She checked her mailbox. There was a large brown envelope from Turtle Island, a small literary magazine in Nordland, Washington, which had published two of his poems. Two red booklets slid out, with the contributors’ names printed on the cover. There was a note. He was talking about ten years of joy in publishing the magazine of the tiny Marrowstone Press. Finally, they were done. It was a good race. Beautiful memories, beautiful writers, beautiful readers, friends. Bye. A handwritten note from both editors.

“We are nominating your poems for the Pushcart Prize this year. It was a pleasure to have them published. Continue to love the world with your poems. —Linda and Alex.

She went up to her studio. His heart was heavy.

She began to enjoy her imprisonment. Frozen life in a flash removed a coil of bitter energy. The delirious beast staggered but lifted its scaly head, stuck out its forked tongue like lightning. It was as if she was deceiving the world, desolate and bandaged and mournful and burned with inner joy.
The poems have arrived. The bleak landscape outside his window, the old-fashioned steam heater in his studio, the oddly high ceilings, the painful confinement. They pushed poetry, thin and flowing in a chilling way.

Mostly his poems came out in little magazines that looked old and yellow straight off the press. Occasionally they appeared on the bright green of glossy travel and gardening papers.

She came across another video of someone speaking another of her poems and felt the same shame. They looked like wild, violent, slippery beasts that had no grace or care for anyone. How could she talk about such pain? A pain she hadn’t felt herself? What right had she to dig them out of the cold-print and fan the flames with them?

His pupils drifted in his poems. Kendra, a black college student in her 40s, handed her a handwritten card, inviting her to her graduation ceremony. Megha kept the little card on her bookshelf, where it became the first thing she saw whenever she entered her office.

The note said Kendra’s twin granddaughters would see her walking with a college degree.

Megha wrote a poem borrowing the voices of the two five-year-old girls she hadn’t met, singing their joy at their grandmother’s big day.

Our grandmother is a little girl/ Our grandmother is now a big girl.

Our grandmother, our grandmother. She yearned for the raspy blues, the old woman’s voice of an aging New Orleans crooner, pushing through the wonder of little girls, proud of their grandmother, dazed by their pride.

Could a poet speak in tongues? In the language of others? Languages ​​yet to be born?

The beasts crawled inside her and made her nauseous. His students chattered. They told him about their life. They trusted him. They offered themselves. She fed them into the gossip mill of poetry. Their lives came out, flayed and chopped up, sometimes rhyming, sometimes looking for rhyme.
She violated their privacy. Again and again. They told him why their parents argued and how they swung between them, wasting away with each swing. They talked about alcoholism, jealousy and the paper bells blooming in their garden. Sometimes they sat in his office. She threw them all into the abyss of her poetry. They burned, creased, screeched a little, and created the sooty smoke of art.

Sitting in your office, I’m aging like your mother
How can someone so young hold us back
Dare to know the language
So young, so dark, so fucking stupid,
Do you hear, in my voice, a wrinkled wonder?
Tell me if you do, my little girl?
Help me chop the peppers for dinner.
Slice them thin and wet, will you, little girl?

Sometimes she wished she could throw the graduating students into the flames. Why wouldn’t she? The bland white grad students who smiled at him weakly as if they were smiling at a joke in their head. The girl in the computer room who had asked her curtly if she was there to fix the printer. The gnarled professor whose bookcase she had pushed a little closer to the window.

She could not. They were vaporous creatures, ghosts. She could only flay and burn those who loved her, who laid bare their lives for her. Sometimes they knew the pain; sometimes they didn’t know they were open. But the bruises appeared in his poems.

It was like sleeping with someone and chatting about the lives they revealed under the blanket. It was cruel. His words were cruel. Guilt gnawed at her. She made them laugh. They nudged him again.

She found great pleasure in assembling the poems into a chain. They were like family members who didn’t like each other very much, sometimes snickering and laughing at each other.

A very dysfunctional family trying to find their way home.

Excerpt from The Middle Finger by Saikat Majumdar (Rs 599, pp. 240), courtesy Simon & Schuster India

Saikat Majumdar is the author of three previous novels, The Scent of God (2019), The Firebird/Play House (2015/17) and Silverfish (2007), and several nonfiction and critical works.