We Were Always Temporary
The earthquakes in our house
don’t show up on the Richter scale.
They can only be measured
by the tremble in my voice
or the pounding of my heart.
They don’t shake the whole world.
Just the 970 square feet between
our front door and the back terrace
My mother is the tragedy.
The crumbled kitchens
and battered bedrooms
left to languish
on the ground.
My father is the resilience.
The speech made
on a podium of rubble
to an audience of one
and a half.
An entire family perished
amid these tremors,
you will not find their names
in any archive or newspapers.
But sometimes,
if you’re lucky,
you can glimpse
their corpses gathering
in the living room
to entertain the guests.
***
The People of India v. His Majesty’s Government
Sir,
I saw them.
They laid my country upon
the stretcher of their maps
and took a scalpel to her flesh.
They made no pretence of anaesthesia
as they drew the lines.
One across her left shoulder
where the arm meets
the chest.
The other carving out
a part of her flank
on the right.
They brought in the butchers
and they set to work.
Sir,
they amputated her
in the middle of the night.
Blind to her screams
and deaf to her pain,
they began separating
her flesh from her bones
and her blood from her veins.
Her blood, like her rivers,
didn’t know where to flow.
All that was left was
bone seeking bone.
Separated as though
they were not one and the same.
Sir,
they were never the same again.
Not the arm,
not the flank,
and not my country.
They left her heaving
on that stretcher
day upon day,
week upon week,
till the very blood in her dried
and parts of her no longer remembered
how to be together.
She was never told why she
needed those parts amputated.
What rot festered in them,
that they had to go?
Sir,
her body has long since fallen still.
The surviving few nerves, too,
shall die soon.
There will be no memory left
of what it was like
to be beating, breathing, alive.
Whole.
They left her with nothing.
No medicines, no prescriptions.
No cards and certainly no flowers.
Nobody came to see her when they pulled her apart.
To those who come today,
I’d like to ask:
What reparations can you make for a broken heart?
***
