A woman reading a book in a library. Credit: Unsplash
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What’s my crime?
I ask.
Having a Tongue that is meant to be an appendage, they reply.
Oh! Only one! – I say.
No! They retort and then they hand me a list that can be called a charge-sheet:
A woman with dysfunctional pronouns and a spine
who barks and bites
when her people are hungry
and denies the supreme virtues of meekness and silence.
Many police visit me under many names:
Parents. Society. Schools. State. NIA
I’m a fugitive for some and a terrorist for many.
I don’t have guns – they say but
I read Arundhati Roy and Meena Kandasamy.
Moumita Alam is a poet from West Bengal. Her poetry collection, The Musings of the Dark was published in 2020. The book has about a hundred poems written in protest against the humanitarian crisis from the reading down of Article 370, the Delhi riots, and the Shaheen Bagh movement to the unbearable sufferings of the migrant labourers due to the unplanned COVID-19 induced lockdown. Her second poetry collection, Poems At Daybreak, has been published by Red River Publications. The Telugu translations of her poems have been published in a collection titled, Poems That Should Not Be Written.
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