Saturdays we left for epic adventures
Through snow capped Kashmiri mountains
Falling in love amid flowering Swiss fields
Dancing wildly in dimly lit Spanish bars

After two hours we'd stop for Intermission
For fried pakoras and warm ketchup
Or cold chai spiced with Milly Aunty's gossip as old as the stained theater seats

From Monday to Friday we’d work
In offices in warehouses in farmyards
Until late nights became early mornings
And our bowed heads kissed concrete

With our eyes blind & our ears deaf
silently waiting for our stars to come

I.
My mother places a dot of
Vermillion
On my forehead the same hands
That have helped
Bury a million
Unborn babies in the lush green
Fields that the brochures display

II.
The young bride enters her groom's house
Her alta colored feet leave red
Bloodstains in her wake
A young girl trails behind
places her little feet
in the same prints and
Waits

III.
The gotar mali has her arms tied above
Her head and her legs splayed blood
Drops from her body and the officials
Frame it in a green background and
call it a flag, call it a country, call it a
Dying woman's honor

IV.
My mother places a dot of
Vermillion
on my forehead
And I wonder if it's way of
branding
Women with an honor
they did not ask for
And cannot control

I am obsessed with my name
The way it swells and curves
With straight edges that can cut
A knife wrapped lovingly in silk

I write it everywhere these days
On papers scattered around the room
On the oily remains of the dinner plate
On chalkboards in empty classrooms
On your skin in the middle of the night

each stroke is radical
Me to mine and
Mine alone

When his fingers traces the border

Around the ridges of her spine

When his breath falls softly

Around the ridge of her collarbone

She whispers in Arabic to him

The words melting in the heat

Absolving this sweet sin

The smell lingered long after she had called the ambulance, after she had scrubbed the bathroom tiles back to a pristine white, after she had thrown out the ******* mangoes he had hid in the closet. For days afterward, she avoided the bathroom, showering the best she could in the old porcelain sink they had installed in the spring when he was able to keep fresh flowers in the kitchen vase. Those days, she would come home to jasmine and broken plates, marigolds and burnt biryani, pigeon wings and torn paper. Some days he was snake-quiet. Other days, his skin was fever hot, his limbs flailing to an alien language, his head tilting back, ululating.
Every day she would carry his soiled clothes into the laundry room, ignoring the thousands of whispered comments that trailed behind her. “Look how outgrown her eyebrows have become” as she strangled the hardened blood out of his blue longyi. “Look how her fingernails are yellow with grease,” as she beat the sweat out of his white wife beaters. “Look how curved her back is” as she hung his tattered briefs to dry in the small courtyard. The sultry wind picked up the comments as it breezed by her, carrying them down the road to the chai stand where they conversed until the wee hours.
Today, there is no wind. The coarse sun has left the mango tree in the back corner of the courtyard too dry, the leaves coiling inward. She picks up the green watering can filled with gasoline. The rusted mouth leaves spots on the worn parchment ground as she shuffles over. Her chapped sandals leave no impression. The trunk still has their initials, his loping R and V balancing her mechanical S and T. They had done it with a sharp Swiss Army knife, its blade sinking into the soft wooded flesh. “Let’s do it together,” he urged, his large hand dwarfing hers. A cheap glass bangle, pressed too hard against her bony wrist, shattered.  
Now, her arthritic finger traces the letters slowly, falling into grooves and furrows as predictable as they were not. When had they bought it? Was it when he had received the big promotion, the big firing or the big diagnosis? Or was it farther back, when he had received the little diploma, the little child or the little death? There was no in-between for him, everything was either big or little. Was it an apology tree or an appeasement tree? Did it matter? The tree was dying.
Her ring gets stuck in the top part of the T. He had been so careful when he proposed. Timing was sunset. Dinner was hot rice, cold milk and smashed mangos, her favorite. Setting was a lakeside gazebo surrounded by fragrant papaya trees. She had said yes because the blue on her sari matched the blue of the lake. She had said yes because his hands trembled just right. She had said yes because she had always indulged in his self-indulgences. She slips her finger out, leaving the gold as an offering to the small tree that never grew.    
She pours gasoline over the tree, rechristening it. Light the math, throw the match, step back, mechanical steps. She shuffles back through the courtyard as the heat from the tree greets the heat from the sun. She doesn’t look back. Instead, she is going up one step at a time on the red staircase, through the blue hallway, to the daal-yellow door. These were the colors he said would be on the cover of his bestseller as he hunched over the typewriter for days on end. Those were the days he had subsisted only on chai and biscuits, reducing his frame to an emaciated exclamation mark. His words were sharp pieces of broken glass leaving white scars all over her body.  
She remembers his voice, the deep boom narrating fairytales. Once upon a time, she had taken a rickshaw for four hours to a bakery to get a special cake for his birthday. Once upon a time, she had skipped sitting in on her final exams for him. Once upon a time, she had danced in the middle of an empty road at three in the morning for him. Once upon a time, she had been a character in a madman’s tale.
Inside, she takes off the sandals, leaving them in the dark corner under the jackets they had brought for a trip to Europe, never taken. Across the red tiled floor, she tiptoes silently, out of habit. From the empty pantry, she scrounges up the last tea leaf. Put water in the black kettle, put the kettle on the stove, put tea leaf in water, wait. On the opposite wall, her Indian Institute of Technology degree hangs under years of dust and misuse.
Cup of bitter tea in hand, she sits on the woven chair, elbows hanging off the sides, back straight. Moments she had shot now hang around her as trophy heads on cheap plastic frames. A picture of them on their wedding day, her eyes kohl-lined and his arm wrapped around her. A picture of them in Kashmir, her eyes full of bags and his arm limp. A picture of them last year, her eyes bespectacled and his arm wrapped around an IV pole. The last picture at her feet, her eyes closed and his arm is burning in the funeral pyre. No one had wanted to take that picture.      
A half hour later, a phone call from her daughter abroad. Another hour, a shower in the porcelain sink. Another hour, dinner, rice and beans over the stove. Another hour and the sun creeps away for good. It leaves her momentarily off guard, like when she had walked home to find him head cracked on the bathroom tub. The medics had assured her it was just a fall. Finding her bearings, she walks down the dark corridor to their, no, her bedroom.
She sits down now on the hard mattress, low to the ground, as he wanted it to be. She takes off her sari, a yellow pattern he liked. She takes off her necklace, a series of jade stones he thought was sophisticated. She takes off the earrings he had gotten her for her fortieth, still too heavy for her ears. She places her hands over eyes, closing them like she had closed his when she had found him sleeping in the tub, before she had smashed his head against the bathtub.  
In her dreams, she walks in a mango orchard. She picks one, only to find its skin is puckered and bruised. She bites it only to taste bitterness. She pours the gallon of gasoline on the ground. She sets the orchard on fire and smiles.

When my uncle came home from the war
he brought seven bags of naan
two pounds of butter and a piece of
shrapnel buried in his stomach

Cook he commanded
Butter the naans, heat
their skin on the stove
until they’re scorched

until they scream for release.
Cut them into a million
pieces and scatter them
Along Victory Avenue.

Once Noakhali’s valiant champion
Who scarfed 100 fuchkas  
With their blood sauce streaming
is now unable to eat

His stomach is a paunch
Growling with rotting screams
pulled fingernails and broken
bones, fragmented stories

In a way, Mr. Nelson's death was the closest we ever got to him. It was the closest we ever came to solving his mystery. He had moved to our small town about five years ago. There were no boxes announcing his arrival. Just a small sign on the postbox and some flowers planted outside the door. Without the presence of moving trucks and their cacophony, he had inserted himself into the community.

We didn't know what to think of Mr. Nelson. We never saw him enter shops. He didn't buy groceries at SuperFoodMart, get his haircut at Barber Joe's, never browsed in the whimsical shops like Shelly's Seaside Surprises or Ahmad's Rugs, never bought clothes in K-Mart. Quite frankly, we don't know what he ate or what he used because there was never a garbage bin. In fact, we don't think he had ever walked down Main Street.

Except when there was a community event. He was always at every single Thanksgiving parade, softball games, and summer concerts. In various shades of corduroy brown and pastels in the fall and wide brimmed hats in the summer, Mr. Nelson would be there. He would never participate, never pitch the ball or cheer in the sidelines. Instead, he would have an old Nokia Lumia video camera, filming everything in sight.

Though no one ever asked him what he did with these videos, there were several theories. Ahmad thought he was a spy, a CIA agent in disguise, waiting to catch someone in our sleepy town. Joe thought he was a ******, reporting back to some godforsaken land in the East. Shelly thought he was just a creep, spying on women behind his sinister lens. We conspired together on back porches and cozy couches, on lazy summer days and cold winter nights. Some of us got tired of all the talk and tried to find out.

There were several attempts to infiltrate Mr. Nelson's house, both covert and blatant. The Betty twins hid in the flowerbeds, the Warden's daughter had tried to crawl in a window only to find that they were always shut. Mrs. Gilovich baked endless amounts of cookies, pies and casseroles only to find herself politely thanked and the recipient of a *** of jam on her doorstep the next day. One day, noisy Edna hobbled over and tried her trick of requesting water, but was greeted by Mr. Nelson at the door with a cold glass and a bemused smile.  

So concerned were we with Mr. Nelson that he came with us on vacations, on roadtrips, and even on our most solemn sojourns. In  hushed whispers he was summoned in distant lands. He skied with us over snow and water and was even known by our most tenuous relationships. It came as a surprise then, when on the last weekend of summer, we received an invitation to Mr. Nelson's wake at his house.

That Mr. Nelson had died was a revelation. Sure, he hadn't come to the last few summer shows but we didn't think too much of it. Still, it would be a lie to say that we were not excited when . Calls were quickly made to every house, to confirm the receipt of the invitation, to go through costume changes and appropriate greetings. How would we be greeted? What would we see?

Some of us, those of us who can never bear to wait, showed up five minutes before while some trickled in five or even ten minutes late. We came in clusters, hushed and energized groups, murmuring our condolences to each other. We were like eager schoolchildren visiting the Holocaust Museum, understanding the gravity of the situation yet unable to contain a sense of excitement.

In the end, we were sorely disappointed. His wife, who we had never seen before, greeted us at the door. We ate cheese and crackers while our eyes scanned every corner, attempting to ferret out an explanation. The rooms could have been any one of our homes, with furniture from last year's Pottery Barn catalogue. There were no hidden corridors, nefarious Communist propaganda, perverted sketches.As quietly and plainly as he had arrived, Mr. Nelson had bidden us goodbye.

For weeks afterwards, we exchanged ideas of what it could mean, what Mr. Nelson could possibly mean, what a life can mean. Once again, he travelled with us around the globe. Long after we had left our sleepy town, Mr. Nelson remained with us, filling us with equal measures of curiosity and dread.  What a shame we voiced, no one would ever remember Mr. Nelson. What a shame, we thought, that Mr. Nelson would outlive us all.