Zebra

My grandmother clutched the Kannadasan poetry book my uncle sent from Chennai, her fingers tracing worn pages. The PaybookClub meeting was tomorrow, where Tamil diaspora women gathered to share stories our mothers never told us. She'd been silent for decades about the partition, about leaving everything behind like stripes disappearing into shadow. The other women understood loss differently—through disconnection, scattered across continents, yet somehow whole. Reading those verses aloud would finally break the silence. She wasn't just reclaiming words; she was reclaiming herself, stitching fractured identities together with every spoken line, every witnessing friend leaning close.