< Issue 3 >
The Whore
by Rose Mary Boehm
I
Asalah hunches. The brown river
thick with feces, plastic bottles
and sometimes miraculous things.
She has just captured an old parasol
with her stick. Perhaps the bottley wallah
will give her a rupee for it.
Black mud squelches up between her toes.
She presses her feet deeper into the river bank
which has not much river to keep in its bed.
She stands, thoughtful, thumb in her mouth,
the rags she wears barely covering the body
of a girl almost a woman.
From somewhere she hears her name.
‘Asalah! Asalah!’
Don’t, don’t make me. Please, Mother.
But they know where she hides out
when the rent man comes and they
all argue, and her mother cries and
wrings what is left of her sari, using
words Asalah has never heard.
When her thin legs reluctantly
carry her closer to the voices coming
from her shack, she blinks and rubs
her eyes. There is a black, shiny,
metal house with wheels. In it a fat
princess wearing a shimmering sari, long gold
earrings dripping towards her round shoulders,
on each plump finger a precious ring.
As the child approaches, her mother turns
and goes into the shack. The princess beckons
Asalah to come into her house on wheels,
and there is no resisting such wonderfulness.
The princess wants to be called ‘mamasan’
and strokes Asalah’s cheek with pudgy
hands that smell of paradise.
II
In moments of slow business, when
she stands in the unforgiving Indian
mid-day heat at the door of her brothel,
barely covered by the straw shade,
Asalah fingers her fine sari and remembers
the fresh, clear waters of her river,
blue as the summer sky.
The Whore
by Rose Mary Boehm
I
Asalah hunches. The brown river
thick with feces, plastic bottles
and sometimes miraculous things.
She has just captured an old parasol
with her stick. Perhaps the bottley wallah
will give her a rupee for it.
Black mud squelches up between her toes.
She presses her feet deeper into the river bank
which has not much river to keep in its bed.
She stands, thoughtful, thumb in her mouth,
the rags she wears barely covering the body
of a girl almost a woman.
From somewhere she hears her name.
‘Asalah! Asalah!’
Don’t, don’t make me. Please, Mother.
But they know where she hides out
when the rent man comes and they
all argue, and her mother cries and
wrings what is left of her sari, using
words Asalah has never heard.
When her thin legs reluctantly
carry her closer to the voices coming
from her shack, she blinks and rubs
her eyes. There is a black, shiny,
metal house with wheels. In it a fat
princess wearing a shimmering sari, long gold
earrings dripping towards her round shoulders,
on each plump finger a precious ring.
As the child approaches, her mother turns
and goes into the shack. The princess beckons
Asalah to come into her house on wheels,
and there is no resisting such wonderfulness.
The princess wants to be called ‘mamasan’
and strokes Asalah’s cheek with pudgy
hands that smell of paradise.
II
In moments of slow business, when
she stands in the unforgiving Indian
mid-day heat at the door of her brothel,
barely covered by the straw shade,
Asalah fingers her fine sari and remembers
the fresh, clear waters of her river,
blue as the summer sky.
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