Tejimolā Forever

I am a survivor, I am.
Didn’t that stepmother of mine
Try a thousand and one ways to kill me?
And didn’t I survive still?

Māhi āi, māhi āi, muk nāmāribā…

What a pathetic creature I was!
Crying and cringing, letting her grind me in the mortar
And throw me away in the backyard.
Only I grew back as a creeper.
She cut me and threw me in a ditch
I started blooming.
She tried to drown me
I became a lotus.

I knew pitāi would come back soon.
I’d then tell him about his wicked wife.
I sang out as his boat went by:
Don’t reach out, don’t pluck me
O you strange boatman
Māhi āi ground me in my silk clothes
I am Tejimolā really.

Pitāi of course chased away his wife
And brought me back to shape
And got me married
To Dhonpur who loves me.

But having been a creeper,
A flowering plant and a lotus,
I did not want to be a wife.
But nobody asked me.
So I left when it got to me.
They searched of course
But I’d learnt to disguise well
And they gave up.

Now I live and die
A plant, a creeper,
A vine, a flower.
I live and die,
Tejimolā forever.

***

[In the Assamese folktale, Tejimolā, the story ends where the eponymous heroine gets married. To retell the tale to let the docile Tejimolā choose her own fate is to take a gendered stance vis-à-vis the process of translation.]

***

Published in Chandrabhāgā 15/2007