My grandmother tells me silver-tongued stories of how broken mirrors are proven to be a bad omen, as she soaks her feeble fingers in mustard seed oil and shakily scrapes my hair back into a braid; the one she learnt to make from her mother, who learnt it from hers.
This is how the women in my family survive.
It is a sweltering summer afternoon and the city smoke hugs the sky outside. We don’t even know what blue is supposed to look like anymore.
Lahore is a city of ashen chaos and we can’t find our way back to each other.
My dadi breathes heavily as the perspiration sticks to her forehead. She doesn’t want me to break mirrors like she did and walk on beds of shattered glass like gliding across melting butter on the kitchen floor. She doesn’t recall what it felt like to be a blackbird, to be free-spirited in the horizon of the subcontinent. Now, her hymn pushed back down her throat and her wings clipped, dadi only remembers ripped bellies, bruised limbs and the crush of her resolve.
She hasn’t known any comfort besides the sweaters she has knitted out of her tears and swept over my back.
This is how the women in my family survive.
Sometimes the jasmines in the garden wilt away from the scars on her sallow wrists and I pretend too not to notice the battle being fought. Sometimes it’s easier that way to act like something doesn’t exist like putting a band-aid on a hole in a wall but shards of glass still remain in the cracks between my toes where I forgot to pick them out.
And in those, I see her reflection.
The writer is an aspiring poetess. She can be reached at [email protected]