‘She, Unbound’

 

       Volume - 1                             Issue -2                     March 2025             

‘She, Unbound’

I. Daughter
She was the first monsoon rain—
a giggle in a cradle of sky,
her father’s vaanam held in her fist,
her mother’s lullaby stitching stars to her eyelids.
School ribbons tied dreams into braids,
while her knees scraped the earth,
learning to rise.

II. Wife
They called her manaivi,
but her crown was woven of silence,
her throne a threshold between homes.
She became a bridge—
carrying his storms in her sari’s pleats,
her laughter a lantern in his darkest corridors.
Yet, in the mirror, she still traced
the girl who once climbed mango trees.

III. Mother
Her hands grew rivers—
one to cradle, one to cleanse.
Midnight lullabies blended with dawn’s alarms,
her voice a pendulum between kanmani and Excel sheets.
She traded sindoor for sanitizer,
kumkum for keyboard smudges,
her love a hybrid of old hymns and WiFi passwords.

IV. Grandmother
Now her spine curves like a question mark,
her wrinkles mapping forgotten wars.
She fries vadai in coconut oil,
stories simmering in her throat:
“I wore my first jeans at forty…”
Her arthritic fingers, once jailed by kolam rice powder,
now swipe TikTok, teaching grandsons
how to unlearn caste.

V. Mother-in-Law
They painted her villain—
a dragon guarding generational vaults.
But beneath her stern pallu,
she hid letters from a lover lost to Partition,
her sighs echoing in the daughter-in-law’s coffee cup.
One night, she whispered:
“Break what I couldn’t.
Make peace with the ghosts.”

VI. Sister-in-Law
Neither friend nor foe,
she’s the hyphen in family trees—
borrowing lipstick, sharing side-eyes,
her WhatsApp forwards a ceasefire treaty.
In Diwali group photos,
her arm hesitates before resting
on shoulders that once stiffened at her name.

VII. Housewife
Her mornings are algebra—
budgets balanced on grocery lists,
monsoon leaks quarantined by buckets.
The pressure cooker’s hiss
synchronizes with her fraying breath.
Yet, in the nilavilakku glow,
she paints landscapes no gallery will hang,
her art folded into lunchboxes.

VIII. Officer
In stilettos that blister,
she marches through glass labyrinths,
her ID card a shield against “Can you make chai?”
Boardrooms flinch when her Tamil-accented English
detonates data like grenades.
She signs memos in red ink—
the same hue as her long-erased maang tikka.

IX. Herself
Beneath these roles—
a girl still hums,
her voice a tangled radio frequency
tuning between aadi thapi and snowstorms.
She is the hyphen in “woman-kind,”
the footnote in epics,
the edit button on history’s rough draft.
When the world demands, “Which are you?”
She smiles, a thousand mirrors reflecting:
“All. None. Beyond.”

                                                                -RS

*****