by Nikita Deshpande
The Summer I Watched Oppenheimer
I also ate my first Italian Peach, red round as a sun behind sleeping eyelids, big soft as a newborn’s head. You had to extend both hands to cradle it. The fruitseller’s hair was the same silver as my grandfather, who had taken it upon himself to sell me on both Physics and Fresh Fruit. But this Nonno did not bother with language. He merely lifted open palms up to his nose and mimed taking a good, long sniff. And in that one inhale, I could hear the music, the song each particle sings to the other as it holds together the straining fabric of the universe. Later, I’d sit on a black pebble beach, close my eyes, and bring it to my open mouth like a prayer and stars would be muted from existence, crushed to pulp beneath the roof of my mouth, shimmering galaxies born from the sweetness and the tang, and though ancient planets would flatten to string and come to be stuck between the gaps of my teeth, I wouldn’t mind. I’d simply tease them with the tip of my tongue all afternoon, scraping them against the atoms of lunch, letting them pool in the black cave of my mouth, unhurried. I nodded then, and Nonno smiled, crow’s feet folding in flight at the edges of his eyes, both delighted in knowing something that nuclear physicists don’t.
Nikita Deshpande is a poet, novelist, and screenwriter based in Mumbai, India. Her poetry has been published in The Bombay Literary Magazine, The Rumpus, The Hooghly Review and an anthology called The World That Belongs to Us. She won the 2023 Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize and was awarded a 2015 Vermont Studio Center Fellowship to work on her fiction. She is also the author of a novel called It Must’ve Been Something He Wrote published by Hachette India and a short story ‘The Girl Who Haunted Death’ featured in The Deadlands.