Father

Noorulain Noor Father

“Sever my name from yours, then,” you said, your voice thick like lassi sloshing against steel, your hands in usual repose but for the fountain pen clasped between thumb and index finger, whipping through air, measured, sinusoidal.

God knows what coalesced inside me— perhaps the malleable pride I inherited from you that we have both, at times, limbered or coaxed or obliged to become armor as well as weapon.

But I remember your eyes, the same waxy brown of ploughed soil as mine, our only threat of betrayal, our only leverage on each other — they never could lose the warmth of golden harvest fields we had walked across

together in those old days, our footfalls leaving impressions in the cane patch, yours always deeper than mine, and mine missing for furlongs at a stretch when I took care to tread on the furrows you made.

I wonder if a tired farmhand going home for supper saw our winding trail and thought that the child vanished among the crops while the father meandered forth towards the dipping sun, the hobnobbing village.