The following is an excerpt from poet K. Srilata’s book Three Women in a Single-Room House published by Sahitya Akademi.K. Srilata, ‘Three Women in a Single-Room House’,Sahitya Akademi (2023). A Poem Entirely in Brackets This is a poem that shouldn’t be written about the thing we don’t want to remember.And so it has become a poem entirely in brackets. (There’s a box of divorce papers in the loft)(The box is a living, breathing thing)(We hear its breath from down here)(The painters found it, reminding us) (She asked for it to be taken down)This box, which is now, no longer in the loft,but in the body of a poem entirely in brackets.(Open ones, with no closure. AtticSome things, I tell him, are best left up there.Best to keep the windows tightly shut,blackened against memory’s ambush. Treat it like an air raid,do what our parents did. Kanpur, 1971. My mother. The circling of planes.Will they? Won’t they? No, I don’t have the bandwidth, I tell him,using a word we didn’t know back then,when nimble-footed, he climbed the ladder,certain that one day we would unpack them –our lives packed in newspaper,and, no matter how thick the dust,know them as before. Old Words for Old Things It is best to use old words for old things.Goggles is better than shades.New words hustle. They smell of houses painted over,and no trace of soul. New words pay no mind to anything.They are full of bluster, whereas old words – old words are quiet. They tunnel through,climb ladders – a step at a time – on bad knees.Old words are tortoises.Take it from me, they get there in the end. K. Srilata is a poet, fiction writer, translator and academic. Srilata’s books include This Kind of Child: A ‘Disability’ Story (Westland), a novel Table for Four (Penguin, India) which was long listed in 2009 for the Man Asian literary prize, six collections of poetry and the anthologies The Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry and Short Fiction from South India (OUP).
