Meet him.
Not Black, not Muslim, not Latino.
Not trans, not immigrant, not gay.
Not a card-carrying revolutionary,
not the frothing caricature you wanted.
Just a typical, homegrown lad,
straight as a plumb line,
a son, a brother, a suitor, a mate, refined by a conservative hearth—
and such hands are pulling the trigger.

So what now?
Do you stitch another fence from your fears?
Raise another shibboleth?
Wave another flag, red or blue,
as though stitched cloth could cauterise the wound?
You think radicalisation redeems?
You think polarisation purifies?
Antiquity laughs in the physiognomy of your illusions.
From Belfast to Bosnia,
from Rwanda to Westminster’s own whispering antechambers,
blood has always flowed
when men mistook categories for causes.

It is easy to mourn the dead,
to canonise them in marble prose,
to cry martyr, saint, beloved.
But brave you admit
that their words, their deeds, their ideology
cut others to ribbons while they yet breathed?
Valiant you hold paradox in your palm—
to love the slain and still
recognise the lesions they left behind?
Or must you always polish the past
until it gleams in a single colour?

Why does compassion crumble
the moment it meets conflict?
Why do we, clever apes,
demand a world painted in absolutes—
black or white, villain or angel—
when the truth is muddier,
a swamp of motives,
a cesspit of contradictions?

Unconditional love—
is it sermon or substance?
Does it mean to embrace
the murderer and the mourners alike,
to carry both insult and affection,
venom and antidote,
as though they were salt crystals upon the tongue?
And yet—
a pinch of salt, we say,
British understatement camouflaging despair:
It’s all good, baby, baby.
But is it?
Tell that to Gaza’s children.
Tell that to the mother of Stephen Lawrence.
Tell that to the father who buried his boy
after Columbine, after Sandy Hook,
after Uvalde, after London Bridge.
Is it all good?
Or is that phrase a nostrum,
smoothing over jagged veracity?

I ask you—
what if the problem is not extremism
but our refusal to sit in dissonance,
to experience its bitterness,
to accept that love must live with critique,
that empathy must coexist with resentment?
What if accord will never be built
from symmetry or certainty,
but from the messy work of holding opposites
without breaking?

So take your slogans, your scapegoats,
your shrill chants of “them” and “us,”
and taste them—
with a pinch of salt.
Swallow, if you dare.
It will burn on the lingua and glossa.
It will make you question
whether you have ever truly thought,
or only borrowed thought from louder voices.
It will make you squirm,
because exactitude is no banquet—
it is gristle, sinew, bone.
And it is yours to chew.

Once, the patterns were legible.
The habitual offender.
The ideologue nursing his factional frenzy.
The broken soul, warped by trauma or twisted chemistry.
We could explain them away—
file them neatly under pathology or politics.

But now?
Now the face is familiar.
The figure is camouflaged as a friend,
a neighbour who mows the lawn,
the colleague who shares your tea break,
the classmate who once copied your notes.

And when such a countenance turns,
when such a hand clenches around the firearm,
what excuse remains?
What comfort in the old categories?
What shield against the statistic
that the monstrous now wears
the pretence of the prototypical?

So I ask—
If the neighbour becomes the threat, who remains neighbour?
If the scholar becomes the killer, who remains wise?
If the ordinary becomes the executioner, what remains of the ordinary?
And if the veneer of normality can hide anything—
how long before it hides you?

Which brings us to the final, most unforgiving inquest.
People act as they do because people are pushed—
pushed against walls, pushed into corners,
pushed until the mind itself buckles under the strain.

Violence, we are told, erupts only when there is no other way out.
Yet irony mocks us:
it is often the free, the strong, the educated—
those with choices—that lift the weapon.
For you cannot expect the man, the woman, the child in Gaza,
starved of agency and shackled by rubble,
to redraw the law with their bare hands.

So why, then, are those who might have chosen amity
driven to the brink of madness?
Why do those with liberty squander it on bullets?
Should those who push not have learnt from history?
For history speaks, again and again:
whatever you sow—courtesy or cruelty,
mercy or malice— ricochets to you a hundredfold.
And if today resistance rises like smoke,
it is only because tirades of turbulence
were thundered from pulpits and podiums.

So the query stands, unresolved, unavoidable:
How do we bring kindness into a world
so fluent in fury?
How do we restrain the hand
before it clenches into a fist?
How do we calm the earth, unsettled and quaking,
when our very values tremble like sand?
What is ethics, what is morality,
if not the courage to refuse the cycle of return?
And if we cannot answer—
what hope remains of peace at all?

It is a grievous yoke, this burden of borrowed blame—
a collar fastened not by hand but by suspicion’s iron whim.
Each time some wayward soul, bearing a surname that resonates mine,
trips the wires of wrong,
the whole damn nation tilts its gaze—
not toward justice, but toward us.

Us.
The dusky-skinned, the mosque-born,
the ones with crescent moons in names,
whose mothers prayed in tongues too foreign for prime-time comfort.
Suddenly, we are all summoned.
Summoned to the dock of national conscience
to account for sins we neither conjured nor condoned.

They demand an arena of shame—
lip-wrung condemnations,
flag-wrapped fealties,
a parade of disavowals
that must be louder, sharper, more breathless than before.
As though the volume of our denials might absolve us
of crimes not ours.

And I must speak, not softly but starkly:
I am no confessor for a stranger’s sins.
No tribunal sits above my brow.
I owe no one the hippodrome of guilt.
The sun rises without my bidding,
and so too do the madmen fall—without my nod.

I am Indian. Not as an addendum.
Not pencilled in the margin of someone else’s belonging.
But wholly, fiercely, undeniably so.
My veins carry the dust of Bhagat Singh,
the perspiration of Ambedkar,
the silence of every unmarked grave
that nationalism buried and forgot.

Do not ask me to audition
for a passport already inked in sacrifice.
Do not hand me the script of the apologetic native,
for I shall not read it.

Let this be clear as broken glass:
A man’s faith does not annul his rights.
A man’s skin does not tether him to another’s shadow.
Identity is not inherited crime.
It is forged—in thought, in constancy, in scars.

Let us speak, then, of unrest—
of the state that forgets its promise,
that stirs the pot of division
and calls it patriotism.
Of ministers with tongues forked
like colonial serpents,
charming the poor with gods and guns
while coffers burst unseen.

Let us not forget the riots fed on rumour,
the lynchings filmed for Facebook fame,
the laws tilted like bent scales
toward temples and terror.

In such an amphitheatre of control,
what madness to demand that we perform purity?

Enough.
Enough of this Pavlovian shame,
of being summoned to cry on cue,
to swear loyalty not to a land—
but to the lie that we do not already belong.

Do you not see?
The question is not whether we are Indian enough,
but whether this India remembers what that means.

So hear me now—
I am Indian in every breath I take,
every grave I’ll return to,
every injustice I’ll fight till my bones are ash.
I will not lower my voice
so others may raise their fears.

I will not apologise for my name,
nor for the noise it makes in narrow throats.

This land is mine—
not because I say so,
but because it is written in the soil,
in sweat, in struggle,
in the quiet, unmoving certainty
of those who stayed
even when the nation turned its back.

This is the beginning.
And that—regardless of your stare—
is also the end.

No sugar on this tongue, mate.
Only ash and iron.
The tale’s older than supremacy, older than script,
etched into sandstone with the bones of the forgotten.

A tough case?
Call it what it is: an open wound.
A brutal ledger, autographed in the blood of men
who prayed eastward and spoke in tongues
your maps could not fathom.

There is no mistaking the pattern —
from Andalusia’s cathedrals repurposed,
to the sickly glow of Guantanamo’s cages,
from the Sykes-Picot lines drawn by gin-soaked hands,
to the drowned faces in the Aegean,
still clinging to the smell of home.

I have watched them shuffle in,
barefoot, broken-backed,
clutching nothing but the word ‘hope’ —
a word turned counterfeit
the moment it passed foreign lips.

They have stared down barrels,
felt boots on their necks,
and lived to count the microaggressions
that chip away at a man’s soul
quicker than any bullet.

The psychologist would call it ‘othering’,
the philosopher would call it ‘absurd’,
Kafka wrote it in code,
Camus wrapped it in smoke,
Orwell saw it, bled it, named it.

Muslims — an easy shorthand
for fear, suspicion,
a wildcard in the media’s deck.
Brown skin — your convenient silhouette
for terrorists, refugees, cockroaches, invaders,
depending on the decade.

London, Paris, Delhi, New York.
The skyline changes, but the cold shoulder remains.
Your streets, carved by colonisers,
still smell of the sweat of Muslim hands
who built them, unthanked.

We don’t ask for much, you know.
No thrones, no sceptres, no crowns.
Just a square of earth to call ours,
unspat upon.

Yet you treat us like relics,
museum pieces behind glass,
or worse: statistics.
Collateral in a war we didn’t declare.

You fear us,
because your history books taught you to.
Your Churchill, fat with imperial pride,
let Bengal starve as he lit cigars.
Your Kipling spun verses,
singing the ‘White Man’s Burden’
as Muslim corpses paved his kingdom’s roads.

And today?
The same old tune —
syllables stitched into soundbites:
‘radical’, ‘extremist’, ‘immigrant’.
When all we are is weary,
exhausted by centuries of suspicion.

A quiet racism,
the kind that does not shout but whispers.
In job interviews, in airports,
in the narrowed eyes of neighbours
who’ve lived next door for decades
but still call you ‘foreigner.’

We are not cattle, mate.
Nor your scapegoats, nor the unfeeling mountains
against which you hurl your inadequacies.

We breathe the same bitter air.
We bleed the same red.
Our prayers are not calls for conquest,
but quiet hopes to be left unmolested.

Emma Lazarus wrote of your golden door,
but it slammed shut long ago.
Now you build walls,
literal and psychological,
to keep us in check.

You, the majority,
the architects of borders and bullet points,
fear us.
Why?
Because to welcome us would be to admit
your systems were built on sand.

We ask only this:
Let the soil you claim as yours
recognise our footprints too.

History will judge you, as it judged Rome.
And the verdict will be cold.
Because you had the numbers,
the wealth, the power,
but lacked the humanity.

The question isn’t,
“Are we safe with you?”
It’s:
“Are you safe from the rot you’ve sown?”

For without the hands you vilify,
who builds your cities?
Without the backs you bend,
who shoulders your economy?
And without the hearts you break,
who tells your children
the world can be better than this?

So I stand here, in this grand courtroom of existence,
the defendant, the witness, the accuser, the victim.
And I ask, plainly:
Haven’t we been through enough?

We are not seeking charity,
just the decency owed to any human soul.
Not asylum,
but home.
Not tolerance,
but belonging.

If your scriptures, your constitutions,
your manifestos, your manifest destinies,
mean anything at all —
open the damned door.

Let the house you call civilisation
be more than just walls.
Let it be a hearth.
And let the fire warm all who gather,
without question.

For the world is tired.
And so are we.