The road is everywhere now
houses adrift, clouds sliding past Preet’s roof, past every gate.
Blue water swallows the old fence lines.
Boys who ran through mustard fields
float face-up, eyes wide to a sky gone silent.
The wheat called for rain. Rain came,
and came. And will not leave.
Barefoot on the crumbling bund, I watch
yellow blooms bow beneath the current
mustard that grew waist-high last month
now learns to breathe sideways.
A duck dips through a bus shelter.
My father’s tractor, red once, rusts in a stranger’s field.
The floodwater knows no Punjabi, no Hindi—
just the physics of fill and drain.
At the relief tent: women,
silent, wringing silt from dupattas.
A child asks when. A mother shakes her head.
This water plays no favorites.
It takes the wedding album, it takes the diesel can.
Roads will spend years remembering their routes.
My sister says: ik teer naal do shikar—
but this arrow hit everything, killed nothing clean.
The proverb floats by, useless as soap,
and we stand in water to our thighs,
watching the old words
drift.
