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Our fathers were on fire in the black shadow of which, her partially hidden silhouette in a white salwar & black hair was glowing. Women are not allowed to be present in a cremation ceremony except our mother who was going to heaven by being burned alive with her dead husband.
We were 12 and crying. She was watching using the ashram wall of the Widows. I was watching her. I had only ever seen her in dirty clothes, two fishtails & dirty black hands, helping her father collect remaining ash leftovers after the living left the dead ashes in the Ganga.
Every morning I used to accompany my father to the Assi Ghat & every morning she would look at me. Today, I looked at her. She was white, her chest had buds & her hair was open, her face clean with tears.
Her eyes were no special color like blue or green but her eyelashes were wet. They blinked, & when the lower lash touched her skin, it reminded me of the clean stones near the bottom of Lakhaniya Dari, the waterfall on the outskirts of Benares where last monsoon, my friends took me. We were sitting on those stones & were continuously sprayed with the bouncing water falling on them.
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BENARES
RomansNo longer innocent, they sometimes betray her age or maybe I was just deceiving myself. When she looked at me, I looked for hope in her eyes. In passing each other on the same road, it did not happen often. But when it did, the gap between us died.
