Poetry: “Borrowed” by Arihant Jain
Arihant Jain’s “Borrowed” is remarkable for its technical shifts and innovations with language—some memorable moments include “her accent bleeds / jasmine” and “the taste / of monsoon” but Jain is much more than just a powerful and noteworthy linguistic stylist. The remarkable element of this poem is its murky ambiguity. The mother practices English even as her daughters fall away from her, leaving to follow their own dreams. They are repeating a natural cycle, children leaving the family home and following a supposedly better path that will help them to become safer, stronger, healthier and in a position to acquire skills and wealth that they can either return home with or send back in the form of cash or gifts or even just necessary supplies. Huge numbers of immigrants send all kinds of things back to their family and friends in their countries, and one of the things they send the most often, Jain notes with startling terror and beauty and a sharp, unexpected observatory eye, is the loss, the emptiness they leave behind when they follow their American dreams. This is what they’ve been raised for. But a mother is a mother. Purpose doesn’t blunt the hurt.
Borrowed
Petrichor (n.): the scent of rain on dry earth—
or my mother’s hands after she’s done praying,
turmeric-stained & trembling. At dawn, she reads
fortunes in chai leaves, searches for words
that might survive crossing oceans. Each morning,
she practices American until her accent bleeds
jasmine. Until her mouth forgets the taste
of monsoon. Some words refuse to cross borders—
like the way she counts grief in cups of rice,
each grain a small prayer for daughters who grow
away from their own names. In her mother tongue,
there’s a word for the sound of memory rotting,
for the precise temperature at which language
spoils. I’ve seen her wrap whole histories
in banana leaves, preserve scenes of before
in pickle jars: her father’s late morning cough,
her mother’s cologne of fresh-cut mango,
the specific gravity of a language drowning
in Pacific depths. Sometimes I catch her
testing the weather of her children’s tongues,
measuring the distance between mother & ma,
between home & the place we now inhabit.
In Bengali, there’s a word for daughters
who learn to split their voices into war zones,
who inherit their mothers’ gift for making
homes in hostile climates. Who pack whole
childhoods into carry-on grief, who learn
to speak in airport-code & passport-promise.
I watch her gather storms in her palms like decades
of unlived daughters, each one named for a way
of leaving. For a type of rain that falls sideways
in two languages. For all the words that died
in her throat before I was born. At night,
she teaches me to read weather in breaking
voices, in the barometric pressure of sacrifice.
Shows me how to fold longing into origami ships,
small enough to sail through customs. How to wear
distance like a second skin, how to translate
survival into American dreams. There’s a word
in her language for the sound of daughters
turning into their mothers’ worst fears. For the way
certain rains fall like apologies between generations.
For what happens to women who spend lifetimes
learning to speak in borrowed weather.
Arihant Jain
Ari is a writer born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee. Their work can be found in Eunoia Review, Gigantic Sequins, and Blue Marble Review, among others. They have been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation, the National Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and more. In their free time, they enjoy playing pickleball and badminton.
