Mahek won third place in the 16-18 years category in our 2022 Young People’s Poetry Competition.

 

I’ve never felt at home

I’m proud of where i’m from, i am

But it wasn’t always like this

I used to hide in the summer

Stay in, lather myself in sunscreen

Praying i wouldn’t go a shade darker

Id go back ‘home’ and see the adverts

‘Fair and lovely’ on every billboard

Looked down on in my own ‘home’

For what i wear, How i talk, How ‘white’ i now am

 

I’d come back here and turn on the tv

Seeing myself in the indian characters

Nerdy, awkward, ugly, unwanted

I knew it wasn’t true but i believed

So i didn’t take out my pack lunch

I forgot my mother tongue

I tried to act dumb

I laughed at all the jokes

All these people raved about loving my cultures food

Yet when i ate it, I was disgusting

 

Diwali, every year my best friends at mine

We’d light the fireworks and laugh

Until last year. I don’t even know who she was

The fireworks were too loud wherever she lived

Somehow that was my fault

She called my people dirty, uncivilised

And just like that, tears

Crying on my doorstep at midnight

Just when i thought i loved myself

A stranger broke it down

 

But im building it back up

I wait until summer to get a tan

Even online i love to see people like me

A shared experience no matter how different we may be

Again i turn on the tv and see characters like me

This time smart, beautiful, friendly, loved

I’m trying to learn my mother tongue again

I talk about my birth place

How beautiful, how rich with culture, how much i long to go back

A piece of me remains in India