This is our journey. And our love, will sail us through.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Letters need to be a little rude now

Mama and papa
The time should be here soon, in its scaly corset and flying beehive head
To tell you that everything you have been shredding me to, grading my body like a plastic product and checking me like a doll, unscrewing its hinges
Undoing its colors
Changing its clothes, knocking its head and
Pasting your labels.
And jutting it in your store of family shame that burns with crisps of rubber and spices that curl up a good family’s dinner. It all has to stop.
I choose that you stop fiddling with me now and finally let me go out of your hands.
Your insecurities maybe gangrenous and I see that it has snaked on my sister too. She has purple scratch in her words, her throat is tied somewhere when she is on phone. My grandmother is trying hard to muffle all the naked shrieks.
For you, I have to be a “her” who would like to be a “him”. For myself, I will then be a capital “h” and you are open to fill-in-the blanks.
Probably that’s your way of curing my body, because I am no longer your child.
But just a fucking! body.
That needs to grope its hormones and be hurled in the streets to see the manliness of the walking animals. To learn its essential skeleton and be sliced and pruned in the rooms where dreamless boars fart their logics of this world.
You need me to stop dreaming.
You need me to stop being myself; in short you don’t want me to live anymore. And what a liar you can be mother? You only taught this restless child to hate lies and play it clean.
My clean truths are these and might be your army rulebook would omit its print, but its words cannot be taped anymore. They too are camouflaged bombers, mama, you need to see them before they explode.
You reduced me to a penniless devil that is wrecking your life. You called me a liar, a eunuch with attention disorders and you have told the entire world to help me.
I feel I am in a custody and your criminal investigations can be recommended to the Indian police.
There is no help I need. You just need some honesty.
Tell me if you believed that I was a man at all? Tell me, if my sister found it bizarre for me to be in a sari with her. She had only seen a sister grow up who was addressed as a guy and there is nothing that was so unexpected about it. But there is nothing less I have done.
I have kept all my demons to myself and I, as I see, have to continue to do that if I want to be yours.
BUT

Here is a proud, shouting woman and she refuses now to be frisked.
You can now choose to see “her” or bury “him” in some graveyard where soldiers drink ecstasy in heaven and make love to gods. Like you and me.

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