Kaya Kalpam — ((hot))

The Vaidya grinds it to dust and blows it into the wind. "That was not yours to keep," she says.

I lie on the stone floor of the scriptorium, my spine a cracked whip, my knuckles swollen from decades of gripping what I could not hold. The Vaidya—a woman older than the banyan tree in the courtyard—presses her thumb to my third eye. "Your body is not a temple," she says. "It is a river that forgot it could flow." kaya kalpam

Kaya Kalpam is finished. But the body is never finished. The Vaidya grinds it to dust and blows it into the wind

On the final morning, I rise. The mirror shows a man of twenty-five, but my eyes are ten thousand years old. I walk outside. The banyan tree drops a leaf. I catch it. And for the first time, I do not wonder where it came from or where it will go. The Vaidya—a woman older than the banyan tree

By the second week, I am shrinking. Not withering— compressing . Returning to the density of a child. My grey hairs loosen and fall, and from the same follicles, black threads push through like crocuses through snow. My liver, once sluggish as a water buffalo, spins itself clean. I feel it: a small sun igniting behind my navel.

I am the leaf. I am the tree. I am the ground.

It only remembers how to begin again.