Cartography of the Unseen

My body is not broken—

it is a country with languages yet to be named,

an atlas of nerves that bends in unfamiliar syntax.

You touch it with maps made of myth,

assume the terrain from stories told by those

who never asked for directions.

You call me other

as though difference were a sin,

as though the moon’s dark side

did not hold oceans in its silence.

I do not walk—I navigate,

not through absence, but through a world

that built its doors too narrow,

its stairs too steep,

and call that design.

You think of limbs like architecture,

of eyes like searchlights,

of speech as transaction, and of stillness as vacancy—

but I am a cathedral of stillness,

echoing in stones and shadows.

My wheelchair hums like a hymn,

like thunder rolling through a cracked temple,

unshaken in its sanctity.

I am not your metaphor for resilience.

I am the storm itself,

the ache that sings beneath the surface

of every normalcy you ever trusted.

You see taint; I see translation.

I speak in frequencies

that break the skin of your understanding.

I have lived whole lives inside a blink,

while you hurried past the garden

where sparrows stitched my thoughts into air.

My hands are not clumsy;

they are symphonies in strange time signatures.

My stutter is not a fracture—

it is a heartbeat caught mid-thunder.

What you name delay,

I call divinity taking its time

to reveal the sacred in breath.

You love the word inspirational

the way colonizers loved spices—

for what it added to your bland palate

without understanding the fire, it came from.

I have danced with canes

like rivers dance with their banks—

always touching,

always yearning.

I’ve been held like porcelain,

looked at like prophecy,

pitied like a wilted flower

that secretly poisoned the soil

with questions too ancient to bloom.

There are worlds inside me

you will never step into—

not because I lock the doors,

but because you fear dim lighting

and rooms without mirrors.

When I move, the world moves too—

adjusts, stumbles,

fails its own test of kindness.

I do not mourn the body you expect—

I mourn the expectation.

I mourn the gaze that sees defect

instead of constellation.

I have friends who speak with blinking lights,

who paint with breath,

who write essays in eye flickers

that undo everything you know

about speed, clarity, meaning.

What if time is slower here

because it is deeper?

What if beauty is not speed,

but the patience it takes

to see something truly?

 I am not missing—

I am myth in the making.

I am story not yet read

because the font is too wild

for your eyes.

I do not want to be normal.

Normal is a ghost town

where all the houses look the same,

and no music plays.

I live in mosaic,

in contradiction,

in the feast of being

both wound and wonder.

Disability, a texture.

Otherness is not exile—

it is invitation.

Come close, and I’ll teach you how to listen with your bones.

In memory of Dr. Divya Joshi (1967-2025).

Professor, Dept. of English

Govt. Dungar College, Bikaner.