Wander-Root

She was born in a village so small

that the wind knew everyone by name,

where morning sunlight entered through mud-hut cracks

as gently as a midwife’s hands,

and the smell of wet earth was the first language

children learned to speak.

My great-grandmother—

the woman whose shadow still stands

in the doorway of my memory—

was a wanderer not by choice

but by the quiet rebellion of the soul,

a root that refused to rot

in any one kind of soil.

They say she learned to walk

by following monsoon clouds,

her tiny footprints washed away

before anyone could trace them.

But she always remembered

the map her feet carried—

lines carved by dust,

rivers drawn by sweat,

forests whispered into her bones.

She married young,

like women of her time often did,

but she never let marriage

lock her spirit behind a courtyard wall.

While others learned embroidery,

she learned horizons—

counting not stitches but miles,

not threads but paths.

She learned early

that the world listens

more to silence than to voices.

So she practiced silence

as one practices prayer,

letting it stitch itself

into the hem of her sari.

And when she finally spoke,

the air leaned in

like a student eager for the first lesson.

Her hands were brown with sun,

hard with work,

soft with mercy.

The kind of hands

that could peel fruit for a hungry child,

or break open stubborn soil

for a season that had forgotten to rain.

“Work is worship,” she would say,

though she never stood inside a temple

without dust on her feet.

She carried stories

the way old trees carry rings—

layered, unhurried,

marking every drought, every bloom.

When she sat with me under the neem tree

and began a story with “Jab main choti thi…,”

time itself leaned back

and let her take the lead.

She told me of rivers she had seen,

wide like open arms,

narrow like regrets.

Of days she traveled on foot

with a pot balanced on her hip

and a baby tied to her back.

Of nights when the sky felt closer

than the roof over her head.

She taught me that wandering

is not walking away—

it is walking toward

something your blood remembers

even when your mind forgets.

She taught me

that roots do not mean stillness.

Some roots stretch—

under rivers, across continents,

beneath fences and borders—

seeking better water.

Seeking new possibilities.

And she,

my wander-root ancestor,

stretched so far

that her stories reached me

before her photograph ever did.

I remember her voice

like an old song hummed half-forgotten

but impossible to erase.

A rhythm of tin plates,

a melody of spinning wheels,

a chorus of women laughing

from one doorway to another.

Her strength was never loud.

It moved like evening light—

slow, golden, certain.

When life broke her in places

no one dared to touch,

she stitched herself back together

with thread pulled from faith.

On the day she died,

a crow sat on the roof

and did not fly for hours.

The wind was strangely polite,

and even the street dogs

didn’t bark.

It was as if the world paused

to hold its breath

for the woman who spent her whole life

breathing meaning into ordinary days.

I still feel her sometimes—

in the scent of wet soil,

in the hush of evening,

in the gentle ache of leaving home

and the soft relief of returning.

From her I inherited

the feet that cannot stay still,

and the heart that refuses to forget.

From her I inherited

a map of unseen places,

a courage older than my name,

and the quiet understanding

that the past is not behind us—

it is the root we wander with.

So here I stand,

generations later,

carrying her stories like lanterns

through the dark.

A wander-root,

just like her—

moving, learning, becoming—

growing toward the sun

while still anchored

to the woman

who taught me

how to bloom

everywhere.