I don’t know sari woman

SJ Sindu | Poetry

But her eyes reach out to me across the 95A bus east to the river where I will teach her daughter
to not listen to her wisdoms. Sari woman’s eyes are pebbles from a sea I’ve forgotten. She still
swims there every night and sometimes days when her vision clouds with brine. Sari woman
cleans houses, chops other people’s salads, packs boxes in factories, sews tiny brand labels onto
the necks of t-shirts. She cooks spicy mutton and leaves a clay pot on the bank of the river. I
watch sari woman from my third story cement office. I’m talking to her daughter. Don’t look
back, I tell her. Your mother’s tears will fill the sea. Don’t stop. You could drown.

SJ Sindu is a Tamil diaspora author of two literary novels (Marriage of a Thousand Lies, which won the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award; and Blue-Skinned Gods, which was an Indie Next Pick and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award), two graphic novels (Shakti and Tall Water), and one collection of short stories (The Goth House Experiment, which won The Story Prize Spotlight Award). Sindu holds a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Florida State University and is a co-editor for Zero Street, a literary fiction series featuring LGBTQ+ authors through the University of Nebraska Press. Sindu is an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.