Shanti

For eleven generations, the women of her family have swept this courtyard. The lamp has not gone out. Shanti keeps a shrine in a side lane off the Grand Road. No signboard, no queue of pilgrims, no priests managing access. The flagstones out front have been swept so many times the grit has worn entirely away. She is Sabara. Her family kept the ground before the temple existed, tending what was already in the earth before any name was put to it. The priests held the ritual. Her family held the ground. After 1803 they kept the keeping alone. When her mother went to the administrator in 1971, he sent engineers into the chamber without her and closed the entrance afterward. Her mother never spoke to an administrator again. Shanti has been keeping the difference alive for fifty-two years. She sweeps the courtyard, trims the lamp, and waits for the people who find her because they needed to.