As my bare feet patted down the soft, dusk-touched dirt, I remembered the curved back of my grandmother’s sari.
Until last night, I had only ever seen the front of her jewel-blue sari. I could still recall the feel of her silky blue sari slipping between my plump fingers as she cooed overhead my Babul crib. Since my mother had gone to work mixing cement for the new highway encircling our crumbling village—a “poor man’s job” to supplement my father’s meager income from his fried roti stall—daa dee, Grandmother, had raised me like her first child. Whenever I hid from my parents’ red hands under my bed, daa dee would crouch beside me—her joints creaking with the effort—and procure a piece of tart candy from the front folds of her cobalt sari. Pressing this rare delicacy into my shaking palms, daa dee would tell me tales of her childhood. Wearing that very sari, she said, she had walked to her first Holi celebration and sprinkled sunset-colored powder onto Grandfather’s shoulders. Back then, I always doubted her stories because after so many years, her sari was still immaculate, still vibrant and full of life in the wind.
           But when Grandfather passed away, her sari became disheveled and seemed to shrink with her diminishing frame, collecting dirt and tears along the hem. The day after Grandfather’s funeral, daa dee was at the market buying agati for dinner, and my father declared that daa dee was now branded with the cursed title of “widow”—a harbinger of bad luck. That day, he unceremoniously piled her possessions in the street and locked the door.
        I paused for a moment, stopping to catch my breath as I watched the sky. The moon stood still at the height of its path across the sky—midnight. From the pulsing throb in my legs, I knew that I must have walked at least ten kilometers by now—almost there. As I stood, resting, I heard the faint hum of the highway nearby and tried not to dwell on the enormity of my task ahead. My fingers found their way to my cheek, still swollen from the night before—a reminder that for now, I could only look behind rather than ahead, into my memories.
        Dinner had been silent. Not even the merry clink of bowls against each other could draw my eyes away from the newly empty seat at the table. Father was brooding even more than usual, brashly scooping aloo gobi curry into his bowl until it overflowed. Mother wasn’t home as usual. With just the two of us at the table, I decided that that moment was my only chance to speak up.
        “Pita,” I said, using the ancient honorific to show Father the gravity of my thoughts.
        “What is it, beta?” he asked, still scooping curry into a lumpy mountain in his bowl.
        “I think…” I paused, gulping. “We should take daa dee back in. After all, widows are only bad luck in superstition. It’s 2016, we shouldn’t follow old, outdated…”
        I lost my voice as I looked up at Father. For the first time that night, Father glared at me and set down his bowl with a quiet thud. He was silent for a moment before he drew his hand back and I lost consciousness.
When I came to, I was curled up on the ground, a hand-shaped welt forcefully stamped onto my right cheek. Father stood above me, tapping his cane against his foot, ready to teach me a lesson in case I hadn’t learned the first time.
Cowering, I had lain in silence.
I resumed my journey. The sun would rise soon enough, and Father would be livid when he discovered that I had snuck out to walk the thirteen-mile journey to Vrindavan, where homeless widows like daa dee lined the streets, begging for food. But on risk of beating, and even death, this was what I could do for daa dee. This was the least I could do after remaining silent when she was thrown out, remaining silent when my father’s outstretched hands struck me over and over—remaining silent as daa dee had not throughout my childhood when I was in danger.
Even a thirteen hundred mile journey could not keep me from bringing daa dee home. As my feet stumbled across the dirt-encrusted land, I saw the lights of Vrindavan ahead, glowing with muted hope. I did not know how I would find daa dee when I got there, among the twenty thousand widows in the city. But I knew that I would not stop walking until I found her.