A ransacked village in India is where my lineage began

Women.

Women, I will

And

Can never, ever know.

Tribulations my western brain

Cannot comprehend.

They made me.

I have the blood of

Hundreds

Of Maharanis, princesses, and queens of India.

The iron will of thousands of brave Pakistani women burn through my veins.

But,

The only monarchs I’ve ever heard of,

Were the ones who

DESTROYED

Everything my ancestors died to create.

I have European blood in my family, but it

Is

Not

Naturally

Occurring.

My great

Great

Great

Great

Great

Great

Great

Grandmothers, and

Every woman in between had to scrub white hot sin from her skin.

Here we are, still choosing to commend these men in our history books

For their “greatness”.

WHAT

Is so great about the rape and massacre of my family?

When I leaf through the

Tattered and barely kept photo albums my mother tries to forget about,

I only look at one photo:

One of my maternal grandmother.

Her hair fell in long reddish, brown tresses down her shoulders,

She adorned her head with a

Hand made

Rose garland.

Her billowy skirt sprawled over grass that was more vibrant than any artificial sod I’ve seen in America.

She wore a smile brighter than Karachi on a summer day.

Her warm, hazel eyes,

Had seen a multitude of lies.

She was barely twenty-five when that photo was taken,

But she had already borne eight children.

My grandmothers would hurl themselves into the underworld,

Silver heads first,

If they saw where we wound up today.