Season Without Solstice

It begins, always,

with a tremor cloaked in stillness —

a thunder that skulks beneath bone,

never quite erupting,

yet never wholly silent.

I await its arrival

as one does a reckoning —

a procession of unnamed tempests,

perhaps rain amassed like infantry,

or frost cascading through latitudes

where deserts deny even memory of moisture.

Or worse 

the hush before a hurricane

when even the wind holds its breath.

And still, I do not flee.

There is a ritual to this ache —

an intimate familiarity.

I no longer discern

whether I anticipate its cruelty

or simply fail to unlearn its choreography.

It dismantles my shelter

with the elegance of erosion,

leaves my dwelling—my chest,

roofless,

wordless.

What breaks is not the world

but my witness to it.

This storm,

though weathered like myth,

resides within—

a cataclysm without lightning

yet full of incandescence.

Each utterance I forge

turns to cinders at the mouth.

The throat,

a corridor of splinters.

My voice,

an archive of failed departures.

I wish to scream,

but find that breath

is taxed more dearly than silence.

So I exhale

in fragments—

in ghosted syllables

lodged between my fingers.

And I ask again,

this question I do not want answered—

Do I love this season?

Or has it simply become

the only inheritance I dare touch?

He arrives.

Like prophecy.

His presence,

not loud 

but certain.

He does not ask,

he presumes.

His breath swells with entitlement,

his hands

script scriptures of conquest

across my unwilling topography.

He collapses into me

as if to baptise his manhood—

to canonise it

in a body he does not name.

And when his sacraments are spent,

he retreats,

donning his shirt like armor,

leaving behind only

the smell of completion

and a silence

far louder than mine.

I do not weep —

not loudly.

The sorrow here

is subterranean.

It does not seek an audience.

Tomorrow,

I will reopen the door.

The frame splintered,

the ritual unchanged.

Another will come,

his pockets heavy with validation,

his hands light with reverence.

He will not know

that what he buys

is not pleasure—

but subsistence.

For two mouths,

too small to understand

the transactions that feed them.

Two girls,

who call me mother

but do not know

the altar I burn on

each night.

So tell me —

is this body

a cathedral defiled,

or a crypt

where hunger lays its offerings?

Or is it

a sanctified ruin

consecrated not by choice,

but by necessity—

where each desecration

begets salvation

for those I love

more than breath itself?

[  Not every woman who sells her body is part of a criminal network or an organised racket. Many are driven by necessity ; to feed their children, to keep a roof over their heads, to become the sole breadwinner in a world that left them with no other choice. Globally, it's estimated that between 40 to 52 million people are involved in sex work — most of them women and in regions like the Asia-Pacific alone, over 1.8 million women are known to be in the trade. India accounts for nearly 3 million, with states like Delhi, , West Bengal , Karnataka, and Maharashtra holding the highest numbers. China is said to have the largest population of sex workers in the world, with around 5 million. Places like Thailand, Brazil, Myanmar, and Indonesia also reflect this harsh reality where women, many of them trafficked or forced into the profession from a young age, continue to live this life not out of choice, but for survival. The global sex trade generates an estimated $186 billion each year, yet behind those billions lie individual women often abused, exploited, and judged. 

What society tends to forget is that many of these women carry out the purest form of motherhood — selling their bodies not for pleasure, but to educate their daughters, feed their sons, and shield their children from the very world that failed them. And yet, they are treated with disgrace, as if their survival is a sin. In places like Sonagachi in Kolkata , Asia's largest red-light district — clay from a sex worker's doorstep is collected to sculpt the idol of Goddess Durga each year before Durga Puja. It is a sacred ritual that silently honors their existence, recognizing that divinity and survival can exist in the same breath. So before calling her impure, remember who knocked on her door. The shame does not lie in her work . It lies in our refusal to understand it. ]