By Ipshita Sarkar
She is not mine.
Nor ever was.
She is Kailash,
snow-crowned and sovereign,
a stillness too vast for ownership,
too sacred to touch.
And yet,
I have loved her
not with the hunger of men,
But with the hush of pilgrims,
those who have glimpsed divinity
and dared to kneel.
She walks through my world
like mist over stone,
neither staying
nor vanishing.
Each moment she lingers
is a mercy
I have neither earned,
nor questioned.
She is Parvati
when her fi ngers rest against mine
delicate, deliberate,
the gentlest architecture of affection.
She is Sati
in her silences,
grace wrapped in fi re,
a woman who carries within her
the memory of every lifetime lost.
And she is Shiva
not because she destroys,
but because she becomes
everything I cannot name,
and cannot survive without it.
I love her.
Utterly.
In every impossible,
unrepeatable way.
Not as one seeks possession,
But as one seeks salvation.
When she breathes beside me,
the Earth forgets its rotation.
Time, for all its tyranny,
stops to watch her mouth
form the shape of my name.
She has not yet gone.
But already, her leaving casts
a long and sacred shadow
The sort of absence
That feels like scripture,
the kind that doesn’t take,
But transfi gures.
And I
I would love her
In the moment before loss
than live a hundred lifetimes
without the miracle of her nearness.
Let her depart.
Let her ascend to wherever
goddesses go
when they tire of pretending to be human.
I shall not tether her.
I shall not weep at her retreat.
I will only stand,
unchanged but undone,
Whispering the only prayer I have ever known:
Her name.
