The House with Green Windows
By Vandana Nair
From the many homes I lived in,
this house has green windows.
Its three floors lie flat
like stone pebbles balancing on the ground
and window-like eyes
looking into the soul of every tree
at daybreak and dusk,
At night, the windows look inward, into me.
The roof is old,
wooden slats weathered to a grimy brown,
A hint of home resting
on a faded red brick wall.
In my imaginings,
the colour of soil blended with brewed,
orange-brown tea leaves—
mixed-by-hand manure of my grandfather’s rose-patch.
From every window
I see him lifting the trowel,
paying homage to every
dark-red rosa indica shrub in a terracotta planter,
“Desi gulaab,” he says,
“has the fragrance of atra and the tint of blood.”
I hear his voice in the daylight,
cajoling plants and children alike
I long to grow deep-red in the wilderness, but nothing holds,
All I wake up to see from the window is green.
Vandana Nair grew up in India believing that relationships, in life and on the page, need to be nurtured from their roots. Living away from her land of birth has given her the distance essential for mining themes for stories, essays and other forms from her cultural home and heritage. Learning across geographies have enabled her to complete her undergraduate degree in India, work as a freelance writer, and attain an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop in Fiction.
Punch, her debut novel, can be read on Kindle. She has also contributed The Signature, a short story, to The Knot Wound Round Your Finger (Bell Press), an anthology on memory, history and inheritance, which was nominated by the publishers for a 2021 Pushcart Prize. One of her essays, How my mother taught me to make pickles, has been made into a 25 minutes short Hindi language film called Achaar, which received an Honorable Jury mention at the 10th Kolkata Shorts International Film Festival-2021. Her book reviews of translated texts from India have appeared in Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation, The University of Iowa.
Her novella, The Wedding, is a forthcoming release from Santa Fe Writer’s Project in 2026. She is presently working on her literary women’s fiction collection She/Her.
Nair lives in Redmond, Washington State, with her husband and two youngsters, one of whom is a canine.