Fluency

Rukan Saif

The second time I visited Dhaka, I threw up in the car. 
Now, I remember this as exorcising the American. 
At nine years old, I dislodged English from my throat, 
Left it to waste away in a polythene bag. 
What crawled in its stead was sticky love song and crooning ghazal.
It sounded like muslin. It loved to play in the light.
It hid in shadows and in monsoons, 
Rolling and lush, breathed in 
Angled light, became lodestar 
For the lizard darting across the latticed night. It lived there,
With my grandmother in a floor-level apartment on Green Road, 
Amongst wedding jewelry wrapped in old nightgowns and crusting bowls
Of mehndi, inside the browning legal pads my mother left behind. 
Nanu tells me of the grace
With which my mother had picked up her pen, 
Bending two fingers against the angled barrel, her ink bottle 
A bloody red disk at the center of the Sundarbans. 
What was left was curlicued and brilliant and 
I couldn’t read it. Nanu tells me 
Her husband used to write the same way, 
Frantic elegance, inkblot hedonism, 
Kazi’s “The Rebel” on paper: I, the perennial wonder of mother-earth.
Bangla. My mother, 
As old as her country, 1971 blossom of liberation. How war alters
A coastal language sweet-tongued and uncaged. 

Rukan Saif is a senior at Johns Hopkins University studying Applied Mathematics & Statistics and the Writing Seminars. She is originally from Los Angeles, California.