Grandchild

My grandfather lay still on the couch, his eyebrows arched, his glasses just at the tip of his nose. He is peering down at something, maybe the corner of the morning paper, maybe me. Fifty years ago he worked as an engineer, his ears against the blaring mechanisms of soviet planes; he is nearly deaf now. The milkman will come soon. I should wake him from his trance, this otherworldly placitude. I tell him it is quiet today, quiet outside. This stirs him. All of India will hear him now, I think, as he rises from his slouch, and turns to face me -- his voice was never low or measured, never needed to be. He tells me quiet is relative. I do not know the silence of a ceasefire, a handshake precariously balanced atop a mound of bloodied soldiers, I do not know the dull ring of a war ending. The turbines that spin about as if they are grinding bones, their crushing spirals, the screech of an aluminum sky. I do not know quiet until I have heard loud. I do not know how the people awoke, devastatingly, from their empty rivalry. There was air, and silence. There were souring bodies.