Zarina was on the way to the shop
where she worked; I was driving to my office;
after much insistence, she stepped into my car and
my heart gonged as she slammed the door
and snapped tight the seatbelt.
As much as I tried to fish out intelligent things
to say, ideas and words sogged in my brain;
I asked about her parents whom I saw
at the school gates – in all these years they were faces
seen through incorrect eye-powered glasses,
and she mentioned they were dead
I offered condolences,
wondering what else to say, whether to ask how
she sank into silence
Only after we had passed the hotel with a terrace garden,
she told me how she hid under the bed
where her parents were gored with tridents,
how she was shaking like the finest muslin
on a wind twanged clothesline,
beside jars full of pickles her mother had
conjured from dried tamarind, lemon rind,
oiled chillies and mango mush
how they found her and dragged her out
smashing the glass jars, spattering on the floor
grainy gravy and the last slivers of motherly love;
the many rounds, as everyone wanted a chance
and left her like the sludge in a slaughterhouse,
presuming dead.
My mind raced back to her last day in my kindergarten
eight years before the carnage; back home, I had grabbed
my grandfather’s yellowing atlas to hunt down her new town,
my tears conspiring with the Rann of Kutch to over-salt
the palate of those who orchestrated my heartbreak.
I reached for those play-dough soft hands cupping
my early childhood, but she withdrew them
like the earth recedes along fault lines
perhaps the red thread around my wrist reminded
her of devils; I straightened myself with all the poise
I could muster, determined not to be the little boy
with a slimy napkin tucked in his pocket,
clutching a blotched, irreversibly creased map of Gujarat.