 Sultana Razia, when I ruled Delhi, I went without the veil, wearing the tunic and headdress of a man. Now forgotten by most, I lie in my tomb, tucked away on the banks of the river Yamuna, serene and slow. Some of you in your youth may have meandered through my life. In those eternal picture stories, the Amar Chitrakatha comics, your parents bought for rupees three a piece. Perhaps you know I sat on the throne from 1236 to 1240, when Rumi was beginning to write poetry in Turkey, my country of origin, Cengiz Khan, less than 10 years in his grave. Today I see the Taliban torturing women, Muslim women inside their black burqas, from Saudi Arabia to Sudan. A stifled in education made second class, but my father, the Sultan, selected me over my brothers to be his successor. Some emirs opposed me, wanted my half-brother Rukh Nuddin to rule, but dance girls and drink diverted his attention. Realizing the rotting of the state, people pleaded they wanted Razia to rule. So I rode in my red robe and Sultana Razia sat on the throne in 1236. The poet in me encouraged poets and painters and musicians. In schools I built, children learned not only the Koran, but also Hindu philosophy and astronomy. In libraries I let Hindu science books stand side by side with Mohammed's message. I dug wells and planted trees for the traveler on the roads leading to Delhi. My heart hurt when I heard of the Gujarat massacre of 2002, Hindu jihadis maiming Muslims and Lashkar-e-Toeba terrorists bombing travelers in 2006 in Mumbai trains. I knew tension would travel through time. So to bridge the rift between the conquered and the conquerors, I abolished the tax on the Hindu farmer and porter. So a hymn did not pay more than a Hussain. As a witness of my companion and advisor Jamaluddin Yakut, Governor Althunya attacked. I Razia laid my troops with Jamal at my side, but he was killed. And I was made a prisoner, destined for death. To serve Delhi, I, a true Turkish Sultana, forced myself to marry Althunya, the only option. Jamal Yakut, I still yearned only for you, but you understand, don't you? Towards Delhi, as I rode with Althunya, my elephant was attacked by the army of my brother Bahram, whom in my absence had usurped the throne, and an arrow entered my heart. And I died before I reached 35. Such is my story. You come to this Yamuna to wash your feet and forget your troubles. Here too lie the ashes of your ancestors and trash from nearby towns, Hindu or Muslim, young girl or old man. Sometimes I want to seek you out and tell you your own story. And the next one is Nehmen. The film rolled on Nehmen's face. Sitting on a stool, he answered, I only took the photographs. He, the Khmer Rouge photographer of Security Prison 21, S21. Black and white photos taken, shutter snapped, and 17,000 people put to death between 1975 and 1979. Girls with fringes, with shoulder length hair, could have been my junior college classmates, old men with cotton colored hair and missing teeth, stand-ins for my grandfathers, only three survived, bow men by painting pawl-pot, Chun-me by fixing sewing machines, and Chin-ma, 20 at the time, doesn't know why. Nehmen asked, what could I have done, got shot? After the screening, we step out in the courtyard and eat lemon tarts and chocolate eclairs. And this is from the second edition of the UC Berkeley Extension literary review, Arsa Minor, December 1992. I am a 20-story building, saluting the Arabian sea. In me live doctors and lawyers, police officers and civil servants, each in their two or three bedroom flat. They greet and stand, elbow brushing elbow in my lift as they go up or down, making conversation about the latest cricket match, some neighbors' health problems moving slightly away from someone's cough or two friendly dog. At times they rode the service elevator, though this was used mainly by the servants, the Jamdar collecting garbage and the milkman delivering milk in the morning. Though the adults were separated, the children of the Chowkidar played with those of the doctor, and the electrician's son clean-bolded the government officer's sons in cricket. The names on the brown wooden board at the entrance read, Vaidya and Vardarajan, Ahmad and Akbar, Pereira and Pinto. Till the riots began and the board was blanked, so no intruder knew the religion residing in any particular place, and names became just numbers in that sad month when Bombay betrayed its inhabitants. And I'll read a couple from the Bay Area Generations, which was the reading where Kim and I got to share the same stage with Kim Shah. Let's just say it that way. And Sharon was there too. So if I can find the farmer from Andhra Pradesh, if Indira does not give reigns, the rice will not grow. Early summer and I wake every day before the cockroaches and the stray dog barks, my bullock and me plough the soil. In spite of Surya's wrath, I sing to keep my sanity. Then I spread manure and some factory fertilizer. They said will yield better rice crops. I purchased it by selling off my wife's only pair of gold earrings, the wedding ones. She cried until the cocks crowed. But I explained it's for the family. Chief Minister speaks of Hyderabad as Cyber City. In English, a Videshi language I cannot understand. Someone called Bill Gates shakes CM's hand in the newspaper photo. Something about computers, I don't know what they do. But my eldest son says he wants to go to the city and study them. In Telugu, I try to tell of my troubles. But MLAs from Telugu, Desim and Congress only appear at election time. Promising bore wells and roads for votes. Last year, two of my nine children had high fever, maybe malaria. And before we could borrow enough money to go to the doctor, they died. My middle daughter Shanta still talks to Neela in her sleep. Sushila and Shanta want to go to school to, like Sundar, their eldest brother. But I cannot afford more school uniforms and books and pencils. Besides, the girls will just grow up and cook and keep house like their mother. Why do they need school? It will only spoil them. So ideas in their heads, like women, are just as good as men. And they'll suffer more when they marry, like they say Nagarka, Nagarka. Not of the village nor the town. Sundar studies in school, while Karna and Karthik help me in the fields. I'm getting old, my back hurts, like a hammer hitting it. Soon my sons will need to take over. The rains have not come. I prayed to Rama and Krishna, Shiva and Parvati. Even been to Tirupati, offered my wives only ponchampalli, silk saree. But there's no food for my family, no rice to sell. First we stopped eating dal, then chilies, kept diluting the curds with more and more water, till the buttermilk became clear like a river. Now we eat only a handful of broken rice once or twice a day. I cannot bear to hear my children's bellies growling or look at my wife's veins showing through her skin, like parched earth. The office babu comes from the city occasionally in a chauffeured ambassador car with his chaprasi. Does his namaste, promises subsidies. But only his belly gets big with all the bribes. I can't stand it anymore. Two weeks ago, Jan Reddy swallowed a can of pesticide. He could never repay at 36% interest. Three days ago, Shivaraja discovered the seeds he was sold did not germinate, and he could not afford his daughter's dowry. He strangled himself with his wife's saree. Should I join them, at least then I don't have to see my children suffer anymore. Maybe the government will finally give the money for my dead body to repay the debts, get my daughters married, and my wife, no stranger to suffering, will somehow manage. But can I hear my children's cries when they find out I've taken my life? Is it better to live like the dead or die to be reborn as a crow, a cockroach, or a corropathy, or maybe some cursed soul, just like me? The next one, Berkeley, not Baghdad. Power caught downtown Berkeley, 7 a.m. to noon Saturday. No hot shower, god damn it. On the other hand, it's 105, but I can get breakfast at Starbucks, vanilla latte and croissant, even if no AC, no TV, driving around the block with hubby in our SUV, emitting greenhouse gases. The air feels so stuffy with no electricity. Hell, I need to focus. Big exam in three weeks. Open windows, but sweat makes an artistic tea on my nose and eyebrows. Go to freezer to put ice cubes in my fresh lemonade. I slip in the puddle by the refrigerator, shit. Then I think of Baghdad, dry desert heat, no electricity most of the day. Forget TV and AC, no fan or hot water for cooking in country whose oil we covet. If you walk the streets to the bazaar to buy food, no Starbucks to counter grit shut down, throw in the bomb blast as well. Late evening, talk with my father in Mumbai, tell him about our five hour power cut. He tells me it is essential to experience surviving without a cordless phone and the microwave. Maybe, just maybe, five hours will help me understand what people in Baghdad have borne for five years. Baby's milk spoiling in the sun, only a minor worry when surrounding buildings get raised and maybe it'll help me understand the villages in India, in Kenya and Nigeria where they've never even heard of Edison. By noon, PG and E has turned on my electricity and I step into a hot shower, soap off, self centered me, 7,200 miles from the cradle of civilization. Chanel number five. I'm the sleek black Chanel number five perfume stick of the year of the India-Pakistan war. The year you were a three year old leapfrogging to four, me a gift from your father to your mother, but soon you turned an eager eight and your mother sprayed a bit of me on your collar. By 10, you tucked me away as your own, kept me in your cupboard and secretly sprayed me on special occasions. The party where you wore a borrowed red dress that dazzled, college graduation day, you looking gorgeous in a pale pink saree with a bit of me in your neck and armpits. You then carried me back to America, boarding a plane for California, but now spent, I lie unrecognized in a landfill, sandwiched between cheap plastic plates and circuit boards, VCRs and baby napkins, endless useless shit all pressing down on me. And I'll do a lighter one. It's not a warrior's poem, but it's still a basketball poem. A basketball, spherical and ponchy, I get dribbled and passed around. I fly through hoops, today NBA final and Kobe is caressing me, flicking me in the air and his wife does not even care. Fat and round, I get passed around. The swelled cheerleaders in their so short shorts, some with silicone and shampoo commercial hair can't compete with me for attention, a rotent on a rebound. And the next two were published in the Berkeley Daily Planet, The Gutting of the Taj Hotel, November 26th, 2008. Today I'm coughing, choking in smoke. I see human eyes peering at me through wide angle cameras where once I'd see children with balloons, lovers soaking in the sea breeze close to the gateway. Today I hear the pounding on my head. I hope the commandos have come. My inside is burning. Gunshots ruining my lovely skin of wall to wall Persian carpets. My skull of chandeliers cracked. A few days and all will be quiet. Images of me burning, just a curious click on the web. And the rich folk of Mumbai will return to my caresses of chicken tikka masala served by men and women who lost their colleagues and close friends today. And the next one, ordinary people. I get up today with the saffron sunrise, have been traveling through the traffic jam of Marine Drive and Matunga, going through the gullies, veering to avoid hitting children, playing cricket in corners, being jolted by bumps on dug up roads. Yes, I'm just another black and yellow fear taxi on Mumbai's roads. I've had my morning meal of petrol at the pump, my wheels now running and rolling, young children in school uniforms, old women in saris and burkas, men in sharp suits and mullas with flowing beards, all have sat in my behind. These two boys look no different, clean shaven jeans and t-shirt. One slips a package underneath my seat, the other helps. You ask how I see this? I have eyes on my behind, rear view mirror, you call it. Some other strangers will sit in my back seat and we will go towards Santa Cruz station complaining about the suffocating sun. I do not know now, but soon those strangers and me will be broken to bits, but for now those boys slipping something underneath my seat look like ordinary clean shaven, denim jeans and t-shirt types. And this poem became my new favorite. It was published in Spectrum, the Santa Barbara Literary Review and also in the best of 60 years of Spectrum where there was a piece by William Carlos Williams in the same issue, so it became my new favorite poem. Minakshi Temple Madurai. Since the 1600s, so many have come to ask Minakshi for her blessings, men in dhoti's, those white cloths hanging to the ankle, knotted at the waist, women in kanjivaram silk saris, with rich zari borders, and women in torn cotton saris, six or nine yards, girls in patapavadas, silk skirts spreading like umbrellas and now modern day women in salwar camis and jeans. Each has walked the same temple ground where I now place my own bare feet as I approach the temple, I too marvel at the Rajagopuram, intricate stone carvings of deities in brilliant colors, rising majestic and meeting the sky. The temple in Livermore, California, minuscule juxtaposed against the sanctuary within a city. Everyone rushes and pushes to get to the statue of Minakshi, some even bribe a guy standing by to help them jump the line. My husband too pays money to get us a visit with the deity, but I wonder, will this really bring us closer to God or only the armed guards on alert symbols of our age like the metal detectors we have to cross to get to the altar? How do you feel I want to ask the hallowed earth? Can you tell the difference between the cracked feet of the elderly, the patring feet of young girls and boys, the cautious steps of a young bride with silver anklets? By the gate, can you tell a cane from a foot, a corrupt politician from a poor peasant? I stand on stiff toe to eye the idols and listen to the pre-sprayers, but as I leave it is the cold stone and sand, the grains between my toes. It's you that sticks with me, the peace I carry back outside, and I want to know, were you the same sand and stone my grandmother who grew up in Madurai stood upon, when as a girl of eight, after the death of her mother Nagalakshmi, she came to mother Meenakshi to speak her secret sorrows with those thoughts I get back in the taxi with my husband and the driver together but alone. Two more, dissection, this is from the Wona writers of color anthology, Wona voices anthology, dissection. One frog is green and one of them is sporty, they bear one common name and yet they vary and talking modulates their voice diversely. Thus is your croaking catalogued in hymn 101 of the Rig Veda written 2,500 years ago. Some call you Indian bullfrog with eyes that bulge like soap bubbles. I've heard you herald the first train of monsoon as precious for the forgotten farmer as a pre-sprayer. In 12th grade science I studied you, Rana Tigrina with the Tiger Spots, family Rannide, phylum Cordata. You came chloroformed with bare hands. I pinned you on my wax tray and took a scalpel and made the first incision on your ventral side to close to where your hind legs join your body. Cut and cleared skin and muscle to expose your stomachs, spleen and pancreas, your burgundy liver and tiny heart. I was grossed out by your yellow fat, scrutinized your intestine and wondered if your system was really just a miniature of mine. Your digestive system came easily but the arteries and veins were another story. I pried and poked and ruptured to excavate your bloody intricacies. I did not stop to think of your story, your father mounting your mother, a tadpole hatching from an egg that escaped being eaten, developing lungs, shedding tail, metamorphizing into a full-brown frog. No, I had my board exam to think of, you were only a digestive system to me, 10 easy points, not a living, beating, breathing body that I had to kill to study, the story of a sacred coupling, calling for a mate. Those were the days when I was old enough to know of a kiss frog who became a prince but too young to know a kiss prince can also become a frog that cannot be dissected. And this is the last one. This little lamp of mine, silver lamp standing serene on the black kadapa slab in the storeroom, my mother pouring oil, pulling five cotton strands was the flame in five directions for the five husbands of Draupadi in Mahabharat or five fingers of my five-year hand, crawling Krishna, palm-sized brass, catching the light of the Kuttyvalaka, morning and evening, mummy lighting the lamp and praying, me too prostrating in Namaskaram before the daily dinner. On my marriage, the lamp repolished and presented to me, my marriage ended but the lamp languishes unlit, tucked away in a cotton cloth bag in Berkeley. Time to time I open and feel the lamp, rubbing my palms and memories creep back of mummy lighting the Kuttyvalaka and placing Semiya Paisam and praying on Diwali days, us wandering by the small spaces, the police constables one room houses with a lone lamp, a child lighting, a small sparkler. Now giant Ganesha's manufactured maybe in China, financed by gangsters and politicians, are paraded in processions during Ganesh Chaturthi, while the little crawling Krishna cries in the corner, and my fragile 80-year-old father lights a five-tiered brass lamp by turning on an electric switch, though I know this ritual will soon be extinguished. Thank you, and that was in eternal snow.