Filamentous strands of keratin
And interwoven cotton fibers,
These mundane objects change our lives.
Everyday as I look in the mirror
Combing my cascading beard,
Coronating myself with my Guru’s crown,
I see a plethora of history.
I put on that cheery face
And I begin another day of pretending...
Pretending that I can't see you gawk at me as I walk down the hall.
Pretending that there's no reason behind why the seat beside me is the only empty seat in the entire bus on a crowded afternoon.
Pretending that I am not being automatically denounced in professional settings because by crown is too high, or my beard hangs too low.
I look in the mirror and I see centuries of pain.
I see the 50 000 lions laid to rest at the hands of the Mughal army in 1762,
I see 352 black and white turbaned faces staring coldly back at me from the Komagata Maru,
I see Lal Singh Rai, my great great grandfather, shot point blank on his way home from work by a white man in the streets of California because there were one to many shitskins in his town,
I see the pain of people who can no longer call their home their home as Pakistan is split from India; as these new counties rejoice, Punjab is broken in two,
I see the rubble of the Akal Takht, and the ash of hundreds of years of literary history gone up in smoke, defiling the holiest place my eyes have beheld,
I see the burning bodies of men doused with kerosene and weighed down with truck tires, the air putrid with burning human flesh and melting rubber,
I see the mangled bodies of children and elders,
I see the sisters who were violated sexually as passerbys looked on at their mangled children and burning husbads in the streets of Delhi,
I see Balbir Singh Sodhi, shot four days after the twin towers fell because he was seen as a terrorist, and I hear the deafening silence of the lack of response to his death ringing in my ears,
I see a community that has gone through the worst things possible from its very inception,
I see a quam that is willing to get up and fight, despite repeated attempts at wiping its name off the face of this planet.
To you it may just be hair, to me its the lineage of pride and sacrifice I carry on,
To you it may be a rag, to me it is my crown, a living testimony to the perpetual optimism of my community.
I will not bend, I will not break.
I will wake up in the sacred ambrosial pre-dawn hours, and coronate myself, the weight of my predecessors' blessings on my shoulders.
Filamentous strands of keratin
And interwoven cotton fibers,
These mundane objects change our lives.
Everyday as I look in the mirror
Combing my cascading beard,
I see a plethora of history.
I see pain, I see perseverence, I see pride. I see aankh.
With this aankh, I coronate myself.
