
I cannot bring politics
at the dinner table
because that's what
I learnt from my parents,
I cannot tell them how
our bodies are made
into puppets at the hands
of those powerful men
in the parliament,
how Trump in his interview
says blood comes
out of her 'wherever'
and how my friend
when she was thirteen
did not bleed for ten weeks
ever since her art teacher
slid his bony finger
down her spine and
tonight, while I am here,
quietly eating my supper,
someone is being raped
in some part of the world.
I cannot tell them how
on Sunday, people watch
a Bollywood movie
on acid attack survivors,
and say films like this
must be made more often,
but how they still stare
at the marks on the face
of the woman in the metro
till it makes her so uneasy
that she changes her seat,
how people will be angry
for thirty five minutes
when there is a
mutilated, charred body
left to rot on the streets
or when in the capital city,
the intestines come out
after an iron rod is inserted
into a woman's body,
and how the very next day
they will casually crack
another rape joke
and ask me to relax.
So for dinner table talks,
we discuss no politics,
we discuss no war,
instead, we pretend
it is just a normal day
and talk about the weather.
When Maa asks me
why there is so much of
anger in my eyes,
why I cannot be like
normal people for once,
I want her to know
it is because the moment
I came out of her vagina,
the responsibility of
fighting for a safe space
to just sit and breathe
was dumped on these
shoulders of mine
and I have been carrying it
all my life, wherever I go.
This is not a normal day,
it has never been so.




Talking cats are normal to Murakami,
Marquez would make mothers outlive generations to see the family end,
All because Kafka defined a cockroach as a man,
Or the other way round.
Tolstoy wrote a book about a woman so beautifully pathetic,
that I wanted her to die,
And I cried when she did.
While Hemingway wrote a whole history between sentences,
As I sat and wondered about the IQ of Shakespeare's fools.
In my brain I sit with Woolf in my room discussing my obsession with Plath's fig tree,
All the while wondering if
some kids really talk like Green's,
Or would Darcy's daughter curse her mother for falling into the patriarchal trap,
Just because she was wearing a gown too flared.
Nietzsche was a misogynist some say,
Others justify why so.
Neruda wrote love poems,
Only to abuse the one's he didn't.
Bukowski downs that with a beer as human nature,
And I wonder if Jung was right about dreams,
Or Freud about abuses?
Maybe Homo Sapiens are not the wise humans,
But then I remember one
Who is!
So Jeeves, "What is normal?"