Posted on Wednesday, November 09, 2005 - 03:28 pm:

The women want to take the day into their own arms and embrace it, but how? To embrace the land and earth, the horizon, and triumph? To forget the hesitant moment, death, the years of deafness and struggle? The women want to take the time of resignation, of throbbing fears, and declare this to a vanished day, but how? And take the memory of departed sons, and bury it. But how? To end the unsure sunsets, the solitary loveliness of the hills? Instead, nothing moves. The rocks remain solid as ever; the boulders are still. Not different. The trees are bare of leaves and carry a stunned and lethargic silence. The women expect sudden and spectacular fissures on the rocks. They expect some crack, some sound that will wrap over them like lightning and they will not need to ask if independence is truly here, or if indeed this is a new day. The women feel an immense pride. They burn in it. This is the most exalting feeling they have for those who have returned, the most protective; they have endured the most agonizing absense, and this feeling is the most understanding emotion, the most accepting, the least demanding, the clearest, the least desparate, the most merciful, born of terror, this pride, filled with glory and tenderness.

A burden lifts as a new day appears. This new day. A place to start again, to plant hope and banish despair, to be restored. Everything is changed. Day is light, not heavy; light as a leaf. The women move from every weaving and meandering pathway, in and out, onto the main road so that the day can find them, find their bodies, which are longing to be touched by something new. They remove bright scarves from their heads and toss them like butterfly wings. They greet the air in red, blue, and green cloth intertwined. The cloth twists under the arms raised, and fingers searching. Their hair is young, even if it has turned white with waiting. For years, they have only learned to wave their voices, from door to mirror, with no hope of release, and now they can dance in the clouds. They wave their arms like promises. They swing their scarves from arm to arm. Shout, and watch their own voices ripple high into the sky, to the hills of Gulati.

They sing earth songs that leave the morning pulsating. They weep in daylight, surrounded by ultrablue skies and the smell of rain. Their minds a sweet immersion of joy, they float, jubilant. Their senses almost divine, uplifted; their pain inarticulate. Voices rise to the surface, beyond the dust shadows that break and glow, and lengthen. They will not drown from a dance in the soaring dust, from the memories of anger and pain. They will not die from the accumulation of bitter histories, the dreams of misfortune, the evenings of wonder and dismay, which should have already killed them. The echoes from Gulati, which should have already killed them. The despondency, to tremble when a door is tightly shut, when it opens wide. A door, a mind. The dust turning into vapor above the distant rocks, which should have destroyed their minds but did not. Today, they walk on a dry earth, not dead, in an intoxicating brightness, and leave no trace of fears, embraced by the day overflowing, touching branches and tops of trees, a day veined, alive, not dead, replete with wonders and new destinies. They rejoice in a vast sweetness and sound. All that is bright among them is brighter still: the sky, the altars in Gulati, hope. A wind sweeps through the hills, their voices, their bodies in chorus. Their voices wake the somnolent dove. It flies through the dancing light above. Independence will not come again, and the best spectacle of it is in these women, with the pain in their backs, the curve of their voices, and their naked elbows beating the air.