A nine-year-old saree grows up not to be wrinkled and crestfallen akin to humans, it passes on from almirahs to closets, and turns into a semi stitched lehenga, with a deep neckline blouse, ruffled sleeves, darted patchwork with modernity strewed over its obsolete silk. Fabric doesn’t age, humans wrapped in it do like magenta toffees. You iron them and pleat over again. Did you also try ironing your grandmother’s skin and bringing her back to life? Or do you wear her saree and wonder if it was her mobile skin that she would wrap over her conical bones? What is your favourite wine? Do you also reply to it as “the oldest saree in our ancestral portmanteau, because the older the saree, the better it pleats on your vertebral column?” Do you also notice the sunset and sunrise in your clothes? When a part of them fades and personifies like a band of faint light until dawn, and then the whole of its dye is flushed in the washing machine, as if colours don’t replicate in the sky and have accepted their end to dusk. Do you also smell your clothes and hunt states and habitats in them? Like the sweaty t-shirts with spice patches reminiscent of Rajasthan or the pyjamas you menstruated in bringing you Kashmir, because “𝘐𝘧 𝘪𝘵 𝘣𝘭𝘦𝘦𝘥𝘴, 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘪𝘵 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘣𝘦 𝘒𝘢𝘴𝘩𝘮𝘪𝘳.” Do you also feel the wind in your pockets? Or do you seek in them old charms and crinkled notes? Do you smile back to your clothes hanging on the clothesline coming neat out of detergent asylum, or do you perceive them hanging down after a homicide? Do you ever open your closet, and a garment comes falling at your feet or do you like choking them until you really run naked? Do your clothes make you an atheist or do they make you worship different things as you change them? Do you also think I ask too many questions or are you deprived of answers?

Ananya Aneja

Ananya means the rarest of all. She finds refuge in the nub of poetry and believes words can even bring the dead to life. She daydreams about fairy tales, Turkish tea and Arabic poems all day long. She loves bringing revolution with her poems. She writes about women, men and their tectonic differences. Poetry is the echo of her voice.