On an Indian girl’s take on adapting to the variety in the country
When I left for college, I remember not mother not father but,
the swings cry because there was no one left to hold,
Their words passing by a stranger’s ear,
killed by passing winds, I don’t know if they reach.
I left a language unknown to a land of words and tongue
speaking old, and young, with oh, so many spices mixed
in their ways, a dialect was no longer thrown as netting
across a pavilion of a country, the curly haired blokes from
seaward parts spoke Malayalam and
I learned not to confuse it with Tamil
the hard way.
I missed those stays that the creaking swing held
for me, I was back to knowing a language of none,
ears filling with large intonations and little sense.
The language that escapes me in the brown girl’s heart,
tries to listen in and hear others,
pulls me apart between circles of whispers.
Hindi poetry, kannada jokes, tamil metaphors, English grammar
flew past
My brain stewing in their wake, like odors that waft in
after I just ate.
The language that escapes me, wants me to hold it like
the swing held me, but it is slippery,
for my feet with cobwebs beneath, because that
is all I have learned to stare at, when others speak.
Spatika is a fourth year student at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali, pursuing an Integrated Master's in biology, who also likes to experiment in writing and poetry. Her writings have been published in Sublunary Review, Feminism in India, Live Wire, Brown Girl Magazine andThe New Verse News. You can follow her on Instagram here.