Train to Agra

Train to Agra

 Train to Agra I want to reach you— in that city where the snow only shimmers silver for a few hours. It has taken seventeen years.This trip, these characters patterned in black ink, curves catching on the page like hinges, this weave of letters fraying like the lines on my palm, all broken paths. Outside, no snow. Just the slow pull of brown on the hills, umber dulling to a bruise until the city is just a memory of stained teeth, the burn of white marble to dusk, cows standing on the edges like a dust cloud gaining weight after days of no rain. Asleep in the hot berth, my parents sway in a dance, the silence broken by scrape of tin, hiss of tea, and underneath,  the constant clatter of wheels beating steel tracks over and over: to the city of white marble, to the city of goats, tobacco fields, city of dead hands, a mantra of my grandmother’s— her teeth eaten away by betel leaves—the story of how Shah Jahan had cut off all the workers’ hands after they built theTaj, so they could never build again. I dreamt of those hands for weeks before the trip, weeks even before I stepped off the plane, thousands of useless dead flowers drying to sienna, silent in their fall. Every night, days before, I dreamt those hands climbing over the iron gate of my grandparents’ house, over grate and spikes, some caught in the groove between its sharpened teeth, others biting where they pinched my skin. ...