43
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.
