Mother

None can fathom

her beauty in younger days

if they hadn’t seen her

wrapped tight in her teens

in jaba-printed salwar kameez.

There goes Her Majesty,

passersby would purr,

eyeing her honed features –

the moon face, the button nose –

as she sashayed down the street:

the Mumtaz of their dreams.

She gifted eight healthy babies

to a clerk of modest means,

who never, ever aspired

to be anything higher in life,

letting her sacrifice

her meager morsel with a smile

when there wasn’t enough to eat.

My dear skeletal mother,

grown feeble before her time,

still shines golden in the sunset

with blue veins coursing

like my land’s zillion canals.