It is rare that a publisher receives a manuscript that causes a somatic response, a verge of tinge and contracture, emitting saffron light, smooth to the touch, waxy like soft-bodied insects attaching themselves to stem, leaf, branches, a wrist. It is even more rare when a manuscript forces the body to weep.
In Kiran Bath’s debut collection, Instructions for Banno, readers are presented with the horrors of grooming, the grooming of brides. Girls who will one day become brides. Become chattel, a soundtrack for instructions, a mapping for carrying the multitudes of girls expected to become bride, forced to be bride, reduced to contemplating future, become a belonging: her body a wishing well. Her future a prediction:
Calculations of worthy began so early. I arrived a bride of soot and modesty.... I knew from the beginning how much should be missing. The math to girls going hungry. Their lips and feet. The lessening. Girl as less. Girl as lesson. Girl as...
Instructions for Banno captures the variation of voices of poet, witness, familial inheritor, and archivist of the inherited consequences of becoming a South Asian bride: Banno. The poems capture the intensity of the experience of Banno through the tactile senses and that in its unexpected power it records, gives voice to the loss and sacrifices of Banno past, present, and future.
These instructions account for a lacking, the counting of backwards, of less, and less, least and zero. A dissonance of disappearance, the growing smaller, a distortion of light, the ways in which a girl, a bride, a woman can just go missing, go up in smoke, become ash.
Bath ruptures the plight of Banno through grayed pages where “The Poet Interrupts” through first-person narrative and reimagination, a veritable reclamation of story, an insistence:
In this version you’re not married off...I am taking over for a brief moment. I pull the sky taut, a black sheet between present and ancestors. It’s just us now. A reduction of octaves.
The groundswell of voices serve as disparate resonances that cannot be coherently narrativized, drawing attention to the fact, that these stories travel through the timelines and cartography of pre-partition matriarchs, migrant mothers, first generation daughters through the dangers that face all Banno: subjugation, inter-partner violence, honor killings, and infanticide. Resulting in a diary left to and for all Banno, a diary that breaches familial and cultural institutions and seeks to disavow, marking a beginning of anew, where the poet joins the brides, not on the pyre this time, but rather the poet interjects as somatic experience, “Kiran, return, as Tropic of Capricorn, join the brides/ as a hemisphere of sunlight, let this be all we ever know of gold.”
