Three men walk out of a bar
And step into an art installation.
A documentation of five lives:
Five women from five different lands.
As five limbless, headless mannequins.
With five screens playing five rituals
And five headphones playing lullabies.
An immersive installation
That took fifteen people
Fifteen days to put together.
The first man turns to Tilamai.
A mannequin painted in red & black.
She is seventy; a midwife, hunter, gatherer,
preserver, and more.
She has held her tribe together for decades.
He raises his hands at her,
and cups a breast with each.
The second turns to Sumitra.
She is a mannequin in neon green
Plastered with clippings of twenty women
who were killed
on suspicion of witchcraft.
Fourteen of them were teenagers.
He, too, raises his hands at her,
and cups one breast apiece.
The two pose.
Four hands.
Four breasts.
Two smiles.
The third clicks a picture.
Note: An art installation took months to imagine and weeks to make. Every detail was weighed: trust was placed and shared by the survivors while others took care to preserve the stories. The room was meant for listening and witness, but reverence is not a language everyone knows. Three men stepped out of a bar and into the art installation, and in the flash of a phone camera, turned the work into evidence of something else entirely. The poem was inspired by “Magical Women,” an installation by author and poet Pragya Bhagat at the Shadow Script exhibition at Goa Open Arts.
Usman Riaz is a writer from Srinagar, Kashmir. Professionally, he works as a freelance copywriter. He writes poems and short stories (and long Instagram captions on a whim); writing in the present-continuous, as he calls it, reflecting current states of mind juxtaposed with the culture and nature he was brought up around. His writing is emotional, evocative, lamentful, and usually angry and political. He currently lives in Goa with his two cats.