For My Mother, Who Learned to Smile in a Foreign Language

by Vaswati Das

My mother wears her trauma like a second sari, 

drapes it over her shoulders every morning, muscle memory— 

the way a child-bride learns to walk without making a sound,

the way a daughter learns to watch her mother disappear. 

In my dreams, I'm always eight years old, watching her pick up

the pieces of her shattered bangles after my father’s fists. I’d say,

“Maa, one day we'll have a house so big 

your voice won't echo when you weep. One day 

I'll build you a home where no man can reach you.”

Now we have marble floors that gleam like fresh milk, 

but my mother still walks like she's crossing a minefield. 

Her mangalsutra hangs between her breasts like a grenade, 

tick tick ticking with every heartbeat. 

Did you know that a mother's silence can become 

her daughter's entire language? That grief has a taste

like kerela bitter on the tongue, that it passes

from mother to daughter like a cursed diamond? 

At night, I catch my reflection wearing her face, 

her eyes rimmed with kajal and all the words 

she never said. In this land, we're both foreigners— 

her accent thick as ghee, mine bleached SoBo clean. 

Don't tell me healing comes with time. 

Time is just more space for haunting. 

My mother's ghosts have moved into my body,

made a temple of my ribcage, turned my heart

into their prayer room. 

Every time I open my mouth to speak, 

her silences fall out like broken teeth.

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Vaswati Das was uprooted from the lush greenery of North-East India and replanted in concrete soil across the country as a reluctant corporate photosynthesizer. She's mastered the art of PowerPoint presentations by day (MBA from IIM Kozhikode — her parents' refrigerator still bears the admission letter) while moonlighting as a poet by night. Her verses document the things too dangerous and too common to acknowledge in polite, white-collar, upper-middle-class Indian society — the inconvenient mess of her childhood, her generationally warped working class background, and the implicit violence of being born female in India: the weight her mother carried, the weight her grandmother carried, and how that weight keeps showing up uninvited in her own life. She started writing at six and has basically been writing the same poem for twenty years, just with fewer spelling mistakes and more precise anger. Her work says: I'm here, I'm watching, and I have a pen.