Ichthyophaga

By MJ Dally

Hatching on a baneful night of the Poonthura riots, a bombed fisherwoman’s soul replaced hers

as she drew her first breath. The other Brahminy Kites would tauntingly call her a stinky

fisherwoman with wings, in their marine melisma. In her defence, their queen would remark she

wouldn’t die in two decades like them, which she had begun suspecting true. She experimented

on a human boy; traced him take birth, then crawl into black knickers, unto maidens and fishing

trawlers, till an airplane flew him somewhere. On return, he was old, rich, sounding and smelling

different, even cautiously disgusted by fish. Then he left the fishing hamlet, moved into the city

from where he brought new people, burgeoning buildings and colossal bulldozers that chased out

his ancestors.

And their supposed squalor.

More than two decades must have passed. Her sisters had returned to the Arabian Sea too.

She still hovered high above human smallness, impervious to the jets abducting people to Persia,

the nets and caked poisons of the people left behind, and the curses they hurl as she

disemboweled their fish.

Yet she longed to be with them and their vice; coral wrecking, earth plundering, kite killing

barbarians.

And indignant disbelief would riddle her.

And she’d decide to try only when she was a hundred years old and resolutely ready to die.

Because on the ground, among the people, their festering rage, spilling cities and cowering

coasts, death is all she would find.

By MJ Dally