English Medicine Poem by AISWARYA THARA BHAI ANISH

You must cut off my Dravidian tongue
When I speak with guttural tones and a plausible yell
You must sew a new tongue where the old stub
Swells with an urge to stutter and swear
It must be English Medicine that you put
on the amputation
The herbs and moonlight will no longer cure me
It has to be English needles that you join my new
Tongue to the old one
Or better still, place both together at forty five degrees
So when I speak, I will put out a two-headed serpent
Pink with vessels and new with life
I will mix poison with milk and make honey
That I may soon forget what it meant in my town
Dress like simple man from the south
In a starched white shirt and a white mundu
But my language is the Crown, India-made
Baked in dusty classrooms with leaf-roofs,
Sung with missed rhythm in nursery rhymes
Perfected in the call center where I speak
To unseen voices about broken ovens
Televisions with wifi I have only seen in the shops
At Anna Nagar
Spoken with two extra syllables and a thick
Dark accent they call Indian.


You must write all the books in this foreign tongue
Place it before me, teach me to hate the anarchy and the mayhem
To dissent and disagree, earn a European degree
Form new bills and make a policy, tie it with a red thread
And bring it back home, try to explain and know they won't care
In English everything is right, bare
Is the language my mother put in me
When she fed me milk, she called me the sweet bird,
The rabbit cub, showed me the moon, male.
But when I don this new face at the new job
I have to be the way my foster-mother taught me
To imitate, to force out sounds that I do not have
And to find a comfort I know I never will.