The Middle Finger by Saikat Majumdar

Author:Saikat Majumdar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: S&S India
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

14

RORY LOOKED VULNERABLE, A terrified prey. He was naked but for the jewelry on his upper body over the bright yellow dhoti, but he did not look naked, he looked like a temple deity who had come to life. He played the pursuer and he played the pursued and his footsteps created a demonic music on the wooden stage.

He played animals, cold reptilian animals and their fluttering preys, the snake and the gecko and the grasshopper, the household lizard going after the cockroach. He had taken Megha’s poems and turned them into dance. Megha sat in the front row and watched, trying to read her poems; she could read some but not all, as there was much else in between and it was impossible to say when one poem ended and the other started, or if anything ended at all. She sensed that he had picked out the poems where race relations became sexual, when the pursuit of a body of a different texture started to look like a hunting game. The dance sharpened the pangs of guilt she had felt writing them, heard them spoken in drunken, slurring speech in noisy bars, seen them in print, now floating in the air, trapped in Rory’s naked arms, let go, cursed and caressed.

She had never imagined her poetry in Carnatic music. It was like hearing them translated, even though Rory’s performance was wordless. There were no vocals, but the sound of the violin and the mridangam were a kind of a speech, a call to Rory to become fearless, and then terrified, to run from one corner of the stage to another.

A pale lizard chased a brown roach. The roach fluttered its wings, a dying flirtation.

A snake eyed a green leaf till the leaf sprouted into a greenish-yellow bug, willing to be eaten.

There was thunder on the stage. Rory was demonic and then a shy teenage girl.

Spit flew around in a train station. Spit that chased people like winged ghosts. People who chased spit, crazed with thirst. Black teenagers in a beat-up car, packed like canned fish.

A man throwing a glass of wine at another man, staining his shirt.

A man walking through a rough neighborhood, ice in his loins at the voice of the men around, singing and drinking.

Rory slid off the stage like a dream. The lights came on and Megha and Siya went up. She felt like rubbing her eyes, it was like everybody had just woken up from sleep.

“I’ve seen many of Megha’s poems spoken out loud,” Siya told the audience. “In smoky bars, in poor quality YouTube videos, watched them performed on Instagram to the recording of guitarists outside New York City subway stations. But I’ve never seen them dance wordlessly.”

“Poems dancing wordlessly,” she turned to Megha with a smile. “Make that a new poem, will you?”

“Welcome to the launch of The Forked Tongue, a deadly collection of poems by Megha Mansukhani. My thanks to the Oddbird Theatre Foundation,” Siya looked at the front row, looked around the auditorium and thanked them all.

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