(Some notes on having gone missing)

I ran I ran

Towards Iran

The land of deserts and lemons and

Zarathustra

For it was the only true land

The only

The only

And they called me mad

Indians

Assholes alluvthem

They knew not where I came from

Iran, my true home

My only

My only

The land of turbans, pomegranates

Shawnameh

My country

My country

If only

If only

My soft, sweet loves had not died young.

If only

If only

Your hard, broad shoulders had not broken.

I ran I ran I ran I ran I ran I ran

Towards Iran.

My one true love

Did not recognise me

My only

If only

But then

Nevertheless

All this useless grammar

Gimme a drag now…..

Gimme a poem that can contain my pain

My only pain

My enormous, grotesque pain.

I ran I ran it was my only option

My only escape from the prison of language

Of nation

Of love

Of hate

Of this awful business of you and me

Over and over and over again.

Of us and them

Of new and old

Of binaries and fuckwits

I know them all

I licked their asses nicely.

The night was young,

Swiftly threw away the cellphone and credit card.

And I ran I ran

Towards Iran.

…
Atreyee is a writer and anthropologist based in Delhi. She teaches at O P Jindal Global University. Her first book Time, Space, and Capital in India (Routledge, 2018) concerns her long relationship with the categories of time and space in the age of late capitalism. She is trying to research and practice Vaishnavism at the moment.