By Sreemoyee Bhattacharyya
My mother leaned into migrant letters
Disrobed and practically shriveled like
Soaked raisins;
the television screen
Aired news while the clothes aired themselves
On the clothesline
Scorched terrace, my mother could never
Get accustomed to the tropical heat
So she leaned against her rust velvet armchair,
Watching television in a dark air conditioned room
Leaning into the possibility of other worlds
On a small screen— in early 2000s India of small screens and hidden mouths
Almost as if the screen was an orange
And she could lean into it, eat it, have sex with it
The orange is where she hid her mouth, uttered her words
Come winter, she’d stuff her mouth with the same purged words
Keep them in her belly
Give birth every winter
To orange peels full of words
Her secret conspirators
My mother had the ultimate binge-purge response with small screens of 2000 India
Oranges conspired with her behind closed doors
Bury her sorrows in the small television screen
The shriveled orange peel ready to hold—
My mother lets her feet drop into the peel
Then lowers herself and disappears
Amidst the tangerine folds of slowness
My mothers version of the tv is slow
Slow hum, white noise to lean against
My brother and I inherited eating oranges from my mother
We lean into oranges when we think our stomachs are too full of the dark cupboards of our childhood
Purge, binge, purge, binge
Anticlockwise, our bodies try to empty inheritance
But we consume oranges instead
Slowly. Never slowly enough.
The tv never stops humming
Meanwhile, our family tree rests along the veins of an orange carpel.
Mother, brother, me, darkness.