Vandana Khanna

I want to reach you— in that city where the snow only shimmers silver for a few hours. It has taken seventeen years. This trip, these characters patterned in black ink, curves catching on the page like hinges, this weave of letters fraying like the lines on my palm, all broken paths. Outside, no snow. Just the slow pull of brown on the hills, umber dulling to a bruise until the city is just a memory of stained teeth, the burn of white marble to dusk, cows standing on the edges like a dust cloud gaining weight after days of no rain. Asleep in the hot berth, my parents sway in a dance, the silence broken by scrape of tin, hiss of tea, and underneath, the constant clatter of wheels beating steel tracks over and over: to the city of white marble, to the city of goats, tobacco fields, city of dead hands, a mantra of my grandmother's— her teeth eaten away by betel leaves—the story of how Shah Jahan had cut off all the workers' hands after they built the Taj, so they could never build again. I dreamt of those hands for weeks before the trip, weeks even before I stepped off the plane, thousands of useless dead flowers drying to sienna, silent in their fall. Every night, days before, I dreamt those hands climbing over the iron gate of my grandparents' house, over grate and spikes, some caught in the groove between its sharpened teeth, others biting where they pinched my skin.

1. Two Gods: the one in the closet and the one from school days and both are not mine. I opened the door on God at dusk and closed him the rest of the day. He perched on the ledge above my father's shirts and wool suits, a mandir in every Hindu house, ours smelling of starch, surrounded by ties and old suitcases. I was the ghost at school, sat on the pew and watched as other girls held God under their tongues. My lips remember the prayer my parents taught me those evenings with their bedroom closet open—Ganesh carved in metal, Krishna blue in a frame. I don't remember the translation, never sure I really knew it. I got mixed up sometimes, said a section of the "Our Father" in the middle of the arti, ending in Amen when I meant Krishna, Krishna,

They didn't find it in me until months later— just like Vallejo who died on a rainy day far from the heat rising over a garden in silvers and reds—far away from the din of buses, tobacco vendors, cows that overran the streets with their holiness. Laid on the surface of the Ganges, the thin shells reflected light, clamored against the current. Far from the Atlantic, farther still from the Potomac. Same color of night, dull dawn. The fever should have churned my blood into tight fists while the sunset stretched across the sky like an open mouth. Everything was splintered heat. I'd awake to winter in D.C., find streets covered in snow, the words of some ancient language blooming under my ankles like a song, a mantra called home. I could trace it like a geography of someone I had once been. How to explain the hum of mosquitos in my ear, sensual and low, nothing like the sound of rusted-out engines, police sirens, a train's whistle. How easily I'd lost the taste for that water, opened my legs to their hot, biting mouths.