Moon at Half Past Noon

The dust here has a different weight.
It settles on your comb, the one with two teeth missing,
on the stack of your saris, smelling still of you and camphor,
on the archives of our silence.
I am the curator of this ruin.

(The memory is a fine, white thread, tied to an ankle. It leads back…)

First, the shock of the garland.
Heavier than I expected.
The flowers bruised, shedding yellow pollen on my new red sari.
His face, a stranger’s, a closed gate.
I was fifteen. My body was a room being sealed shut.

That night, in the shack that breathed with ten other sleeping forms,
we lay on the charpoy, a taut net of suspense between us.
We measured the wait in the slowing of breath,
in the final, distant snore from the corner.
The ropes groaned one low note as he turned.
His hand, in the dark, was not a lover’s touch,
but a question mark placed on my arm.
The whole house seemed to hold its breath.
Intimacy was a conspiracy of silence,
a secret passed between two bodies in a room full of witnesses.

(The children, half-asleep, in their corner:)

The ropes sing a tired song. A shuffle, a muffled word that is not a word.
Is it a fight? Is it a game? The dark makes it all one thing.
A warm fear, a curiosity, pressed into the mattress.
Sleep comes like a blanket, smothering the question.

(The world outside our four walls:)

Then, the marketplace voices, slick with laughter.
“Getting enough sleep, brother?” His uncle’s wink.
“Someone’s looking tired these days!” The women’s circle,
their eyes on my waist, their words weaving a cage of “fun.”

Every joke was a fingerprint, smudging something clean.
Every laugh, a stone thrown at our private window.
We learned to stop opening the shutter.
The touch that was a question became a statement:
“Be still.” “Be quiet.” “Don’t give them a thing.”
We built a fortress of our performance,
until we forgot the secret password to each other.

(…the thread pulls taut, a decade on…)

Whose hand was that, placing the extra roti on my plate when the wages were cut?
Whose voice, a low growl to his mother, “She is tired. Let her be.”
The power was a subtle shift, a seepage.
It was in the way I held his son to my breast, a kingdom in my arms.
It was in the knowledge that his comfort was my domain, a territory I ruled without a word.
He held the money. I held the keys to his peace.

(A memory he forgot, but the house remembers:)

The year the factory noise entered his bones and never left.
He would come home, his hands trembling, his speech a sharp weapon.
One night, he shouted. I did not flinch. I took the water pot,
poured it slowly, carefully, over his cracked feet.
The shock of the water silenced him.
He looked at me, truly looked, and for the first time,
I saw the boy behind the gate. I had the upper hand then.
It was the power of seeing, and of choosing to stay.

(The narratives begin to braid, the I and the You merging into We.)

We were a joint enterprise, then.
A business of survival.
Our battles were not against each other, but against the world.
The leak in the roof was the enemy.
The school fee was the enemy.
We built a fortress of our shared defiance,
our backs pressed together in the fight.
There was no you, no I. Only the structure we had become.

(And now, the collapse of chronology. The present ruin is all that remains.)

This charpoy is too wide.
I sleep diagonally to fill the space you left.
The doctor talks of blood pressure and solitude.
I look at my hands. They are your hands now.
Knotted, veins like rivers on a map.
I am becoming you, to keep you here.

You began as a girl, trembling on a cold floor.
You became the pillar that held up my sky.
I began as a boy, playing a tyrant with a stranger.
I became the earth that held your roots.

We buried the ‘couple’ long ago.
What remains is this fossil, this echo in the bones.
A love that was not a feeling, but a fact.
As solid, and as silent, as this dust.