Mother-tongue
- Jun 30, 2021
- 1 min read
by Debasish Mishra
From the vague signpost of memory to this tiny station of time where the train of life doesn’t bother to stop I was/am obsessed with English
Speaking it was/is a luxury a sign of one’s education the very science of knowing
When I was a child with brown skin and white hopes, the foreign alphabets in hardbound books and bright colourful paperbacks with the promise of a choklet accent grew over the chalk-clad roots
My dreams were in English too: sophisticated, Elizabethan Maa became mom and baba turned dad I drifted from my place with the catalyzing vehicle of a borrowed apparatus
When I lost my dad, I realized anguish can’t sit on a foreign tract I feel a deep sense of longing now for something which is mine but isn’t! I search for that word for longing
in my own dialect but I fail
It’s the [m]other-tongue
Debasish Mishra, a native of Bhawanipatna, Odisha, India, is the recipient of The Bharat Award for Literature in 2019 and The Reuel International Best Upcoming Poet Prize in 2017. His recent poems have been published or are forthcoming in North Dakota Quarterly, Penumbra, Quadrant, Star*Line, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and elsewhere. He is presently pursuing his PhD in Humanities at NISER, Bhubaneswar, India.
