makkhan malai – Swastika Jajoo
noon settles— embroidered with trinkets of winter dhoop, rising steam from the chai stall across, colours of kesar from makkhan malai that has seen the moon all night & finally becomes its song. that is how i am, too, becoming the lyric of you, dear moon, dear love, dear whose name i can barely whisper for fear of it scattering across my every sky. so i keep you like a safeguarded secret, the loneliness of the man who brews & brews & brews the makkhan for hours on end with no company but the moon. he is met by a morning slightly sweeter but no less lonely. what do i know of love? nothing other than it is what it is & makkhan malai? nothing, too, other than it is what it is. o khuda, thank you for at least letting the best of things stay safe from the desperation of description. if there is no meaning to pining, let pining be meaning itself.
![Swastika Jajoo Swastika Jajoo](http://www.parenthesesjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Swastika-Jajoo-1-150x150.jpg)
Swastika is studying Linguistics in Japan — or at least that is what she’s doing when not conversing with crows, teaching, trying to poem™ or worrying about if she’s added too much ginger to her chai. Her work has been featured with The Seventh Wave, Eunoia Review, MudRoom Mag and The Lickety Split among others.