Rules of Mancala: Three poems by Rahana K. Ismail
‘they say you could / map out migration by how / games change hands—hands tiny in hope, / searching a piece of it in the other’.
Author’s note: The poems presented here are, in one way or the other, connected to the old game of Mancala, known by different names in different places. My grandmother introduced it to me first, and I have been fascinated with it ever since, with its myriad versions, and its evolution across centuries and continents. In the attempt to map out my engagement with Mancala (we didn't have a name for it then), the poems I wrote have an interwoven narrative of the feminine in my family history.
Mancala Not Named So
Two rows of seven houses and a store—
the version we always played
before I knew there were as many as 200
versions, before I knew their hunger
by knowing mine (which is the only way) for things
and their stories before they became what they had
to live up to, before I knew it had as many as
800 names. Our game had no name.
Rice, sugar, kerosene, there were more things
rationed by the war. We lost many objects that way.
We held on to this by its sound—sound of tamarind
seeds, of its scooping like children getting adopted
by a simple scoop and carried home.
Like my grandmother was.
It must have been evening, three girls
and a young mother. Difference between
having home and being one sleeps like a parrot’s sea.
Like my great grandmother’s language
using her only alphabets in Arabic to write
her Malayalam.
*
Prestidigitation
1.
Light of hand,
she magic-pots chor and curry
in a whisk & flick. At earth
light alights
and she is there,
at the row
of our little curled feet
by the wooden palakas,
ladling leaffuls
snow hills.
After the MG road magic show,
we called her ‘Our Houdini’
to which she nodded
a purple sun.
2.
Blowing herself
into the rust-red stove pipe,
like the old-timer
at Sivarathri fair,
balloon-twisting air
into Dachshunds.
On our way to play Mancala,
We would hear this—
Like pie-dogs
barking,
with a whoosh,
fire lazing,
to talk.
3.
Years varicosed,
river-willows chalked
to bronchiolar
twigs, coughs, slips
in time and we saw the
slow plain pain—
we walking towards a white hill
slowly seeing
trees one, then one,
how the axe carved out
dainty crescents, where a strangler fig
lingered in hugs, where blind termites
marched to a mutiny, where mushrooms
shelved time in ladder rungs, an ellipsis of caked red
where a poised wing was shot by a poised arm,
where the Neem tried
a new knot and failed, where crazed childhoods
broke off stickmen, every leaf it loses, a touch of place
you lose, where the Yellowhammer
pecked a half-hole, a swing-rope gash, a wing-brush.
Falling away
to husk, shell, yellowed fluid,
feet among musk-flowered sheets,
layers laid bare
in the Petromax shrill
the coming undone
a winding
drummer—hoop, head, a whole house of drum notes hanging
limbo.
*
Mancala board
A long fish
Northern Pike, King Mackerel,
Capelin, Blue Whiting
cut open
its slender fins
still
in Eritrean wishwells
its tiny fishmouth
still open
in a timid gulp
of Arabian Sea anglers,
isopods, an ill-aligned yelp
slurping out a week
of holes—they say you could
map out migration by how
games change hands—hands tiny in hope,
searching a piece of it in the other,
a half-line, a skin-tag, a wrinkle
in the same day
of the same decade
to withdraw
gills
purpling
in a small house
by Kochi shipyard
gulls.
***
Rahana K Ismail is a poet from Kerala whose work has been published in nether Quarterly, Verse of Silence and EKL Review. She waits until the line brims and tridax daisies array themselves in casual question marks. She can be reached at rahanakismail@gmail.com when she is done rummaging through the woodsorrel, ironweeds and adiantum with her daughter. You can find her on Instagram: @ra.ha.na.k.ismail and Twitter: @RahanaKIsmail1.
