Mina Malik
This poem was first published in The Aleph Review, Vol. 4 (2020).
if you are just anybody, out for
dinner and want to wet a tooth
you may go to jaidi paan shop, order
something that arrives in a gold
coffin-box
and eat it in two awkward,
dribbling bites.
if you are my grandmother, you will
have a small leaf of a basket, evenly piled
with the rough pellets of betel nuts
and during chitarhaar, whilst you can
read the hindi titles and sing all
the songs, you will clip the nuts with a
small silver cutter, sharp-edged blades that bite
the nuts to spiky rubble.
if you are my grandfather, you will
drive to paan gully every month, carefully
navigating your Datsun to the far end of
anarkali
and buy a block of terracotta kattha,
a packet of choona
and glossy green leaves, damply wrapped,
from shahid sahib, whose father was also
from Bareilly
if you are my mother, you will finish
lunch—roast and peas, on a saturday back when
the weekend began on friday—
and ask for a paan
and if you are me, you will sit humpbacked on the
carpet with the roses
and watch as the gleaming brass pandaan lid glides up
and the hexagon tray of leaf is thumbed, searching for the
right one, pinching off
the stem and smoothing it down.
your eyes will follow the calm ritual of a practiced hand
lifting little lids, a small metal spatula gliding white, then
brown over the waiting patta
and then, your favourite part—
the ilaichi, dry and purplish grey. Nana will
choose the right one, one that he will roll between
his fingers like lucky dice and snap open
into his palm, and because you are small
and have your mother’s eyes, he will offer you his palm first.
if you are my daughter, you will open your mouth
and let me carefully place a pinch of small black seeds
onto your tongue, and you will receive them like
a wafer or a prayer, a spell from an ancient book,
runes printed beneath your heartbeat
Mina Malik is the Prose Editor at The Aleph Review.
Maryam Baniasadi is an Iranian visual artist based in Lahore, Pakistan. She holds a BFA in miniature painting and MA (Hons.) in visual arts from the NCA in Lahore. She has participated in different exhibitions such as Contemporary Miniatures from Iran, Teer Art Fair presented by Azad Art gallery in 2019 and Contemporary Miniatures from Pakistan in Reitberg Museum in Zurich, Switzerland. Maryam is currently working between Iran and Pakistan.