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.