The Sand Flows Upward and 6 other poems

They came with silence.
I came with sand.

Handfuls of it.
Under my nails, behind my teeth
carried from all the places they said never existed.
The burnt mosque.
The broken dargah.
The girl they buried without a name.

I opened the earth like a prayer mat.
Spread it flat.
And began to bury.

Not bodies
but shame.
The way my mother lowered her eyes in court.
The way my sister’s mehndi was still wet when they found her.
The way our stories were always footnotes
in someone else’s war.

I buried the word izzat
and the silence they stitched into my school uniform.
I buried the fear that crawled up our legs
when uncles entered the room.

The sand rose like a rebellion.
It did not fall.
It climbed.
It remembered.

Even the wind whispered:
“Bolo.”
Speak.

So, I pressed my tongue to the earth
and it tasted like my grandmother’s tears.
Salt, turmeric, something older.

I did not cry.
I did not pray.
I named.

Each name a flame.
Each flame a map back home.

And when I was done,
I stood still as the adhan at dawn.

The storm circled me.
Quiet. Holy.

And I said:
“Let them dig.
One day.
They won’t find bones.
They’ll find a tongue.”

Shelves as tall as minarets.

I walk through barefoot
the tiles whisper in Urdu:
“Kya tu waqai zinda hai?”
Are you truly alive?

Each book has a spine like mine.
Bent. Soft.
Carrying all I did not become.

One volume hums like a harmonium.
Inside: a girl who said no at seventeen
and left her village with a lover who wrote poems
on her stomach.

Another: a widow who refused to be purified.
She danced on Muharram night,
and they said her hips carried sin.

And one thin pamphlet, almost invisible
just says:
“If you had screamed that day.”

I do not borrow a book.
I burn one.

Ash is lighter than regret.

I am sitting cross-legged on my own “qabar”.

The tablecloth is a white dupatta,
embroidered with moths.
Around me: women I never met.
But their voices sit under my skin
like old henna.

One pours chai into a chipped cup.
Another, slices pears with her thumbnail.
One feeds me rice with her hands
her fingers smell of Dettol and daal.
I think she was my badi amma (great-aunt).
Or the neighbor who died in childbirth.

They eat like queens.
They speak in riddles.
They keep saying my name like a lullaby.

But one turns to me and whispers,
“You came too early, beti.
There are still fires that need your tongue.”

When I ask what that means,
they cover their faces with napkins
and weep into the soil.

It came from the east,
but not like morning
like someone rewinding God.

First the silence, then the echo.
Then the crackle of a mic,
like it was peeling open the sky.

In my sleep, I saw the muezzin as a boy.
Barefoot. Holding a transistor radio to his chest
like a mother would hold a dying bird.
His voice: bruised with longing.

In every dream, she is watching.

Behind the curtain of the meat shop.
On rooftops where girls press their chests
into thin cotton under a shy moon.
By the well where your cousin’s body was found,
her mouth full of pondweed and gossip.

She never blinks.
She is not jinn.
Not saint.
She is the memory that knows your skin
better than you do.

She never sleeps
because her daughters do.
Because rest is a luxury not built for brown bodies.
Because every time she tried,
a man opened the door.

When she speaks, it sounds like silver bangles
dragged across a prayer mat.

She told me once:
“I watched your mother die
while making rotis.
She put ghee on one,
folded it, and fell.”

And now I know why the dough never rises
in our house.

It sounded like a warning,
like love in a war zone.
Like the call you never return
because the voice that called it
was taken to the sea
and did not return.

I woke up drenched in rosewater and sweat.
The kind of sweat that, lives under veils.
The kind that stings like salt on faith.

I think the prayer was for me.
Or for someone like me.
A woman with hair still wet from ghusl,
who lights incense so thick
the dead mistake it for a path home.

Growing up in a house where silence was inherited, where stories hid in spice jars and under prayer mats. These pieces come from that place from dreams, from ghosts, from women whose names history forgot. Written like one prepares for burial: with care, with rage, with ritual. This collection is a journal of the remembered and the erased. Each poem is a tongue, finally freed from the soil. I offer it humbly, like my grandmother offered roti to the dead warm, torn by hand, and full of everything we never got to say aloud. They are not fiction. Not entirely. They come from my dreams, from real women I’ve known, from shadows in family stories, and from the invisible weight passed down through generations.

They buried me backwards.

First the forehead, pressed with my grandmother’s last dua. Then the lips chapped from speaking truth in rooms meant only for silence. Then the feet still warm from crossing deserts that never made it to maps.
And the sand oh, the sand. It did not fall. It rose. It climbed into the air like it had forgotten gravity. It coated the ceiling of my ribcage. It filled the clock I kept under my bed as a child, the one with Allah written in electric green.

In that hourglass, time didn’t fall. It remembered.
And I remembered with it.

The smell of first blood.
The way mango pulp stains your wrists in June.
The rattle of my uncle’s TB cough.
The woman in the bus who bled onto my lap, quietly.
The taste of camphor on my dead sister’s lips when I kissed her goodbye.

Who said memory moves in one direction?
Mine swims upwards, toward the womb.