Dadi says there are two kinds of thirst:
the one that leads horses to river, the one
that leads girls to marriage. Each monsoon,
she teaches me to read prophecies in rainfall—
how water, like family, knows a thousand ways
to enter a body uninvited. In her stories,
every daughter becomes a well where mothers
drown their own reflections. Every daughter
learns to swallow oceans without showing salt
on her tongue. Last night, I dreamed Dadi’s
wedding bed turned to river, her body dissolving
into all the tears she never allowed herself.
She wore silence like a second skeleton,
rattling beneath her sari’s silk. Even now,
decades after her burning, I find scattered bones
of her unlived life: a cinema ticket stub,
half-written love letter, English primer
with penciled dreams in margins. Amma
says women in our family are born with gills—
not for survival, but for knowing how
to breathe through drowning. At night,
I press my ear to her door, count rhythms
of her midnight gasping: each breath
a small resurrection, each exhale heavy
with the weight of swallowed stories.
In morning light, we rebuild ourselves
from water damage: steam rising from chai
like ghosts of almost-spoken truths,
while Amma teaches me to read weather
in a husband’s hands, in the barometric
pressure of his moods. Some nights I wake
to find her filling mason jars with rain,
preserving storms like family recipes.
Says every daughter needs an ocean
of her own. Says thirst is another word
for learning to drink your own drowning.
ANUJ JAIN is a poet and community organizer from the San Francisco Bay Area whose work explores the intersection of cultural identity and linguistic transformation. Growing up in an immigrant household, he witnessed language’s power in both presence and absence. His poetry navigates the space between Mother Tongue and English, embracing contradiction rather than forcing simple answers to complex questions. When not leading educational initiatives and research for systematic change, Anuj can be found on tennis courts or scribbling verses on the backs of research papers, searching for beauty in the gray areas that science alone can’t capture.