A Country at the Door

Someone has left the door open.

The rain has come in

and made a small map on the floor.

I follow it.

It smells of tea in Assam,

of wet earth in Andhra Pradesh,

of pine in Arunachal Pradesh.

In Bihar, a child asks a question

and an old classroom grows young again.

Chhattisgarh keeps a forest in its palm.

Goa brings salt in on the breeze.

Gujarat sends kites into January;

Haryana waits for its daughters to come home.

Himachal Pradesh folds winter into a shawl.

Jharkhand hears the rain on its trees.

Karnataka speaks in many voices,

and Kerala lays out an Onam meal

with room for another plate.

A river crosses Madhya Pradesh.

A worker crosses Maharashtra before sunrise.

Manipur ties its bells for a dance.

Clouds sit on Meghalaya’s windowsill

as if they have nowhere else to be.

Mizoram sings across the hills.

Nagaland gathers its stories at Hornbill.

Odisha shapes a memory with patient hands.

Punjab brings the harvest home

and opens its doors at Vaisakhi.

Rajasthan has saved a song for the desert.

Sikkim has saved silence for the mountains.

Tamil Nadu lets Pongal rise over the pot.

Telangana carries flowers for Bathukamma.

Tripura’s loom is still awake.

In Uttar Pradesh, a child runs through a lane

older than anyone who knows her name.

Uttarakhand holds a river at its beginning.

West Bengal brings the Puja lights out

before the evenings turn cold.

In Jana Gana Mana,

the old names stand close together—

Punjab, Sindhu, Gujarat, Maratha,

Dravida, Utkala, Banga.

The Vindhya, the Himachala,

the Yamuna, the Ganga, the sea.

I wonder if we have ever listened

to the space between those names.

Will there be a day

when a woman leaves her house after sunset

and no one asks her to come back early?

When she can miss a train, take another road,

sit alone for tea, travel for work,

and think of where she is going

instead of what might happen on the way?

I want her mother to sleep through the night.

I want the girl at the bus stop

to hold a book in her hands

instead of her keys between her fingers.

I want the streetlight repaired before she asks,

the complaint believed when she makes it,

the law to meet her as a person

whose life is wholly her own.

Let her be heard in the classroom,

paid fairly in the office,

welcomed at the table where decisions are made.

Let marriage be her choice,

and motherhood, and work, and rest.

Let her say no without fear

and yes without surrendering herself.

Let her grow old with stories of places she went,

things she made, people she loved—

a whole life lived in dignity.

What kind of country asks its women

to carry so much courage

just to do ordinary things?

Will there be a day

when two human beings

walking different paths of faith

stop beneath the same tree for shade?

One offers water.

The other makes room.

Their children begin a game

before anyone thinks to ask their names.

Let us learn each other’s festivals

from the people who celebrate them.

Let us listen when a neighbour speaks

in a language we do not know.

Brotherhood could begin there:

with the patience to listen,

and the simple belief

that another family’s happiness

takes nothing from our own.

I want prosperity that reaches the worker

who rises while the city sleeps,

the farmer watching the sky,

the weaver whose eyes tire before her hands,

the child whose talent is waiting

for a chance to be seen.

Let the people who build our homes

have homes they can afford.

Let those who grow our food eat well.

Let success leave enough room

for everyone else to flourish.

And let us speak of happiness, too.

Of a father buying sweets on the way home.

Of friends arriving unannounced.

Of a woman laughing loudly on a late train.

Of a child learning another child’s song

and singing it all the way back.

A country must be large enough

to hold such small, unguarded joys.

The revolutionaries loved a country

they could not live long enough to meet.

Bhagat Singh. Matangini Hazra. Birsa Munda.

So many names, and many more

that history never learned to say.

They left us their unfinished hope.

Older still are the questions

our thinkers wrote beneath these skies:

about the stars and seasons,

about the Atman within,

the Brahman beyond,

and how to live among other beings.

We have inherited their questions,

our freedom, our many languages,

our rivers, recipes, songs and grief.

What we make of them is ours to decide.

The rain is still drawing its map.

I place another cup beside mine.

Perhaps the joy of being Bharat

will arrive like this:

a woman walks home beneath the evening sky,

a neighbour calls out to ask how her day was,

and she answers, without fear,

“It was beautiful.”