ANGUISH CALL

In Aam Pata Jora Jora (Anguish Call), I engage with a childhood song and game—one that girls across Bangladesh continue to chant in rhythmic unison, often unaware of the ideological weight it carries. This performance is not a return to innocence; rather, it is a confrontation with the invisible curriculum that teaches young girls obedience through fear. Rooted in colonial-era domestic discipline, the chant becomes a vehicle of inherited trauma: “Harvest mango—mango, pair—pair / I will whip, the horse will go.” The man on the horse is not a metaphor; he is a threat. The whip is real. The message is clear—don’t anger him, stay within your line.
Performed inside a flower circle punctuated by needles, I recreate this game not as play, but as ritual exorcism. I invoke discomfort, building the chant’s pitch from whisper to shriek, forcing the audience to experience the suffocation that women internalize as survival. In this piece, the flower circle becomes the Threshold—the “Lakshaman Rekha,” the invisible boundary that societies, families, and faiths draw around women across South Asia. Step beyond it, and any harm you encounter becomes your fault.
This performance is my mourning and protest. I carry the memory of Dr. Moumita Debnath, brutally raped and murdered while on duty, a woman whose professional role and physical location should have guaranteed her safety. But even hospitals don’t exist outside the circle. I imagine she too once played Aam Pata Jora Jora, laughing with friends, unaware of the fear embedded in the rhyme. The song was her rehearsal for victimhood.
Inspired by Regina José Galindo’s ¿Quién Puede Borrar Las Huellas?, where she walks barefoot, leaving a trail of blood in protest of patriarchal power and violence, I too use the body—my body—as protest and testimony. Like Galindo, I believe performance collapses the space between individual pain and collective history. My chant is both ancestral and present, soft and violent, personal and global. It embodies a question: Will we ever break the circle?
I do not yet have an answer. But in amplifying the discomfort, in invoking forgotten or silenced memories, I hope to plant the possibility of rupture—for myself, for my sisters, for the generations to come.

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