain like it's a moving target. The bureau's forecast about yesterday overcalled off formulaic my pain, I curl tight in my fist all the versions of who I could be. A history teacher, a sari folder, the sizzle of jeera and ghee, the ruffle of pashmina sliding through a fingering, the inside of my mother's palm. I fall often like the unsure wind falls over a teenage girl's petal tally of he loves me, he loves me not. I hanker for the whiff of love like sweet and spicy rough cuts of mango pickle lingering on my tongue swallowed whole. Each of my loves are raw fruit, amply marinated in a mason preserved on a forgotten shelf. I want to crush strawberries in the face of the man who once filled me with cynicism. I sleep well only in motion and wake up on buses once my home is a blur over my shoulder. I slumber in a city built by flyovers dying under its own weight. And on the blues I fall like a torrential downpour until you wonder who's the real boss in the metropolitan of my heart. I'm in the fingerprints of the butter tray licked clean when ma was asleep. I think myself a realistic Krishna, a compulsive flirt masquerading as God singing songs when logic fails reason, fails fate, fails prayer, fails my mother's prayer beads. In her room by the window there was an ironing table, hot steam straightening weary shirt collars. And between the creases of five languages known to me, I learned to swear from my father. The only daughter of his name, my name Preeti is Sanskrit for pleasure, joy, love. All the bloody words, a poem should never engrave. Thank you. Relationship status. Humour has a thing for dark spaces. Else, how can you explain me kissing my boyfriend hard as the flight blackened for takeoff? The flight I was taking to go see my sick mother. I'd find out on landing that she passed away when my tongue was busy sampling lust. I reached home and gargled my mouth with all my lungs as if guilt can be rinsed and emptied into a sink. What else is space but a body of dark humor tied to physical affection like artificial life support? How else can I explain why I overloved every boyfriend after her with a fondness reserved only for mothers? This poem has a lot of repeating lines. I think it's pretty fun. It's called Stop Gap. I opened another hole in my body so you could take more pleasure in untouched parts of me. Sometimes your touch was in your gaze. So you may take more pleasure. I pierced my belly button this time. Your touch was in your gaze, unsure, loose, shifty. The time I pierced my belly button, you called me sexy, hot, cheap, unsure, loose, shifty. You wanted me turned around sometimes. You called me sexy, hot, cheap when I imitated the item song girl's pelvic thrust. You wanted me turned around. Sometimes your eyes closed, you imagined her instead. You saw me imitate the item song girl's pelvic thrust and said, too vulgar, I don't want my girl to do this. Your eyes closed, you imagined her instead stroking a side of you you don't let me touch. Say, isn't it too vulgar for a girl to do this? Shucking tight at the edges of holes, stroking every side of you, yet you don't let me touch the seams of an everyday kind of love. Sucking tight at the edges of holes, my body is a sieve that continues to hold nothing. In untouched parts of me, I opened another hole in my body. I wrote this poem about adolescence, which was just such a smooth part of every girl's life, right? It's called Keep Me Burning. I practiced crossing my legs the way my father daggers his eyes at my mother if I ever wore shorts. Twin openings exposing more than what they could hold inside. It took me three sex ed classes and a crushed pamphlet to know that I must fold and hold my body like a score of eggs on a crowded subway. My period premiered the night we went to watch Godzilla, which wasn't as scary as the sports teacher and bleeding students to sit separately in a lotus pose. A quick whip if the line of our panties showed through the pinafore. We played telephone with our hands instead of running in the sun. In moral science class, the only girl with waxed legs passed a chit under the smooth wooden desk. It read, When he touches, I feel hot and cold at the same time. I lay naked on our marble floor fever under his ripped full body poster. I touched myself the way my sister braids and wiggles her toes over the phone under the sheets, coral pink, her words, like submerged seeds on strawberries. Who knew those were called Aquinis, the berries ovaries? I asked Mom, what was the big deal about sexing? And she asked me, if I'd eaten all my fruit at lunch. What would Madonna have done? I vibrated all around my pimpled ears with a walkman or a home carry-ok mic between my thighs, knowing there was a sound inside that would leak on any given Sunday in Koya as he'd hit his solo bits of give me oil in my lamp. If only there was a way to touch the difference between fill and feel. If only I knew how I could make origami of my shame and let it fly, fly, fly. Thank you. I don't know, every time you think that you can enjoy your body, things just trip you up. So this book is full of such contradictions. Self-portrait as first lines. My thighs are the train's general compartment. Everyone get on board. The uncle who holds my waist like nursing his whiskey glass says you are too attached to yourself. A woman lives as a woman observing herself from the outside. From the outside it looked like we had a healthy sex life. The day he asked for a video of me pissing, I bought the smaller sized dress to look the part. How are you still so tight? The jump to fit the fat under my jeans button. Intimacy really gets me off. And the man who groups my big ass on the bus and the man who pretends to find his keys near his groin, a knife under my pillow where milk teeth were hidden for wishes. To come true, I wish I hadn't shown him that part of me. Favourite position? Low self-esteem. A girl and her razor walk into her bar. Vitamins, masturbation and poetry. Love and marriage like clock hands. One chasing another. Brushed twice a day. I care if I am kissed. A stand-up comic says to me you have perfect bonestar boobs. How do desire and repression meet? Always in a trial room, I. A series of reflections who won't talk to each other. See, two more poems. This first one is called Last Rites. This is usually before the final funeral when the body is prepped for the ceremony. Last Rites. The aunt who yelled at ma when I was nine is putting on redemption as makeup today. Reciting the Bhagavad Gita over my mother's corpse. It says abandon all attachment to the results of action. And uncle makes phone calls for mid-priced wood. Says nothing too fancy. I imagine when he goes, we'll scorch him on a pyre of cash bundles that he's hoping to save of my mother's cold body. She's now being rubbed in ghee for uniform burning look. Look at the neighbors looking down at you from windows like your future is a video clip buffering. Ask the bodyless sky for two more hands to fill the why me and why her. In my mother's hometown the word goodbye is considered bad luck. Instead they leave their house to Aujo which means come again. Ask Ma if she wants a pair of house keys just in case. The theatre of loss has too many emergency exits. Push again to check if any of those doors can open the other way. Thank you so much for being here. I know it's a super sunny and nice day and we'd rather be outside but thank you it means a lot that you're here. I have a few copies of my book if anyone would like to get them or talk about it. I'm going to read this last poem which is called Won't you come give your grandmother a hug? Why did you yell at mother? Aren't you woman too? Why did you frown if her rotis weren't made in perfect circles? Why did you and her have to wait to eat until the men at the table were finished? What caused your temper to become soft and formless like old skin? Why did you have a flip of conscience when she went into a nuclear home? Does it take cancer to become more compassionate? Why was your first response to her loss? My son is all alone now. How is looking for a new daughter-in-law a form of mourning? Why was one woman rejected for her weight? Last I checked she was woman too. Why must you call father's new wife, my mother? Is it because you don't know better? Should I cut you some slack? Should I swallow the bones too because you make me the best fish curry? Should I force my giddy heart to be stoned when it sees your vertigo? Should I look away when you raise your hand and show me how you wish to dance at my wedding? Or massage my memories like you, your kneecaps? Discipline me, reject me. Why do you want to hug me? Am I not woman too? Thank you so much. Thank you for coming out.