House

Sometimes my aunts sit around the stove
And talk about their husbands in shy whispers
While they talk about countries and their fall in another room
This is how it has been ever since I was a child
The demarcation visible to me even as I sit with them
My grandmother prepares chicken curry
And I hear the laughter of my aunts, a testimony to their happiness perhaps
The house is chirping like a bird today
Almost a celebration before a goodbye
The women here don’t need much, but to sit together as their husbands have dinner
Asking if they need another serving
Their nodding heads, smiling in appreciation are enough for my old grandmother
Who stands like a drooping tree,
Her knees don’t take her weight anymore
The folds of her wrinkled skin still have the same old lustre, a reminder that she once was young too
That she was a girl who rebelled against her father by climbing trees or plucking ripe mangoes
She knows that her daughters will carry the years she lived as secrets to womanhood
My grandmother, with a countenance as still as water in a pond, have tears in her eyes
She has seen time slipping by
Or how the conversations with her daughters changed from being good children to good women
My grandmother never wished for more
Her daughters too
But as I stand here between the kitchen and the room
I think about women and silence the same
I notice men with pride in their eyes, their laughter a bit too loud, their legs spread like roots of a tree wanting to claim soil
There is stillness in air, an unsaid promise that women should keep
The promise my mother has kept all these years and I should too
The promise passed from one woman to other when they confide in each other,