She went.
And I didn’t realize she was gone.
Curled in the spotless white chādar
her golden locks I used to pull
looked as normal as ever.
I searched the whole day
for the salt porridge she used to prepare
with the hand
a potent paralysis attack had spared.
With her five sons seated around her,
her daughters-in-law at work in the kitchen
and her husband watching calm -
the proceedings
(he might have poured his grief in a poem later on) -
she looked to me
as domineering and calm as ever.
I hoped the whole day
she would rise
and throwing away the cotton plugs in her nose
would smile through her fallen oral castle;
and listen to my exaggerated accounts
of my mother’s cruelties
(she seemed to be the only one who could scold her).
She didn’t.

I watched her crumble to ashes
leaving behind a hazy signature
on an eight-year-old mind.

Samartha Vashishtha

First published in The Journal of the Poetry Society (India), New Delhi (2000).