DOTS

My grandmother's fingers traced the kolam dots each dawn, humming Thiruppavai verses that had traveled generations. She'd sketch them freehand, never measuring twice, her muscle memory shameless in its precision. Years later, I found her notebook filled with dot patterns, each one dated. She'd been recording our family's artistic lineage, creating an all-inclusive archive of Tamil heritage through simple, elegant designs. When I finally learned her songs and began the ritual myself, something superhuman happened. The dots connected me to ancestors I'd never met, their voices singing through my hands. In those moments, drawing dots became devotion, a conversation across time that only our community truly understood.