Description
Visceral, darkly funny, yet suffused with raw tenderness, these poems delve deep into identity, sexuality, family and history. The heart of this collection lies in its ‘betweenness’, the quotidian woven into the elemental, the infinite into intimate, South Asian into British, resulting in a unique fabric of light and shadow self; language as a living breathing second skin. — Sophia Naz
Between Two British Summers traces memory, exile, desire, and shifting identity between bodies and borders. Inhabiting the ache of belonging across fractured homes and foreign landscapes, Malavika’s voice resists decorum, ushering in unflinching thought-provocation. A restless self in transit she is, in this book, between selves and two summers that never meet yet leave behind longing and quiet disquiet. — Rochelle Potkar
As Charles Baudelaire puts it: ‘I shall give you, my dark one,/ Kisses frozen as the moon,/ Caresses such as snakes give/ Slithering round the open grave.’ Let me write to you in the first person as if it’s a letter to a poet, a young one, a beautiful soul. At the daybreak, on an early February dawn, I am reading, in fact, re-reading your manuscript. The Spring is just at the corner. And it hurts… ‘inch perfect’… ‘always on the edge’… Yes, you kept me always on the edge. Your words are powerful and spontaneous just as a mountain spring that can’t be contained. You play the inevitable trapeze of charged emotions brutally honest. — Kabita Mukhopadhyay
Malavika S Udayan is a writer-academic from India. She completed her under-graduation, with an Integrated Master of Arts in English Studies from one of India’s leading and prestigious national institute of importance Indian Institute of Technology Chennai. She has received a Master of Arts from the University of East Anglia Norwich in Creative Writing Poetry with Merit and has become a full-time writer-researcher since then. Her poems and essays have appeared in Poetry Pacific, Article 19 IITM, The Criterion Journal, The Delhi Post News, Agents of Ishq, The Eye Magazine, The OddBall Space Magazine, Ink Sweat and Tears, Arts Against Extremism, Cafe Dissensus Magazine, NewWriting.Net, Eggbox UEA Anthologies, Madras Courier, CreativeCritical.Net, The Station Newspaper, Alien Buddha Zine, Kitaab: A South Asian Journal and in Hubbies Poetry Anthology by Hawakal Publishers. She has read her poems aloud at Poetry in Aldeburgh, TOAST Poetry, Cafe Writers, Poetry Book Society launch event of Matthew Stewart’s Whatever You Do Just Don’t, the Ink Festival, and at Poetry Whitchurch.
FROM THE BOOK
Long Summer Days
Ground, a starlit white sky
dotted with white flowers, my bowels
green and yellow drinking water
that stinks, hairy armpits and sick skin,
little lot more, a peel of banana, sloppy,
a thin plastic bag of court shoes,
running shoes and shiny sneakers, hangers
aren’t broken, with daring patriotism
and undefeated bravery night appears
when I least expect it, no fuss
chronicling between cold brews and hot water,
my warm fingertips and a body
stooping of languor, sleep deprivation
dissatisfaction while washing infrequent
loitering further, aimless, sunshine
startling muddled in thistles, gross thorns,
neat bushes and clothes with polka dots
Whoever Cuts the Ashoca Invites Bad Luck
What if the world was counted in tenths or one half of each tenth.
For every year you live, somebody is early and something appears late.
I have known men who called me their moppet and gauged a chainsaw on the backyard Ashoca.
A tree of this sort takes thirty years, I was born ten years late into my grandfather’s death.
That night, I played stones with my sisters, he owned a lock even before I found the keyhole.
My father raked the saw so that misfortune drives away misfortune and took the rest home.
I was born into a tree cut as early as thirty while I was already late
into my twenties. I haven’t walked like a hunchback, that’s one thing I miss doing.
Hiding in the Attic
I love you secretly
like how us children used
to hide in the attic
during our games of hide and seek
how we walked in tiptoed
without any tumult
how we stayed there forever
in anticipation
not losing a breath that
we would win at the end
eyes popped out in the dark
still trusting
that it would bring fortunes to our life
the fortune of you sitting at arm’s length
with your wife pains me still
but you steal glances through the side of your eye
and I exhilarate like the blades of a windmill
It is everything about you
your weary eyes to your soft spot for curd
It is everything I love
everything that betrayed you so far
the body you nurtured simply to provide
us kids a tea break during our game
we come out of the dark sit together and eat
I keep some gobbles for you
I think you will like them very much
