2025 Competition

Zain Rishi

Saag Field, Splinter

after Zaffar Kunial’s ‘Fielder’

If I had to put my finger on where this started,

I'd find myself flinching, pulling my hand from the fire

that was really the thicket, our garden, burning

with nettle and bugs. You know me, always catching myself

on various things. Be it the banister, that wizened king

castled through our house, that spinal cord

on which our good and crooked bones were tethered

and swung. Be it the fence, those gaunt soldiers

posted to the fringes of the green, linesmen to the games

we invented and abandoned on the crackled patios

from which we grew. Like I said, always catching

myself on the smallest things. Sometimes, broken glass

in the kitchen sink, when I'm up to the wrists in grey

water, my mind wandering off to some strange country

or somehow still, that damn house, its shadow

an ocean rippled over the lawn. You need that kind of water

for a saag field, said my grandfather, thinking of the rice

they grow back in the homeland. I knew better

than to correct him. And anyway, I liked the image. I saw leaves

becoming lifeboats for squirrels that left Pakistan

for our porch. I heard Zamzam water weep

into our basins, through mottled light the childhood

we never had, but learnt to live. In the end, it always boiled down

to our hands. How still we bent them

into Arabic, around girl's waists or boy's necks, all the shoulds

and shouldn'ts of our touch, all the corners

of the house we left litanies of ourselves. I blamed myself

for the little things. Still do. Always catching myself

or rather, that day, I was caught, red-handed from the fall

in the woods, my skin alive with lice and bark, a home

to wonders I had no words for, as I came blubbering

back to the kitchen. It wasn't the first time she'd see me

like this. That she'd hold my palm like a reader, find the sentence

of wood that couldn't live in my body. Part of me longed

to live in it. T o think somewhere in that splinter, a river of me

could run, feed saag fields through dry spells, carry my cousins

from Kashmir to valleys of milk and honey. If only I'd known better

than to turn from our memory, to lose us in the gallery

of want that reached me like some battered ship, docking

through harbour fog, where I found myself, so far from this

and still completely there. I'd have said, okay, just once.

Just once,

don't take this from me. Let me carry it. Let me live

in a needle of deadwood, saying everything

I couldn't in this country of skin.