By Aishwarya Roy
The colonizers write about flowers.
Sitting in their wooden bungalows, with a papercut on finger covered by gauze.
I write to you about the boys who threw themselves at the open fire in the 1952 Language Movement,
Seconds before becoming shiulis.
About the red-oxide floors and sleepy green-shuttered windows that were taken away.
The houses of Bengal that became English 'Bungalows' instead.
And how the word gauze came from your Arabic Ghazza.
Because you are skilled at dressing so many wounds
While leaving yours open.
Tu’burni (تقبرني) / “bury me”
- It means you hope that I put you in the ground before me because you couldn’t bear living without me.
.
I have 11 vowels. You have none.
You are an ‘abjad’ (‘أبجدية’ / aːbʤadiah/) a ‘consonantal alphabet’.
I walk left to right, you erase my path.
We make friends with birds from another flock.
But over the years, our long polysyllables have been shortened - jagged edges clipped and rounded off.
The soft folds of my shawl, and the sharp edges of the pocket-knife you need to carry, have reshaped themselves to become the soft s's and sharp f's of our poem.
/if I must die, you must live, to tell my story/
“জানি দেখা হবে”
- When your forbidden flag meets my ruby watermelons, the green weeds growing in the cracks of my burnt black village, and the white I shroud my children in — “we will meet”.
.
Today, we talk in the colonizer's language, because love hurts more in our mother tongue.
There is broken glass on the street.
Lego blocks are no longer the only things that hurt our feet.
You call me Rohi (روحي). “My soul mate” - someone you will love a lot longer than your life.
- "Rohi, I got my first scar when I was three"
Chiroshokha, my everlasting friend, we look like minefields now.
/the land remembers; maybe to make sure the people never forget/
.
One day, we will write about flowers like we own them.
But today, we will courageously sit with the wilted poppies and polash, hoping they live to see another day.
“যুদ্ধ শেষ, যদি তুমি চাও”
-The war is over, darling... If you want it.
/A Letter From Bengal Lost in Translation, That Never Made Its Way to Palestine/