Vidya Premkumar

Palimpsest

My mother lived on a plane, all her own; meanings spun from weather-light gestures and stubborn assemblages. People gathered around her like uncertain patrons at an art gallery, unsure of what they saw, sure only that it shimmered. They adored the warmth of her voice and missed the subterranean voltages beneath it. They called her charming because they could not name her circuitry; called her poetic because they could not chart her logic. When she was most herself, gloriously disobedient to ordinary thinking, they sighed that she was “hard to read,” as if she were a ciphered stanza instead of a whole human trembling with unusual music.

starry night—
a lone barn swallow
cuts through the indigo

In my childhood home, she became a monsoon shelter. My friends, exiled from the storms of shouting adults, came to her for untangling. She brewed tea and a safe space in the same pot. They left with calmer ribs and lighter feet, never noticing the cost to her inner tides. She gave without a receipt, listened without intermission, and hid her heartbreak beneath the saree.

Only after she was gone did the world find the right vocabulary. They arrived with late-minted praises: how warm she was, how rare, how “different in a beautiful way.” I watched them speak of her the way art historians speak of Van Gogh. Too alive for her own century, properly adored only when her pulse was gone. My mother became a posthumous refuge, a remembered glow in people’s recollection rooms. By then, the heart that had held so many had already fallen silent.

in bone-white winter lilacs bloom for no one

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About the Author

Dr. Vidya Premkumar is a poet, educator, and author of three poetry collections: Musing while Living, Living in an Indian Laputa, and the chapbook frame story. Her work has been featured in various literary journals, including Pan Haiku Review, Scarlet Dragonfly Journal, #Femku Mag, and others. She resides in Wayand, Kerala, India.

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