1.
Mother had just returned, emptied, from the big house where the rich woman’s breasts weredry, and the baby’s mewls were heartrending. 
But now she was peeling potatoes, thumbs deftly scraping off thin curls of peel, so it would be MammeAma instead with her big rough hands and Ananda’s scalp would hurt. 
The old woman’s tugs were sharp, her braiding swift, sure.
“Present youself neat, you mebbe get good people. Heaven knows you no beauty.” 
“Good people” to work for, she meant. In a house not your own, she meant. 
Because a backbreaking scrape-by existence was all MammeAma knew. But she said it in that voice made ugly with love.
From behind them came the dull, resigned thunks of Aunty pounding spices with a stone, the burn still weeping wetly down the side of her face. The henna stains had not yet faded from Aunty’s wrists when she and MammeAma had clambered out of the well, barely alive, over the bodies of the burned dead.
The skin had peeled from their limbs in great crackling swatches as the fighting across the border grew worse, but Aunty’s face still leaked the tears she no longer could cry for everything they’d lost. 
Ananda kept her head down. 
Na- Uh, countered her wilful heart. Not me.
She scratched out her lesson with a twig onto the sodden ground. Wood to earth, the piggledychildglyphs took her awhile. No matter, she was the only one here who could. 
And they’d eat tonight. 
That meant hope. 
2. 
They’d lost even that to the faceless war. They were now three more dirt poor lumps on the dust brown landscape, on the way to wherever.
3.
Aunty had taken her bangles off when they first saw the empty space.   
The dull metal glinted off bare walls and counters, chopping up light and throwing it back at them, full of possibility. 
“After all,’ she’d said, “I don’t need these now.” 
But she had smiled her old smile.
4.
After that Ananda remembered the years vanishing in smells and sounds, mostly. They curled around the edges of her books, the muffled human din from the front of the shop and the familiar spicy, earth scents in back where the herbed oils gooped and the three women bustled happily, endlessly.
Eventually, the new place had been kind to them. 
The shop, then shops, had done well.
5. 
And now the Foundation was doing good work, hospitals, schools, prisons, and just lately… museums. 
The corporate logo was everywhere, petals unfurled as antiquities experts and enthusiasts, museums and media celebrated the find. 
They’d let her keep one of the nonconsequential items.
Ananda fingered the ancient earthen-ware pot. It contained a tiny heap of earrings. Crude hoops they were, more copper than gold.
The dowry, perhaps, of a daughter of the house. What had her heart whispered to her as she baked bread? As she painstakingly scratched out that childish flower motif over and over round the base of the pot? 
But this was what mattered. 
People like her, living everyday lives. 
In the end, people were all that mattered.
6. 
The door of the office opened. The baby, all grown up now, said, “We are ready for you, Madam Chairman.” 
Ananda’s scalp tingled as she turned her back on the portrait.
The legend on the brass plate underneath was simple.          

GRANDMOTHER LOTUS, FOUNDER.

FONDLY KNOWN BY ALL HER GLOBAL FAMILY AS MAMMEAMA.

It was time.
Ananda strode forth to face the world on plush brown carpeting that fell quietly away from her ankles, like peeling curls, like wet earth, like memories of henna.
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The Woven Wyrd was an editor of business news and nonfiction for several years, before going rogue as a freelancer. Her work has appeared nationally and internationally, published by platforms such as Thomson Reuters, Oxford University Press, The Wall Street Journal, Xinhua News, AFX and the now defunct Dow Jones News Wire. This is her first short fiction piece.