Anima Writes a Letter Home

Dear mother and father and old and young people of my home. Dear pets and weeds and flowers and footfalls. I write to you in a script speckled with time. I write to the language of a poet and many who chanted after her. I quote those verses which are laments, songs, praises, and warnings. The laments are about not being of your skin, your tongue, your high heaven. The songs are about television screens, newsprint din, and the men with the megaphone going around shutting people’s windows down. The praises are to those that wear spotless clothes, hidden weapons, buck-skin shoes, and plastic faces. The warnings are about daring to speak, daring to say I’m two languages not one, I’m three faces not one, and I’m a quarter bile not full. Dear people of my city, town, lane, and invisible spaces, tell me, how do I return to you? It is the night of the patient moon. But the doorkeepers are asking for proof that I lived here, the watchful voices are mocking my 
wandering toes, and the vigilantes are simply admiring their righteous claws.
 

I, Anima, stand bewildered in the midst of midnight’s jowl. What is it, why is it that for many there’s no home? Although it is chaand raat, the night of the moon? And a child’s tearful whisper: Take me to Eid tomorrow, Ma, take me to Eid. I, Anima, ask you to wait for me to find out the answer when I carry the grasshopper home.