Running dreams.

Two plates

The kitchen was always the first place to wake up in our house. Not because the sun was early. Because Ma was.

By five every morning, she moved through the kitchen like a quiet storm. She ground spices in the old stone mortar, blew life into the chulha, stirred the pot with one hand while holding her sari away from the flame with the other. Her bangles announced her before her footsteps did. Chin-chin. That was how I knew morning had arrived.

I would sit on the cool floor with my knees pulled to my chest and watch her. Sometimes I wondered if mothers ever slept.

“Ma,” I asked once, “do you sleep?”

She didn’t look up. “Mothers sleep with one eye open.”

I believed her.

Our house stood at the end of a narrow lane in Keshavganj, a town in Uttar Pradesh where everyone knew everyone’s business and no one admitted to knowing anything. The houses leaned into each other like old women swapping secrets. Three streets away was a temple. Beyond the market, a mosque. And at the corner, a tea stall where men gathered every morning to talk about cricket, politics, and the lives of people who weren’t there.

The town smelled of cardamom tea, dust, frying samosas, and wet earth when the monsoon remembered us. I loved it. I loved everything then.

I loved the crooked neem tree outside our window. The sound of bicycle bells. The women calling their children home at sunset. The old man who sold guavas and always gave me one extra because, he said, my eyes were too big to be trusted.

I was eleven when I first noticed the plates.

Two brass plates sat on the wooden rack above the kitchen sink. Every Sunday, Ma polished them until they shone. One belonged to her. The other belonged to Baba. His plate was always larger.

I never understood why.

“Because your father eats like a king,” Ma said when I complained.

“Then I should become a king.”

She laughed. “You? You would become a queen.”

I liked that. A queen. It sounded like someone who could never be told what to do. Sometimes I stood in front of the small mirror in our bedroom and practiced. I straightened my shoulders, lifted my chin, put my hands on my waist.

“I am Queen Meera,” I announced. Then I burst into laughter.

“Meera! Stop talking to yourself and come eat!” Ma would shout from the kitchen.

I never told her I was practicing for a future where I would be important. I didn’t know then that some girls grow up learning how to become queens. Others grow up learning how to disappear. I was somewhere in between.