Yakshini by Smitha Sehgal

By the third day, we reached the long end of our patience and silken desire.

Yakshini

by Smitha Sehgal

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Grandmother forbade menstruating women
of our family from stepping out after dark.
On the first day, we picked nits and lice,
oiled and combed each other’s hair,
braiding it into dangling ropes. On the second day,
we embroidered hibiscus flowers inside
tight wooden frames. By the third day, we reached
the long end of our patience and silken desire. We knew
ways to open the latch noiselessly and leave
rose teakwood doors to the courtyard open at dusk
to hear the white owl flap its wings into the arc
of time, to inhale the scent of night-blooming jasmine
opening to the stained moon. Let the flickering lamp
die out early. In the sound of anklets closing in,
it was not often that someone arrived smelling of
sandalwood and myrrh. It wasn’t often that we sipped
palm toddy or tasted hemp leaves. Long afterwards,
in the luminous stillness of dawn, the wind circling
nutmeg trees gathered shadows of terracotta
figurines we knew from the textbooks of ancient history
of our burial grounds, curvature of their waists, fullness
of breasts and lips much like ours, in the rippling waters
of moss-grown, abandoned stone well.

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