Michelle Cahill

Side by side

DURGĀ: A SELF PORTRAIT

I see an icon of myself in the dark night of amavasya.
Mothers weep for young, married daughters, coming home.
They decorate my pandal with sweets, paan and sindoor.

I am saving my best argument against that feminine subject,
caught in another version of the dream. Here, the heat stifles
almost to inertia, the city shimmies with carnivalesque lights,

microphones, traffic horns, and one gaudy float after the next.
Sometimes I feel like a freak show, a cock in a frock, a new
machismo, lethal as Phoolan Devi or Buffy the Vampire Slayer

though my preferred epithet is Vindhayavasini. I miss a terrain
of mountains where thunder shakes, where fog is a sky snake,
where monsoon slugs engorge to the size of Krishna’s penis.

Today I am androgynous, engineered as a split sex. I copy
Shiva’s face, Vishnu’s arms and Rama’s hair. Light congeals
with strength in my bones to mend a crisis the male gods fail.

I memorize Mahisura’s praise: You are too beautiful for anything
but love, he declares, too delicate to fight. Half an hour later, after
he morphs from a buffalo to an elephant, a lion to a man,

I castrate him with a graceful blow. My suitors surrender to this
transcendental play. As for Vishnu I spin him right round, like a record.
Men desire me for the fruit of knowledge. Want no handmaiden,

yet still a second sex; the sum of my parts being multiples of one.
My instruments, my weaponry and my props are channelled
from sensitive New Age gods, with their fondness for repetition.

She whose form is sleep, hunger, shadow or thirst, I’ll wear
a virgin’s blush. Tomorrow I’ll drink the blood of dacoits.
Send hail to the valley. Raze ten lakh’s worth of rice and corn.

What I see is myself in this world: deviant, without genealogy.
Snow monkeys shiver in the deodar pines, goats loop in a shelter.
Women abandon their duties, their grief, and Vishnu is paralysed.