The men to whom I belonged, said,
”Beware of those men.
They will impregnate you
With a hard hate
Made soft with the deceit of desire.
They will caress your thighs with fingers
Beneath whose nails
are the scrapings of the stench
Of slaughtered cows.
They will place the white skull cap
On the tender head of your unborn foetus,
And hire the maulvi to sing lullabies to it.
They will rub their smiles across your lips
As they murmur the name of their God
In a zealot’s prayer.”

But, when I smelt his smile
It was nascent like the newness of the present.
When we spoke
There was a difficult silence
To be wrenched into the grammar of our desires.
When he and I undulated into each other
His God and mine became flesh of our flesh.

The men to whom I belonged
Recognized him as an other man,
Knew him through the familiarity of fear,
Understood him through the rituals of his body.

As i was re cognizing him
Through the ruptures of desire,
As he was tracing patterns of vermillion on my forehead
With his tenderness,
Why did i remember the red
Of my brother’s blood?

The men to whom I belong watch me,
Even as His gaze
Tangles the legibility of our desires,
And unmoulds the licit contours
Of our apartness.