Aditi Rao’s Poems: Understanding Present Through Past

line maker, one of three Indians to draw

the border separating his home in Lahore

from our lives to come. In those secret

months, his old city watched him, eyes full

of questions about nations being birthed

and dying. My grandmother is still proud

of his secrecy, the way he did not even tell

his children, so that when the news came,

they too bundled possessions and crossed

the new line their father had helped draw

with guns (some of the family died, others

would talk of looking constantly at death).

In the new India, they set down roots

in a city of forests and boarding schools

I am now inheriting. Yesterday, walking

down Mall Road, my eyes swallowed, slowly,

the giant tricolor hovering over old British

buildings, a new orange Hanuman towering

over Christ Church. For a brief moment,

my throat caught in pride, then sorrow,

We made this home, and now, new lines?

My mother had tendonitis

like her mother before her. I was meant to

have my grandfather’s hands, not the one

who used a rusted knife to carve more life

into the lines on his palm. But the other,

not-biological one who carved driftwood, nursed

saplings into fruit, sometimes cooked us Chinese

food (when he was dying, the doctor remarked

on the strength of his grip). I run clay, not sawdust,

through these palms, trusting them when the rest

of my body fails. Today, as I borrow my mother’s

fraying wrist brace, I become most certainly her

daughter. This, too, is what legacy looks like, this blue

too-tight glove, simultaneously support and stifle.

This woman, praying

to a djinn in a cave of sleeping bats

-- she is my city, an accumulation

of dents, six missing stones, incense-

blackened walls in medieval mosque,

a mix of emperor edict and stray dog.

I count my joints, the places inside me

that bend, twist, crack open. What is a city

but a constant encounter with one’s own

fragility, the many ways a life can break?

This woman is alive in a cave of sleeping,

her head bowed, her faith spanning

centuries, scaring authorities that insist 

on history as mere backdrop. This woman is

continue. She is my city, an accumulation.

(At Ferozshah Kotla, November 2018)

Aditi Rao is a writer, teacher, potter, and narrative practitioner.