My father, reeking of sweat and liquor
Beat up my mother and my sisters
Reserving just a shove for me
As I was his son, a boy, the eldest born
He threw my mother on the stringed cot
Home was that space where violence reigned
Was the house owner keeping a watch
Over all of us?
We knew
The difficulty of earning enough
So that fear of hunger of the morrow
Left us, at least in our dreams
My sisters were married off,
Carefully matching the gothras
And little else, but they had learned well
By my mother›s side
One of my brothers-in-law is called
‹Na Mard› derisively by his people
For he never raised his hand on his wife
Even after the third daughter was born
I was taken from that hut of pain
By my uncle, to a place miles away
We live under tarpaulin sheets
Draped over those incomplete
Concrete rooms we ourselves built
Some of us cook our traditional food
When we pull on hookahs,
Sharing couple of bottles of bootleg
Liquor and singing songs about a home
Which never was, but something we call
For lack of a better word, home
Our grandmother never sang
She chewed tobacco and talked to God
Hacked out phlegm or cursed my mother
We send a little money intermittently
In Amma›s name, which the postman
Handed over to father, filching
A few rupees as baksheesh
Thank Providence I am a what they call a migrant
Cast out of a cruel society
Into a harsh one, which I can navigate
With my labour skills and
An adroit ability to throttle memory
Together with its plaintive twin, nostalgia.