One country is too small for you

You go from hope to disillusionment
You go from pride to disgust
There is something terribly wrong with the world
Just yesterday the world had been set for you
How were you to know
They would come for you?
We are accidents of history,
especially you, with your slight eyes
Your freedom-loving bones
It's been almost seven decades
And they still haven't got the hold of you
they don't know why you dance and sing
they don't know the words of your lips
they don't know why you die
year after year, asking to be free
Sometimes even love fails to stem
the tide of this feeling, so late in life
which has been been aroused in you
By now you know they will never see you an an equal,
Yet they ask you to fight for this nation
Whose nation? you want to ask,
You will always forever be the other
Marginalised, neglected but chained.
This heaping of indignity, it makes you feel small
It makes you so ready to apologise for
what you haven't done.
For you are a wanderer on this earth
And one country is too small for you.

There was a freak rain in the morning
the day I left home as though Manipur
was mourning my departure, I romanticise
the Wakching rain, I miss the way my world
erupts in laughter in the morning
The steps of Mama going faint
As she goes downstairs, Papa's songs
filtering into my room
I am growing old and impossibly younger
My bones are heavy with history
There is always so much writing to do
which never gets written.