Anu Mahadev

Anu Mahadev is a New Jersey based, left-brained engineer who morphed into a right-brained poet. She is a 2016 MFA graduate of Drew University, and her work has appeared in several journals and anthologies. She serves as Editor for Jaggery Lit, the Woman Inc. and The Wild Word. Her collection of poetry titled A Mouthful of Sky was released April 2022 from Get Fresh Books LLC. In her spare time, she loves spending time with her family, music, books, meditation, yoga, and walks with her dog.

Dear Mother,

Some days, there are walls inside us, growing with vines that hold us back. I should be inviting you to that cozy cafe down the street. Where coffee is always brewing, the sleek machines are grinding beans nonstop and the carafe is always full. How my willpower crumbles when I see the fresh croissants, how my mood lifts upon hearing the door chimes and the constant chatter. I want to write to you about the arresting warmth of cinnamon, the sinful taste of the chocolate in the pastry, swirling with vanilla and nutmeg, the fresh berries that you would love, if you could ever come for a visit. But this is not our secret code. The stubborn grammar of this place tricks me into believing that I belong. My pen refuses to go on, waxing effusively about some brick and mortar shop that someone built, filled with books and music and thirty varieties of beverages. I have been fooled into this bubble. I instead, invite you to the unspoken intimacy of the temple we walked to without shoes, both of us with chapped heels and toe-rings on the second toe. The red and white striped walls, the sacred ash near the deities, the banyan tree in the courtyard, its roots jutting out of the ground, the bells tolling during worship. I invite you onto the bund, where we walked by the river and spoke of things, important and mundane. These moments, far and few that you can spare for me, are the ones that make me question my choices of refusal. Of home, of homeland, of mother tongue. Of struggles, dreams and disappointments. We cannot have it all. But we will always have that day, when we prayed for each other and the family, walked back home via the grocer’s shop in that little dusty lane and I took selfies.

Losing my religion

after R.E.M

I imagined the rug pulled from underneath me to be Turkish. If one is going to fall, why not do it in style, in splendor, after all. Intricately woven, its double-knotted weft would narrate tales of a heavily pregnant woman being given an average performance review at an accounting firm. Wait, that’s not exotic enough. It’s as if God wanted to convey to me, you—with the naïveté of a child, you can have one thing only and not both. You choose. I chose to cradle my son and walk on a flaming coal bed of unkind words. A mother doesn’t fit into single New Yorkers’ beer pong parties. Once my manager told me her dreams were about the project she would never finish. And I thought—how sad is that. If you can’t permit yourself to dream about places to go to, or people you love, you need to recalibrate your life. It’s as if my degree certificates were tearing themselves to shreds and flinging about in my face. The stinging slap of a burning rejection of self. What they call a reality check. Oh life, it’s bigger than you. You are not me. My ever-morphing dreams are only beginning. I am shedding the python skin today. Come, take a step in my shoes. Maybe then you’ll know what impostor syndrome feels like. My only regret is that I spent all my gestation months in a windowless war room of a bank rather than nesting in my home, ready to welcome my baby. Oh no, I’ve said too much. I haven’t said enough.

Self-portrait as the shadow dancer

My doppelgänger wades beside me in my daydreams, like when I dip my spoon in warm honey. Slow to the eyes, but breaks the sound barrier in no time. She is a gazelle with doe-eyed innocence, limber and quick, everything I am not. She gets married at twenty, nubile and fertile, bears children, learns to cook, laugh and be popular. The kind of person parents like. For whom they would forego dowry. Not the woman who would seek refuge in her mangalsutra and her children so she can be safe. Not the dark sallow complexion, not the thin lips that have forgotten how to curve into a smile. Not the plastic trophy entertainer, the one who everyone would envy. I am a wallflower, ready to fade into the background. It would do everyone good to pretend I am not here. I am at best, an accompaniment to the main act, a best friend in a love story, a part of the corps surrounding a ballerina. The one who never knows if she’s going to clear the audition, and if so is only in the limelight for a few seconds. The one whose shadow stretches beyond the stage, with a life of its own.