By Shubha Mittal
As a little girl, I was told to dream
of a family of my own, a world of my own—
filled with memories, places, people, and faces.
My world was different than others,
and everyone had their own,
which they painted with their own colors
of imagination.
Every time I met someone,
I saw a world so expansive, vast, wide—
colored in their own light of
happiness and sorrows.
Their memories filled the space of a galaxy,
colliding in the moments of celebration.
But then the wars came in.
Some were big, and some were not.
Some of those didn’t even get reported.
We measured the importance of a war
with the number of deaths recorded.
One of those killed
some thousand people out of millions.
They said it was still permissible
if that stopped a bigger danger afoot.
But I did not see the faces—
I saw the many worlds collapsing.
Their own,
and their places in the others.
The wars burned down
a thousand and a million galaxies that day,
and there is no way to build them up again.
So, we stand there,
still holding on and waiting
for the wars to reach this
tiny little world of our own.