He asks me which pind
do I belong to?
Confused, I respond by telling him
the names of my grandfather’s and grandmother’s village.
He interjects, her’s not necessary. Your belonging, your identity, your pind is traced through the
pind of your father and his father and so on, you see.
I say nothing, and just nod.
In the blink of an eye, my grandmother’s history was deemed irrelevant. Erased.
History belongs to the victors, they say.
Clearly, she had lost.
Her past, torn
like it was an unwanted page from the book of history.
Her clung together memories
got flushed down the toilet like a clump of hair stuck in the comb.
What is her pind, then?
What is her home country?
Or is she a traveling soul?
A wandering Sufi?
An escaped soldier?
An absconded convict?
A fugitive?
A refugee?
If she had no home to claim as her own,
which borders did she cross then?
To what extent did she even cross any, if at all?
What was her supposed ‘home’?
Or was there even any?
________
Prerna Bakshi is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of Burnt Rotis, With Love, a debut full-length collection of poetry from Les Éditions du Zaporogue (Denmark), long-listed for the 2015 Erbacce-Press Poetry Award in the UK and cited as one of the 9 Poetry Collections That Will Change The Way You See The World by Bustle Magazine in the US. Her work has been published widely, most recently in The Ofi Press, Red Wedge Magazine, TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism and Prachya Review: Literature & Art Without Borders. This first appeared in the Ofi press of Mexico.
