Whitewashed home

 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  future, the tongue that promises a successful life and I refuse to acknowledge the recesses of shame and  bullet ridden bodies that died speaking meri matrabasha. It is this tongue that promises me convenience  in paperwork, and rewards me surprised blank faces that ask: oh how do you speak such good English?  

We did not grow up hearing this if that's what you ask.  

We spoke Gurumukhi, Devanagari, Urdu, and a hundred other dialects before the education of the tyrants  changed entire millenniums of generations of children - the children of those who ran away from your  greased rifles and false promises. We are the boiling blood of those who hid in the shadows as fires rained  down, who got on the last trains that escaped the cleansing. We are the untold Holocaust that you  poisoned us into with whispers and enmity.  

Blank visages look at my face now, it may not be as fair as theirs but tell me if you cannot see the faces of  my grandparents and my great grandparents - 

a family divided by a border we fought to build.