Muskmelon Seeds

By Vandana 

There's a tin on my kitchen shelf
—not silver —not sacred
just an old dabba with a dented lid,
and inside they lie,
— not precious stones — not expensive teas;
But the dried-out heart pieces of a musk melon: the seeds.

Not too many.
Not arranged.
They have been laid aside with intentions.

I return from big cities that devour voices,
Where elevators forget my name,
And the roads run too fast.
And there they wait — without fail,
on the top shelf beside a box that once held biscuits.
They wait.
Not for ceremony.
Not even for gestures.
But because she remembers, my mummy remembers,
what I loved most,
when I was small, timid and soft;
As if she held every little piece up to the sun and asked,
"Will you carry my love?"

I take one between my teeth.
It cracks open the doors to my childhood,
where I would watch my mother
peeling that soft orange flesh and scooping the seeds,
Like she is pulling stars from the sky.
Sorting, rinsing and waiting upon the seeds
under the scorching sun,
The drying that followed on newspapers,
With yesterday's obituaries, politics and deaths,
laid out all flat on the flipping alignment.

For days, they would rest under the sun and shade
as there were no ceiling fans,
And somehow the wind had forgotten
the way to our house for many days.

They taste of what no poem could sing right —
a time spent in secret,
utter lack of things,
and a mother who sees only a child,
But the world has forgotten that I was ever one.

I do not remember how many I ate,
till the dry rattle of the box became my language.
Maybe this is life's offering,
when the seeds outlive the fruit.
I, too, have become like the muskmelon seed —
dried by vicissitudes, brittle with silence,
forgotten like tin cans on many shelves.
Perhaps, this is the resurrection I wait for,
to be held like those seeds,
in the curves of my mother's palms
like those afternoons, I sobbed
with bitter haldi on my scraped wounds. 

I wait now for the warmth of her sweet hand,
The quiet benediction of being held —
not to be planted, not to be known,
But to be remembered as something once tender and soft.

I open the box,
and the seeds rattle like dry bones.
I crack them, one by one,
to taste what love and memory have left stunned.