GODS SUBSIST ON ROADS OF KILL

This piece originated in my own experience of hearing muffled screams and crying children from a certain building I frequently passed in Mumbai. It took several weeks of inquiry to learn that the building was a brothel for pedophiles. Four times I dined in a restaurant that afforded a view of who entered that building. I saw the men. I heard the girls. Then I learned the myths related below. In poverty-riddled low-caste villages, the perennial problem of what to do with excess daughters who cannot be dowered is solved by selling the girls to itinerant procurers who deceive parents into believing their daughters will become maids in good families. When I lived there the going price for a six-year-old was three bags of rice. Older girls between eight and eleven were worth only two sacks. The poem below is an amalgam of my own observations and many vignettes related to me by courageous women who put themselves in harm’s way fighting the pedophile brothels in Mumbai and Chennai. The flirty tales of incest among the Hindu gods described in the Rg Ved (Rig Veda) have devastating consequences when idyllic tales descend to the level of those who patronize brothels. The myths are also used justify incestuous relations of fathers and brothers with daughters who have no rights of their own. It may seem heartless to seek poetry in the gruesome life of a ten-year-old girl sold into one of Asia’s legions of child brothels, but one duty of poetry is to tell the truth. The references to the Bombay film world reflect the economics of crime lords from the Gulf states and India laundering their criminal profits — drugs, brothels, and extortion — by investing in India’s sweetly romantic song-and-dance films. The irony could not be more cruel.

It’s in the Rg Ved their wandering desires skulk over my skin Agni was the lover of his sister the next one how silent he is but he’s scented the rose

I am one of the unfortunate ones, the girls a mother knows she can never dower, in a world where an undowerable daughter fetches a week’s worth of rice from the men who tour the countryside looking for brothel profits.

It’s in the Rg Ved I must give the rose and give again after Pushan was the lover of his sister till I am as a pomegranate rent thighs stained with its color

Girls not sold into the brothels can face the fate of indentured service to an elderly “uncle” with a secret room in his innermost heart where he dreams of sex with his daughter, but not being able to hint the slightest word of his dreams given his standing in his community, sublimates them into raping his “maid.”

It’s in the Rg Ved his shallow quick breaths

Gods Subsist on Roads of Kill his smell of spoiling sea

It’s in the Rg Ved the sea I loved till I smelled it seeping from me

Hush and be still daughter!

I am your father and this is my duty.

It’s in the Rg Ved the piercing gush at the cut of his scissors

The Ashvins married their sisters Surya and Savitri the river of his groans drowns my hair

I forced out of my mind their unzipping sounds the street below hearing from the windows and doing nothing proclaiming what would soon begin running running along the black roads of fright pretending I was asleep that dark dream night when the morning is moaning make sure my eyelids did not flutter faces grimacing their clouds of eyes

It’s in the Rg Ved suffocated by saffron

Upanishad in Asian Pale thrown over my face

They made the brothers the Ashvins the suffocating fright under bodies like stone the madness of their thinking that the more they force me please please kill me, I want it so the more I will give find a knife to slash my throat never, never pull my hips away choke me please choke me till I struggle no more force my fingers to not tremble scream and scream and hear only the next one unzipping hour after hour after hour tearing my insides till my eyes are as red as my thighs

It’s in the Rg Ved in and in and in the sanguine beak

Savitar and Usha were brother and sister crude the breath which never sings the dog that snarls between my legs see the married man daughtering me in his afternoons somebody then somebody then somebody the next sleep when I can and not know how many had me see the gods become strangers in black raiment

Gods Subsist on Roads of Kill

wish, too, my heart would reach the snapping point of my will till I was as a dead body who knew not what hour it was and cry out despite the punishment the men of religion who beat me where they just raped me

Agni was the son of his father and his sister all the gods, all of them, spoilage on my thighs while the lies of their sex-bribing kisses

It’s in the Rg Ved kiss instead dread the man of politics who continues to slap after he is done see me in the mirror of his gold-colored car not even an adolescent, my breasts not yet begun to swell from my bitten nipples come pretty bosoms in your films

I am your brother shut my eyes, shut them and father has said me pray for the sleep to come this is my due eyes of hate behind the cowled holyman hood seek me in the scrolling credits of sweetly romantic films my thoughts when I first learned this was to be fighting the other girls for the room’s only blanket whatever my life remained there I am, unsaid in the gossip columns of screen stars the criminals who profit from silver-screen dreams

Prajapati was the incarnation of Vishnu and his daughter he pretends he’s raping a god but he knows it’s only me

It’s in the Rg Ved the god of his dreams is his hands around my throat

This I knew ten or more times each night into my eyes their sperm spray in which I slowly drown little if any sleep by day on my creaking charpoi cot’s strings the tinted tunnel of darkness that paints his vanity into my cries unroped to be taken to the well suffocating under unbathed bodies and decaying teeth have my body washed of the hours just passed raped in rope before my little buds could begin to grow knowing I would die one rape at time but not knowing the number or when they would come

Hush and be still, daughter, this is my duty

It’s in the Rg Ved

Hush and say nothing, sister, this is my due

Gods Subsist on Roads of Kill

Rape after rape then send in the next all this from cloud-maid ghandarvas singing of celestial love

Rape

oh men, men, when will you see

Rape

the dazzling virgin maids of yesteryear gods

Rape

now make fantasies and brothels each into the other

Rape

as a father’s psychic ancestry mutilates his daughter with tradition

Rape

until her footprints fade into a bored husband’s first visit to