Manjiri Indurkar's Origami Aai Recalls A Playful Childhood Through Poems

'Origami Aai' chronicles Manjiri's childhood relationship with her Aai (mother), her Aaji (grandmother) and her Baba (father) that is told with playfulness, rawness and humour that feels no shame in hiding or covering up anything and is purely written from the eyes of a child who sees the role her mother plays in the family and her essence in their lives as a central pillar that everyone relies on.

Here's an excerpt from Manjiri Indurkar's Origami Aai 

Load Shedding

Aai brings back Geeta Dutt to life tonight,

As she admonishes her lover (Ja Ja Ja Bewafa),

In a game of antakshari she can never lose.

Every time she pokes a needle into her stomach

Her insulin resistance breaks through her skin

And cracks in her voice grow branches.

In a cement tank overflowing with sand

Where a lonely dog sits every morning. I take his

Place in this night of government-supplied darkness.

When Aai fans me with events of yesterday—

Death, decay, destruction, the usual—

An ant colony takes a stroll on my dress.

And abandons me mid-sentence. By the time

We are returned to the light, our faces have

Been altered, for the sake of belonging.

Aai grates her fingers to fit into her new body

And we follow in her footsteps. And our grated fingers

Are turned into wall hangings, with pretty tassels.

I slip into the sand with ease now. 

My breasts have been chiselled, 

They gouge through palms.

These hands won’t close your eyes anymore.

Thereafter, with our grated fingers, we return to life,

With hopes of forgetting the people we once used to be.

The Dahlias of My Garden

Baba refuses to grow vegetables,

He only likes flowers.

He waters them every day.

He talks to them.

He grows them on his stomach.

His stomach is hard as the piece of

Earth on which his flowers grow.

The flowers that grow on his stomach

Are dahlias.

I water them for him,

When it becomes difficult.

A baby is fed through the mother’s

Navel, old wisdom informs us. Say

Aai lost her navel to me and my brother,

Baba lost his to the dahlias.

We are a family that turned a man into a plant,

Because they told us, men don’t give birth.

Writing Love

These days, it’s hard to write

about stranger things like the night

jasmine flowers, and love,

so let’s not do that yet.

Because the time isn’t right.

How can I talk of love,

when this planet keeps newborns

hidden in cocoons that eat them

a little, each time they move?

When ants go to sleep, wherever they go to sleep,

what do they dream about?

I give myself a scar today,

I carve out a name I cannot spell

and honey drips out of my leg.

Is that why your leg looks swollen?

Ma asks me.

The insides of my flesh develop beehives.

Look at all the ants I am attracting,

some yawning, for I woke them up

before coffee could be served.

The babies that come out of these cocoons

are often missing limbs.

They are reared for certain purposes.

There’s no freewill on this planet.

So how do I talk of love?

A baby was born without

a tongue.

He talked in whistles

and they all understood,

his lack of tongue makes him

a good container.

He holds inside him a lot of data

required to run this planet,

where I can’t write about love.

This planet of thirteen moons

where I have been exiled

is where death comes to die.

Babies are dropped head-first on to the ground, so that they crack their

skulls and their brains can grow in size.

Babies with big heads and no limbs

are efficient janitors, and excellent computer

programmers. They’d give automatons a

run for their money, if automatons had

any money.

Birds don’t fly here, they might rip

apart the cocoons and disrupt the process

of creation.

The last time it happened, a bird was sentenced

to death. I hear that’s better than

living on this planet, unless they

find a purpose for you.

It has just been discovered that I

am turning into honey.

I am the nourishment this planet

doesn’t need.

I will be dropped (head first, because

that’s the rule) in my mother’s shiny

cup, that she has put out for drying.

If I break the china, I’ll be exiled again.

If I break my skull, I might finally

understand,

what people write, when they write about love.  

Extracted with permission from Manjiri Indurkar's Origami Aai; published by Westland Books