Languages

At night,

I let Tagore sing to me,

crawl into the space 

between the notes

and curl myself along the arc of the moon that the songs paint

Most evenings,

I take long walks with songs by Hariharan.

Our fingers interlace,

as we watch the Sun set to the tunes of

Tu hi re.

All-day long music echoes within,

speaks to me 

in languages, I may

or may not understand.

Bangla, Malayalam, Hindi

flow into each other

like rivers

coming together at the Triveni Sangam.

Yet, 

when asked about my favorite songs,

I very carefully choose the English ones

like a farmer picking tomatoes

from a harvest, he is the proudest of.

Me and my sister,

we sing to each other,

pass lines like a relay baton

each holding the responsibility

to complete the song for the other.

Yesterday,

her friends asked 

if she had heard the new song by Rihanna

but nobody cared about the Jagjit Singh's ghazal

we had spent the night memorizing.

In my country,

we nurture racism in out throats,

hide it next to ipods in our pockets.

Here, English is the opposite of melanin.

Our choice of songs make our faces glow

Our vocabulary determines how white we are.

Once,

I said the word किंकर्तव्यविमूढ़ out loud

and they gawked at me 

like I was the darkest sky 

they had ever seen.

My country is a platter served to us.

22 languages,

each rolling peculiarly on our tongues,

leaving an aftertaste that stays for hours.

But some days I'm afraid 

that they'll end up as leftovers

stuck between our teeth.
That these languages 

will evaporate

and become just words

buried somewhere in dictionaries.

How long can we preserve the meanings after the words are forgotten?

It wasn't always like this.

Once,

We were little green leaves in a dense forest.

Came a storm and swept us away,

scattered us far.

And now we can't figure out

which trees we belong to?