The water of the Indravati.
The water-like wrinkles on the skin of the old lady stacking Siali leaves.
Moonlit water dancing on carved stone slabs.
Bridges of stone across quiet streams.
Streams slipping beneath terraced fields in the valley.
The last village at the valley’s end—
Like the landscapes we painted in school.
A school with three children.
A school with none.
A school without a building.
A school with two rooms and a leaking roof.
Roofs under which some slept under umbrellas,
And I slept on a bench.
A bench by the roadside,
Where an empty alcohol bottle glowed like gold in the morning sun.
The glowing poster-green of paddy fields,
Water layered over them like resin—preserving, deepening the colour.
The preserved soil tucked in the large roots of age old trees
The scent of mehendi in the forest air when there’s no mehendi in sight.
Humid air that clings like an embrace
Lulling to sleep like mother’s fingers trace.
Sleeping in a stranger’s house
Waking up to a kitten and a chicken in the same room,
A mosquito net the only thing stretched between us.
Clothes stretched out on a wooden log between two roofs,
A chicken walking that log like a tightrope stunt.
An aloevera plant tightly strung,
Potted in a long lost helmet
Of someone who once built the dam
And laid hundreds of villages barren
A tree stripped bare,
Save for a small bunch of purple flowers on a thin branch
Or were they just radiant leaves?
A girl with the most radiant smile.
A man digging the road with a face carved like a model’s—
And eyes, God, those eyes.
The eyes of that old woman
Whose grandchildren had died the day before,
Red as a stoner’s.
And the red saree stripped from a woman’s body,
As she bathed by the hand pump,
Her sagging breasts hanging loose, carefree.
Carefree laughter of children who danced with me.
The little girl twirling,
Her mother cremated just the day before.
Cremation fields atop the hill,
The hill soon to be lost to time and memory,
Where the clouds wet my skin,
Where the receding sun blurred into waiting night,
And where we searched for a village, a light,
Where I could hear my own heartbeat with each breath—
Exhausted, scared, cold, wet,
But alive.
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