Mother Tongue (Poetry)

• As if it is the same thing
• As milk from her breasts.
• As if it is something which flows secretly
• Between us like a memory
• Growing deeper as it vanishes.
• Other people of my terrified childhood
• Have come and left with momentary hands
• And receding eyes in my mother tongue.
• Elders with cavities in the heart
• Poured their love like saliva.
• It is difficult to wash away their sticky memory
• From my mother tongue.
• Father was a shadow from door to door
• In my mother tongue.
• His voice of stern hands and hurried blood
• Was different from mother’s voice of rice and barley
• During many illnesses.
• The language of friends in my mother tongue
• Is a story where I learnt about my past.
• The story of stolen guavas of toppled kingdoms
• Forest fires, puberty and heroic love.
• I grew up mostly away from my mother tongue.
• I stepped out of the house to know streets and loves
• Outside the lullabies of my mother tongue.
• I fell in love with melodies and eyes from other languages.
• The smell of strangers swayed in the air
• Between suspicion and love.
• My mother allowed me to bring home
• Other languages with their bottomless snares.
• I grew many vices from them behind my mother’s back
• But she could always squeeze out the story
• From my shadow.
• I do not know the story of my mother tongue
• Before I was born. Maybe she fell in love with strangers
• From other languages like I did. Maybe that is how
• She brought in new words to her tongue
• And lost some of her own.
• Maybe she wanted to run away from home
• The morning she had gone to pick flowers
• For treacherous gods.
• Maybe that morning she wanted to change
• Into a language of flowers that get stolen from gardens
• But never reach the altar.
• The story of my mother tongue
• Goes as far back as Kunti[1].
• She alone held the secret of the four men
• Who gave birth to her sons.
• Her silence gave birth to a mythology.
• Her secret is however part of my mother tongue.
• You speak of the mother tongue as if some tongue
• Has been fixed into someone’s mouth like a tattoo.
• What always stuck on my mother’s tongue
• Would be stains of slaked lime and catechu.
• You who speak of the mother tongue
• Like law-makers of the fictional history of lives
• And the yellow grammar book do not ask me
• What my mother tongue is but rather ask
• How is my mother tongue
• And I would tell you how my mother tongue
• Is a jar of pickles preserved under a rotten shade.
• I would tell you how my mother tongue
• Like the dark side of the moon hides from my daily life
• Like medicines in the cupboard.
• I would tell you how her speech and her eyes
• Have lost each other’s company.
• I would tell you how she tends to flower trees
• In the absence of her children
• And still has tears for old songs of love.
• I will tell you how her unsteady feet
• Still manage to hold her heart.
• I would tell you how her tongue bore lives
• Of different names as she became daughter wife
• And mother with no time to decide how
• She would like to be as a woman.
• My mother tongue was never allowed
• To become a woman.
• To name our tongue in the name of
• Her motherhood
• Is a conspiracy to turn her speech into milk
• And suckle her dry.

 

Footnotes

About the Author