Dear Suzannah
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About this ebook
Pankhuri Sinha
Pankhuri Sinha is a writer who currently lives in Calgary, Alberta. This is her first collection of poems in English. Her previous two books are both collections of stories in Hindi, Koi-Bhi-Din (2006) and Kissa-e-Kohinoor (2008). She is also soon coming out with her first collection of poems in Hindi, Kakaharaa. Her poems in hindi have been published in several prestigious magazines and blogs. Prison Talkies has a sequel in Dear Suzannah. These books are to be followed by two investigative studies of the relationship between crime, society, community, immigration, academia and the police, called ‘Some Very First World Tests: Spanish Bases, Nigerian Accounts, a Lottery Scam in Canada’, and ‘Academia’s War of Immigration’. She is also working on several stories and poetries in Hindi. Pankhuri has received many prestigious awards for her literary writing in Hindi.
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Dear Suzannah - Pankhuri Sinha
Copyright © 2014 by Pankhuri Sinha.
ISBN: Softcover 978-1-4990-7839-8
eBook 978-1-4990-7841-1
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.
Rev. date: 10/02/2014
Xlibris LLC
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Contents
The great stalemate
The Incomplete Story
That poem
At home
Where the talk was stuck
Meeting someone
The desire to move people so much
Busting the drink racket
The problem with that kind of socialization
The Politics of the Mirror
The sticky point
The crisis of acknowledgement
The known perfect method
The crisis of the third person
The market of love
Capitalism’s crisis
The game was
The office tours
The office hours
Problematizing sex
Speed Dating
In the footsteps of the previous one
Picture politics
Godmaking
The Grocery stores of other countries
They just did not let me move an inch
Had to defend then,
move now
Making everything about money
The having of the affair
Having my rights in his pockets
Coming back to the alliance statement
What I was told to stand up for
Playing the politics of the automatic
And I could not do it
All I had to do
Those In Charge
Playing the politics of abandonment
All they wanted to hear
Those who crept inside all talks
The art of talking
Their most recent kill
The road to the grievance talk
Like the evaluation of currency and other things
Something like modern economics
Campaign grounds of upcoming elections
Locating the war
The equation
The half truths of taught lessons
The Position Measurements
The need to laugh back
A mockery of the good old dictum
Matrimonial bliss
The fitting into the pattern
The politics of being made to consult an attorney
The announcements of position taking
The display of insecurity
The power of veto on matrimonial website
In my police complaints
And that’s a checking of our system right there
The Confidence Game
On not fighting, simply moving on
Meanings of words
The great game of adjectives
Authoritarian structure of relationships
Appointing authorities
The phone lessons
Invention of languages
Creating a perfect identity of the victim
Odd patterns
Need all poetry be spiritual
Why is a bearded man following me
The green nights of Alberta
Stories of well being
Integrity of work culture
The validity of proposals
The pyramid structure
Exit strategies
The cult of fear
Who and what people are
Don’t go back there
The need of the last phone call
Phone Hanging
The goodwill calls
The cheerfulness of the secretary at the law firm
Happy Is
Love is
The mentalite of obedience
The porter competition
The exactness of the word
The entrance of a new argument
The chorus inside my head
Writing the literature that no one wants
Dark poetries of Coco Picking
An oil drenched sea bird
Talking with everything at stake
Normalizing the cyclone of people
The Spanish accent in which she said bread
To not even write poetry
Drugged Slumber
To the extent that I had left him
The politics of re-starting
Cat Moods
Topaz eyes
On eating welfare cookies
Cat silences
Cat sleeps
Cat touches
The day’s math
Mirroring my work in my daily life
The hacker’s nightmare
Eating out
How they tracked my reading
The metaphor of speaking in French
The official speaking of French
Patient poems
Getting to work
The unclear things
The talk about free things
The age of sentences
Laughing alone in home video
The visibility of my work
The writings about strange prisons
Retrogression
Not
communicating right
The girl with the big eyes
Bride Burning
The knitting classes
The knitting yarn
The trouble
And the afternoon was made up of
Going first
Outside in
Shoplifting
Selection
The artist’s journal
Very hard prison
Reading
Talking
That poetry has been written
Still that poem
The golden coin
The enigma
Another enigma
Why would you steal people’s rights, so that they would need to complain?
Politics free talk
The role of prayers and wish making in infiltration
An administrative post
The arrival of the English question
Stealing Prayers
Shopping mistakes
From under the pine tree
The Twin Defences
The Crime Scene
The Arab acquaintance
I know what she is doing
More on campus police
Psychological frameworks infront
The New Atrium
Picking myself up or just working
The dance tunes
Its pure simple racism
The job not done and the job undone
The charity dress
The overdone math about your being here
Almost mid-day
Yesterday’s mid-day
The napkins from the library today
The apple poems
The fear festival
The artful cat bites
Monday morning
The instrument of the phone
In Jackson Mississippi
The invisible war
Response Regime
Paid for, free, welfare, and merit
Just names
The huge Ironies
Wander
Intravenal Feeding
Pointlessness
The survey phones
The politics of what they talk about
Calling upon fever
Coming and going during meal times
Coming home after a buffet over eat
Campus Police
Replicating rants
In the great living abroad of the fellow country folks
Asking you to stay
Freshness has a taste
Strange Similarities
The dance of satisfaction
Getting rid of the nurse
The hospital should be a calmer place
Campus violence
The violence of own people
On having rented a place to write
The Stomach’s Capacity to Digest Anger
The Assassin Last Night
The walk yesterday
The walk outside right now
How her lover became her landlord
Urgently needed
The politics of wastage
The silence of his not coming back
Changing channels
The single who that mattered
The rumors and suspicions
An all too familiar mechanics of persecutory talk
On being stuck
The obsession with things
On change
The linguistic insistence
Explaining the carnivore
Guessing the nationality of the man on the street
In building the brand of the nation
Politicizing response
The cry about working
Free labour
The neighbours right in front
Of actually harming, while claiming to help
In the glorification of the country
Polite talks with the cat
The official disturbance
The map of the afternoon
The constant harping on reading
Ice cream, in the middle of fever
The sum total of all of my presentations
Relishing Quarrel
Of the many ways, in which she was out of this world
Illegal
The Embassy
The replication of her drawings
The returning fever
In a eunuch country
Analyzing leftovers
The unique allegations
Of always making you comeback to that same point
Cat pictures
Post-colonial discourses
A country incapable of freeing its people
The Asking
The secret of the Password
Further secrets of the password
The very tricky situation of half told stories
Chamber Music
The acquired right of asking how do you have what you have?
The dethronement of my baby
Loosing the last ally
On not bringing in personal stuff
Uncommitted love
Not calling it a relationship
The script about the temple dancers
The beginning of the stealings
Why we name names?
Problematizing relationships
Problematizing things
On eating Lettuce with bare hands
Like Bread
What Felt Most Legitimate
On Making Eating Unbearable
Suzannah Poems
The googling of heart diagrams
Loving him doesn’t solve things
The pick up with a smile
The smiling rehearsals
Laughters in Grocery stores
Living close to the hospital
The story of the spelling mistake
The story of further spelling mistakes
In this latest round of musical chair
So nice to sit together and talk
Comprehending narcotics anonymous
Those without languages
Some things are just not done
Of just not being able to help that voice
Comprehending the language of video once again
You can display it on your car
Her German history
A very big brain game
Making it all about voice
The point of my speech
The school yard outside my window
What is
persecutory delusion
Dedication
This book is dedicated to Jennifer, Jenny, my class mate in school, who had volunteered to sit behind, at the back, when I first got my glasses, this was in class 7th. The year was 1987.
It reminds me of that moment of entrance, in University, in 2005, when having written many, many stories, I had enrolled to study history. It was a very big moment of my life, one I had worked very hard for. But it turned into a moment of theft, when a lot of credit was stolen from me. This has continued ever since.
In the seminar on how to succeed as an International Student, a professor of Indian origin, from the department of computer science had said, if you sit at the back, and do not ask any questions
, you will be in trouble. I had not imagined that my life would be up for discussion, and I would need to ask questions, in order for it to be not stolen from me. I would need to ask questions in an invented language, a language completely unfamiliar to me.
This was also the moment, after which all control over my life, began to be taken slowly away from me, mostly in the name of Immigration. However, to so kill somebody’s talent, ambition, actually the entire person, in the name of Immigration, is a grave crime. This book talks about the discrimination, I faced at the hands of the academia, and academic corruption. What I am most dazzled by, are the twin letter incidents. University, allowed me to drop my status with Praxair, offering me an F1, a study permit, and then wrongfully cancelled it. And then, again, in Canada, the University residence did not give me my visa interview letter. These are incidents of unprecedented brutality, that should be investigated.
However, before it all went wrong, the moment of entrance was a wonderful life turning moment. It turned into a life turning moment in a ghastly sense. After the alleged disappearance of my six year old status, which was put under review, I hurried back to campus, half in disbelief, was arrested for criminal trespass, detained, and deported back to homeland. A letter of cancellation had supposedly been sent to my small little hometown, of Muzaffarpur, in eastern India, where I had grown up going to school with Jenny, Jolly and so many of my friends, and teachers.
This book is also dedicated to Jennifer’s grandmother, who was my first teacher, in St. Xavier’s School, whom I faintly remember. She was an Anglo-Indian, and a very strict teacher.
It is also dedicated to many Catholic, Methodist, and Protestant churches in my town, whose architecture I used to admire, while going to school. I think of these buildings specially, as I find myself surrounded with a war around religion.
I hope that religion is never used as a weapon of war. I hope that people are not simply recruited in a war, they do not even understand. This book is also dedicated to everybody who works, and strives for peace, and to those who fight for it. Sometimes, peace is not one of the objectives of war, victory is, conquest is, at all costs, at many costs, at prices so expensive, it is hard to describe.
This book is an attempt to do so.
This book is also dedicated to the memory of Rupali Hota, a very dear friend, of whose death, suicide, I found out in the second semester of my Phd, after divorce, detention, deportation. After complete heartbreak. I remembered many light hearted moments with Rupali, and what she used to say about the office becoming larger than life. I remember I had walked to the office that day, in complete shock, sat down in my chair, and touched the wall. I felt so much had been taken away from my life, so little remained. I was struggling to pay my bills, already, and a couple months later, when my visa interview letter was not given to me, I lost more of my voice, further control over my life was taken away me. Did not finish my Phd, someday will, but Suzannah, is the person who spent a very hard time in the University hostel. Of course, she also had a hard time outside of it. Coming back to the continent, yet again, was a trying experience. Will have to plan and prepare. Suzannah is also the person, who did manage to have some fun, and a fine time, nevertheless.
The great stalemate
The great stalemate
Within that situation
That I needed to tell them about
The stalemate they just could not see
Or could not fathom
Or simply did not accept
Despite its visibility
Or said
It wasn’t visible enough
Was a stalemate made up of strange suspicions
And actions emanating from there
Or elsewhere
But
Having suspected
That she was going to leave him
Was going to eventually leave
Although
Why would a girl do that?
Or how could a girl do that?
And if he had a time for her leaving in mind
For girls ran out of time
Something, even she forgot
Living in that stalemate
Living the suspect’s life
Being quizzed on daily things
Being quizzed on basic things
As though, to find out
Where it all was going
You see
Living a life
Where all doings
Seemed to be doings inside the props of a set
That one day
Had to be taken down
Where all living
Was living on a stage
Within the script of it
Being written
Very funnily
For having said
That his baby
Would be very fat
Fat indeed
Fat and healthy
He receded into total distance
Not just distance
But withdrawal
Into a coldness of not doing anything
After making a mockery of doing anything
Anything physical
That had to do with love
Or lovemaking
At every single moment
Where it could have been possible.
That this was the result
Of a one time denial
Was a reaction
Out of proportion
For comprehension.
There was
Had to be
Another conspiracy
Behind it.
And that I had to somehow break
The perpetuating stalemate
With all the praises
Coming just for him
Was an inhuman task.
The Incomplete Story
Being left
With that single sentence
I cheated on him
Was a very incomplete version of things
A very inappropriate picture
It was a big admission
A big confession
Took a toll
Each time
It was made
Took a lot of guts
Making it each time
And there were many times
She came close to making it
Found herself hanging there
For the question of what had happened
Loomed large
Not just in memory
But walked with her
Every step of the way
Although
The roads themselves
Seemed to end
Or simply go around in circles
And the memories lingered
And walked with her
Literally every step of the way
Not just in her changing status
And in the sale of things
Also in their display
In the great war
Of purchasing power
And all that it purchased
In the vicinity
Everything