Yolk

I’ve always been jealous of couples, the ones on park benches, hands brushing thighs, cheeks blushing. They are together with nothing to say, but his eyes scan her freckles, she kneads on the cuff of his coat. They both smile at this conversation which has passed between them in a language all their own. This summer in London, I’d walk to Russell Square Park after class and look around at the children pinned to their mother’s legs, couples ripping up grass into heaps then brushing it into each other’s laps, bodies curving together on picnic blankets. Sometimes my eyes would meet a stranger’s. I’d hold the contact a beat longer than an accidental glance and sometimes the clouds would shift so the sun could paint their irises alive.

Back home, I stand with my mother in our kitchen and watch her. Her hands are covered in phulka dough, dry flour dusting her knuckles, her elbows. On the stove, the potato curry is burning, so I turn down the heat and hover over the bubbling pot. My mother and I do not speak. There are craters beneath her eyes, I notice, and I wonder about her life before she was my mother. Jaanmari, puttu, she says, my dear, my gold. I am hers now. She tells me about before, when I wasn’t. She tells me stories of her schooling in Delhi. She would stay late to paint women standing by firelight. She wanted to linger in the classroom; she didn’t want to go home and cook for her parents, my ajji and thatha. She wanted to listen to the silence, listen to the brush against paper, drawers opening and closing, the sounds of her own rummaging as she searched for art supplies.

Sometimes I wish that I did not have to speak in poems, that my mind didn’t move in stanzas. There’s an ache in my syllables when I try to speak over the phone with thatha in Kannada. I want to tell him that I miss him, but the conjugation, the intonation, will be wrong. I sit across my friend on a couch in his college common room. He asks me what’s wrong. My words don’t come out. If I could just speak in ums and pauses. If I didn’t have to say anything at all. If the silence didn’t harden between us, between my mother and I, on the phone with thatha. “Nīvu hēgiddīri?” I ask him, in an accent that isn’t quite right, and he can’t hear me, the meaning doesn’t translate. We both laugh, but I still don’t know how he is.

I can’t comprehend how people grow apart so easily. It’s been two months since I’ve really talked to my best friend. I’ve seen her, but our conversation feels hollow, gracing the surface of things we used to talk about. She didn’t do anything to me and I did nothing to her, but I no longer spent my late nights in her room singing “Hallelujah.” Since then, she’s reached out and I tell her I have to finish an essay, have to call my mom, I need to sleep because I’m getting over a cold. This weekend I walked by a coffee shop and saw her through the window, earphones in, sitting alone with her work. I couldn’t tell if she was sad or if I was projecting my own sadness onto her.

I walked back to my room, but I could not bear the weight of my body. I do not know what it is about the process of growing up, if this is growing up, that settles in the body like dust. I wonder when our silence lost its ease. I sat on the steps, cradled my head in my hands, and cried.

I couldn’t tell, from outside the coffee shop, rain clinging to the glass panes, whether I was cruel for not wanting to see my friend. There is a cruelty at the center of it all, when the violence of the world festers, curdles in us like blood.

On the steps, I kept thinking of my thatha, how I have not made the time to speak to him for months. I was busy, I was tired, the time difference was too large. I want to ask him about his walking group, whether any new members have joined lately and how is the weather, how is it really, do the clouds fade into the sky and is the rain the same kind of misty, warm haze like it was when I visited years ago, when I was younger and still too scared to climb the guava tree?

My parents are in India now, visiting ajji and thatha. Thatha is getting sick. They walk with him on the streets of Bangalore, visiting flower markets that sell kumkuma, a red powder that they spread on their foreheads before praying in the morning. They went to Mantralayam, a prayer village in the south of India, for one day and sent me pictures: people bowing down, scavenging for scraps of salvation. They pray for his health and for my happiness, they tell me over text. In the evening, my dad throws some cardamom, tea powder, clove, milk and sugar into a pot with water for chai, which my thatha, ajji and parents all drink together.

I open every photo they send me but most days I forget to respond. I don’t know how to tell them that sometimes, at night, I sit alone at my desk with my own silence. I don’t want to see anyone but I don’t want to be alone. In these moments, I look at the photo they’ve sent me, their faces pressed together, neither of them looking directly at the camera (they don’t know how to properly take a selfie). I feel sad when I see the wrinkles of my dad’s skin, when I see my mom’s eyes; they seem tired now.

I write poems and I write this but I am still envious of those who can sit together saying nothing. The world around them stills, and no one can break their closeness, can permeate the comfortable silence. Yesterday, my ajji commented on a Facebook photo I had been tagged in, and something in me broke open like an egg. It has been too long since I’ve heard her voice, I am forgetting its rhythm, too long since I’ve worn the scarf that she knit for me before I left home for college — now, I am broken, and I’m waiting for something to spill out.