When my mother was pregnant with me,
she was stung by a scorpion.
they say that's the reason why I am so
venomous.
The “they” here is me.
No one else has ever called me venomous.
venomenity implies mythicality.
A certain grandness.
And who would mythologize me, but for
me.
I'm my own muse and I am my own
museum.

Sometimes I like to think that
the scorpion was radioactive
That it was infested by the toxins
that made up my coming of age and my
youth.
All of the Navi Mumbai fumes
were already in her sting
When she stung my mother,
she blessed me with the ability to
breath in some of the worst air in the
world.

When my mother was pregnant with me,
she used to walk miles to get water every
day
from an almost dried up well.

they say this is the reason why I lack
emotion.
The “they” here is my mother.
She’s right of course.
You cannot keep the pools
of emotion full and clean
when everywhere is drying up.

Water has always been a crisis in my life.
The lack of it. The excess of it.
The over-abundance of it in my eyes,
the retention of it in my body,
all the fainting from dehydration
the floods and the droughts.
We are the same, this land and I -
Wilfully ignorant of being at the risk
of being burnt down by an inferno of
logged water.

When I was pregnant with this poem,
a village a few kilometres away
was engulfed by a deluge of mud*.
They say that is why this poem
is so useless. Its words hollow;
incapable of making it rain less or rain
more

or taking a hot summer and making it
temperate.
The “they” here is the speaker of this
poem.
No one else calls my poems useless.

Months later, I travel down the road
that passes through that mudsunken
village
sitting at the window of a red and yellow
bus
listening to ELIO sing
“the whole world is ending
so fuck the environment, baby”
singing along. knowing well,
that she would never be close enough
to the environment that was getting
fucked.

And I,
was right at the centre of it.

*On 19th and 20th July, the Raigad District in Maharashtra, a state of India,
experienced extremely heavy rainfall that caused a landslide in the village of Irshalwadi,
fully burying around 48 houses. 27 people were declared dead on 23rd July 2023, and the
rescue operations were called off with 57 people still missing. Such landslides have become
a common occurrence in the region in the last few decades and are progressively getting
worse, owing to climate change-induced flash floods.

Rituja Patil

A bildungsroman