A Woman Reflects On Mutability

‘As a man discards a worn out garment and puts on one that is new, so the spirit discards a worn out body and moves on to one that is new.’ – Bhagavad-gita, II, 22.


We were born
into a patrilinear society:
we could not help it.

Unthinking,
we took the names of our forefathers,
as our foremothers slunk back,
useless as unfertilized eggs
along the oviducts of history,
but like ghosts
they could keep us in their possession.

At first we played round the basil bush,
and with candies for consolation,
had our ears pierced by fine gold wires.
Then we were set to work.

Halfway through our lives,
damming wild flood-waters,
glancing up, we happened to notice
our names dangling from the notice‑board:
lists of workers
and intricate time-tables,
day-shifts, night-shifts.

What a surprise met our eyes;
our names were altered;
the old selves had been traded in;
the new models were out.

Later still we were entirely discarded,
some being retained
as antiques in museums,
but most were given over
to sprawling junkyards
where we were carefully rifled
of our still grinding parts.

And as we were dismantled,
it was a marvel to discover
how the parts were correlated
and ticked away together.

Birds migrate,
but we have transmigrated
within one lifetime.
Or were these the lives
which Krishna, his temples greying,
half scratching his head,
vulnerable but diplomatic,
had tried to indicate,
when he rambled on the field
on the eve of the battle
about people changing clothes
and souls changing bodies?


Written in English. First published in my poetry pamphlet, Hibiscus in the North, Mid-Day Publications, Old Fire Station Arts Centre, Oxford, 1979, and later included in my collection Spaces I Inhabit, Navana, Calcutta, 1983. This poem was translated into Spanish and published in the Buenos Aires magazine Empresa Poetica, Year 4, No. 7, July-December, 1987, under the title ‘Una mujer reflexiona sobre la mutabilidad’.