Shikha Malaviya: California Poets Part 11, Five Poems

Shikha Malaviya

October 20th, 2026

California Poets: Part XI

Shikha Malaviya

Five Poems

COINS 

We were at the age when 

our mouths & minds had no filter 

seven and nine, my brother & I 

we learnt the chicken dance 

at a resort in Tenerife in 1980

from a group of merry Britishers 

whom we lectured on how they plundered

India, and most nodded in agreement 

asking how we knew all of this at such a young age 

though they had already guessed who was responsible 

our father & mother, Indians who had met & married in Britain 

where my brother and I had been conceived 

yet we were Indian, our hearts and passports said so 

our very brown skin and thick brown hair betrayed it 

and we had a little green card that made us 

residents of yet another country 

but we were still Indian by ethnicity, by heart

it would take us a lifetime to sort through this 

though we didn’t know it yet 

and tell me which age is the right one to learn 

of colonialism, to learn of the other, to see greed 

in the form of a coin waterfall slot machine

and feed it quarters like the one at the resort

where white men and women sat naked

in the sun waiting for their skin to brown 

and blister like a roast in the oven, while we shielded ours

One morning I put a coin in the waterfall, and it shook 

the tray, clinking—shk-shk, shk-shk, shk-shk, silver spilling out 

a man ran up to me and said in a crisp British accent 

‘Those coins are mine, I was playing it a few minutes ago 

I was going to put in one more, so the coins belong to me’

I felt sorry for him, yes, I did, so I gave him a few

but I kept the rest, yes, I did, and told him 

this doesn’t cover what we are due

WAITING FOR MY OWN INDIAN SUPERHERO/INE

And how did you think we’d turn out? Of course we are pacifists. The father of our nation, a man who proclaimed nonviolence, giving the enemy his cheek. We never grew up reading Superman or Spiderman. Our heroes were almost always flawed and mostly celestial, between the matte-colored pages of Amar Chitra Katha: hold-your-breath-blue Krishna, pale peach apsara Malavika with an hourglass body, minaret-haired Buddha under a bodhi tree that held him perfectly, always torn between karma and nirvana, or the elusive, never aging, Phantom who lived in Africa, who from a distance, looked like a giant, muscular eggplant, riding a horse—& then there was red-haired, freckled Archie and his constantly breaking down jalopy, with two girls fighting over him as he navigated high school (oh to be so coveted!) & Asterix and Obelix: one short and smart, one sweet, big, and lovably oafish, two Gauls defending their turf against the Romans in 50 BC—how we love to dwell in the past! Last but not least, Tintin and his most faithful Wire Fox Terrier companion, Snowy, traversing exotic locations, whether trudging in Tibet or walking the wilds of Congo. There was no one from the present from where we were, no one with our muddy skin, our not quite straight hair, our names that held our villages, our mashed-up vernacular, our exiled silences...until Shaktimaan—oh, if you had arrived a decade earlier, I might have learned to love your maroon velvet suit with gold gota on the shoulders. But being from a tropical country, what you wore made no sense. You should have been dressed in the thinnest of cottons. I imagine your obituary saying that 'he died of spontaneous combustion.' I’m still waiting for my superheroine, the one who castrates rapists with a single glance, that turns all the dirty men blind, that gathers all the young and hopeful and tells them they are good enough. Let’s call her Polyester Padma, a cross between Silk Smita and Kali, who seduces all the villains with a cabaret dance before slaying them with the safety pin that fastens her saree blouse glittering with sequins, dancing over their still bodies as onlookers whistle and cheer.

THE STORY OF OUR NAMES

Let's start with the first wobbly letter

we wrote when we didn’t know

if we were left or right-handed

in my case, perhaps, an inverted S

shaped like a snake 

or a river with two bends

it's all about perspective

every name carries a story, 

mine the tip of a mountain

the Himalayas to be specific

shaped like the nib of a pen

where my great grandfather 

was once doctor to a king

of a princely mountain state in India

and my grandfather, a poet and teacher 

whose name meant Goddess Durga’s offering

my father, named flower bud,

left the Himalayas as a teenager

for England because he had faulty eyes

and needed surgery, not to study 

computer science as I had assumed

but to see better, and England is where 

he met my mother, named moon glow

who also was from the Himalayas 

but had traveled from there first to Ghana

before reaching the land of the Thames

how far they both traveled to meet

one another, though their point of origin

was the same. And maybe that is what

names are, poems that are archives

of things left behind and things to be

this naming of me, Shikha, derived from 

the Sanskrit word Shikhar, top of the peak

tip of a flame, temple spire

or the tuft of hair on a bald priest’s head

that bounces and waves, a cultural flag 

of the mind. In my name, a GPS pin

that helps me return to where I’m from

each time someone says it

Of course, sometimes I don’t want it

this name others stumble over

that I help others pronounce again and again

by telling them Chicago without the go

which I discovered while riding the bus

to college as the driver yelled out Chicago Avenue

and I thought he was calling me

And yet sometimes I became Chica, Sheikha

or Shanikwa, a Jewish coworker even called me Shiksa

And at a coffee shop in San Francisco, 

they handed me my cappuccino with Shitkha 

written on the cup, which in my mother tongue 

translates as eat shit. It was okay for the State I grew up in

to be called cloudy water in Dakota, for cities within

to be Minnetonka or Shakopee

a waterfall could be Minnehaha, a camp

called Tanadoona, but Shikha was sometimes too heavy

for them to bear, another kind of Indian

and perhaps there was only room for one

and they had been pushed into corners,

spaces that they tried to make seem special 

by marking them reserved for preservation

THIS LITTLE ARMY: a Golden Shovel

After the COVID-19 Pandemic and William Carlos Williams

Neither typhoon nor earthquake but a centurion so

small, it slips through mouth and nose, without much 

fanfare, undetected. How it announces its arrival depends

A cough that breaks the silence or beads of sweat upon 

the forehead? This little army that has nary a

spine yet stands so tall and turns the earth red 

All ships anchored, stilled the jet plane’s wheel

As skies turn bluer and dew weighs the barrow

this spring. Locked within our homes, glazed

in anxiety, we seek answers, measured with

syncopated breaths. What becomes essential—rain

to squelch the drought—hope, a glass of water 

half-full. We will meet again, I promise, beside

the fountain in the park, commiserating over the 

ones we’ve lost, as children trawl for coins

white from wishes of when we were oblivious as chickens

PAPER BOATS: A GAZA GHAZAL

There will be no love letters tonight in your city

only gauze flapping like ghosts tonight in your city

In a house with no roof and cracked windows

you read Darwish amidst the rubble tonight in your city

Stars shine with abandon, as if nothing has happened

please kiss all the children left behind tonight in your city

No silver bells, only mortar shells

the roads are long and hungry tonight in your city

Tearing squares of paper from discarded textbooks

they make paper boats and set sail tonight in your city

I kneel in prayer, hands turned towards the sky

wondering if God is there tonight in your city

Author Bio:

Shikha Malaviya is a poet, writer, and publisher. Her latest book, Anandibai Joshee: A Life in Poems (HarperCollins India), reimagines the groundbreaking journey of India's first female physician and the first Indian woman to study medicine in the US in the 19th century. Her earlier collection, Geography of Tongues, explores themes of immigrant identity and belonging. Shikha’s poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart prize as well as featured in Prairie Schooner, PLUME, Catamaran, and other distinguished journals. As co-founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, curator at the South Asian Literature & Arts Festival (SALA)  as well as a Mosaic America Fellow, Shikha works to amplify diverse literary voices. Shikha has been an AWP Writer to Writer poetry mentor for seven seasons, poetry faculty at the Rooted & Written conference and is a member of the SF Writers Grotto. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.