ATTRI DEY

Inherited Current

My grandmother's Dhakai muslin
still smells of her—turmeric and something older,
a grief-smell that has no name in English,
the Bengali word for which is also
the word for rain arriving too late.

She wore this saree the day Partition
split her village into before and after.
She crossed a border with three children
and one cloth that remembered
the body that first broke it in.

I have been thinking about what fabric carries.
Not memory—that's too clean a word,
too much like a library where things are filed.
Fabric carries the body's arguments with itself,
the nightsweat, the longing, the held breath.

When I wear the saree now I feel
a current moving in the weave—
her wrist turning to fix the pleat,
her way of tucking grief into the fold at the hip
so it wouldn't show, so she could keep walking.

Textile as subway: thread as tunnel.
The shuttle of the loom moving back and forth
through years I wasn't born for,
carrying her forward into my body
which learned to hold things the way she held things.

I don't know if I am grieving her
or grieving the version of myself
I would be if she had never crossed.
The cloth doesn't answer.
It just holds the warmth longer than it should.