घुड़सवार

They said heart attack on a Sunday, like it was something routine;  like they weren’t shoving lightning back into his chest with every shock,
like his absence didn’t echo through every drawer, every slipper out of place.
She had baked his favourite bread— now fed to the silence,
the only sounds filling the room:  beep, beep, beep.

Mora saiyaan, moh se bole na,
still, silent, lips parted slightly, breath borrowed from a machine.
Not even the gentle clearing of a throat he always did
before saying something wise.

Mother sits, spine folded
in a waiting chair with no cushion.
Three sugar cubes in her chai, untouched.
She folds into a chair with aluminum arms,
her eyes cracked like dry riverbeds,
hands shaking slightly.

Main laakh jatan kar haari,
as if her devotion could be CPR,
as if memories could defibrillate the man
whose shoulder she would rest her head on,
who hummed ghazals all day long
while their children asked him to stop.
She traced the curve of his eyebrow with her gaze,
remembering how it twitched when he’d lie
about how many badams he ate.

His chest, once a quiet drumbeat in her sleep,
now tangled in wires blooming like creepers,
the beat irregular, off-tempo, jazzed by panic—
arrhythmia, the doctor said,
but to her, it was just him forgetting the rhythm of home.
The man who counted breaths like clockwork while boiling doodh
now reduced to beeping rhythms she didn’t understand,
except they meant life, and the threat of its leaving.

He always pronounced heart like hurt,
as if he knew, even in language,
that love and pain live in the same vowel.

Saawan beeto jaaye peeharwa, mann mera ghabraaye,
to no one, to god, to the nurse adjusting saline,
to her own throat— except him.
Aching with things unsaid and too often assumed—
like that he’d never leave before her.
She touched his hand—cold,
not icy, but like wet marble after the rain.

Aeso gaye pardes piya tum, chain hamen, naheen aaye,
even the thought of another life felt wrong to her.
No, no, she told herself, there is only this one.
And it nearly had less of him in it.

The ceiling fan did not move.
the air was still,
thick with antiseptic, thick with something else:
grief in suspension,
like mangoes in a storm, still attached—
but you know the branch is straining.

Death, quietly trying to slip in through the wall
where the paint had begun to peel,
waited in corners,
too polite to knock,
too patient to leave.

Jab hum na honge toh peeharwa, bolo kya tab aaoge?
She didn’t say it aloud,
but it hovered in the quiet
between his heartbeat and hers,
in the silence where songs go to wait,
in the room that held too many machines,
and not enough answers.