The Men of the House

My father met my mother

When he was mighty and thirty,

And she was shy and twenty,

And like most Indian "marriages",

It was decided that they were

"Made for each other";

Three monsoons, and several taunts later,

I was born, and perhaps that was

The only time when my mother lucked out,

She was suddenly accepted as

"The woman of the family",

And was no longer a "witch", a "whore",

Or a "barren land" for that matter;

The reason of the sudden promotion?

Her womb birthed a son;

I was seven, every night father

Would come back home,

His entire existence reeking

Of cheap liquor and his own vomit,

And though unable to stand tall,

He made sure that he used

All his might to inflict bruises on mother;

The morning after, Maa would smile at me,

As she'd serve father a hot cup of

Adrak chai and her special poha;

At twenty, when I moved out of the house,

I took with me my mother's smile,

And she gave in to the perpetual callousness

That my father unleashed every day,

Till the day he breathed his last.

I was twenty eight when I found myself a wife,

The first and the second years were

Right out of a fabled fairy-tale,

The third and the fourth year

Were spent running after our daughter,

(I was surprised why mother

Never called my wife names

Because she birthed a girl)

But on the hundred and eighty fourth day

Of our fifth year together,

I found myself hitting my wife,

And I kept hitting her until she passed out;

They say when you are a child of a broken home,

You either walk away from the path,

Or you become the exact reason why a home breaks,

So the next day when my wife smiled

At our perplexed little daughter,

It was then that I realized

That I chose to become

The monster that my father was.

//NaPoWriMo, Day 15