on privacy

They are adding bricks to the wall of my grandparents' house

—there was never traffic to intrude in Harrington road, now there is—

And we (bourgeois-ly) don't like it.

There are dire warnings, now and again—

The State will pry. It will swallow up

all the information on all the forms you've ever filled,

And then you.

I slump in the chair on the porch, barefoot, coiled up,

and stare at chameleon on the wall, who is

failing to blend in with the new white paint.

A gate and wall can only be so captivating.

What's the big deal about privacy?

A lot. Why should we adjust without it

If it's a Right (enshrined, etc.)?

And Ayn Rand said that civilization

meant setting man free from man.

I don't underestimate freedom.

I need it. Yet

—perhaps this is indoctrination—

I have grown to appreciate

the relationships that grow

out of not being able to lock the door

and of being locked in together.

I defiantly say: my personal is political.
I get—I take—more out of this than they do.
I negotiate, I change
These aren't just readings to me.

Admission: they aren't even readings to me.
I don't read them.
And yet opine, question, discuss.

When my father says
In Incontrovertible Rightness, with Finality,
that when I have his grey hair I will understand,
I say Experience is important, but it's not All That.

I believe this, my concession to his knowledge,
But it's also strategic, an assertion of my maturity,
My brown-black, densely populated head
—I believe/ wish—
speaking up for itself.

How can I explain?
Sometimes he doesn't know
(The way people think nowadays, for instance)
Sometimes I don't
(I don't read the papers like I should)
We each say, when we do not know,
Oh come on. Everyone knows this.
And win to ourselves, in our heads.

I know I'm not talking nonsense (mostly)
When I set up the argument in class.
I know it's frequently useful
When I don't agree,
And I know I accept, correct, when I am wrong.

And I know I am unethical
When I could have known
And should have known
And when people respond thinking I do.

My mother has a point when she says what she says about history.

(She says it's useless.)

The usual progress-and-change argument,

And I always hotly defended the worth

Of my 94 in ISC

In the subject that investigates and records what people live by.

I don't know anymore.

How much can we leave behind,

And how fully?

I cannot say that I have forgotten

Even when I have (hopefully) forgiven,

Though my memory for facts is like

A baked-goods smell in a bare kitchen.

Lingeringly, heartbreakingly empty.

And how much do I even want to forget?

How much is the child the father of the man,

And when does it become

Sins of the son visited on the father?

I am not Nemesis. I can only

Remember, catalogue,

Perhaps provide some leads to proof

When the case comes up in court.

I cannot even say what I mean. Cannot

Rise in protest like those

Brave young college students of the seventies

(now mired teaching us)

Who feared neither torture nor incarceration.

It isn't that, now; I speak in metaphors

Because of the anecdotal evidence

Of generations of Experience telling me

That Growing Up and Succeeding In Life

is learning to shut up.

Even if you remember.

How much use is history?

Perhaps students must put up

Parchas and morchas in soundproof corridors

And other academic circles.

And maybe then they will remember to change.

"Soft of heart to succour Woe"

Well along pregnant, she was as alive as it's possible to be, I guess.

Then stuff happened. Accident, statistical exception, tragedy—

There are many ways to describe this sort of death. It had a bit of everything.

But finally one corpse inside another, inside a box.

[(Eurocentrically) Metaphorically speaking].

I have the words, and inside the words

Hopefully profound meditations on death, on life,

On pain—Within myself, I try to pay my respects

by thinking sombre thoughts.

Respects to Death, maybe.

To hers as my own. I fail.

The arrogance of the living.

Cain's offering was rejected, after all.

Death is normal, and only loss

Gives birth to grief; else it gets stuck in my throat

And dies coming out. It was never real.

And all there will have been for them to miss

Is me. And I moved on, leaving them bereft.

It disturbs me sometimes that I can't remember what I used to think. It's like I wasn't there.

I used to be a horrid tattletale (or so I am told by past victims)- but I can't seem to remember feeling like one at all. But then, maybe I'm thinking of the Blyton description of tattletale-psyche and missing the same viciousness in my own head. Maybe this forgetting was convenient.

I can't remember the me who wanted a textbook on talking to people. I can't remember what it was like inside the head of the girl who wrote on my old blog. I can't even remember, and this was only a year ago or so, what it was like to blissfully contemplate a life spent running a cafe-cum-book and card shop.

I know I'm forgetful, but even I should notice leaving selves behind.

People are really quite beautiful.

They pop up, in dirty gullies with dead rats and much dung and vegetable vendors married to household help, and make you filter coffee and make you grin.

She is a wife-beaten.
Yet she comes upstairs sometimes to reassure me
about sitting alone in the office—
I am not to worry, because
She doesn't let just anybody into the building;
Yes, that's right, I should have no fears on her watch.

And I don't. While she,
and the old women who chastise trespassers
in the women's compartment,
and the women who come up discreetly in public places
to tell you you've stained your skirt
are around, I know
that I'll deal with the screechiness
and silliness
and yuckiness
and pain
of being female.
We'll get by.

Maybe they'll reserve a whole metro-train for us soon,
so girls in stilettos and pinstriped pants
won't have to stuff wrist-to-elbow I'm-married bangles
in my face.