I don't know politics but I know the names of those
 in power and can repeat them like days of week or
 names of months, beginning with Nehru. I am Indian,
 brown, born in Malabar. I speak three languages, write
 in two, dream in one. Don't write in English, they cried, English
 is not your mother-tongue. Why not leave me alone, critics,
 friends, visiting cousins, everyone of you? Let me speak
 in any language I like. The language I speak becomes
 mine, its distortions, its queernesses all mine, mine alone.
 It is half English, half Indian, Funny perhaps but it's
 honest, its as human as I am human, you know....

 It voices my longings, my hopes and is useful to me
 as cawing is to crows or roaring is to the lions,
 it is human speech, the speech of the mind that is here, not there,
 a mind that sees and hears and is aware, Not the deaf,
 blind speech of trees in storm or of monsoon clouds or of rain
 or, of the incoherent mutterings of the blazing
 funeral pyre. I was child and later they said, I grew,
 for, I became tall, my limbs swelled and one or two places
 sprouted hair. When I asked for love, not knowing what else
 to ask for, he drew a youth of sixteen into his
 bedroom and shut the door. He did not beat me but my sad
 woman-body felt so beaten. The weight of my breasts and
 womb crushed me. I shrank pitifully. Then I wore a shirt
 and a black sarong, cut my hair short and ignored all of
 the womanliness, Dress in sarees, be girl or be wife,
 they cried, Be embroiderer, cook or a quarreller
 with servants. Fit in, belong, said the categorizers.
 Be Amy or be Kamala. Or, Better still, be just
 Madhavikutty. It is time to choose a name, a role
 Don't play pretending games. Don't play at schizophrenia
 or be a hympho. Don't cry embarrassingly loud when
 jilted in love.... Later, I met a man. Loved him. Call him
 not by any name, he is every man who wants his
 woman, just as I am every woman who seeks love.
 In him the hungry haste of rivers, in me the ocean's
 tireless waiting. Who are you, I ask each and all. The answer is, it's I.

 Anywhere and everywhere I see him who calls himself
 I. In this world he is tightly packed like the sword in its sheath.
 I is I who drink a lonely drink near midnight at hotels
 of strange towns, it is I who make love and then feel shame,
 It is I who lie drying with a rattle in my throat,
 I am the sinner, I am the saint. I am both the lover
 and the beloved. I have no joys which are not yours
 no aches which are not yours.
 We share the same name, the same fate, the same crumbled dreams...