Turmeric
Her kitchen doesn’t hum.
It hisses.
The linoleum is a skin of grease under my heels,
air heavy with the sting of onions chopped since 5:00 AM.
Her knuckles are swollen—knotted ginger root,
pressing into dough with a force that looks like a grudge.
She doesn’t talk about revolutions.
She talks about the price of eggs
And how the neighbor’s cat ruins the
Mints.
When mustard seeds pop in hot oil,
they jump like frantic, black heartbeats hitting a tin lid.
I eat her courage, but it’s bitter,
stuck between my teeth like a peppercorn.
Forty years of never being asked
what she wanted
Cereus
One frantic hour of light
in a city that only sleeps when the power fails.
On a balcony cluttered with rusted Godrej chairs
and a cracked plastic bucket, I open—
a medicinal scent cutting through the exhaust of the flyover.
My petals are waxen, alien things,
shivering in the hot draft of a neighbor’s window unit.
Below, a pigeon with a mangled foot
pecks at a discarded lottery ticket under the neon glare.
I bloom for the night shift,
for the woman in 4B who smokes in the dark,
while her husband’s snores
compete with the fan.
I bloom for the ignored—
for anyone who knows what it’s like
to be beautiful only when there is no one left to see it.
The View from the Flyover
The sky isn’t blue; it’s the color of a bruised knee.
Below, the slap of plastic slippers on wet asphalt
is the only rhythm we have left.
A pothole holds oily rain,
reflecting a towering billboard for The Emerald Heights—
luxury flats with infinity pools
rising over a gutter that has forgotten how to drain.
The air smells of damp dog and ozone,
and the metallic tang of a local train
shuddering under the weight of three thousand wet umbrellas.
We don’t look at the horizon. We look at our feet,
calculating the jump between the curb and the sludge,
praying the hem of a sari stays dry
for just one more hour.
The city isn’t sinking.
It’s just dissolving.
Aardhra Chandran is a postgraduate student from Thrissur, Kerala. Her work has appeared in anthologies and in a literary journal. Her writing explores themes of silence, memory, and the unnoticed textures of everyday life, with a focus on the emotional and social realities of contemporary India.