inventory of aunties

ageing aunty with milky eyes that can barely make out
the lights in the gurdwara hall; aunty with laugh that peels
down southall broadway like cheap rhinestones off a suit;
new aunty so richly perfumed with incense that her nieces
shrink in horror; aunty with swollen wrists, bangles biting
into the flesh; aunties chewing; aunties chopping onions;
twenty or thirty aunties who swap salwars in the colours
of parakeets & perch at the back of the langar hall, watching;
twenty more with swollen arteries & beige bra straps, laser
hair removal leaflets in their purses; aunties chopping garlic;
aunty whose fingers begin with gold bands folded into flesh
& end with tips rooted in her daughters' oiled scalps; aunty
always clamouring to name the newest baby; aunties chopping
ginger; aunty licking haldi off her finger, aunties on whatsapp;
aunty wearing your eyes; aunty wearing your mouth; aunty
wearing your nose; aunty whose face you don't even know
reaching to unclasp her chain & press it into your palms.

Cia Mangat's effervescent prose-poem alchemises the squawk and the twitter of a bustling, aunty-laden gurdwara, and the polychromatic vibrancy of a Sikh gathering, into pure gold. The listing of 'types' - each representative of a disposition or activity that contributes to the hive of the whole, deliberately and deliciously confounds the inventoried form, and ironic use of ampersand, in which the poem is served.

For here is a celebration that would stand as a celebration even if unintended. Frenetic, energetic, and as far removed from mock-solemnity as Southall from Westminster, the collective will of the all-purpose aunties is as refulgent as the parakeet whose colours approximate to the exchanged salwars, as the new wearers 'perch' in the corner in a fluttering sub-tropical pastiche.

Accretion by accretion, the gathered build in momentum, to peel in - like a laugh down Southall Broadway - a crescendo for the living and the ailing, the noisy and the toothsome, the joyful and the caring.

Mangat's final lines build the features, the culture and the beauty of these women into a declaration of identity, an acceptance, in good faith, of the gift of community and continuity.

'inventory of aunties' is taken from Lobe, published by New Poets List, the Poetry Business (2025).

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