Creative Writing Prose

The dust settles at the moon’s feet. There are several acres of yearning cultivated along their arms. They are wearing my grandmother’s Dabur Gulabari rose water gleaming on the stretch marks that procreate on their thighs. This is my moon’s body: Udaipur’s silver biscuit back stuck between golden headlines of a wedding, Pallava’s carved lion necks, and tangled roots of a Cochin mangrove peering through its antiquated eyes. This is my moon’s body. Saline rinsing of their soul every morning, when a copper pot greets Suryadev, the sun god and then he responds with wisdom that encloses in a bahi khata, the financial ledger of moon’s transactions with my mother. She is the sole earner of spirituality in this house, but my father speaks in humus, this humble Latin earth. They hold the ground from below, like a cosmic turtle bearing the weight of my moon’s dust and swim across an ocean of space. I watch everything take place, an observer in a sixty-year-old amethyst temple behind my house’s lane. White marble floors rifle in a chant here, they melt my grief. I am in the process of meditation in a crystal temple and my moon’s feet lend me a feather of a bird I am yet to recognise. A voice wakes me, a priest with a palm-full of mishri and the face of the man I had seen in my dream.