Barter

Mist hung low that morning.

Fields slick with dew, earth and cow dung curling into my nose.

Seven mouths leaned over the table, shadows bending my life into pieces.

My mother’s hands cracked like old clay, trembling.

My father’s eyes, rimmed with toddy haze, weighed me.

Three bottles of toddy.

Two days’ meals for seven hungry bodies.

And me.

Me, promised a city I would never see.

They whispered it like a ritual.

Seven faces, some hopeful, some already breaking.

My older brother flinched.

My cousins’ eyes darted, wild with hunger and fear.

My mother’s lips pressed tight as if swallowing me whole could make it right.

And I, fifteen, became a parcel,

folded into hands that were not my own,

sold in quiet, deliberate silence.

The man who came smelled of smoke and oil,

his teeth sharper than knives, promises slick as wet floors.

I should have screamed. I did not.

Flesh pressed into flesh,

warm hand into colder hand,

and the city swallowed me,

a tide of streets and shadows,

a whorehouse that pulsed like veins,

corridors narrow as throats,

windows dead eyes blinking at nothing,

air thick with perfume, sweat, and longing.

Twenty years now.

Twenty years of nights given to survive,

lunches and dinners measured in what I carried into his bed each night,

every thread of skin, every trembling laugh, every piece of warmth offered

so another day might exist.

The girl I once was — small, hungry, pliant —

has drifted away, slipping like smoke through my fingers,

leaving only shadows stitched into the hollow of my chest.

I had always heard of love,

a word whispered like a prayer, a fairytale in fish markets and meat shops.

But I never found it in the drunken eyes of fragile men,

hands shaking, patience thin as ash,

eager only to smell my bare skin,

to take what I had to give and call it possession.

The first night returns to me, every night: 

hands, voices, sweat, the smell of oil and fear,

pressing until my skin was no longer mine,

each year a survival, each year my gods slipping farther away, 

fading into shadows I cannot reach.

And the one I was named for,

the goddess who stayed the farthest from me,

the one of wealth, of fortune, of blessings—

I am nothing but her absence,

her hollowed echo,

trading pieces of myself for bread, for water,

for rooms that never learn the warmth of life,

for a life I will never touch again.

I drift,

through corridors stitched from memory and darkness,

walls leaking years I was sold,

floors slick with hands that counted me,

breath tasting survival,

steps dragging vanished bodies,

fingers brushing ghosts of flesh I once was,

shadows folding into shadows,

village and city bleeding together.

I am Lachhmi.

I am blessing bled into corridors,

threads of skin and hunger unraveling,

echo of promises never paid,

ghost of the girl I cannot reach.

I am everything they bartered for,

and nothing left to claim.

I am ghost. I am absence.

I am Lachhmi

in a country where gods are bartered

for a few lunches,

and prayers are cheaper than bread.