Between two continents, I stand in the ruins of a palace, peering through a crack in the bricks. I like staring when I can’t be seen. Invisibility feels like access.
My sister should be here. We never got to plan futures the way other sisters do: a house in the hills, tea at sunset.
In the parking lot beside the palace, vendors sell fish, roasted chestnuts, bread. An old man lifts a pigeon from a box. A string tethers its claw. He launches it like a kite. I watch the bird rise in stuttering loops. The sky lightens into pale yellow.
A flap of wings cuts across my view. For a moment, I can’t tell if the string is still there. Then the bird drops. The sky turns grey again. Below, the pigeon is back in the old man’s control.
I remember my mother returning to the terrace storeroom again and again, even after our father was gone. It’s where she used to shut herself in for hours to hide from him. “I’d rather run naked in the street till my feet give out or stay in that piss-smelling room than look at you,” she’d say after he’d call her out on her skipping medicines, yelling at neighbours, or smoking bidis.
I move on from whatever would happen to those pigeons. I frame what I saw as an old tradition when I call my sister, “They bring their birds out from cages, who fly in circles, eating crumbs out of their palms.”
She says, “Remember, our turtle who came out after months of hiding. Ma was so thrilled. She made kheer and put a little for the turtle too.” I laugh, and for the first time in a long while, I breathe fully.
Garima Chhikara is a writer from Bangalore, India. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Forge Literary Magazine, Hypertext Magazine, Hobart, Cherry Tree, Lost Balloon, BULL, and elsewhere. Find her at garimachhikara.com.
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