Not from the ‘Bollywood’ — those scripted storms
that gather, break, and are forgotten by Friday.
She learned it in a kitchen, over tea,
the steam ascending like a small petition;
he read the paper upside down,
frowning at the world’s long grievance
as though it had been addressed to him personally —
then laughed at something she could not see,
and she was, entirely, at home.
She had come from a city that ran on its own pulse —
where the 7:14 pressed her ribcage to a stranger’s spine
and no one apologized,
where the tap in her building ran dry by eight
and the whole chawl cursed in seven languages,
where her mother said jaldi like a mantra
and her father fell asleep standing on the train.
She had learned early
that time was not a river but a local line —
always arriving, never waiting,
and that love, if it came,
would have to be something you could carry
while running.
She knew the trembling was not the proof.
The trembling is common currency;
any hand will shake in the dark
and call the shaking fire.
It was the steadiness — her name pronounced
not as a summons but as a threshold;
his silence, which never required filling,
but was a room she was already standing in.
She knew the instant she imagined Tuesday.
Not the vows, not the conflagration —
but Tuesday: linen on the line,
a disagreement about the route
dissolving into laughter,
his hand at the small of her back
among the oranges, choosing
the same ones they had chosen
for a thousand Tuesdays, and would again.
She knew because fear had changed its address —
no longer will he remain? (a tenant’s question)
but let me become the kind of woman
who merits this unremarkable grace:
a man who burns the bread, who sings
deliberately wrong against the wireless,
who looks across the ruined toast
as if she were the entire morning.
She had not looked for transcendence there —
among the cups, the mess, the ordinary linen.
Yet here, said the kettle, now:
the temporal and the timeless,
which rarely touch, touched —
indifferently, over breakfast.
She did not require the heavens to open,
or a sign inscribed in fire.
She knew the way the root knows water —
no argument, no evidence tendered,
only that slow and unhurried turning
toward what sustains.
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