My Mother Language

I fuck in four languages.
My lover sucks my breasts in Malayalam
I smooch him in English.
When he rubs my navel
I feel Bengali on my skin.

Every time I moan
I moan in Kamtapuri
as I heard in the language my
mother moaned under the thatched roof in the
wee hours of the morning
and my father was cautious of
not to break our sleep.

After the lovemaking
I dream in the language
of my orgasm –
Kamtapuri.*

*Kamtapuri – the language is spoken by a large number of people in North Bengal. Though Kamtapuri or Rajbanshi made its way to become one of the official languages of West Bengal in 2018, still the mainstream community treats the language as “other”.

Moumita Alam is a poet from West Bengal. Her poetry collection, The Musings of the Dark was published in 2020. The book has about a hundred poems written in protest against the humanitarian crisis from the abrogation of article 370, the Delhi riots, and the Shaheen Bagh movement to the unbearable sufferings of the migrant labourers due to the unplanned COVID-induced lockdown.

Featured image: Kier in Sight / Unsplash