Everlast

Ananya Anand

On a balmy summer afternoon, we sat Strewn across our little veranda. Far apart from each other, in distance and in years Yet held together by our culture, the one and only thing I can never dare define.

Perhaps our culture is what my grandfather is, A devoted son to his land and to the language that adorns his heart. An artist whose brush forever lingers for a tryst with his dog-eared canvas. A broken soldier whose soul still lingers somewhere on the battlefields.

Or perhaps it is my grandmother whose culture I should find myself in. The girl who became a bride and a mother before she was even a woman. The lady who always who wore all the norms and the strains of her time Like tinkling anklets on her petite, restless feet.

My mother's culture might just be the one for me, For rebellion and courage are all it has ever known. I worship her hunger to be seen just as worthy of glory as her brothers are, To not follow in her mother’s footsteps, to make a lasting example of her life.

My father’s culture was one of change, of questions, of curiosity To redefine everything that his old man had once stood for. Once the voice of a new generation of men and women, he now remains The same cryptic, odious man in my eyes as my grandfather once was in his.

Rejection is how my brother chose to embrace our culture. “I’m simply getting on with the times and moving ahead”, he says. On an obsessive quest to find acceptance in any culture but his own, I fear He’ll lose a part of him, a piece of his identity he has never realised.

Meanwhile I sit on my door sill, humming a lullaby from our native land. Sometimes I secretly wish I wasn’t a human, but this very song instead. I want its power to survive being passed on through countless generations, While my kin and I still struggle to thrive under the burden of the passing days.

Torn may we be, my brother and I, when it comes to the matters of our roots And may never see eye-to-eye until our final breaths. But our never-ending battle to be heard and seen, to not be forgotten by our kind Has united us in a way no other conversation ever would.

Some brand us as traitors of our blood and our values For the sin of going against those traditions of theirs that we are the preys of. They tell us that we are betraying the very colour of our skins As if our body, our flesh is all there is to be remembered in our legacy.

I wish to defy, to dare, and rewrite what my culture ought to be. To not be that army man who never came home from his war, Not to be that woman whose innocence ended so that her children’s could begin. I’d rather leave behind my footprints on a trail that I can call mine and only mine.

I wish to be the song of change, to not perish under the weight of my own wings; Neither am I the first to dream of this feat nor will I be the last. Through this very journey I’ll undertake, like my family before me, I hope I’ll someday find the woman that I am meant to be.

I wish to be the shoulder on which the millions like me can cry on To be the ear that takes in all the ways our culture once wronged us. Yet I also wish to celebrate the beauty of the legacy of our past and our present, The people without whose mistakes and musings, I doubt we’d have made it this far.

Through all the wars and the exoduses, through all the falls and the famines Through all the joys and the tears, through all the changes and the constants Through the well-wishes of the saved, the prayers of the grieving Through my soul and my life, may our story everlast.