In which language do I remember you?

In which language do I remember you?
English?
That feels like a betrayal
The language, after all, was your enemy
For most of your mortal life
Never leaving your side
In a city where everyone
Spoke too soon and spoke too fast
Never missing out on a chance
To tell you: you are not enough

How do I remember you in the language
Which kept my poetry apart from you
All our lives
A reminder of the frown on your face
As you struggled to understand
The word with too many syllables
In the poem I wrote about father

Mother, it feels like a betrayal
To remember you in the language
Which ensured you would sit silently
In the parent teacher meetings at school
Clutching the pleats of your saree
And hoping that the conversation
Would reach its conclusion
Even before it began

Mother, in which language do I remember you then?
The language of our ancestors
Comes back to me only in fragments
Like broken pieces of memory
I struggle with the gender of objects
Are the bangles you wore a feminine object?
And is the leather bag a masculine one?
Do they care?
Is your absence a “she”?
Is your memory a “he”?

And what about grief?
Grief, to me, at times has felt like a
Man struggling to differentiate
Between anger and hurt
At others,
It has felt like a woman
Who has forgotten how to speak
About all that ails her heart

Mother, I remember you in English,
And I hope that in the afterlife
(If there is one)
You will understand my poem
And know that there’s
Only one word for longing in the language
But a thousand ways to long for you.

My mother did not consider herself beautiful

My mother did not consider herself beautiful
I think mothers often don’t.
They get too caught up in other adjectives, like:
Stoic. Sensitive. Warm. Caring. Resilient.
Some, which they are
Some, which the world tells them to be
I don’t know which ones my mother was,

And which ones she eventually became
But I often imagine her,
As a student going to college,
Putting on a kurti, and thinking
“This looks pretty on me”
I wonder if she ever tried putting flowers in her hair
And giggled, looking at herself in the mirror
Because she loved flowers, I know that
I wonder which adjectives she used to describe herself
Before words like stoic, sensitive, warm, caring, and resilient
Entered her dictionary
And I wonder if beautiful was one of them
Or was it intelligent? A dreamer? A goofball? An introvert?
I wonder which language she dreamt in,
And which words she thought about
Before the world took up too much space.

Flights and Funerals

The first time I took a flight
Was to attend my Dadu’s funeral
And amidst the tears that flowed down,
I never found the time to be scared about the take-off
Or excited about the multiple hues of sky
that lay outside my window
I never even got to cherish the moment,
For it was also the first time my father held my hand
And said “things are going to be okay”
I didn’t know what he meant –
Was it about the flight, about our loss, or about us?
And till today, I haven’t understood
How to put on an oxygen mask in times of emergency landings.

Death of Lilies

When I was a child,
There was a small lily pond
Near my dadi’s place.
For most of the year,
It was a cemetery:
Home to dead weeds,
And charred remains of flowers.
But on some days,
Life sprouted in there
Sometimes, a single flower grew
Sometimes, it was a triplet.
And so, when my teacher asked me
“How many seasons are there?”
I said two: one, in which lilies are dead
And one in which they fight to be alive.
Shaking her head, she told me
To go home and revise my textbook
And since then, I liked
Going to the pond a little less.

Love is an Ali Sethi ghazal

You ask me “why don’t you ever write about love?”
And I say: there’s only so much you can write about a four letter word
What can I say that has never been said before?
How can I write about love’s anguish better than Jaun Elia?
And what can I say about longing that Agha Shahid Ali hasn’t already said?
And oh dear, how can I even come close to penning down its tragedies,
Shakespeare has been there, done that.

You protest. “There must be something left for you to say.
There are as many ways to describe love as there are stars in the sky.”
I look at you, and see that you mean it.
So today, I describe love for you
As an Ali Sethi ghazal
It starts slow, and saves its best bits for the middle
On mornings when nothing else makes sense,
It gives you hope in the form of a line like:
“Raah chalte koi khwaab mila that,
Betaab, bekaraar mila tha.”
And on some evenings, it is like a child, begging you to stay
“Tu mujhse khafaa hai toh zamaane ke liye aa.”

On other lonesome nights, when all you have is the moon as a lover
It reminds you: “chaandni raat badi der ke baad aayi hai,
Lab pe ek baat badi der ke baad aayi hai.”

What I mean when I say love is like an Ali Sethi ghazal is that
It starts slow, and saves its best bits for the middle
It is both poetry and melody into one
And it makes sense, on moody mornings, eloquent evenings and nostalgic nights.
You can play it on repeat, and yet find something new to cherish every time
Little details: the changing pitch of a voice,
the surprise entry of a flute,
the steady presence of a harmonium.

And so, if someday, when we haven’t spoken to each other in ages
And I send you the Spotify link to Ranjish Hi Sahi
What I really mean to say is:
Ranjish hi sahi dil hi dukhaane ke liye aa
Aa phir se mujhe chodh ke jaane ke liye aa.

Shruti Sonal is a Delhi-based writer, poet, and journalist. Her poetry has been published in various anthologies, including Penguin India’s Ninety-Seven Poems, HarperCollins India’s The World That Belongs To Us, and the Alipore Post’s Memories On A Plate.

Excerpted with permission from In Which Language Do I Remember You?, Shruti Sonal, Writers Workshop India.