എന്നെ എനിക്ക് വേണം

ഞാന്‍ എന്തിന് നിന്നെ പേടിക്കുന്നു?
നീ ഇതു ചോദിച്ച് മടുത്തുക്കാണും
അന്നാല്‍ ഇപ്പോള്‍ ഞാന്‍ പറഞ്ഞേക്കാം
ഒരുപക്ഷെ നാളെ ഉത്തരം മാറി പോയാലൊ

The Shades of “Liberation”

Islam has always fascinated me. When I was little, I found the muezzin’s calls from the mosque near my house beautiful. I loved to just sit outside, close my eyes and listen. As I grew up, Islam had other significances. Islam was my friend, who happened to have ‘Osama’ as a part of his name and you can imagine the discrimination he has faced. Beat up by mobs, spit at and completely humiliated, he left America last year. Islam was my Hindu friend who found out that she was actually adopted from a Muslim family. She cried more because she had Muslim roots than because she was adopted. I slapped her across the face. My best friend. The poor girl. Islam was the most misstated in that ridiculous History curriculum  I wrote of earlier.  Islam is my friends from Pakistan, Sudan, Iran, Qatar, Bahrain and the list goes on. And of course I have Indian friends from all different religions.  So what’s my point? That Islam didn’t make my first friend a bad person, he endured more than any human being could have and he still didn’t let go of his faith. Islamic roots didn’t hurt that Hindu friend, whose doing fine now and is actually thinking of converting to Islam. And those friends I have, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with them. Yea, I just felt the need to affirm their normalness.

I go to the mall once in a while with my friends. We’d be a group of girls just walking in the mall, sometimes loud and sometimes quiet, but no matter our mood or our noise level, we always seem to attract unwanted attraction. “Hey beautiful!” men, or perhaps I should call them boys, would yell and crowd around us, “Wanna come over tonight? I have a king.”