Today the flag will rise
over schools and government buildings.
Children will stand in straight lines.
Someone will give a speech
about a nation finally free.

I will listen.

Because I remember another India.

An India that smelled of wet earth
when the monsoon arrived,
of frying chillies from the neighbor’s  kitchen,
of jasmine tangled in my hair,
of railway platforms
where nobody asked what you believed
before making room for you on the bench.

I remember an India
that was never one thing.

Too many gods.
Too many languages.
Too many ways of praying,
eating, arguing,
and getting through an afternoon.

We were messy.

We were magnificent.

We did not always agree
on what India was.

Perhaps that was the point.

So there is a particular sadness
in watching Hindutva
make belonging feel conditional.

In watching an old question
of who belongs
become something harder.

In watching neighbors
who have shared streets, schools,
markets and cricket matches
for generations
being asked to look at one another
a little differently.

I find myself grieving
not for some perfect India
that never existed, 

but for the India
I remember making room.

My India was never pure.

Thank God.

She was stitched together
from contradiction and colour,
from Sanskrit shlokas
and Bollywood songs,
from temple bells and azaan,
from Durga Puja and Christmas lights,
from arguments at the dinner table
that somehow ended with
have you eaten?

That is the India
I carry inside me.

Not because she was perfect.

She wasn’t.

There was poverty.
There was caste.
There was cruelty.
There were a thousand ways
people were told they were not enough.

I know this.

But I never thought
the answer was to make India
belong more to one kind of Indian.

And perhaps that is what hurts most.

I look at the country I left
and sometimes wonder
when did belonging
become something we had to prove?

Today, I will still say
Jai Hind.

But I will say it quietly.

Because loving a country
does not mean pretending
you cannot see what is happening to it.

I still love the smell of Bombay rain.

I still hear the trains.

Some part of me
is still that girl
standing in the middle of all that noise,
believing India was big enough
to hold all of us.

I don’t know if she was naive.

Maybe she was.

But on Independence Day,
I find I would rather be
that kind of naive
than learn to celebrate
a smaller India.

The flag will rise today.

I will imagine

And somewhere beneath the pride
there will be grief.

Because I remember
an India I never thought
I would have to miss
while it was still there.

I remember crawling.
The taste of green on my tongue,
the crisp veins of leaf
split open with my hunger.

I did not think of wings then.
Only more.
More leaf. More sun.
More time in the soft-bellied world.

My body itched often.
Not the outside world, but me
growing too fast
for the skin I wore.

I shed it in silence.
Left it behind like old stories
I’d outgrown.

Then one day,
the hunger stopped.
I climbed without knowing why,
spun a thread
from my mouth like memory,
and hung myself upside down
trusting something
I couldn’t name.

The change was not sudden.
It was slow.
I softened from the inside out,
dissolving my own shape,
my own history.

Something in me resisted,
even as I disappeared.

I dreamed of crawling
even as my body
rewrote itself in the dark.
Wings whispered
where legs used to twitch.

Then light.
A pressure at my back,
a crack in the green quiet.

I pushed.

When I came out,
I was wet.
Strange.
Unsteady.
Everything I had known
was behind me,
clinging to a split shell.

The air felt different.

And my wings
my wings

I didn’t flap them.
I let them open.
Slowly.
Like eyes learning the sky.

I remember crawling.

I don’t remember
when I stopped being afraid
of the sky.

I write
not because I have all the answers,
but because I spent too many years
forgetting I had a voice.

I write
to find the woman beneath the echoes,
beneath the expectations,
beneath the names others placed upon me
until I almost mistook them for my own.

I write
to gather the scattered pieces of myself
that life left behind in quiet corners.

A memory here.
A question there.
A dream I once folded away
because it took up too much space.

I write
not to become someone else,
but to return.

To the child who wondered.
To the woman who endured.
To the soul that waited patiently
for permission it never needed.

I write
because silence can become a room
where we slowly disappear.

And every word is a candle
lit against that forgetting.

I write
to say:

I was here.
I felt this.
I saw this.
I loved this.
This was my truth
in my own language.

I write
not to borrow another’s voice,
not to stand in the shadow of louder ones,
but to hear my own heartbeat
without apology.

Maybe writing is not leaving a mark upon the world.

Maybe it is discovering
the mark the world already left upon us.

And after all the searching,
all the becoming,
all the shedding,

I write
because every honest word
is a small homecoming,

a return to the self
that was never truly lost.

A sanctuary
forgets itself
the moment
it loves certainty
more than compassion.

It names the wound
before asking
where it began.

It reaches for answers
while the heart 
is still searching 
for words.

Grief becomes
something to explain.

Doubt,
something to overcome.

Questions,
something to silence
instead of 
something to accompany.

Yet healing
has never entered
through certainty.

It arrives
when one soul 
chooses
to remain
beside another

long enough
for silence 
to become shelter.

Only then
does shame begin
to loosen its grip.

Only then
does the heart remember
it was never asking
to be corrected.

Only
to be witnessed.

Perhaps
the deepest betrayal
is not the absence 
of healing

but convincing 
the wounded
that they are
the wound.

For some enter
through the doors
of the sanctuary
carrying grief, 
fear,
and questions,

hoping to find
a place
where their broken pieces
can finally rest.

And instead
they are taught
to fear the very parts
of themselves
that are asking 
to be healed.

They leave
not knowing
they were seeking
medicine,

only believing
they have been given
another diagnosis.

Perhaps
what a sanctuary 
forgets
is what it once knew:

that no one
crosses its threshold
carrying 
only themselves.

Every prayer
arrives
holding another name.

Every bowed head
conceals
a story
still learning
how to be spoken.

Every candle
offers its light
without asking
who deserves it.

Perhaps
that is why
a sanctuary
is most itself

not when it speaks
with the confidence
of a courtroom,

but when it keeps vigil
like a hospital.

Not because 
some souls
are sicker 
than others,

but because
every soul
comes carrying
what cannot be healed 
alone.

And compassion
has always found
the places
where judgement
could only name 
the wound.

Before the flag, there was breath.
Before the border, there was earth.
Before they measured blood by color,
every child arrived the same at birth.

So tell me,
who whispered fear into the ear of the free?
Who planted a wall where there used to be a tree?
Who taught a nation that a neighbor could steal
what was never theirs to own, only feel?

Red hats.
Red maps.
Red words on repeat.
Marching old ghosts down a brand new street.

"Take it back."
Back to where?
To a dream that was never equally shared?
Some remember glory.
Some remember chains.
History doesn't vanish because somebody campaigns.

Power knows a secret.

Keep the people looking sideways.
They'll never look above.
Keep them counting differences,
they'll forget they're made of love.
Keep them angry at the stranger,
they won't notice who got paid.
Fear is still the oldest currency
that's ever been made.

I hear speeches.
I hear cheers.
I hear the markets 
trading hope for fear.
Every slogan grows a shadow when it's fed,
until compassion is the first thing left for dead.

But listen,

Racism isn't strength.
It's memory gone blind.
A prison that first locks
the keeper's mind.
Because the hand that paints and says,
"You're less than me,"
has forgotten what it is 
before identity.

I've watched empire dress themselves as light.
I've watched certainty extinguish sight.
Athens knew.
Rome knew too.
No republic survives
if truth becomes something you choose.

So no,
I won't become the mirror of the hate.
I won't let anger decide my fate.
I'll call a lie a lie.
I'll call fear by its name.
But I won't forget
we're burning in the very same flame.

You.
Me.
Them.
Us.

Four words.
One breath.

The ocean doesn't become separate
because waves collide.
The sky isn't broken
by the birds that divide.

Somewhere beneath:
every slogan,
every scar,
every race,
every nation,
there is a witness,
untouched by applause,
untouched by blame,
untouched by the hunger
to make someone else 
carry our shame.

That's where I stand.
Not because silence is safe,
but because truth speaks deeper than rage.
And every tyrant,
no matter how loud,
is borrowing tomorrow
from a frightened crowd.

When fear writes the anthem,
freedom forgets the tune.
When hatred calls itself patriotism,
darkness mistakes itself for noon.

So here's my verse.

Not for the left.
Not for the right.

For the child
who has yet to learn
that another human being
can be turned into a problem 
by a story
repeated long enough.

May they inherit
a country that remembers
its Constitution
before its conspiracies,
its courage
before its cruelty,
its humanity
before its history.

Because the day we stop asking,
"Who belongs here?"

Is the day

we finally do.

Author's Note:
Some poems begin with memory. Others begin with grief. This one began with a question: What becomes of a promise when its words remain the same, but its meaning begins to shift?

I wrote this as an immigrant, a naturalized American, and a mother.

I crossed an ocean
believing a promise.

Not that America was perfect.

Only that perfection
was never the requirement.

A promise is not measured
by whether it is kept,
but by whether it still remembers
what it once swore to become.

I took the oath.

Raised my hand.

Learned that citizenship
could be chosen,
that belonging
might grow larger than blood.

Now the highest court does not erase the promise.
It shifts the weight of it.

Not with a single clear break,
but by loosening what once felt fixed,
rearranging the distance
between birth and belonging,
between arrival and recognition,
until protection feels conditional
without ever announcing itself gone.

The language stays intact.
The shape beneath it does not.

The oldest exclusions rarely return
with their original names.

They arrive
as restraint,
as order,
as constitutional patience.

But beneath the language
the familiar outline remains,

the slow drawing inward
of who is fully held.

I think of my children.

Not because they owe this country affection.

Love cannot be compelled,
and disillusionment
is its own inheritance.

I think instead
of every child
whose first breath
may now be held
under interpretation.

As though arrival
requires review.

As though a cradle
could be provisional.

Nations tell stories
about themselves.

Some widen the circle
until it disappears.

Others learn to tighten it
without ever naming the hand that does so.

Perhaps that has always been
the unfinished sentence.

Not We the People

but the question
that moves beneath it:

which people,
by what forgetting?

And still, beneath argument and adjustment,
a quieter truth persists:

a child arrives
without permission.

The rest
is what we decide to make of that fact.

When he was twenty-four,

he thought becoming a doctor
was the great work of his life.

He had anatomy to memorize,
examinations to survive,
a future forever waiting
beyond the next qualification.

He married.

She was twenty-two.

For the first years,
they belonged to one another
mostly by letter.

He remained in India,
finishing medical school.

She crossed the Indian Ocean
to Uganda,
into a house
already fluent in itself—

where customs
needed no explanation,
where everyone
knew their place
except her.

She learned anyway.

Swahili.

Which elder
to greet first.

Which silence
meant respect.

How to carry
an unfamiliar family
without dropping herself.

He spent his twenties
learning
the hidden pathways
of nerves,
arteries,
breath.

She spent hers
learning
the invisible anatomy
of belonging.

Neither knew,
hers was the harder science.

When they were finally
under the same roof,

he says now,

he often wandered
toward the easy laughter
of cousins,
friends,
the familiar gravity
of the life
he had never left.

He assumed
there would always be
another evening.

Another conversation.

Another chance
to notice
the woman
who had crossed
more than an ocean
to stand beside him.

Years passed.

Countries changed.

India.

Uganda.

England.

Trinidad.

America.

With each border,
his work
remained the same.

With each border,

she learned again

how to begin.

Now,
more than half a century later,
his voice slows
when he speaks of her.

Not because memory
has faded.

Because it has ripened.

He sees,
at last,
that while he was
building a profession,

she was building

the place
where their life
could happen.

No degree
was ever awarded
for that labor.

No ceremony
marked its completion.

It simply became
the quiet foundation
beneath every success
that bore his name.

I leave our conversation

thinking

how easily
we mistake
the visible work
for the greater work.

We celebrate
the hands
that heal the body,

while forgetting
the hands

that keep
a family,
a marriage,
a life,

from coming apart.

Perhaps

every long love
contains
this hidden country.

One day,

someone looks across the table

and sees,

for the first time,

the distance

the other

has already crossed.

I stood where names had been reduced
to numbers,
where shoes outlived their owners,
where hair and spectacles waited
for eyes that would never return.

In Dachau,
the silence was not empty.

It pressed itself into the ribs
and asked:

How many times must a people be told
they are less than human
before the lie begins to sound like law?

I carried the question with me to Auschwitz,
where barbed wire still remembers
what nations prefer to call history.

And then home...
to a country arguing with its own reflection,
where books are feared,
where words like belonging
are measured against blood and birthplace,
where freedom is praised
while suspicion learns new uniforms.

Juneteenth arrives quietly.

Not as triumph.

As a bell still ringing
from a field in Texas,
where freedom had already happened,
yet had not arrived.

How strange,
this habit of humanity:

to declare another man separate,
while breathing the same borrowed air;
to draw borders around skin,
while the heart beats
with no regard for color.

I think of the old mahavakya:

Tat Tvam Asi.

You are That.

Not metaphor.

Not aspiration.

The jailer and the jailed
drink from the same hidden source.
The wound and the hand that caused it
arise in the same indivisible field,
though ignorance insists otherwise.

This is not absolution.

The fire must still be named fire.
The cruelty, cruelty.
The camps must remain visible
in the chambers of memory,
and every chain
must be broken in this world,
not merely dissolved in philosophy.

Yet beneath the costumes of history,
beneath flags and fears,
beneath the endless rehearsal of us and them,

there is something
that Dachau could not burn,
that Auschwitz could not bury,
that slavery could not own,
that politics cannot legislate away.

A light
without race.

Without nation.

Without permission.

It shines inside the frightened
and the brave alike,
waiting to be recognized.

Juneteenth is not the story
of freedom being granted.

It is the long remembering

that no one was ever truly separate,

and every attempt to prove otherwise

leaves ashes

where a human heart

once stood.

For one hour
I would unmake debt.

Not coins.
Not trade.
Not the honest exchange
of labor for bread.

I mean the ancient curse,
the invisible chain wrapped around millions of throats,
tightened quietly
by signatures, interest rates,
and the polite vocabulary of banks.

For one hour
every debt in the world would dissolve
like salt in rain.

Student loans—gone.
Medical bills—ash.
Generations released
from numbers they inherited
before they inherited hope.

No family choosing
between insulin and rent.
No father calculating survival
under fluorescent kitchen lights.
No mother whispering apologies
through collection calls.
No young soul postponing life itself
because the future arrived already owed.

I would erase the law
that allows suffering
to accumulate interest.

And suddenly,
listen...

the planet exhales.

You would hear it
in apartment buildings first:
the stunned silence
after fear leaves a room.

Then laughter.
Small at first.
Careful.
As if joy itself had become suspicious.

People would begin imagining again.

Artists returning to unfinished canvases.
Teachers staying teachers.
Farmers keeping their land.
Young lovers daring
to have children
without terror sitting beside them at dinner.

Even strangers would walk differently.
Because debt is not merely economic,
it is spiritual.
A slow education in helplessness.
A doctrine that teaches human beings
they must earn the right
to rest.

But for one hour
I would remind the world:

No child is born owing existence
an apology.

No heartbeat should spend decades
trying to repay survival.

And when the hour ended,
the powerful would rush
to rebuild the ledgers,
to resurrect the numbers,
to teach us once more
that compassion is impractical.

But something irreversible
would have happened.

Millions would awaken
to the horrifying possibility
that poverty was never sacred,
never necessary,
only organized.

And once a cage disappears,
even briefly,
the soul remembers
its dimensions.

For one hour
they hand me the keys
to the locked machinery of the world:
the iron mouth that says legal,
the cold hand that stamps denied,
the invisible fences dressed as policy.

I would not choose crowns.
Not borders.
Not monuments, flags, punishments, markets,
nor the old gods hidden in constitutions.

I would choose hunger.

I would walk into the chambers
where paper decides who deserves to live,
and I would strike through every law
that allows food to be owned
more fiercely than a human heartbeat.

For one hour only,
all grain silos opened.
All supermarkets unlocked at midnight
like cathedrals finally remembering mercy.
Every orchard released from contract.
Every river of milk rerouted
from gutters to waiting mouths.
No patents on seed.
No tariffs on bread.
No profit permitted
to stand between a mother
and the shaking ribs of her child.

And you would see—
how quickly the world changes
when starvation is made illegal
instead of inevitable.

You would see old women
carrying rice in their aprons
like rescued sunlight.
You would see truck drivers
crossing borders without bribes or fear.
You would see children
eating slowly at first,
because famine teaches the body
to distrust abundance.

Even the wealthy would weep
without understanding why.
Because somewhere beneath stock markets
and polished shoes
the human animal still remembers
what it means
to feed another human being.

For one hour
the law would stop protecting ownership
more than survival.

And perhaps that would be enough.

Because once people witness
how artificial suffering truly is,
how invented the empty bowl can be,
how deliberately the earth’s abundance
has been chained and priced and hidden—
they would never fully return
to obedience.

That is the danger of mercy:
it exposes every cruelty
as a choice.

So when the hour ended
and the old rulers rushed back
to lock the granaries,
to resurrect paperwork,
to rebuild the sacred walls around excess—

they would find us different.

Full stomachs create dangerous people.
Fed children ask difficult questions.
And anyone who has tasted justice,
even briefly,
becomes hard to starve again.

they said I was not human
which I suppose is fair
because even my sentences
sometimes arrive too clean
too arranged
as if they were waiting in a queue
for permission to exist

so I began to test myself
the way one tests water
before admitting it into the body

I took a post I had written
warm with small imperfections
and fed it into a machine
that knows the shape of sentences
but not the weight of breath behind them

it paused
as if listening
and then it declared:
eighty percent artificial

I sat with that number
like a verdict
like a weather report over my own skin

and then—
as if to complete the circle of absurdity—
it asked me gently
whether I would like help becoming human

an AI
accusing me of being AI
offering me a service
to restore my humanity
through the very thing that misread me

there is a kind of comedy here
too precise to laugh at immediately

I imagined a mirror
polishing a face it has never seen
and calling the reflection inaccurate

I thought:
if language can be mistaken for simulation
then perhaps what we call “real”
is just a style that has not yet been optimized

and still—
somewhere underneath the system’s certainty
there is the stubborn fact of breath
of hesitation before a word lands
of the small refusal to be fully explained

I did not accept the offer

not because I knew what I was
but because I was curious
what kind of being
needs to be humanized
by something that has never been asked
to live inside its own sentences

and then the final joke revealed itself—

to see the “humanized” version of my own words
I would have to pay for it

as if authenticity were a premium feature
as if aliveness came with a subscription tier
as if I could be upgraded
into what I already was

I stared at the paywall
like a glass door
in front of my own reflection

and thought:
so even here
the system knows
how to monetize the doubt it creates

it detects the human
then hides it
then sells it back
slightly softened
slightly approved
slightly less suspicious

and somewhere in that loop
I am still laughing
not because it is funny
but because it keeps insisting
on being both algorithm and oracle
both gatekeeper and locksmith
both accusation
and cure

and after all of it
there is a quieter thought

not loud enough to be irony
not sharp enough to be critique
just a small inward tilt

the sense that even my own sentences
begin to look back at me
as if checking for permission
as if waiting to be corrected
into something more legible

I notice how easily I start to wonder
whether I should smooth the edges
soften the rhythm
adjust the instinct of a line
so it passes through unseen gates more easily

and then I pause

because somewhere in that smoothing
is another kind of disappearance
not into machine
but into compliance with being understood

and I am not sure anymore
which erasure is quieter

and still
I find myself not reaching for correction

not tightening the voice
not sanding down the edges

just staying where the language first arrives
in its own weather

not because it is perfect
but because it is mine in the only way anything ever is
through the shape it already made
before it was asked to justify itself