In her collection of poetry “Flotsam of a Restless Mind”, Malini takes on the difficult subject of life circumstances that create sexual ambiguity…

In her collection of poetry “Flotsam of a Restless Mind”, Malini takes on the difficult subject of life circumstances that create sexual ambiguity; a women clearly possessed of gender identification that even provides marriage and offspring, forced by the shock of abandonment to assume the role of principal breadwinner and champion of spouse, child and thus family.
As we see she introduces this dilemma, in the first poem of this book. This poem You Are the Man is notable :
Be the man you ought to be
She was told
She chopped off her locks
And smiled her brilliant feminine smile
For the last time

It is not written in the first person and, also, it gives a more historical and sociological understanding to the position her life circumstances place her in.
In Women Woes, we find a poem which details the struggles that many women must face when in poverty and alone ; we words also written in the third person. In dread she writes:

Invitingly smiling at any man, that looked well dressed
She needed the night to go well
She needed at least four customers
To feed her mother, her blind cat and pay her rent

The social order of what we term heterosexual “Couples” begins when humanoids are still walking on feet aided by knuckles, uprightness had yet to be achieved. When humans left the heat cycle, coupling took over from classical mating. It created the first social contract between females and males.
Agreeing, that one must go out to gather food for all, while the other could provide food by nursing newborns, is how males became breadwinners ; for no other reason. According to social anthropology it was the chief reason we began trying to walk upright, so food could be bundled and pressed to the chest in larger masses otherwise it could only be carried in two fists that touched the earth.
This had nothing to do with one gender being inferior to the other.
Small wonder, modern couples are stricken with an archetypical alert system that can cause a transference of duties, as well as, a difficult adjustment to taking on multiple roles in child rearing.
I write all of this because we see in the first poem that there is an expressed change in the subject’s demeanor that suggests an outward and decided change in physical appearance, and a changed relationship with the world around, not by choice but as a result of a clearly painful life altering situation.

Malini writes in Go Away….Stay ; in this poem the very title is about the relationship and the stresses she shared with the man in her family ; we see financial difficulties and a fearful or disgusted reaction to his masculinity.

Addressing this man in her life, she compares his ‘violation’ of her to a Fishbone in my throat :
Either I’ll swallow it
Or spit it out
Then they said
I’ll get used to it

Then, likewise, in this poem we a person facing a common dilemma for those who face sex with or without a partner :

I went to buy sex toys and thought of God
I went to buy sex toys to further spice up my sex life
And while I was looking at the battery charged vibrators
I thought of shame

Malini speaks elsewhere of lost love with “curvy hips.” Now alone after many more portions of her life, she refers to earlier times when she was on the verge :
Oh the bliss of the cusp we are, half in half out
Of each other, making rhythmic moves candid and free
…….And we wonder if this isn’t it, what is love all about?
So, she is sad as she ages, older but with her son. But she is without tears as she experiences the events of elder life. This poetry is full of tension, as she progresses with great strength beyond youth.

As she tells us in Friends at 40 :

Friends at forty struggle
They struggle to look forward and onward
They dread it…

How much is the author’s real life and how much is fantasy we can only guess.

Certainly, this book is poetry of the highest quality and Malini’s words are skillful and always entrancing ! Besides revealing her life, they reveal every woman’s inner life, fears and, perhaps, reality.

If you want to be mesmerized, read this book. Believe me, there is a vast world within its pages !

By Mary Barnet

Author
Critique: Haiku for the 21st Century : The Haiku of Sayumi Kamakura (Cyberwit. 2018),
At the Top : The Haiku and Poetry of Ban’ya Natsuishi (Cyberwit, 2019)
Poetry: The Train I Rode (Gilford Press, 2018),
Founder and Editor In Chief of PoetryMagazine.com now 23 years on the internet