Tremble Within

I do not hunger for the high chair,  nor dream of golden thrones.
I do not wish my neighbour’s cars were mine, nor his smile, nor his smartly sculpted god.
I do not thirst to mend the world, its wounds are old, and mine are not heroic.

A good job, a humble home, my family with laughter around,
Parents and close relatives and friends, all happy, healthy and prospering.
I have all this, and yet my mind itches like pink skin around the scab on a wound.

What is this stirring?

It is not envy, nor greed, nor grief. I don’t have those bones in me.
It is not the fear of falling behind or missing out, I never run that race.
It is not ambition knocking at the gate, it is something else.

I see a boy, barely ten, his name "not ours", bleeding on a platform while men made reels.
I see a girl, sixteen, her face “unlike ours”, dragged from her village far to the east, paraded like a victory spoil.
Justice took a nap. She woke briefly when cameras turned.

I remember Dadri, a decade back. Meat, they said.
They didn’t mean steak. They meant a reason to break a skull in some God's name.

I remember the farmer, bent by debt, his bones returned to the earth before the harvest.
They renamed the bill, not his pain.

I remember Delhi, a few years back, fire kissed the alleys, and men cheered. Even the air was divided.
Shaheen Bagh stood like a prayer that the gods no longer answer.

I remember the PhD scholar, whose pen was silenced mid-thought. Too sharp for comfort.
And his birth was termed his fatal accident by himself. Too Dalit for dignity.

And what of the trains that run over dreams, the speeches that twist truth like sugarcane,
The cries muffled by sedition laws, the jail cells filled with those who dared to ask?

And yet,
My hands still hold my tea cup, my legs still cross at ease.
My job pays on time, my friends and I crack jokes on politics and forget.

But my subconcious mind.
It remembers.

Not as protester, not as warrior, not as victim. Just as witness.

That is my unrest.

A dissonance between the comfort I breathe and the chaos that screams just outside the frayed boundaries of my personal life.

A shame without direct guilt, a sorrow without personal loss.
A tremor that shakes the soul not because it is weak, but because it is still human.

I am not angry. But perhaps I should be.
I am not brave. But perhaps I must be.
For the silence I wear might one day choke me.

Not because I did “something wrong”, but because I kept sipping tea
While the nation quietly burned its conscience away for votes.

But then, isn’t that “Something wrong”?