The Ring

 

The Ring

*For my ajji, Ratnabai

I wonder if she thought of me then, when
her fair-skinned daughter-in-law unclasped her
diamond nose ring, black bead mangalsutra, hex-
agonal earrings held by tiny chains to her pinnae.
I see her fingers even now, nimbly pleating and
unpleating, tucking and retucking purple plaid silk
like a puppeteer. Colors change in the shimmery
lights and shadows, only never true widow’s white.
I run into her one day, exiting the stone washroom,
her hand bloodied, held up in benevolent surprise.
She beckons me to follow, a ghostly chimera
who climbs a whitewashed staircase to rainwater.
We draw that sacred element over and over
from the cistern to purify our hands, stoves, baths,
wombs, feet, hair, floors, rooms, steel, stone, clay,
hands, food, bodies. We are deities are we
revered. Laid out on her deathbed, wizened, elfin
elder no longer on her haunches, feral, silently
howling her black hair into the brass white
of birth, death, rebirth, afterbirth, and birth again.
Those of us born and reborn from her gather on
a Bangalore rooftop as the treetops scrub the air
polluted. Together we smelt that nose ring
from child-bride diamonds into liquid-gold futurities.