please don't die

india

i find my grandmother's sari blouse in my closet and realize i can't remember the last time i saw her face.

i used to have recordings of her stories because i wanted to make a book out of them someday:

her grandfather taking home a tiny bengal tiger cub, an unexpected softness in him after all his hunting trips. the cub used to follow him around, waiting outside his room. they had to surrender it to a zoo when it grew big and too fierce: some beautiful things are not meant to be kept close by.

monkeys that tried to snatch her little brother from her arms, chased after her sisters as they screamed. one of our gods is a monkey. there's something admirable in their fortitude, perhaps.

a dog that the driver tried to poison and succeeded, two more that ended up dying of disease. these stories were sad no matter how they were told but i understood, anyways: everything familiar will eventually pass.

scorpions in shoes and beautiful, vast deserts: my grandmother, my mother, and my uncle, all alone: small family from kolkata versus a vast country of one billion strangers.

india sounded so bright, so loud, even scary, maybe. i can't find the recordings anymore. something so precious, something unrecoverable: i lost them to time and to being too young to realize how important they were, but sometimes i can taste the way they sounded anyways.