Noorulain Noor
Dispossession For J, with love The south-facing window of your mother’s house opens to a view of your grave. At dawn, after kneeling towards Mecca, she dons her black polyester-blend burka and steps into the narrow sepia-swathed street. At the threshold of the cemetery, she buys day-old rose garlands at a discount from the street-side florist, slips off her leather chappals, tip-toes to you, kisses the epitaph, hangs a garland on each edge of the headstone. Once home, she sits on the window-seat for hours, prayer beads slipping through her fingers, colliding with each other, her eyes never leaving those roses strung tightly together, wilting in the sun. I think of one rainy season of our childhood in that house a fort made out of overturned rattan chairs, the blackboard in one corner, our names on it, our hands covered with chalk dust feeling like sandpaper, and your mother sitting underneath the muted skylight, shelled pomegranate seeds slipping through her fingers, landing dully in a chipped ceramic bowl. She must have sprinkled powdery black salt on them, filled two glasses with milk, spread a dollop of butter on two steaming chapaatis and added a layer of sliced hard-boiled eggs, laid the feast on a plastic tray with painted pink roses on the border, and brought it to us to devour. We must have accepted this bounty with glee, gobbled it all up, gone back to our make-believe lives inside the enclave of toppled chairs. But I can only remember those small clusters of glossy red seeds escaping her fingers, and the gnawing feeling of fine white sand on mine. 62
