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Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca was born and raised in a Jewish family in Mumbai. She was educated at the Queen Mary School, Mumbai, received her BA in English and French, an MA from the University of Bombay in English and American Literature, and a Master’s in Education from Oxford Brookes University, England. She has taught English, French and Spanish in various colleges and schools in India and overseas. Her first book, Family Sunday and Other Poems was published in 1989, with a second edition in 1990. Kavita is the daughter of the late poet, Nissim Ezekiel. She manages her Poetry page at https://www.facebook.com/kemendoncapoetry/
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Tsunami
Tsunami
You have a name now
I have learned to pronounce it
To spell it correctly
Even if it looks wrong,
Learned that the T is silent
To remember the ‘s’ after the T
The ‘s’ looking so small beside the T
Yet becoming the stronger letter.
I liked learning about silent letters in French
How the last consonant of a word slides
To the back of one’s tongue, silently
Swallowing them sometimes posed challenges!
The silence of the T in this word
holds power
The power to destroy.
Back then when we were three schoolgirls
Standing on the black rocks of a Bombay beach
Still in our white school uniforms
Eating * Bhelpuri, balancing our feet
On jagged edges with water between.
You were yet to be named,
Or at least I didn’t know what you were called.
Then the sea became silent
The waters receded to their farthest point
The gulls stopped screeching
A calm of eeriness descended
Before, the sea came back noiselessly with ferocious determination
Arose as a white wall of water
A savage rage spewed from its belly sans words
Blanked out the tall building across the beach
As we ran to anywhere
Holding hands.
All I remember was the scattered debris
The flowers some lovers had pledged to each other,
As we surveyed the rocks
From a safe distance.
I read a novel once
I learned what the ‘Wave’ did
To one family and thousands more.
Loss drowning in the silent wave
that came from nowhere
And returned to silence
Taking everything with it
Except my memory
Which I write in silence
At two a.m. on a winter morning
Far from the beach
Of my school days.
* Bhelpuri is an Indian snack, popular in Mumbai as street food.
The Silent P in Psalm
The word psalm comes from the Greek word ‘Psalmos’
It is ‘’a song sung to a harp’’
A harp is quite a loud instrument
Makes a beautiful sound,
I have always wanted to learn to play it
I may not be able to reach
All the strings, sitting or standing,
Another instrument might be suitable
For my height.
If a Psalm is a song of praise
And songs are meant to be sung
To the sound of a harp
Why should the P in Psalm be silent?
Sometimes the English language defies logic
My Spanish-speaking friends complain
About words like Psalm and Psychology
And Pneumonia, and others.
Spanish has a logic to it, they say
It’s easy to learn.
Why can’t Psalm start with an S
Who invented this bizarre spelling?
I took an Etymology course in college
Only told me the origin of words
Not their spelling history
As far as I remember.
We were given two hymn books in school
The blue hymn book and the brown psalm book,
Standing by the piano teacher
I pronounced ‘Pasalam’ while holding out the brown book
The P is silent, she whispered to me
It was then I knew that one can praise the creator
Silently in psalms.
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Saying Twilight in Two Languages
The darkness always knows it is winter
It possesses intuition and wisdom
It enters my home earlier and earlier
Silently
Shortening the days, balancing on the edge of night.
I miss my mother, though not just in winter,
She turned on the lights
At the first hint of twilight,
She called it ‘TeenieSanza’.
This T is soft, not hard as in English
It’s a *Marathi word, our first language along with English.
Try saying it, ‘Teeniesanza’
Put your tongue against your front teeth
It will automatically soften the T.
Twilight is the soft light
The separation of day from night
Spoken with a hard T,
And ‘Teeniesanza’ is the soft T
It also means Twilight.
The light is the same though
Just uses a different language
To call it by its name.
I’m trying to teach my daughter
To say ‘Teeniesanza’
Marathi is not her first language
She can say twilight comfortably
With the hard T
She obliges me by practising.
Either way, still, it will be twilight
when it’s time
For the light to change.
* Marathi is the language spoken in the state of Maharashtra (India) and of the Bene Israel Jews of Bombay, the community to which I belong.
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