Aryaman Kakkar's Archive

  The fear of being unable to mourn in person led me to retell stories of death. To hear myself say the  words I heard so long ago again and again, when love died not in my arms, not in my tears, but in a home  lifetimes away from mine. The scythe, having fallen enough, left behind a mind calloused, the eyes bone  dry, and a heart that does not know what to do with itself when faced with the funeral pyre of love. To  hear of death and not see their final breaths stinks of a betrayal so deep,   my ashes will smolder with the salt of my absence. 

  Look at the words that flow from my mouth. This is not my mother tongue. This is not the life that was  torn from my jaws by blank hands, blank carcasses who came in the name of civilising the savages. This  is not my mother tongue. Ye hai meri matrabhasha . The irony of saying that statement is lost on you.  You cannot comprehend what left my mouth and what drips now in its place. It is a broken faucet left  filling buckets with sand rather than the water that was pumped dry aeons ago. My brother no longer  studies the Independence of our flag because these textbooks of his - arriving on ships and cargo airplanes  - are attempting to sell our own family histories back to us in a print so whitewashed that the victors have  written black, bold, and beautiful while the truth was painted with thin white lines.   Imagine that.  This is not my mother tongue. This is the tongue that promises me freedom, that promises me a brighter ...