The Fire of No Fixed Star

I am a son of shifting borders,

a map redrawn in blood and silence.

My father’s birthplace is a wound

that never heals — Kashmir,

a name that means both paradise and partition.

The Dogras’ cruelty, the split of ’47,

the land now called Azad, yet bound,

a colony of someone else’s making.

He carries a tongue that no longer fits,

a history that no longer belongs.

I was born in Birmingham,

a city of steel and smoke,

where the word English

is a gate I cannot enter.

It demands blood I do not have,

a history that excludes my face.

The British moniker sticks,

but it does not hold me.

I am the son of an immigrant,

a shadow in a classed and racialised land.

Now, I sit in the Netherlands,

where the canals run straight,

but the past curves like a noose.

The Dutch still dream of empire,

while their language tests my skin.

The more I learn, the more I am reminded:

this is not mine.

I cling to Europeanness,

a passport of skills, not roots,

but the Union frays,

and the right rises,

dragging me further from belonging.

I am a scholar of humankind,

because I am none and all.

The fire inside me burns

to understand what it means to be,

to stitch together the fragments

of a self that cannot be whole.

Rootlessness is my inheritance,

a curse and a gift.

I intellectualise to survive,

to make sense of the strains

of this existence.

If I lose this fire,

I lose myself forever.

But I have no choice —

it is do or die.

And so, I do.

I write, I teach, I question,

I build a global community

from the ashes of my displacement.

I will live by this,

and I will die by this.

My identity is a question,

not an answer.

It is a flame,

not a fixed star.

And though it burns,

it also lights the way.