We will come with a flaming heart

My heart doesn't break anymore, it burns
It razes everything to the ground
The heart, I read somewhere, is an organ of fire.
Maybe that is why it was raining yesterday
Is raining again today
This world weeps for its loss.
Our grief divides us,
You took away what was rightfully ours,
our bountiful land, our deep dark trees
You steal our children in their sleep
You main, you rape, you kill
You try to civilise us, but we detest your
civilization, your loud mouths, your garish wealth
Your ignorance and your indifference,
We have our own tongue
we have no use for yours,
But you came with your guns and your flag
and imposed your history on us.
One day, we will come for you.
We will come with a flaming heart.

All the men I have loved

All the men I have loved 

have always told me not to be so angry

That I should laugh more often

And because I loved them and wanted to please them

I pretended to, but the rage never went away

Today I tell them I don’t want to calm down,

I don’t want to smile

This is a legitimate rage

And I rage for all the years we had to hide

We still do

All the years we had no claim over our own bodies

We still don’t

All the years we remained someone’s mother, 

or sister or wife or daughter

Never our own person

And all the history you took away from us

Confining our names to sidenotes, afterthoughts,

Villianising us, romanticizing us

But robbing us of our agency,

Our right to be angry

Our right to rage against everything that we have suffered

And still suffer

Today I don't want to be your darling daughter

I have no use for your love

If it doesn't let me decide

 The terms of my life

Today I don't want to be the love of your life

If you only loved me for my smile.

If this would ever end, then when

You are beginning to come to terms
With your tight fist of a heart
And that you will always be a little angry
at your own helplessness, at all the sand that
slips through your hands
At your ancestors for having been so foolish
To have got you into this mess,
There is no walking away without
blood in your hands
Something wasn't right from the start,
and you knew it
But when you screamed nobody listened
Because who listens to a woman
in this land unless you are old with a husband in tow
Nobody remembers the past,
except for distortions,
It is now Us and Them
Sometimes hate finds your way into your heart
And then the self-loathing afterwards
Sometimes you watch from your window
for the familiar sight of burning tyres
Boys in their teens running in glee
And the chemically induced tears afterwards
Last night in your dream
you were wandering in a mist
Wondering if this would ever end, then when?

Far better to be savages than to be humans like you

Another milestone

The end of these two years

With people you didn't become friends with

But became familiar nonetheless

When you arrived, you were so self-absorbed

with your aching heart and your little girl dreams

The world has spun a few hundred times since then

Spring has come and gone

You have spiralled into a brave new world

You have dared to raise your voice

which you should have raised all those wasted years of the past

Mostly people you didn't punch in the face

Mostly the times you ignored indignities

or forgave them because they were friends,

excused them their racism, their impunity,

their coal black hearts and their empty minds.

You will never do that again.

They always tell you not to carry hate in your heart

But that is only for the privileged ones

Never having endured social-historical insults all their lives

How would they know what we go through?

To know that our memories had been wiped quite clean

systematically through education

This country doesn't care for the millions of adivasis

whose land is forcibly taken away and sold to corporates,

They only care for eleven men winning a match.

Because it is no longer alright to look away

To be complicit in this vicious terrible silence

This brahmin raj calls us savages, barbarians, uncivilised

But far better to be savages than to be humans like you.

The generation that loses its humanity

You have so much unlearning to do

Starting from history to norms of beauty

Which you have internalised

It is a beautiful day today

but the world hangs heavy

What you own is truly not yours

The language you speak and think in

This religion is not yours, please

put it away

What good is a country to you

that doesn't recognise you as its own?

What good is all the history of the world

when you are ignorant of your own?

How can you fight against one form of

oppression and not against others?

your whole generation, young men

and women, unable to think beyond what

is told to them, beyond the glamour of their

own lives and their future,

unable to empathise for the lot of humanity

Maybe we are the lost generation,

the generation which loses its humanity.

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.