Let me cut out your mother's tongue

and lay it down beside you

like my mother did with mine,

putting me in an English school, as is the custom of those who spent their youths running after trains and kulfi-walas in the scorching sun and their nows chasing the sweat that never seems to bid goodbye.

Maybe you will know then what it feels like

to stand in the kitchen that smells of fenugreek and cumin but not being able to point that out to your father

who wants little more than to just hear a kind word from the daughter who he thought would make him proud;

But you blame him too

for not giving you the words to tell him you are not his daughter, you can never be his daughter

and you left kindness behind somewhere in the yellowed pages and smudged ink of the book you call your own.

I have wanted to be let out into the afternoon traffic

but everyone wants to communicate with their god in a language they neither speak nor understand and I am not able to trespass those boundaries

to read Agnibina without cutting my jaw open on the pebbles on the road.

I have to wait patiently, my feet tapping against the raw cement on my grandfather's roof, to be

let in through words that neither the poet

nor my grandfather

would ever have approved of,

Because the feelings baked between those benjonbornos are not mine yet,

and I am afraid they will cease to exist before they ever let me call them mine.

You might have noticed that I write my mother's tongue in

italics

and my coloniser's in

bold

because my brain is made of hardened clay, the soft plasticine long kneaded into something more brittle

than I would like to admit and I can't hold onto the harsh edges of nishthur or the rounded simplicity of omanobik.

But please believe me when I say that I really wish I could and not just so I can stop formulating my name in foreign syllables but so I can put out the fire that has been burning between myself and I for so long that all that remains of the char is a soft roughness and the

sickeningly sweet aftertaste of my

Mother's tongue.  

Zaima is barely a student these days. Send them your condolences at [email protected]