Heirloom Poem by Arundhathi Subramaniam

My grandmother,
wise even at eight,
hid under her bed
when her first suitor came home.

Grave and serene
her features, defined
as majestically as a head
on an old coin, I realise
through photographs, clouded
by the silt of seasons, like the patina
of age on Kanjeevaram silks,
that in her day, girls of eight didn’t
have broken teeth or grazed elbows.

Now in her kitchen,
she quietly stirs ancestral
aromas of warm coconut lullabies,
her voice tracing the familiar
mosaic of family fables, chipped
by repetition.

And yet,
in the languorous swirl
of sari, she carries the secret
of a world where nayikas still walk
with the liquid tread of those
who know their bodies as well
as they know their minds, still glide
down deserted streets - to meet
dark forbidden paramours whose eyes
smoulder like lanterns in winter -
and return before sunset, the flowers
in their hair radiating the perfume
of an unrecorded language of romance.

The secret of a world
that she refuses to bequeath
with her recipes
and her genes.