- Babitha Mariana Justin
Selected Poetry by Babitha Mariana Justin

Photo Source: Flickr
First Flight
She tripped on her luggage,
weighed down
by her sister's lungs drilled
by hookworms.
I wrote down the process,
from checking
-in to boarding,
fastening the seat-belt that
click locks and
unlocks,
“A cup of noodles for
two hundred bucks.”
She shook her head.
My first flight was at 21, my pretty
classmate made
friends with a pilot who indulged
her with packets
of red and yellow boiled sweets, my friend
offered me her loot
with a twinkle in her eye before shoving
sweet-packets
into her knack-sack. I sucked on them
with a perforated tongue
Last year, I flew out with you, I remember
the dates, time, weather.
I held my sons close, feeling the safe shadows
of your steps.
We stood at the sea shaded by
cobalt, turquoise
and phthalo blues
your wandering eyes drank them all,
I was
a golden grain, lapped by
a foamy wave.
Today, when she walked away from me,
I ran to the kiosk
asking a man in blazers to
take care of her
on her first flight.
I stood near the departure as the security man
scanned her curves.
She swept in like a queen, looked back to see
if I watched her leave.
I waved a teary arm the same way as I waved at you
I staggered with my
bloated luggage to see you zip-past, scissor-swift
with the strangers who
winged as windflowers, after shining
their moons on me.
Hand-Me-Downs
Yesterday was my friend's
mother's cremation,
I didn't want to see her either dead or set on fire,
Once, she had fed me
rice and spiced potato
curry that tasted different from home.
She had handed me
down her daughter's
skirts, they clung snug
around my waist before
my love-handles burst
from their seams.
I blossomed in them.
The last time I saw her,
she was hobbling
inside her house,
her walking stick drummed
up into my darkness,
she warned my friend,
I was selfish and thankless, surely,
I should have paid back
for those skirts.
Perhaps, she thought
I stole her daughter's spring.
I didn't attend my
friend's husband's funeral
for the same reasons. I was thankless and in love
with a man who
swallowed up my warmth,
her husband too had walked away from
her, like I did, in the past.
I will wait for the pyres to die down
to step out of mine, walk towards
my friend with a bundle of blossoms
not made from the recycled,
handed-down clothes
I wore like a queen,
but, from fresh and bleached ones,
white and sparkly with gratitude.
Games
At the therapist, he is hungry,
stalls are stocked with vadas, burgers,
biscuits. Cars are whales
fished out of the sea,
he laughs looking out of the window.
When he opens his mouth,
I see a universe:
frolic's meteor showers,
star-studded baubles,
lances and pincers for words
wedged between his
tongue and cheek,
his hair bristles
defying gravity,
thoughts swirl
off tangent
unadorned by
peacock feathers,
the therapist
writes him off
on a wafer-white
paper prescription.
I know, he has
snakes for friends, stray dogs
as his kin, he dances with the storm,
he balls up clouds like butter
in his palms. He pockets
the prescription slip, folds
it into a paper boat for a rainy day*.
· Images of Krishna slaying the demons, and the mother imagines her child to be the young Krishna and experiences the divine in dyslexia
Chutney Grinding
I used to grind chammanthi[1]
for my grandmother, she hated our newbie-mixie– which had sharper
blades than her tongue, swifter turbos than her footsteps.
I had to mash Kashmiri
chillies charred to cinder,
with a few crystals of rock salt, to a paste; the catch was
to grind a dollop of
Tamil tamarind into a tongue-twister.
Shallots, picked, peeled to perfection like
the moons of her eyes. Grated coconut – waited for its turn
to be roasted, I slurped over
the story of an elephant who plunged his trunk into a hut begging for coconut halves.
The paste should not be smooth nor coarse, chammanthi ought
to achieve the fine balance, reaching there, my arm-sockets ached.
The ground
roughage of curry leaves,
was the garnisher’s gouache,
I scooped off chammanthi
from its the raven-granite universe. It had to resemble the
roundness of a planet
with curry leaf river-veins,
speckled with chilly-flake stars.
With burning palms, I balanced
age, time, geographies, tastes, myths and
universes
in the not-so-simple act of chutney-grinding.
[1] Malayalam word for Chutney, usually made of desiccated coconut.
Babitha Marina Justin is an academic, a poet, and an artist. Her poems and short stories have appeared in Eclectica, Esthetic Apostle, Jaggery, Fulcrum, The Scriblerus, Trampset, Constellations, Indian Literature, Singing in the Dark (Penguin), etc. Her books are Of Fireflies, Guns and the Hills (Poetry, 2015), I Cook My Own Feast (Poetry, 2019), salt, pepper & silver linings: celebrating our grandmothers (an anthology on grandmothers, 2019), Of Canons and Trauma (Essays, 2017) and Humour: Texts and Contexts (ed. Essays, 2017).