In the next line, I’ll say “I’m sorry but,”
In the line after, I’ll say, “I don’t mean this as an offence.”
I’ll begin the second stanza with, “I think it is”
And end it on, “but this can be subject to errors.”
You call my tongue sharp
But I’ve wrapped it in mights and ifs and buts and maybes,
just to be heard.
You say my eyes are too high
But I’ve drowned them in guilt of pretty privilege,
or the lack of it.
I’m full of experiences turned lessons
From an age when I shouldn’t have been worried about my…
skirt’s length.
Like how a woman on twitter taught me to shout “fire! fire! fire!”
She said, people are more likely to hear fire
than rape.
My wounds are not my wounds
Until they make someone a knight in shining armour, I guess.
“I guess,” I add so quickly.
It's my second nature, if not the primary.
As if that guessing is going to save me from any judgments
passed so unconsciously.
And how my aunt won’t understand why she doesn’t enjoy sex,
She tells me this, “I think I was born broken.”
I try to tell her how sexuality is a spectrum
But shush, that’s something she neither understands nor believes.
A few might have judged my aunt to be homophobic by now;
And she possibly could be.
But how do you make a woman understand about her sexuality
When you make her drop out of school at sixteen?
Marrying her to a man of twenty-six, like a puppet.
Puppets, may I remind you,
don’t feel or understand
anything.
How do you make any woman understand about your concepts?
So big and woke and laced with vocabulary of intellects;
When you fed her on a silver platter, the art of house and child rearing
And closed your libraries and took her childhood away by calling her “mature.”
“Too wise for her age.” “Sacrificial like Sita.”
“Not like other girls.” “She’ll make a great wife.”
I was thirteen and hearing even one of these was ecstasy.
I was thirteen and I couldn’t differentiate.
Couldn’t differentiate how you put me on a pedestal
A pedestal that serves you.
Making sure that your jabs at my being
Are taken as a gratitude and not what it is - an insult.
I’m nineteen and when I hear another of your camouflaged lies
Dripping with the blood of unpaid housewives
And basketball playing girls – I want to rip my ears and then theirs
because they are on a pedestal which you control, all unknown.
Because they are also the ones who hate me for wearing or not wearing pink
And then they call me “too much” or “too little.”
You made sure that I’m either powerful or desirable.
Not both. Not neither.
And never what I want to be.
And also, how my uncle comes home with my marriage proposal
A silver lining to bring back your lost fortune.
“He’s the best that you’ll ever get,” father says with no room for argument
And mother hushes quietly, “you’re our last hope.”
You see, this case is subject to individuals
And I won’t disagree,
But I hardly hear any collective gasp of shock.
Because there have been enough individuals to make it “normal.”
Now, I said “your fortune” and not “our”
Because I’m hardly a shareholder in any.
Don’t come at me with your laws
They are the same ones which haven’t been able to provide toilet facilities
for women in their courtrooms.
“There is no woman Chief Justice of any High Court in India.”
A minister had reposed to the above;
And it’s almost funny how since 1947
Not a single woman was “capable” enough to hold that power.
I talk locally first because somewhere in the equality race,
We forgot our grassroots.
But in making it personal, I make it universal,
because somehow, we have been enough in numbers but not enough in changes.
When I speak, I don’t have the luxury to get away with a slip,
A slip – of my wardrobes to words.
Because you hear our voices, just not all of us.
And you comprehend even lesser.
But that’s a privilege too,
isn’t it?
You take our rights and make it our privileges,
You take our handmade homes and give it to your sons.
We are either deprived first-borns
Or never born.
This poem is neither in chronology nor rhyme,
It might not even qualify according to traditional poets.
But this isn’t a work of art,
It’s my reality.
A reality which I realised at various stages of my life
And a lot is still left.
Saddening, but nothing new.
Trust me, no one wanted this to be fiction more than myself,
A tale told with once upon times and happily ever afters.
But that would make me an “emotional being”
Emotional enough to not be allowed to make my decisions.
Like a full circle, I’m saying sorry,
But not for being myself.
I’m saying sorry because I couldn’t cover everything I wanted to.
Because getting even these down on paper
Had my hands and voice shaking.
I’m sorry, I couldn’t give voices to more
And I’m sorry that just this much isn’t enough
for a social change.
And it’s sad that it won’t be for a long time.
So, I’m learning.
I’m learning to be a feminist
Without hiding to be one.
I’m learning to be myself
Without hiding who I am.
Sincerely yours,
A Feminist.