Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- The Lion
- Entomological Specimens
- Practising Your Skills
- Insomniac
- Taster
- What Every Girl Should Know Before Marriage
- Bad Day in the Office
- You Are Not
- The Gold Bangles
- My Mother's Hair
- ‘Jesus Saves’
- Ticking
- On Ellington Road
- Cousin Migrant
- The Daughters
- Different Principles of Enclosure
- Day Ghost
- This Morning
- The Bird
- Almost September
- Phone Call on a Train Journey
- Small Hands
- In the Coroner's Office
- April
- 18th of November
- Notes Towards an Elegy
- The Urn
- The Rain That Began Elsewhere
- Gloves
- My Father Wants to be a Rooftop Railway Surfer
- Ghazal
- Ghazal
- Ode to a Pomegranate
- Bulbul
- Parvati Waits for the Return of Shiva, After the Slaying of Ganesh
- Lost Poem
- Large and Imprecise Baby
- Wireman
- Barbule
- The Found Thing
- Woman at Window
- Mr Beeharry's Marriage Bureau
- Mrs M Unravels
- Hummingbird
- Ballad of the Small-boned Daughter
- Acknowledgments
My Mother's Hair
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- The Lion
- Entomological Specimens
- Practising Your Skills
- Insomniac
- Taster
- What Every Girl Should Know Before Marriage
- Bad Day in the Office
- You Are Not
- The Gold Bangles
- My Mother's Hair
- ‘Jesus Saves’
- Ticking
- On Ellington Road
- Cousin Migrant
- The Daughters
- Different Principles of Enclosure
- Day Ghost
- This Morning
- The Bird
- Almost September
- Phone Call on a Train Journey
- Small Hands
- In the Coroner's Office
- April
- 18th of November
- Notes Towards an Elegy
- The Urn
- The Rain That Began Elsewhere
- Gloves
- My Father Wants to be a Rooftop Railway Surfer
- Ghazal
- Ghazal
- Ode to a Pomegranate
- Bulbul
- Parvati Waits for the Return of Shiva, After the Slaying of Ganesh
- Lost Poem
- Large and Imprecise Baby
- Wireman
- Barbule
- The Found Thing
- Woman at Window
- Mr Beeharry's Marriage Bureau
- Mrs M Unravels
- Hummingbird
- Ballad of the Small-boned Daughter
- Acknowledgments
Summary
My mother's thin salwar
gives her away.
Her plait snakes
across her back
and turns
to whispers at the ends.
Can we touch it?
they ask in the icy playground.
She shyly places the dark coil
in their hands.
After bathing,
it is transformed,
the rope, released
from its binding fibres,
falling in
a heavy curtain
on to her shoulders.
Steaming by the old radiator,
she sits
with her pan of dried pulses,
discarding
tiny masquerading stones.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Small Hands , pp. 13Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2015