Sunita Ke Liye*

By: Ria Raj

My immigrant mother stands

at the trash can, peeling

soaked almonds one-by-one,

calluses warping

the side of her brown

fingers. She sniffles

as she washes each almond of its

grime, her nostrils submerged

in cumin-infused steam.

As she picks at

the grayed imperfections

of the almonds, she

hums the songs of Lata Mangeshkar

through her crooked,

yellowed teeth, her body drenched

in Hindi and Urdu and Punjabi and Bhojpuri.

I claw

at my human

relationships, searching

for my mother

in everything, pleading

for a love that seeps

from weathered

bodies into my ash

skin, soaking

my world in my mother’s

pyaar, in her

prem, in her

vatsalya, in her

mohabbat, in her

mamata, in every word of her

tongue that translates

to love. And as her love dissects

my organs, dismembers

my arteries, tenderly carves out

bits of tender, raw

marrow from my brittle

brown bones, I wonder if

to be brown is to be queer.

*Sunita Ke Liye translates to “For Sunita”

Ria Raj is a queer, South-Asian-American writer studying based in San Diego. Raj is deeply interested in the intersectional constructions of brownness, queerness, and womanhood in the literary archive, and how their work might fit into this constellation. Their creative work and literary research has earned the UC San Diego South Asian Studies Undergraduate Paper Prize, the UC San Diego Making of the Modern World Showcase Award, multiple spots in the UC San Diego Dean’s Office Undergraduate Art Exhibition, and a finalist position for the Sherley Williams Memorial Prize in Literary Arts. They have an upcoming publication in Eunoia Review.