I read body language for a living. I watch how people sit, where their hands go, the half-second a face betrays something a mouth won't say. But this piece isn't about a cue or a case study. It's about a poem my mother, Laxmi Priya, wrote — and how much it said without a single gesture.
She titled it Jo Main Bhagwaan Hoti — "If I Were God." When she says God here, she means whatever name you reach for: Bhagwaan, Allah, Jesus, the force you imagine sitting at the centre of creation. The poem asks a simple, almost childlike question. If that power were hers for a day, what would she fix?
What she would change first
Her answer is not grand. She doesn't ask for paradise or for an end to suffering in the abstract. She starts much closer to home: she would correct the small flaws in her own creation before letting it loose into the world. And then she goes straight to the thing she has clearly thought about all her life — the way men and women are made to feel about each other.
If she were God, she writes, she would make man and woman the same in worth, different only in form and colour. There would be no pride in being born a man, no quiet assumption of being the superior one. The demon of ego that hides inside that assumption simply wouldn't exist. No one would be cast as the object of pity, and no one would be handed the role of the one who scolds and commands.
The line that stays with me
The verse I keep returning to is the one about love and respect. In her ideal world, a man would carry the same true love and respect for a woman that she so often carries for him. The same loyalty. The same pride in the relationship itself rather than in dominating it. Responsibility and faithfulness would be balanced the way, in her eyes, a woman already balances them — and even heartbreak, when it came, would be felt the same way by both.
That is a heavy observation dressed in very simple Hindi. She is not shouting. She is describing an imbalance she has watched up close and naming, gently, what fairness would actually look like.
Where the poem lands
She ends with the smallest, sharpest wish of all. In every relationship, she writes, let the contribution be only this — to truly play one's part. And then no woman would ever have to feel discarded. No woman would feel like something used up and thrown away.
I have spent years teaching people to read the unspoken. What strikes me about my mother's poem is that she has done the reverse — she has spoken aloud the thing most women carry silently in their posture and their tired eyes. The shrinking, the over-giving, the quiet apology in how they hold themselves. You can see it on a face long before anyone says a word.
I'm sharing her words here because I think they deserve to be heard beyond our home, and because the kindest thing I can do as her daughter is not to translate her into something cleverer than she is. She wrote plainly, on purpose. If you understand even a little Hindi, the original lines will reach you faster than any English version of mine. Read them slowly. Mothers are rarely asked what they would do if the world were theirs to redesign. Mine answered.
Thank you, Mummy. And thank you for reading her.