May 15th prompt by Ananya Dhawan which is on Identity.
A Prose poem.
When people ask me what my identity is I always fall silent. I define it differently from everyone I know. So.
They see me as certain things, Keralite, Malayali, South Indian, Dravidian, Syrian Christian, CSI father, Mar Thomite mother, middle class, Bangalore, NRI, professor of English, writer, born 20th century, Indian, brown, medium height, democratic and left-leaning, straight etc.
When I look in the mirror I only see that I am middle-aged, brown-skinned and a man.
When I look inside I see that the soul has no colour, and no sex or gender or age.
When I look deeper I see nothing, There is no such thing called an i/Identity, only a den (the body) and nothing inside but a flux, a beautiful ever-changing constancy of a flux that will end with my death and be no more. It has no name, time, place, space or anything else attached to its namelessness or non-beingness. This does not mean it is meaningless. This scares the hell out of people who are all so hung up on their identity/identities, defensive, protective and aggressive or passive-aggressive proud of them/it, their petty I/i, me,me, my, we, us, ours, mine trip, so they end up avoiding me totally. It doesn't matter equals energy.
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