Mother Tongue Blues
A human, a woman, a netizen of India,
A native axomiya -a goriya or ‘miya’,
a deshi, jolha or a baganiya
I am all in flesh and blood one
yet i deeply crib when one asks—
what is my mother tongue?
I blast out at
the computer operator
at the NRC hearing centre
who is rude to my
septuagenarian father and uncle
and repeats—
what is our mother tongue?
He has never heard of the term ‘Axomiya Mosolman’.
I was enraged, but he was just doing his job,
yet why i crib when one asks—
What is my mother tongue?
The lockdown did no better
Those who couldn’t spit on the streets
Spat venom on their screens
Some sane, some insane and some obscene
Yet all in flesh and blood one
And still I crib when one asks—
What is my mother tongue?
Endnote
No words nor dreams
no sorrow or screams
can reach my mind
now a tabula rasa.
There are no more echoes
of the soprano
of those bygone sagas of love
as I harp on to
the encircling vistas
of surmounting hatred
I move apart to
untrammelled pastures of darkness.
Walking with the sophistry
of the mind
over lanes and streets
in unseen starry nights,
a masked woman am l,
I hide my brazenness
to walk on with a clogged up brain.
I know not where to stop
and etch my destiny
in the lost footprints of time
Dr. Sabreen Ahmed has received her PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi in Feb 2013. Her area of interest is Gender studies, South Asian English Writing and Contemporary Theory. She has published an anthology of poems entitled Soliloquies (2016) and has also edited a UGC Sponsored National Seminar Proceeding captioned Indian Fiction in English and the Northeast (2016). Currently she teaches in the Dept of English, Nowgong College, Nagaon, Assam, India. She writes poems, short stories, articles, book reviews etc for several webzines in India like Café Dissensus, The Thumbprint, The Citizen, Feminism in India, The Assam Tribune and so on.