The Two Heroines

I have a heroine who visits me only in dreams,

Changing with the wind, with every hour of light;

At dawn she wears the pale gold of an eastern sky,

Softened by the last breath of the passing monsoon.

At noon her skin gathers sunlight from paddy fields,

At dusk, sindoor burns gently across her brow;

She becomes the final ember of the sinking sun,

Then deepens into a moonlit river at night.

Her loosened hair carries jasmine, earth, and sandalwood,

And when she lets it fall, the wind forgets its way;

Sometimes she arrives as a temple lamp trembling softly,

Sometimes as a girl's laughter beneath June's first rain.

No village owns her, yet every village knows her,

She crosses coconut groves and narrow paddy bunds;

She glides beside backwaters silvered by the moon,

Riding a rainbow chariot through the mind's hidden roads.

She is the woman my dreaming heart has fashioned-

Rich without pride, beautiful without cruelty,

Loving without ever learning the art of leaving,

Forever gentle, forever safe within my dreams.

But life has given me another woman,

One who comes without jasmine, and without anklets;

No temple bell speaks her name as she draws near,

She arrives like a shadow lengthening across the earth.

She has no color I can hold within a word-

White as a shroud, red as a dying sun,

Black as the cloud before the first thunder,

Or simply the stillness left when everything is gone.

I called her Fate; she answered only with silence,

I called her Time; she kept moving without haste;

I tried to cut the vine that bound my head and feet,

But every severed tendril found its way back.

Then I called her Death-

And for the first time, she smiled;

Not with the smile of an enemy,

But with something tender enough to frighten me.

For she had known me from my very first breath,

Had watched me stumble into childhood,

Had seen me fall in love and lose what I loved,

And had never once promised to leave.

Perhaps that is why I fear her-

Not because she will come,

But because she has been here all along,

Growing closer with every breath I take.

One day the temple lamps will slowly go dark,

The monsoon will pass beyond the hills,

And the river will carry away the last reflection of my face,

While the colors of my dream begin to fade.

The jasmine will fall from her hair,

The rainbow chariot will empty into the night;

Then the other woman will come barefoot,

And hold out the hand I have spent my life avoiding.

Only then will I understand:

The woman I dreamed of was born from imagination,

But the woman waiting at the end of every road

Was written into me before I knew how to dream.

One taught me to desire life,

To reach for beauty and call it love;

The other teaches me the harder tenderness-

To open my hands and let life go.

Perhaps this is the oldest love story we forgot:

Death was never merely waiting at the end;

She had been walking the whole road with me,

Not as a destroyer, but as the final beloved.

And when she finally takes my hand into the dark,

I will not ask where the road is leading;

I will look into the eyes I have somehow always known,

And whisper, “I knew you long ago, before I knew your name.”

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