By: Adreyo Sen

In her dreams, morning was a cool wind
and the wetness of the grass under her braided head.

The braids had been banished,
as had, in the nefarious hands of Time,
most of the little things so fragile under electric lights
and the fog of her husband’s New York dreams.

She could only sketch them now in her Moleskines –
he was a generous man that way,
a simple one too, transacting with his wife
in the only algorithm he could understand –
and remember the cardamom laced tea
beatified by her mother’s hands, hands
with all the sharp lines of a broken sparrow,
and how she – tall and proud and beautiful –
had chattered and danced and ruled her friends
with iron hands and soft kisses, till finally,
she had been taken captive by a pair of quiet grey eyes,
the same ones that now gazed so often upon her
with a half-fond incomprehension.

She had thought her children would be Kashmir,
in the dresses she’d been making for them
even before she left her home,
stitching in all her desperate secrets in the cunning embroidery
her husband showed off to faculty wives
eager to discover in her spare, proud politeness,
a metaphor for Kashmir.

But no.
The children wore her mother’s face.
But were yet New York in their abrasively confident ways
and whole hearted rejection of their parents’ history.
Did they know they were rejecting her, she wondered,
taking revenge by creating their world from Macy’s and Target and Sears.