Kaya Kalpam | 2K |

I lie on the stone floor of the scriptorium, my spine a cracked whip, my knuckles swollen from decades of gripping what I could not hold. The Vaidya—a woman older than the banyan tree in the courtyard—presses her thumb to my third eye. "Your body is not a temple," she says. "It is a river that forgot it could flow."

I am the leaf. I am the tree. I am the ground. kaya kalpam

On the seventh day, I cough up a pearl. It is the calcified version of every unkind word I ever swallowed. I lie on the stone floor of the