On the Road to Shimla

by Aditi Gupta

The woman in those cactus
colored clothes and hair
brassy from henna, face
cracked and brown as the rock
that peeks from between green
mountains (the greenery
pulled as tightly
against the mountains
as a shawl, with towns
embroidered here and there
and a winding seam
of a road and wrinkled,
so wrinkled), drives
a herd of dun colored cows
with that look on her face—
the calmness of knowing
that the world can be contained in her
wrinkled root-like hands,
that it’s no bigger
than a closely wrapped
green shawl.