My grandmother turned mad, not suddenly,
but the way dusk enters a familiar room,
softening corners, shifting shadows,
making the known slightly unfamiliar.
She began to speak in verses then,
as if rhymes were the only vessel grief could inhabit,
as if ordinary sentences could no longer
carry the weight of what she had lost.
Words fell from her mouth like coins
from a forgotten country, dull with age,
stamped with symbols we no longer recognized;
we gathered them carefully, yet never learned the currency.
She says, “Under the neem tree,
dig until the clay grows warm to the hand,
for the earth,” she warns, “keeps its secrets
from men who stand too straight and listen too little.”
She whispered of sapphires buried beneath the chicken coop,
of silver ringing the dark throat of the well,
of a ruby tucked deep in the roots of her own name,
as though inheritance itself had gone underground.
We laughed, but gently
with the restraint one uses around the unstable
as if her madness were listening nearby,
as if it might sharpen at the sound of disbelief.
She hummed lullabies in a dead dialect,
drew maps on the wall with turmeric-stained fingers;
every room became a riddle, every doorway a question
we were still too young, too literal, to solve.
At night we heard her digging in sleep,
her fingers working the dark with patient insistence,
as though the ground itself might answer her
if she asked in the right silence.
We were told to ignore her,
to let the strangeness pass like weather.
But I keep a spoon under my pillow,
just in case she was right.
***
Madras Courier originally ran as a broadsheet with a poetry section. It was a time when readers felt comfortable sharing glimpses of their lives through verse. If you have a poem you’d like to submit, do email us at [email protected].
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