From what I have been told
by movies, people, and texts,
a person becomes a star
once they are dead
and I have laughed it off every single time,
thinking fables- are meant to make children laugh,
to make them smile,
to be taken as lightly
as the weight of the emptiness between me and them.
After all, how could a person
who dangled a little, slowly walking,
move so far away this quick.
Thinking now, everything that's growing or dead,
was once a child with the softest skin;
like Dadi, like me.
And it hits me, the point of these fables.
As a child, I could be an actor,
pretending to fall asleep to get carried.
A doctor, healing with kisses.
A singer, because she complimented me.
And lately, I have not known what I am,
much less a hundred things in my entirety.
It's fascinating,
I wonder if this is my inheritance.
Fascination;
the point of the stories.
After all, I had never wanted to know
before her hands felt cold,
all the things she had ever been.
I remember her saying,
that her room initially had mud walls
as smooth as her skin was then.
Every time we make a decision,
we lose a choice to make,
we lose the second-best experiences,
and in disposing of anxiety,
a sliver of fascination is traded
with something stable, something concrete,
and a mark appears on the person's skin.
Perhaps, grown of age and works,
blemishes, hardening, a scar
from jumping off a ridge
out of curiosity.
My father mentioned,
He wanted to put an AC in our room,
at the family house in the village,
located directly above Dadi's room
whose every corner, freshly painted,
is now made entirely of concrete.
In the last stage,
of the soft, uncertain skin of the child
come wrinkles.
Right when the person has hardened,
inside and out,
The wrinkles become seemingly infinite,
like the infinity of the stars
and all of a sudden, instantaneously,
the heart and the skin,
both become soft, like a child again.
That should have been my first hint,
that at any moment,
a person is capable
Of becoming anything.
The second, a practical example,
when we burnt her body,
and it disappeared into a form
which I could barely take in with my eyes
but can not yet realize,
to be one with the Ganges,
to breathe as one with the Gods
she devoted herself to.
Maybe giving up a certain amount of fascination
is necessary to gain an understanding of realizations.
56 hours now, I haven't laughed or cried at the movies,
haven't looked at the cosmos with curiosity or certainty,
but something more than wishful thinking,
as against all my beliefs
the stars, despite intent stares
do not seem to be flickering,
as it feels, they have flickered away.
I suppose,
fascination and aspiration are unknown kin
who leave an inheritance for the other
on death.
And in a moment of comprehension
of the stagnant beauty of ever-changing infinity,
they become stars as well.
As I lay on the Earth of our village,
where she had spent a large chunk of her life
without me,
I give the sky the fondest look,
realizing that I am just as far from the stars
as they are from me.
But I try my best to find her,
I know she has with her sharp senses.
Yet I do not wish she exists as a star
but materializes in its belly.
An instance,
in the all-encompassing probabilities
and combinations of elements,
found in endless nuclear reactions.
For she must be reborn like her beliefs,
and I must not allow her loneliness.
It all becomes a possibility
in the boundless stretch of space,
after all, are we, like all,
not made of the same matter
as that of the stars?
As it turns out,
the space between things
is not empty, but rather,
filled with pieces of people, wishes, prayers, hate, affection.
And as my back sinks further into the soil,
I stretch my arms upward,
reaching for the sky,
for things that one might never reach
given a million lifetimes.
But I feel a pilot's rush,
I understand now,
the sky also looks up to me,
that when the longing to embrace
each other is enough,
access to the sky,
becomes a simple matter of admiration.