“If You Lost Your Tongue” is a powerful poem exploring the pain of cultural and linguistic assimilation. Sujata Bhatt uses the metaphor of losing one’s mother tongue to represent the suppression of identity and the struggle to retain cultural heritage. The first tongue, Gujarati, is depicted as a buried, festering wound, a constant reminder of what’s been lost. The second tongue, English, feels foreign and inadequate, never truly capturing the poet’s inner thoughts and emotions. The poem poignantly illustrates the enduring connection to one’s roots and the unsettling feeling of being neither fully here nor there, forever caught between two worlds.