My Mother’s Curse

Crawled up in a corner,

In middle of a panic attack,

Comes an imaginary flashback

My father tearing up the letters

In more than a thousand pieces

And yelling on my mother,

“Now, this is your only family.”

When she was about to post

Some handwritten letters

Scribbled on a scented paper

The letters that never reached

Her family and friends

Who might have been waiting

To hear from their beloved

Caged miles away in her own home

Three decades ahead of those

Dark times, you would imagine

Women would have traveled so far

But alas, to your dismay

I would like to shatter this euphoria for you

For in every generation, a mother curses a father

That he would understand her pain one day

Through the tears that leaves his daughter’s eyes

And that’s the reason why

The wheel of time just rotates

To come back to the same point

Another wife accused by her husband

Of having dreams of her own

Of being ambitious enough

To work for anything apart from home

Sure, everyone likes that extra money

But nobody wants to remember the source

Oh she’s supposed to work just for fun

Coz her actual place is in the kitchen

So here I am, bent, with a broken soul

Injecting all the anger in my words

To utter a very potent curse

That one day you too would feel

The pain of seeing your world crumbling

Under the weight of the age-old patriarchy

But the next moment I shudder

To think of the poor conduit

Who is yet to be conceived

And that is why I realize

I don’t want to be a mother