Salt
The son said,
“Mother, today the food is bland.”
The daughter smiled,
“It tastes just right.”
The husband frowned,
“You always use too much.
What’s wrong with you these days?”
And the woman,
listening,
measuring,
kept adjusting the salt—
but not her sorrow.
She began to believe
salt was not only in food
but in life itself:
without it,
nothing had flavor.
The taunts kept coming,
grain by grain.
She dissolved salt
into every silence,
into her love,
her anger,
her patience,
her giving.
It seeped into her—
into the wet corners of her eyes,
into the lines of her hands,
into the long fatigue of her days.
And later,
when she looked into the mirror,
she saw what she had become:
a small heap of salt,
disappearing slowly—
offering taste to every life around her,
leaving behind
only a faint remembrance
on the tongue.
~Deepak Vohra