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.