For Masrat

For Masrat
Poem about Kashmiri photo Journalist Masrat Zahra

_ Bupinder Singh Bali

Deep purple is not just a colour,
but an award, under our clothes,
that shines,
brightly but painfully,
awarded to the woke, for excellence
in resistance and dissidence.
How do you speak?
and why do you want to?
only inside the mouth,
a tongue is a tongue;
no bone, then how?
how do you make it stand
on its feet, and make it march,
restlessly and tirelessly.
What do you want to muckrake?
for expression is lost,
upon expressing, it ceases to be,
the moment a tide of reckoning hits it
with waves of misinterpretations
and it is pulled into the cesspool
of allegations and arguments, and is
trapped forever in the quagmire of
ambiguous desolations.
May-be you too are haunted,
by the ghosts of azaadi,
or may-be you are a troubled child,
of an unhappy marriage between
concealed fascism
and divulged freethinking.