India is Blinding Young Kashmiri Protestors…
The Guardian UK 18 July 2016
“They asked for it,”
a family friend tweets,
“#AccheDin are here again.”
Go fuck yourself
I want to shout back, our blindness
an affront to our clear seeing,
remembering the last time
I saw this dear friend, not virtually,
but at the Oberoi where her rose-
tinted cat eye designer glasses sat
on her nose like an army
tank deployed by Delhi in Kashmir,
chunky, stolid, demanding notice.
Should I feed her books about Hindu
rulers and Muslims subjects
in South Asia’s northernmost region
to nurse her #MannKiBaat and
#CowRaksha? Will she still praise
the pump action pellet gun
which is really a 12-gauge shotgun,
“crowd dispersal techniques”
India uses in its integral part?
But my friend will just take off
her glasses and shut her eyes.
by Rafiq Kathwari, whose debut collection, In Another Country, is available here.