my grandmother’s fingers are coarse as she braids my hair,
humming stories in a language my tongue ravages.
we sit cross-legged on the shingled roof my great-grandfather
raised, suspended in sweat and ground turmeric.
from here, puddles bleed gold into burnt soil, and a drooping
sapphire skyline ripples across the Himalayas. I feel my
grandmother’s hands tremble — the gnarled rivers
winding down her palms ran red years ago, she tells me,
back when bullet holes forged the moon and its star.
***
(1947 — the partition of India)
damp from monsoon rains, dirt clings to the soles of her feet.
she can feel the trains’ rumbles in her heels, the
rushing wind in her hair, and it
reminds her of home.
she journeyed many miles to this station;
now dusk kisses the spaces beneath her eyes
as she awaits her brother, bleeding radio static across the border.
whispered prayers rise and fly north with the vultures, to
feast on decaying dreams and crumbling corpses of resilience.
red sun weeps across the rails,
and a whistle like shattered bones cracks midair.
cadavers flop out of carriages,
severed arms grasping skyward for stars long extinguished.
she wades a green sea of blood and dust,
in futile search of her brother’s waning crescent grin.
the dried tears tracked down her face
spell out the inexorable message of war.
***
eyes dark with the shadows of countless restless nights, my
grandmother smooths my tears into lotus petals.
as thunder clouds coil along blurred purple mountains,
I watch grandmother shake, watch her frail shoulders
tremble under the weight of a nation.
does she hear her brother’s voice in the
distant calls of songbirds? see his face in the cornfields,
parted by ravaging gales? I shift
my back to the wind, sink my fingernails into
the corners of the universe, and pray the sky
never swallows my great grandfather\’s house.