The Sand Flows Upward

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.