If you still think of English as belonging to the British or the Americans, it may be time to reconsider. Over the past few decades, a quiet but enormous revolution has taken place in the world of linguistics: non-native speakers by a staggering three-to-one ratio. Of the nearly two billion people who use English worldwide, only about 400 million are native speakers. As linguist H. G. Widdowson argues, English is no longer a “product” exported from a western center; it has become a global resource, continuously reshaped bypeople from different cultures to meet their own communicative needs. This remarkable transformation raises a fascinating question: if English belongs to everyone, does it still belong to anyone? And as new varieties continue to emerge, will English eventually evolve into distinct localized languages, or will globalization keep it united?
English is a West Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family that took shape in early medieval England. Its name derives from the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes that migrated to Britain after the fall of Roman Empire. Over the centuries language underwent enormous transformation. The Norman Conquest of 1066 marked a turning point in its history: thousands of French words entered the language, giving rise to Middle English. Later, during the Renaissance and the era of William Shakespeare, English absorbed a great many new words from Latin, Greek, French, German, and Dutch. At the same time, a phonetic shift known as the Great Vowel Shift fundamentally changed the language’s pronunciation. By the late seventeenth century, the foundations of modern English as we know it today had been laid. But this was only the beginning of its most fascinating journey. Today, English has long since expanded far beyond the borders of Britain or the United States. It is used as an official, administrative, or cultural language in nearly ninety countries and territories, and has become the primary means of connecting people of different nationalities in education, science, business, diplomacy, and technology. With close to two billion users, English is the most widely spoken international language in the world. What is most striking is that the majority of its users speak it not as a native language but as a second or foreign language. This means that most communication conducted in English today takes place between people for whom English is not their mother tongue.
This shift has transformed English from the property of any single nation into a global language used by the whole world. As a result, distinct varieties of English have emerged in countries such as the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, India, Nigeria, and Singapore. Each variety reflects the history, culture, and worldview of its respective people.
To account for this linguistic diversity, linguists have put forward the term “World Englishes.” This concept recognizes the many legitimate and independent varieties of English that have formed under the influence of different societies and cultures. While the term “World English” refers to the language’s role as a vehicle for international communication, “Global Englishes” emphasizes its worldwide expansion driven by globalization. “World Englishes,” by contrast, signals that English no longer exists in a single standard form, but is continuously being enriched and developed by the millions of people who use it.
Today, English is no longer governed by any single country or standard. As it has spread across the world, different societies have adapted it to their own needs and cultures, creating new varieties of the language. This is precisely why linguists today prefer the term “World Englishes” rather than simply “English.”
The English used in India, Singapore, Nigeria, Australia, and many other countries is not simply a copy of British or American English. Each has its own pronunciation, vocabulary, and modes of expression that have developed over the course of history.It is precisely this diversity that, rather than weakening English, makes it a richer and more adaptable language. The social function of English also varies from country to country. In India and Nigeria, for instance, English is an essential part of education, governance, and everyday communication. In countries such as Uzbekistan, by contrast, it is studied mainly as a foreign language that expands opportunities for international education, business, travel, and global communication. Because millions of people use English every day, it continues to evolve constantly. New words, new expressions, and even entirely new hybrid forms — such as “Hinglish,” a blend of English and local languages — keep emerging. This clearly demonstrates that English is no longer the sole property of its native speakers, but the shared wealth of everyone who uses and develops it.
Saymurodova Madinaxon Zohidjon qizi, 2nd-year student at Uzbekistan State University of World Languages, majoring in Foreign Language and Literature, Uzbekistan
a motorcycle disappearing at the end of the street.
Nothing remarkable happened.
Yet something shifted.
The air no longer felt
too heavy to lift.
I began to notice
small things again –
the window left open,
rain gathering
on the hibiscus leaves,
the stubborn sparrow
returning to the same branch.
Years from now,
people may speak
of resilience
as though it appeared
all at once.
They will not know
it first arrived
carrying your patience,
sitting across from me,
asking for nothing
except another cup of tea.
The poems explore friendships that hold people together when words are not enough.
Chidimma Ewelukwa is a Nigerian writer whose work explores memory, belonging, identity, and the quiet tensions of everyday life. She has been published in Writer Monk Literary Magazine and Polis magazine in Greece.
The grass smells of sweaty paints mixed with wolfish yawns and dirty fur
I kiss the grass of your leafy hands and try to warm them with my tired hands
But you fade like a candle of sunlight on the eve of the polar night
Your body is so beautiful, so white, but I can’t take it with me: corpses are capable of decomposing
Your thoughts are empty, like a desert —
Let’s go tomorrow at sunrise and take a last breath of preoccupation air
Love
Mother sews a dress for her daughter
Mother sews a vagina for her daughter
<Mother wants grandchildren>
Mother sews a vagina for her daughter for a soldier
Mother’s husband died long ago
Daughter still feels like a child
Because being a child means being a slave to parental love
And vagina tries to talk at night
And the nuclear rain outside the window never ends
The bell
bears sprats viennese carpet turkish ball brazilian borscht ukrainian carnival white bears sharks telephone injections or (open) calls all kinds of cola sugar and blood memory and mint and first and foremost want to die and never never twice and thrice never see newer ti see to know or to hear the killer(s) number(s) 89 back bladder balls beaten chops kidneys of the punishment shorty shortly shitty cell molecules of corpses separated like lovers no one loves and no one knows locusts begin to emerge from the sleeve god’s torn robe еven flowers can’t drink blood water cotton and candy cotton cocon candy sandy mold of memory has grown on my moss covered back (grass or glass) i still can’t speak or remain silent but my screams and these people are pulling my soul out of my carry belly oh oh how painful it is it was it will then they hammer my soul back in like a nail with a hammer and despair
The peeling putty
The peeling putty of human life
The snake sheds the skin of the past and falls asleep
Snake catchers go hunting and kill icy time
The pendulum of the bell tower of the nursing home is covered with gray snow
Cut off the cute
Cut off the cute eyes of a handsome boy
Trample the dew from the glass with your bare feet
Break the grass and crush the helpless ant
(I look down and feel small)
The sky painted with the infinitive of murder floats overhead
The sky floats away overhead
The ground disappears from under your feet and
And the sand of time dissolves in the bowl of memories
Birth
Death
Design
Signature
Time doesn’t exist
Only sand exists
The amount of pain cannot be counted
The number of aircraft carriers cannot be counted
Pain doesn’t exist
Paint doesn’t exist
There is only death
Silence
Scream
Fuck me endlessly and cum inside so that a new atomic bomb is born in my body
You’ll never fuck me
Everything around has long been dead and buried
Blue pоem
The sky is the color of angel blood
•••
Dot drops swell to the size of thinking
°°°
The capillaries of autumn spring burst with a cemetery
|||
The blue shadows of the dead during sleep will be picked up by crows
^^^
The blue shadows of the dead during sleep will be thrown down from the heights by crow
~~~
Down there the river dries up with frozen faces of screams
Militia Vox’s story opens with a kid staring at a piano and deciding she wants in because her best friend is doing it.
“My best friend was playing piano, and I was like, ‘Oh well, I want to play piano too,’” she says. They started together; the friend drifted away. Militia didn’t.
Very quickly, piano stopped being an activity and became a relationship. “Music became a thing that was my best friend,” she remembers. “This is something that I can carry with me forever.”
Her teacher enrolled her in competitive piano guilds without really explaining what that meant. Every year she had to take guild exams, playing for judges who measured everything: dynamics, posture, interpretation.
She accelerated fast. “Next thing I know, I’m winning regional and state competitions, and then like was considered one of the best young pianists in the country,” she says.
But the more she tried to bring herself into the music, the more the classical world pushed back. “Some of the powers that be in the classical circles would say things like, ‘She plays too loudly,’ ‘She bangs on the piano,’” she recalls.
She even got criticized for how she sat: “Sometimes I would side saddle, and they didn’t like that.”
She was already chafing against the idea that her job was to be a polite conduit for “dead composers’ music.”
“I got tired of playing dead composers’ music and not being able to create more,” she says. “When I was trying to bring more of myself to the performance, I was getting marked for it.”
By the time she reached the Boston Conservatory at Berklee, the faculty basically admitted she’d outgrown them. “They were like, we have nothing left to teach you, like your art’s already way above what we’re doing here,” she says. So she decided: if they couldn’t teach her, she’d use what she had and make something of her own.
Even before that, she was already staging rebellions. In eighth grade, she put together a performance‑art piece for a talent show, recruiting friends, painting their faces black and white, dressing them in shredded tuxedo jackets, and choreographing a routine to the industrial‑leaning song “Oh Industry” from the movie Beaches.
“I choreographed this piece to it, and I sang, and everybody was like, ‘This is so weird. It’s really good, but it’s so weird,’” she says. That was the moment she started to feel the split: the world wanted her to fit, and she couldn’t.
“I always felt like I was having to fight and rebel,” she says. “This was like my villain arc because I started a strong sense of like, I can’t fit in here, so I’m just gonna go in the other direction. If you guys are gonna make me feel like I’m doing things wrong, I’m just gonna go for it.”
Her childhood environment didn’t offer much in the way of a scene. She grew up in Maryland, “in the middle of like what was a horse farm,” with no musicians around.
Her father, an avid record collector, became her unofficial curator. “He would like send me to my room and be like, ‘You’re Potter, and you’re gonna listen to King Crimson,’” she says. She’d lie on the floor, listening, trying to decode how those songs existed at all. “I’d just try to figure out like how did these people meet each other? How did they write this stuff? How are they putting this? How do they know what sounds to choose? What notes to choose?” she says.
She watched the Grammys and saw a room full of musicians on TV, wondering, “Where are you? Like, I need to be there. How do I do this?”
Her first rock concert was Duran Duran. She was a kid, her parents had to take her, and she spent the show standing on her chair, screaming at the band. “I was screaming at them and embarrassing the hell out of my parents, just screaming at the band, ‘I’m one of you. Take me with you,’” she says.
Her parents tried to make her sit down. “I was like, ‘No, no, no! I need to be where they are,’” she remembers. It felt like the old fantasy of running away to join the circus—only her circus was rock. “Same thing,” she says. “Different circus.”
The bridge from classical to rock came through a boyfriend who was putting a band together.
He knew she was an actor and asked, “Can you cry on command?” Then he handed her a line to sing: “It’s kind of like ‘Red Water’ by Type O Negative.” She didn’t know Type O Negative yet. “What’s Type O Negative?” she asked—and then went down the rabbit hole. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is awesome,’” she says.
The band asked her to join. “They were like, ‘Oh, do you want to come be in the band?’ I was like, ‘Be in the band?’ I was like, ‘Yes, you want me to be in your band?’” It blew her mind.
That band became Disciples of Astaroth, a name steeped in occult resonance. They played Boston and sold out every night. “We used to sell out. We played in Boston, and we’d sell out every night that we played,” she says. They played New York once, at the Batcave. The sound was dark, gothic, heavy, and theatrical. It was also deeply intertwined with drag and queer performance.
Disciples of Astaroth was a co‑singer band: Militia and Britt the Other Bully. Britt did drag—specifically “dark drag,” long before the RuPaul era made that aesthetic mainstream. “He did drag. He did like dark drag,” she says. “Way before Sharon Needles and these drag queens from like the RuPaul era.” He performed to Ministry and other industrial and extreme bands. “Belinda Davenport would do her performances to like Deicide,” Militia recalls of another drag queen from Beverly, near Salem.
The beauty‑queen drag performers didn’t always appreciate it. “All the other drag queens were kind of uncomfortable because it was pretty wicked,” she says.
Militia marched in Gay Pride with Britt, did drag performances with him, and shared dressing rooms with trans performers.
“I basically was raised by drag queens when I started,” she says. They taught her the importance of aesthetic and presence. “They showed me like, you know, you have to have a look, you have to have an aesthetic, you have to have something to offer in the performance,” she says. “This is how you do your makeup, like show makeup. This is how you get your glitter to stay on. You should up your look or magnify who you are.”
For her, drag queens and trans people were part of the band ecosystem. “I was so used to incorporating drag queens and trans people into our band situation,” she says. “It was weird for me to find people that didn’t find that normal. Like I was like, why wouldn’t that be normal? They have the most to say.”
After Disciples of Astaroth, she moved to New York and joined a shock‑rock band whose singer was a performance artist.
“We were featured on Real Sex on HBO,” she says. Her mother saw the episode and called her, crying. “She’s like, ‘Oh my God, you guys are on Real Sex, and you guys are like doing all this crazy stuff on stage,’” Militia recalls. Her response was pure: “I was like, ‘Well, what are you doing watching Real Sex, Mom?’”
New York’s underground felt like an extension of the world she already knew. “Performance artists are like, they have something to say,” she says. “In New York, performance art and music is also like sister friends. There’s a lot of performance artists here that are also in bands.”
Drag performers, performance artists, musicians, and trans people overlapped constantly. “They’re like the twinsies,” she says. “A lot of drag performers are also performance artists here.”
Her original band Vulgaris eventually caught the attention of Cleopatra Records. “We made an album and then we got noticed by Cleopatra Records,” she says.
They signed a deal to contribute a song to a Dead Can Dance tribute album. “We have the last track on the Dead Can Dance tribute album,” she says. But the label cut their elaborate intro without asking.
“We had done this very elaborate, like moody intro. They cut the whole thing without asking us,” she says. “We were just like, their mind was blown, and then they like shelved our record.”
The full‑length, Embrace the Empty, was a dark, Type O Negative meets My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult‑style record. “It was very Type O meets like My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult,” she says. It never got the release it deserved.
That experience fed into a strategic shift. Militia is now widely known for her cover work—especially fronting Judas Priestess, the all‑female Judas Priest tribute band—but she’s blunt about why she started doing covers. “I only started doing cover songs because my original music wasn’t getting the attention that I wanted it to,” she says.
Her first original band, Disciples of Astaroth, did get attention and sold out shows, but it was localized. The wider industry didn’t know what to do with her. Covers became a way to get heard, to leverage the power of familiar songs while still bringing her own ferocity and theatricality to the stage.
Her range—four octaves, with a taste for drama—made her a natural fit for Judas Priestess. She’s done Bowie covers, Tina Turner, Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades,” and more, moving across genres with the same intensity she once brought to Chopin and Liszt. She’s also collaborated with figures like Dee Snider and sang a duet with Rob Halford, the metal god himself, inhabiting the lineage of metal while refusing to be confined by it.
Identity and representation are central to her story. Militia talks openly about being a Black woman in heavy metal, a genre that has long been saturated with toxic masculinity and narrow ideas of who belongs. She’s been told to change her appearance, to tone down, to fit a mold that has nothing to do with her talent.
“Everybody told me ‘I should not be doing that,” she says. “Everybody, literally, family, friends, strangers.” We duet on the Amyl and the Sniffers’ song. “People told me I shouldn’t be doing that..” She says. “I lived it too. I related to it so much.”
Her album Burn My Crosses was misread by some as anti‑Catholic, leading to bans from events and venues.
In reality, it was a response to corruption and hypocrisy she witnessed in Catholic school, where choirs were rigidly controlled and singing pop songs “for fun” was considered disrespectful.
“Anytime I tried to instill an element of fun musically, usually shot down,” she says. She’s been banned multiple times for being outspoken, for refusing to soften her critique, for refusing to pretend that institutions are benign when they’re not.
At the same time, she’s deeply rooted in dark literature and subversive art. She’s a member of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, a detail that fits perfectly with her aesthetic.
She loves Poe, Bowie, Nine Inch Nails, and the whole lineage of artists who turn darkness into revelation. Her upcoming work includes a collaboration with 24‑7 Spyz and a solo album titled For Those Without Shadows, a post‑apocalyptic project that promises to push her themes of identity, survival, and rebellion even further.
Threaded through all of this is a refusal to compromise authenticity. Whether she’s side‑saddling on a piano bench, painting her face black and white for an industrial performance piece, fronting Judas Priestess, marching in Pride with dark drag queens, or being featured on Real Sex, Militia Vox is not interested in shrinking herself to fit anyone’s comfort zone. “If you guys are gonna make me feel like I’m doing things wrong, I’m just gonna go for it,” she said as a teenager—and she never stopped.
Three hours of conversation with her don’t feel like a linear biography so much as a constellation: classical guild exams and King Crimson, Duran Duran and Dead Can Dance, drag queens and Deicide, Cleopatra Records and shelved albums, Catholic school choirs and banned records, Judas Priestess and Tina Turner, Poe societies and post‑apocalyptic visions. What ties it all together is the same line she screamed at Duran Duran as a kid: “I’m one of you. Take me with you.” She wasn’t asking permission. She was announcing a fact.
Militia Vox didn’t simply move from classical piano to metal. She built a life out of refusing to play dead men’s music quietly, out of insisting that drag queens, trans people, Black women, and neurodivergent misfits belong at the center of the stage. She didn’t just find her voice. She forged it, loudly, and never apologized.
About Alex S Johnson:
Dubbed “The Baudelaire of our time” by John Shirley, primary screenwriter of the cult classic horror film The Crow (1994) and songwriter for Blue Oyster Cult, Alex S Johnson is a retired university English professor, author, editor and publisher with Nocturnicorn Books. He has performed spoken word with the likes of Iris Berry (Punk Hostage Press; The Lame Flames, The Ringling Sisters with Pleasant Gehman), Ellyn Maybe (Beyond Baroque; author of The Cowardice of Amnesia as edited by Exene Cervenka of X and published by Henry Rollins of Black Flag and Rollins Band); Danielle Willis, author of the cult classic Dogs in Lingerie (Zeitgeist Press) and Lambda Literary Award-winning author and retired Yale University trained pediatrician/bi rights and disability rights activist Jan Steckel. Other interviews he has done published on Synchronized Chaos, Blue Blood Magazine, Metal Hammer and Zero Tolerance, etc. include Diamanda Galas, Jarboe, Gitane Demone, Rozz Williams, Lemmy Kilmister, Ronnie James Dio and King Diamond. He lives in Carmichael, California with his family.
KAAL AND MAHAKAAL: A VISION OF TIME AND THE TIMELESS
The ‘Kaal’ represents death, and death is symbolic of mortality. Mortality can be defined only in terms of time. So, ‘kaal’ represents Time. Everything that is born to this earth, – trees, flowers, plants, birds, animals, and men – are mortal as they possess a definite time span. Even if they are not killed, they disappear at the end of their term. This finitude is contained in the seed itself, which grows as per its ingrained potential and then, automatically, a moment comes when the decline sets in. So far as men are concerned, they are governed by their stars, which determine how, what and when of their life work.
Being a part of the creation, every living entity is subject to Time, but they are unaware of the fact that, in addition to Time, they are also being simultaneously governed and monitored by a spatial agency which represents the idea of Timelessness. It is Maha-kaal, the symbol of deathlessness, immortality and eternity. This SuperTime or Maha-kaal is like a satellite suspended in the cosmic spheres from where it keeps a close watch on the entire universal movement, keenly observing how the living objects are conducting themselves.
The ‘Kaal’
‘Kaal’ spares none as the people are trapped in time. Life is a physical entity which is played like a film in which a director [time] wants to say something, and that said, the film is over. However, life represents a confusing web of passions. The protagonists are afraid of temporal authority [courts etc] but remain only vaguely aware of the presence of an over-lording agency, which is recording their movements.
The Uninstructed and the Uninitiated
In general, men show scant regard for the spatial agencies, or even gods, and they never fear they might have to encounter hell. It is a strange peculiarity of these times that hell does not scare anybody. Men create trouble for themselves, because they come to this earth uninstructed and uninitiated. No one reminds them, that they are on a short visa, controlled by time, [kaal], and when their visa is over, they will have to report back. People are blissfully unaware of the fact that their actions are under double check. They find it all right if they get good education, good job, rich marriage, and good offspring. But they have no inkling that all their actions are being recorded, and checked for their genuineness, and if they can succeed in this world with smartness, it will be detected by the spatial sleuths of the Maha-Kaal.
Maha-Kaal
Time that we encounter in our lives is a limited edition of the SuperTime, the Maha-Kaal. The life that we live on this earth is highly constrained. But, everything that we do, has a parallel shot in divine spheres, where our actions are under constant gaze of the stars. Maha-Kaal, the Lord of Eternity and Immortality, who supervises human operations, is in possession of the records of our previous incarnations too. Lord Shiva, who is called ‘Maha-Kaal’, is the ‘Destroyer’ in the Trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh. Maha-kaal, the Timeless agency of God, manages the temporal and spiritual being of creation. He looks over the actions of men, evaluates their life work, and, with the help of Dharamraj, decides the destiny of man.
Maha-kaal and Man’s Existential Reality
The earthly existence which is trapped in time [kaal] is full of aberrations, and the temporal courts punish people who act amiss on the basis of physical evidence which is not adequate enough to judge what a man has done, and what is the extent of his error. Whatever actions they undertake, are just parcels of a larger design which is entirely and absolutely inconceivable. Maha-Kaal, however, takes into account mna’s DNA, and his past ‘karma’, and finally brings up the truth of his actions before deciding his fate. Ordinary people, if they fear anything, it is death. They forget that life is only a small parcel of a larger design and Maha-Kaal is the ultimate arbiter not only of our deeds, past and present.
DR JERNAIL S ANAND
Dr. Jernail S. Anand, with 200 books to his credit [20 epics] is a Chandigarh-based polymath, and a vital architect of the 21st century ethical literature whose seminal work ‘Lustus: The Prince of Darkness’ challenges the moral complacency of our era. Founding President of the International Academy of Ethics, and Laureate of Charter of Morava [Serbia], Seneca [Italy], Franz Kafka [Germany, Ukraine, Czech Rep] and Maxim Gorky [Russia], his name is inscribed on the Poets’ Rock in Serbia. He is an Honorary Member of the Serbian Writers Association, Belgrade. Anand has built a poetics that unites ethics, Vedic spirituality, social critique, and the philosophy of meaning. Anand presents an articulated perspective on poetry as an instrument of planetary consciousness. A moral philosopher, professor, and international speaker, Anand has devoted much of his research to the ethical dimension of language, to the responsibility of the individual within a globalised society, and to the relationship between matter, consciousness, and transcendence.
“Here, beta,” my maasi said as she handed me over a warm glass of water, she was under the wrong impression that I was struggling to deal with the passing away of my mother, just like how she was finding it terrible to not have a sister from now-onwards to daily talk to, after finishing the household work.
I drank a sip, it soothed my infected throat a bit. I walked over towards the window of my room, which had been locked since ages. I entered the room and found it sleeping under a blanket of dust. I pulled my old, worn out wooden chair from the study table, and sat at the window. The moment I drank the last gulp, a tear rolled down my right eye. It was as my brain remembered my entire life, and that how I never had a single good memory of my mother. I must forget now how much I hated, since it is immoral to talk bad about the dead. Will this change the fact that she still tortured me, that she never showed me how warm motherhood is?
I looked all around, the bulb had become dimmer, and the fan had become creakier.
All the memories started flashing in, every incident of my childhood, or I can say every trauma. Living with her wasn’t easy, it required nodding all the time.
I was five when she put me in drawing class. Two years passed away, I couldn’t learn anything. That was the first time she had slapped me, I still remember those four fingers on my cheeks.
By the time I was eight, I was sent off to ballet, although I wanted to be a cricketer.
“You have to look beautiful, that is what matters for a woman,” she would always say, and there would be silence all over. I would spend hours embodying grace and beauty in myself, and somehow I managed to do it, but it wasn’t of any use.
My mom would grab my shoulders and cry out loud. “Why are you a slow learner, tell me why?”
“This isn’t what I like,” I would rebel.
“You are a woman, you must have beauty, beauty and beauty,” she would yell out loud.
She would every day bring in some or the other pastes which would smell horribly, and she would put them on my face all over.
“It is burning like hell, I am going to wash it,” I would say when she would grab me.
“No, it will make your dark tone faire. No, I said”.
There would be oil every time in my hair, and she would shampoo them hard, making them soft and straight, and not like a curly nest like her.
It would pain, but I couldn’t do anything. She hated the fact that I was her Xerox copy.
I couldn’t get any chocolates and cakes, as they would bring acne to my face. I wasn’t allowed to choose what I was going to wear, as she didn’t like my choice. I would always get magazines full of portraits of beautiful models and their tips for looking graceful and radiant when I asked for any comic. I was only allowed to watch cook shows which would teach making modern delicacies, and presenting food in a fancy way. She controlled my life, and all she ever thought was how to make me attractive. She also forced me into being a topper, with me also going to violin and dancing classes every day, not allowed to skip even during my onset of periods.
“I am skipping tomorrow’s exam,” I said one day, too tired from my dance rehearsals.
“No,” she said. She sat there, making me study half of the whole night.
I fell asleep on the day of the exam. When she heard it, she slapped me thrice, tightly.
“Why do you cause trouble to your mother? Why aren’t you turning out how I want you to/ You were born to torture me and bring me troubles it seems,” she yelled that day, the whole house in her terror.
“That’s because I resemble you, curse yourself for that,” I said back, too much frustrated, though I accept a daughter can never in her life tell that to her mother, no matter what happens.
She was hurt, and she cried the whole week. I thought she would stop, but she became even more determined now to make me beautiful. She also did not speak to make, she would enter my room, not speak a word and would sit there, her cold hand pointing me to do whatever she wanted me to do.
I became a distinguished ballet dancer, and could play the violin really well. Her pulling my long hair twice every week to make them silky and smooth turned out to be of some use, they helped me find my first boyfriend whom I married eventually.
“No, I will find a guy for you, you can’t marry somebody else,” my mom objected, obviously.
“Can you please stop interfering in my life,” I burst out wailing that day. “All my life, I lived as you wanted me to live, your will prevailed all the time. Now please, let me take one decision for myself, let me live one day, please,” I begged in front of her.
As the preparations happened throughout the wedding, she was creating chaos, my mother. In the end, I wore what she wanted, and I looked how she wanted me to. During the last three days, she tried to talk to me, but I was already too mad at her for creating an argument at every function. When I was wedded off, I never called her from my in-law’s place. Also, I had then started working again, and I had no time to talk to her except giving harsh and dry replies if she had accidentally called me once in a blue moon.
The day I received the phone call reporting her suicide, I had zero reactions, I wasn’t shocked at all. I knew she was mentally sick, and her life’s motto was to take all of us with her to the asylum.
It wasn’t until I saw her dead corpse that I fell in an abyss, the space of nothingness. I forgot, everything for a second, it felt as if I was the corpse. There she lied hopeless, bald and charcoal on her dark skin, all over her body, after which she hung herself.
“Where the hell were you lost that she did this to herself,” my expressionless and tear-less self told my father, who stood there as if, as if, what has happened, has happened.
Suddenly, my flashbacks went away, and right now here I was in this room for what I came here, to read two diaries left for me by my mother, which was her last wish of this life she had written and put in an envelope saying “Only for Riya”, before she departed forever.
I read through the ten pages she had written, each one slapping my existence to the very core of it. As I completed her diary, I opened the second diary of my father, which my mother had stolen from him and had convinced him by crying for a week that he had forgotten keeping it somewhere. I read all night this long diary of his, full of poems on women, women with silky hair, fair ladies shining bright and ladies smelling of strong perfumes all the time. I saw each mesmerizing beauty’s head-shot he had glued it with love, all the women he lived his life with, except my mother. At first, I thought that this woman’s last wish was also to invade someone’s privacy. Now, it was needed. She was the woman who held her hand out to catch her husband’s love, which was always of some other woman, and it only caught bitterness every time.
“I tried to make him like me more, as I couldn’t leave him for my kids. Every time I ended to make myself more beautiful, he never saw it, as there was someone much better for him ready at each stage of life. Now, no more”. This was the last thing she wrote in her diary.
I sat there trapped in a dark chamber of hatred for her, for my father, and the most for myself. But how could I know this? Every thing made sense now, every dark memory of my childhood lost its hatred. All I could hear was the echoing silence when I never spoke to her for ages, and my dry replies and rough words.
I took up a pencil, with tears dropping on that page, and wrote after the last sentence of my mother in her diary :
