A Hungry Lineage
By Neya Krishnan
My great grandmother,
my mom’s dad’s mom-
watched her husband’s blood
escape his body one day,
carried him into an autorickshaw,
prayed for melanin to return
to his colorless face,
fell down devastated
when doctors in the barely
supported hospital
four hours away
shook their heads as to say ‘he’s gone.’
All this at less than twenty years of age;
As a woman, she was banned
from remarrying or working,
so from no income,
and for a time no home,
she raised two boys alone-
one would become a brilliant lawyer,
the other a renowned professor.
My grandma,
my mom’s mom-
was told not to pursue
a higher education;
she was one of thirteen,
and certainly not a boy;
if she could cook and clean,
what need was there
for her to learn and earn?
But women in my family
are strengthened by the sound of no,
so she went on to earn three master’s degrees.
She would become
the headmaster of an orphanage,
the hand that fed the mouths
of hundreds of starving orphans,
the arms that held the bodies
of hundreds of lonely children,
the hope that allowed all of them
to become engineers and doctors
and teachers and more.
My mom,
born three months early,
was called a lizard at birth.
Not more than a week they said;
I like to think she thought it was a dare-
so she lived.
Not without challenges of course,
through the bomb blasts
devastating her city,
nights with men holding machetes
outside of restaurant doors,
the ulcers that tried to terrorize her body,
malaria that tied her to a hospital bed
working a year for a man who refused to pay her.
Through all this, she lived,
so that when her mother entered through
the doors of her Connecticut home,
she was speechless;
there her daughter was
living a life
she didn’t even know could exist.
These are the stories of
the hungry lineage
to which I belong.
A mother, a headmaster, an engineer:
these are a few of the women
who I owe my life to;
I live and lead
with their histories
embedded in my palms.
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