Death of the matriarch, death of the house

The great-grandmother died in her eighty-sixth year, worn out by compromise, crippled by arthritis, with only a hard cough for company.

By then the poet had grown up. She had learnt defeat, and had found out that becoming rich was hard: she could not keep her promise.

At the cremation, on a pyre of mango logs, the house itself seemed alive and grieving: its windows closed like eyes, its pillars groaned, its dark rooms sighed.

Then she left, for other towns, leaving behind the shrine, the sands and the Arabian Sea.

Now, wherever she lives, she imagines rats running through its halls, and white ants building their mounds, like totems of burial, on its walls. At night she hears its death-rattle.