The Weight of the Pixel
The first parchment bore the round, oil-pressed vowels of the coast,
silt under a tongue.
A crossing to Aluva with a single ledger,
merit counted out in black ink on a slip of wood-pulp.
By noon, the desks formed an iron border.
A hand with silver rings dropped three white sheets across my name —
dry gravel on a tin roof, five small squares left blank.
“The soil here belongs to a different script,” she said,
spectacles catching the sharp hum of the overhead tube light.
On the evening transit, my mother kept her back to the rain,
tracing lines through the grease on the windowpane.
At midnight, beneath a lamp smelling of hot dust and zinc,
the blue screen blinked twice.
The fan in the casing continues to whir.
The Architecture of Forgetting
The theft shows itself first in the zinc of the kitchen.
My grandmother stands by the stove, holding the iron salt-pot
up to her ear to listen for the water.
The room un-names its own corners;
the brass lamp an island, the wicker stool a long road.
A gaze through my ribs as if checking the sky for weather,
asking what time the boy will arrive with the evening milk.
Nouns drop along the red oxide floor like fruit rinds.
The light turns the shade of a dried tobacco leaf,
two women with the exact same slope of the collarbone.
Outside, the grey crows are still gathering.
A Map of Displaced Dirt
The monsoon used to land like an uncle with heavy leather luggage,
filling the granite cistern until the green moss went black.
This May, the sky stayed the colour of an unwashed kettle
until the clouds split into grease and silt,
turning the top-paddy into a brown soup over the boundary stones.
My father stayed on the verandah until his ankles went grey,
watching the red mud go under the fence
in the time it takes to boil a handful of coarse rice.
Oil-lamps, land-deeds, and ration cards packed into blue plastic sacks
smelling of old kerosene.
In the school-house basement, the children do not sketch roofs;
the rain keeps hitting the zinc sheet above the stairs.
Time Zones and Broth
The width of the salt-water comes through as a raspy clearing of the throat
at four in the morning, scratchy inside the plastic casing.
On the glass screen, a thumb looks large and yellow,
pointing at a pot of greens boiled over a single burner in Deira.
Short, flat sentences.
The sound three seconds late against the plaster.
The desk sits thirty floors above an intersection of grey concrete,
the monitor glowing with the numbers of a local weather feed.
“The round blue capsule after the rice.”
The screen stays on.
The Inheritance of Cotton
The iron box weighs six seers, a lump of charcoal-pour
with a base worn smooth from decades of wet starch.
It smells of my great-grandmother’s wrists—the heat of oil,
the heavy press of a palm smoothing the pleats of a landlord’s muslin
before the crows finished their first sorting of the yard.
An iron wedge surviving three separate evictions
when the thatch went up behind the cattle sheds.
The lowest shelf, near the bags of parboiled grain,
level with the floorboards.
The heat remains in the wood.
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