Sold

Simply to endure is to triumph.

If you look hard enough, chaos turns into order the way letters turn into words.

This affliction--hope--is so cruel and stubborn, I believe it will kill me

Trying to remember, I have learned, is like trying to clutch a handful of fog. Trying to forget, like trying to hold back the monsoon.

Instead, we linger over a luxury that costs nothing: Imagining what may be.

In the evening, the brilliant yellow pumpkin blossoms will close, drunk on sunshine, while the milky white jasmine will open their slender throats and sip the chill Himalayan air. At night, low hearths will send up wispy curls of smoke fragrant with a dozen dinners, and darkness will clothe the land. Except on nights when the moon is full. On those nights, the hillside and the valley below are bathed in a magical white light, the glow of the perpetual snows that blanket the mountaintops. On those nights I lie restless in the sleeping loft, wondering what the world is like beyond my mountain home.

Inside my head I carry: my baby goat, my baby brother, my ama's face, our family's future. My bundle is light. My burden is heavy.

Guard the portals of your mind.

When I have run out of words to copy, I look out the window at this strange place called India. Inside the train, the people around me are snoring. I don't understand how they can close their eyes when there is so much to see.

My bundle is light. My burden is heavy.

Ama wipes her hands on her apron, looks up at our old roof with new eyes, and lifts the baby from his basket. She twirls him in the air, her skirts flying around her ankles the way the clouds swirl around the mountain cap--her laughter fresh and strange and musical to my ears.

A KIND OF ILLNESS This ache in my chest is a relentless thing, worse than any fever. A fever is gone with a few of Mumtaz's white pills. But this illness has had me in its grip for a week now. This affliction--hope--is so cruel and stubborn, I believe it will kill me.

A man who doles out sweets, and slaps, with the same hand.

i inhale deeply, drinking the warmth in the scent of mountain sunshine, a warmth that smells of freshly turned soil and clean laundry baking in the sun.

I have been beaten here, locked away, violated a hundred times, and a hundred times more. I have been starved, and cheated, tricked and disgraced. How odd is it that I am undone by the simple kindness of a small boy with a yellow pencil.

Auntie says that in the city, people gather and pay money to see beautiful women and handsome men put on a show. The people in the show are called movie stars.

I have been beaten here, locked away, violated a hundred times and a hundred times more. I have been starved and cheated, tricked and disgraced. How odd it is that I am undone by the simple kindness of a small boy with a yellow pencil.