“Grandmother’s Room” and Other Poems

By Faiz Ahmad

Jagdeep Raina - Madhur's Phulkari (2021), 35mm film still
Image description: A black-and-white photograph of an old lady is framed in green and placed on a piece of phulkari cloth. The cloth is embroidered with geometric patterns in orange, white, and gold. A pair of hands is shown at the bottom left of the image. The right hand, wearing a gold ring and a bracelet, gently touches the bottom-left corner of the framed photograph. The left hand, in shadow, is placed on the phulkari cloth. 

Changes

So you were saying,
my friend in limbo—

that you must now 
give up the old ways 

abandon the sweet
apocryphals of modernity  

no more drugs
no more pleasures
no more speed

and then of your desire
for a hard life of service

to heal and to save
to breathe and to breathe

and I subtly suppress 
the rising wave of that 

old ludicrous doubt
which has plagued many

a prophets’ tribe, the urge 
for cross examinations &

I persist in the courtesy
of believing, and you then

proceed to narrate that
particular cathartic event

and its long aftermath
which you describe as a

darkness not of hellish places
but akin to a womb’s inside.

Many years have passed since,
and I wonder and I wonder

how well, if at all, your eyes
may have accustomed to the

new light of the self-same world,
ever so treacherous as a friend

ever so interrogative as the soul.

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Jagdeep Raina - Jasmeet, sweet brother (2015), Mixed media on paper, 26 inches x 40 inches (66.04 cm x 101.6 cm)
Image description: A colorful sketch rendered in casual strokes depicts the facade of a grocery store. The dark-green sign on the storefront says, “PUNJABI GROCERY & DELI.” The store’s window and door are plastered with colorful flyers. An ATM machine stands on the left side of the storefront. A figure stands on the right side of the store, with his hands in his pockets. He wears a black jacket, a long, white shirt, black pants, and yellow shoes. His beard is discernible. He stands straight and faces left, as if waiting. To his right, gray, worn-out stairs lead to a graffiti-covered door; a graffiti on the top says, “SIKHS IN DA CITY BIOTCHH.” To the far left of the painting are yellow-brick walls and half a window.

Grandmother’s Room

Furnitured by stacks of tablets
and syrups, this wrinkled room

lets in morning sunlight creep
up to the bed, the exhaust fan

spinning noiselessly in your skull,
undoing you, memory by memory,

and I tiptoe to the bedside, tap
your shoulders lightly. Startled,

you snap, who? Faiz, I answer.
Who, you repeat. Faiz, I repeat

thrice, slowly. Oh, you reply.

Out of comprehension or out
of exasperation, who knows ?

And by the look on your face,
I wondered to myself, -

perhaps she loves us still, but
without our names.

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Jagdeep Raina - Paradise Lost (2019), Embroidered tapestry, phulkari border on muslin, 18 inches x 30 inches (45.72 cm x 76.2 cm)
Image description: A piece of colorful embroidery depicts human figures against the backdrop of a countryside setting. In the foreground of the embroidery, five people sit side-by-side on a picnic mat, surrounded by a variety of objects. The leftmost woman is dressed in blue and wears a blue headscarf. On her left, another woman is dressed in pink and white and wears a white headscarf. On her left, a man is dressed in dark-blue and wears a blue turban. To his left, two men, dressed in light-blue and white, wear brown-and-white turbans. They turn to face the man sitting in the center of the arrangement. Behind all of them, a man with a white beard sits on a round, patio chair. In the background of the image is a landscape made up of lush grass, small flowers, white fences, telephone poles, farmhouses, and a blue sky. In the distance, a red-and-white house has a sign that says, “I PROMISE.” On the right side of the image, closer to the figures, is a dark-red house with a white roof. Above its door are the words “PARADISE LOST.” 

But You Know Me, Don’t You?

Counting money may have its
charms, but no so for the turquoise
shirted cashier at the Union Bank, 
for obvious reasons, who now ske-
daddles at lunch break towards the 
neighbouring paan shop and asks for 
a Gold-flake, to straighten his spine 
he says to dry off his spit-moistened 
fingertips he says, and then he lets the 
vendor know, casually, that he would
pay for it the next day, has no change today 
and the vendor smiles all rueful and 
sheepish, like a man regularly betrayed 
by circumstances, no debts please, they 
never return, and our cashier rises up 
from the bench like one of Joseph’s
nameless brothers, wears an expression
of mock disbelief, incredulously asks
But you know me, don’t you? But you know
me, don’t you? and his mouth agape,  
bellowing grey smoke devils that push
his face further into the well of obscurity.

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Faiz Ahmad is a recent graduate in Biological Sciences, IIT Madras, India. His work appears in Poetry Daily, Denver Quarterly, Bayou, Salamander, Poetry Northwest, and others.

*

Jagdeep Raina is an interdisciplinary artist and writer from Guelph, Ontario, Canada. He holds a Masters degree from the Rhode Island School of Design and was a 2021 Paul Mellon Fellow at Yale University. Raina currently lives and works in Houston, Texas, USA

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