The chawan I chose
from the potter’s shelf drew
a submerged memory

the cerulean blue of the Mediterranean 
blending to cyan, rusty red, a muddy brown 
along the calderic rim of the volcanic island
Santorini.

Disembarking from the boat,
I had climbed the mile or so 
to the crater. There,
on a compulsion, I had stooped, 
picked up a rock and flung it fiercely
into the cavernous mouth.

Everything propitious begins with ritual: 
boy hurling a defiant stone at a tank.

Watching the rock clatter down
the burnished copper slope of
compacted, hardened lava,
I clearly saw what was falling away
from my misshapen life.

…

Rinku Dutta lives in a stone hut at the foothills of the Dhauladhar Range of the Lesser Himalayas in India. She has been a scientist and educator, occasionally writing about her experiences. ‘Exploring the Roots of Harmony: India and Pakistan Conflict Transformation’ is a monograph of a selection of her essays that is the outcome of a Scholar of Peace Media Fellowship that she received from WISCOMP (Women in Security Conflict Management and Peace, Foundation for Universal Responsibility of his Holiness the Dalai Lama, India). She won the Scientific Indian Science Fiction Short Story Contest (2008) for her story Aski’s Choice. Her poem ‘Monsoon Rain’ won 3rd Place in the SMS Poetry Contest, Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, Bombay (2006). Her recent poems were published in The Friday Times. Her works have been published in journals like Himal Southasian, DesiLit, Newsline, and Hindustan Times. Rinku Dutta holds a PhD degree in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry jointly from Rutgers University and The Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, New Jersey.