Two Different Interpretations of a Portrait of a Lady

Poem 1:

There she lays, spilled out in all her magnificence, the pools of her eyes dark.

I pick the stencil and let it flow of its own accord. 

After all this time, the outline of her frame comes as easily as a prayer.

I can trace her like a familiar memory, don’t even need to look to know I have the shape of her nose down to its tip—

My eyes follow her face, the stillness of her gaze and my mouth opens of its own accord

 trust me, the action is compelled; 

“The curve of your jaw is b— “

“bent.” she echoes, something memorised.

“Beautiful.” I finish and if it weren’t for the tired light shining from the far end of this lonely solemn room, I would have never noticed the way her eyes quivered,

the dull swallow of a denial choked down because she knows I do not lie to her.

I know it is hard to make her belief…after all they pried open her mind and buried nails in there. Dug open spaces that weren’t theirs to see and whispered poison in the sweetest tones—”look at all your flaws, hate them and make yourself small.”

Lady. 

A lady must be all grace and saccharine smiles and poised silence. 

I look at the mirror and see a mirror.

I realised too late that this too is a privilege because she looks at the mirror and sees an enemy and that makes all the difference in the world. 

I had always been able to breathe, unconditional, freedom handed to me like a rattle to a toddler. 

How I escaped through the cruel, scalding clutches of the patriarchy—I still wonder.

My womanhood was never imposed on me, was never made into a tool with which they threatened and beat me. I never had to hate it.

My womanhood was simply what I made it.

She was not so fortunate—they took away her books and taught her to be a wife, a mother and a daughter. Took away her books because what use are words to those who should only be seen and not heard, yes?

Girls don’t read, right? Or at least…good girls don’t. 

This time is old yet, I know there will be a future where girls will be handed books and told good girls read. 

This era is meant to be condemned and forgotten but that is a choice our children will make. The most we can do is live on. 

She never learnt to cook, if out of sheer obstinacy, her only successful rebellion.          

She loves the sea, but they never let her bathe in it. The fact that I know how to swim irks her.

When we first met, she hated me—I’m sure some part of her hates me still, it is a hatred born of pain, and envy and desire and I cannot ask it away,

Cannot love it away. It was never about me anyway.

She tells me of her stories, soft words falling off a silver tongue, delicate in the way the sunlight is in the earliest hours of the day.

She has so many things to say and when I tell her so, it lights up her eyes in the way nothing else does.

She has a way with words, despite only ever having written for an audience of two. 

Her stories are always about running away, it should be frightening, but it is not.

The fear is of her final choice, when push comes to shove, I wonder which bridge she’ll burn.

Once when we were on the porch out, the same day her mother slapped her for running away to the sea, she kept her gaze fixed at the stars as she said, “is death not choosing eternal youth.” 

I cannot refute it because there is nothing to refute.

She doesn’t do the same when I turn to look at her, the star that she is looking at is a lie, just light travelling too slow. So, I just settle for— “I would miss you.”

Her face breaks into the barest of smiles, and it is almost an answer.

Poem 2:

It is so peculiar when she commands her face, for she is so pretty when she doesn’t try to be, but so fierce when she does, I see the softness through the cameras and I see the softness on the screen and I see the way the predatory smiles that grow wider at the promise of this softness, and my heart is so full of fear—I look back at her and all I can see is strength.

A lady. 

They told us that you must smile even when they spit at you.

 After all, what is a lady but sweet smiles and kindness and poised grace. Softness even in the face of fire.

The softness is a facade, an act to charm and entice and attract—

They haven’t been with her in training rooms since she learnt how to smile when her stomach was cramping and her legs were aching and her heart…

Her smile is something sweet that she stole from the mirror and fixed onto her face.

They haven’t been with her since we were both young enough to still be innocent but old enough to know we were in a place that would soon strip us of it. 

They haven’t seen the hours and days and the weary weeks that lasted entirely too long. Haven’t seen us construct an entire identity from the ground up for the cameras. 

Haven’t seen the anguish and pain with which she strove and fought; they know nothing of who she really is.

The softness is borrowed. I see the carefully restrained determination behind it, her teeth, her ambition, her simmering anger at how the predatory smiles widen. 

My heart still beats, but for an entirely different reason now. The cameras cut and her eyes, that were lovely crescents and yet so sharp pan over to me, and they soften.

She told me once in the hidden darkness of a closet, the crack allowing a sliver of moonlight to paint a floor, that sometimes she forgets that the cameras aren’t there. 

And I tell her that they aren’t here now. 

In the end, I suppose it makes all the difference in the world because she never would have done what she did then, had the cameras been present.

I remember her saying, her voice honey sweet and yet so mocking, so dangerous—four of her fingers in my mouth, the air heady with the smell of our perfumes, the same ones the stylists put on us every day—I smirk at the thought that even something as trivial as perfumes weren’t ours to choose anymore-

“Would you give this away to them too? Like you have everything else? “ 

And it stings that way a needle stings, fleeting. The arousal making everything needy, making me needy, but I still manage to bite out a-

“hasn’t everyone? Haven’t you? “

Her face is half illuminated by the uninvited moon; it makes her seem softer. A lie. But her voice is softer when she says –

“not everything. “

And the mood is sombre for a single second before her eyes go dark again and all is lost to heavy breathes and muffled moans.

It’s alarming because both of us adjusted pretty well to the fact. It was as if we knew, we would never be found. As if we knew that this, whatever it was, just was. For the time being. 

I still think she is the strongest person I know. There is a restraint in her calmness. When I was younger and foolishly in love, I once wrote how the ocean could not compare to her depths. 

And even now, I think I foolishly lie to myself that she is not the first word that comes to my mind when I write. 

I could not let go of her even if she asked. So, she never did. 

But this isn’t a love story, really. 

It’s not even a story about two people. 

It’s just a—it’s a story of how fire in the form of a girl consumed someone whole.

By Shreya Suhani, for the Trans Solidarity Fundraiser

• ASHOKA UNIVERSITY
• Trans Solidarity Fundraiser