Special Edition: Tainted money, tainted love

By Anita Nahal

Her translucent shadow strikes the grim building as she comes shrieking in and leaves the same. As if from birth adored cries had become needy clarion calls. Blue-black, sooty bruises were splash-painted on unclean doors, windows, and walls. And the pain just settled and settled and settled like an adamant fog that refuses to disperse. What is it that some souls seek to revel in? Rebel in? Castigate in? Bake in? Churning the over-thick cake mix that looked like cement and mortar, she eyed me disapprovingly. The spoon got stuck, standing straight and chiding. My efforts were outdated bank notes, just like my aging skin that can’t appear youthful in every picture. Everything around me spread not like smooth butter but like a heavy shroud of disapproval and demise. No bank, not even in recession, can allow tainted money to be invested. It’s like a cake mix that was never baked, left on the counter, and molded in a few days with flies swarming around.

 

Bio: Dr. Anita Nahal is a professor, poet, children's books writer, recent novelist and a very recent poetry-film maker. Finalist, Tagore Literary Prize, 2023, for her ekphrastic prose poetry book, Kisses at the espresso bar and she’s been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize (22, 23), Anita won the 2024 Nissim Prize for Excellence in Literature for her poetry-prose novel, drenched thoughts. Her third prose poetry collection, What’s wrong with us Kali women?, is mandatory reading at Utrecht University. Her first under 3 minute very short film, “Clubs my sinful dance muse,” won the best super short film at the Five Continents International Film Festival, Venezuela (August 2024). Her latest book is, Animals-Prose poems on sentiency, decency and indecency (2025).A Fulbright and NEH scholar, she teaches at a university in Washington DC. www.anitanahal.com

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Setu, September 2025