Yasmeen Fathima Thantrey

When I was a child I loved being in the room with my mother as she completed her night-time routine. This won’t be a telling of a glamorous exotic woman who brushes her long silky hair one hundred strokes or bathes her locks and skin in aromatic nourishing oils. This is a lightly tanned Brown woman, with thinning, bobbed coils, and sagging breasts. Rough spikes and cheap razor burnt legs, and modest pyjamas. This is the embodiment of a working-class woman through the lens of a Brown girl.

My mum would unsuccessfully try to shrink herself, hiding the folds of her stomach with her work clothes from the day. I would lunge forward from my parent’s bed, desperate to trace the purple-red dents around her back and shoulders with my fingers. When I close my eyes now, I can feel the warm soft sensation of our skin touching. The hair on her torso is fine and almost unnoticeable when I compare it to my own.

As my own body ages, I witness it transition through healing and recovery. My collar bones and ribs have sunken back into their body, and my inner thighs find comfort in their touching. My own softness has begun to resemble that of my mother’s. Nutrition once again brings curls to my hair and folds to my stomach. I adorn my body in colour and serotonin inducing fabrics, that remind me of mothballs in the cupboards and suitcases of silk. Nani’s gold hoops and bangles rest on my skin as they once did hers, and I run oil through my hair as she once did for my mother.

Sometimes Mum fights with me, says I need to live within my means, live modestly. I resemble a magpie drawn to the vibrant, loud, maximalist things that glisten in the light. We are very different. At twenty five had to provide a stable household. A balanced world between traditional South Asian house wife, and modern working woman. I like to believe she had a choice to have that life, but I know that the world had already set a course for her to take.

My very own, South Asian, working class hero.

I’m homesick

In a flat with my dogs

And my lover

But the smell from the kitchen

That wrestles with the extractor fan

And floats down the street

Does not smell like home to me

I want to wake up in the morning to sweet desserts and spices tickling the hairs in my nostril

The doorbell to ring once or twice and it not be a delivery from an order I forgot I made

A morning kiss and cuddle could never compete

With a tight embrace over the shoulder one two three

Tea and coffee rounds after every meal and in between

Uncle and dad coming home after their namaz

And we hug one two three

And we feast

Scraping the last grains of rice that try to stay on the plate into our mouths

Fingers running along the inside of the bowl to get every last drop

This morning I don’t even get a text

I don’t know if it’s today or tomorrow

Waking late to a meeting on the sofa

My thighs fused with the plasticy cover beneath them

I eat hash browns and bbq sauce while watching strangers travel the world

And I cancel plans to fall into a habit I’ve spent years breaking

Climbing into an empty bed with my screen rotating through clips of strangers

To make me howl with 15 second laughter

And swipe

Swipe

Swipe

My mood swings to the far end of the spectrum

I want wetness to fill my eyes

But instead I frown

Thinking it’s my flakiness or ruined plans

But I’m just homesick on Eid

Maybe Derby’s not so bad

A room in Lewisham for a grand a month

I’m sat in a blue box

2.5 beds

1 bath

Garden.

Buildings growing taller around 

but I stay small

low to the ground

leaky window

1.35

under market value

I’m waiting for this email to come

for that one to become a two

Market value

market value of a blue box

social housing

buy it back

private social housing 

if you take the poor person out of the social housing does it become luxury?

US embassy

swimming pool

tube station

Clapham Common

market value

I’m having a crisis

who’s got a grand to spent on a bedroom anyway?

If the housing association are increasing rent I’ve got no hope with the private private housing

I’m in the private social housing

the private social blue box housing

the knock down the furniture shop to build luxury social housing housing

It’s still a council estate

with private social housing 

and young professionals from home counties

who’ve got a grand to spend on a room so anyway

the private social housing would rather they live here 

than aunty and uncle next-door 

and Kim the cat lady

I’m in the middle

with my private social housing 

under market value

working class but my parents own their home now

upper working class? lower middle class?

but I don’t have a grand to spend on a room

so when that one becomes a two I’m really

screwed

screwed because I have things in every room

screwed because I’ve become comfortable in a housing crisis

I missed the first wave that knocked my friends back to their parent’s 

I’ve settled in a temporary blue box that’s heading the same way as the furniture shop

but in the mean time they want to squeeze as much profit from this poor

blue box

and that means

market value 

and luxury housing.

Maybe Nottingham would be okay…