“falak malin* ——————— firmament” by Tanisha Tekriwal, Class of 2023
Some evening I heard there’s a new word for the panic
that sets in when thickened tongues
of smoke coil upwards roiling in a saturated sky
& for the disquiet that lumps in the throat when we
are caught between ash ocean America & they call
it solastalgia to be homesick at home
& then later before finally heading home
in a liquored stupor someone panicked
& asked if English is my first language if I call
it that & I said yes of course but Hindi is my mother-tongue
& what difference does it make & why do we
make that difference when neither has a word for a burning sky
& the other day I couldn’t remember the Hindi word for sky
Ma what would you say when you heard of this estrangement from home
this story from abroad dulled in incubation betwe-
en lips and lisp gut and guilt & maybe you wouldn’t panic
at all after years of hearing the turns of my tongue
the Judas always slips back to colonial creole in cyclic recall
& how many times can I call
myself De.si before it starts to sound like an elision of desert sky
an identity that has been nostalgic longer than it has been real a tongue
too made of history a home-
coming of romanised lettering smoking urgent and panicked
across some creamed page that I know I owe (more)
& how do we
grieve a past we didn’t live through & it is time to call
the country to remember what English can sound like to forget that the skies
are falling & Ma there is no Planet B & where is Home A
they’ve been saying the coasts will flood will drown our tongues
& Bombay— no it is Mumbai now in our native tongues—
is by these roiling seas & they say that grief is linear we
know it is a spiral a concentric cinching a forgetting home
meanwhile is my last call
before this double helix of loss and lost burning in the sky
burning in my veins takes over doubles down like dystopian panic
Ah so home tongue I beg of you take over
paint over panic don’t remind me why we
called it quits the skies have changed in your absence
*Falak: Sky; Malin: Dirty
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am still working out the knots in my relationship with language but for times of conflict I like to go back to a Chinua Achebe quote: “Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it.”