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, bom 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, fnends, visiting cousins, everyone of you? Let me speak m 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, it is 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 to the lions, it is human speech, the speech of the mind that is here, not 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 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 this womanliness. Dress in sarees, be girl or wife, they cried Be embroiderer, a cook or a quarreler with servants. Fit in, belong, said the categonzers.

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 nympho. 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. It is I who dnnk 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 dying 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 crumpled -dreams...