They say, that our curry laden tongues
Stress unnecessarily on the 'R's and the T's,
We seem to be rolling syllables like pebbles,
In the banks of our spiced mouths
Unlike the liquid drawl which astounds.

But Macaulay's Minutes made its presence felt,
Like an ancient river made to change its course,
And it wasn't long after 1835
That the ghost of Shakespeare was invoked
In sunlit classrooms on winters too warm
And summers too wet
Working on the umpteenth character sketch.
And we knew how Laila and Majnu
Could have ran off to the imperial lands,
And yet face death under the disguise of fair Romeo and Juliet.

So when a girl wrote sad poetry in English,
We began to see Plath lurking under her brown face,
Like the grafted multicolour roses,
She loved to grow in her flower garden
Under skies of hawks and men flying planes.

As she scribbled page after page in bed,
Cracking meanings from Chaucer and Spenser
Like the golden unseen core of parboiled eggs,
Listing ironies so evident in unabridged texts,
Creating an irony herself,

Where the once colonised dissects
The ways of the coloniser and his intents,
To master them
And create her own context.