The Oil Stain by Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad

When you fry sardines the whole world will know,
my mother would say, seated at the kitchen table.

She rubbed the fish with chili paste, silver skins
sparkling, as they crackled like fireworks

in the blazing vat. Oil splattered in amber spots
she never wiped away. People often complain

about the stench of sardines, but I never found it
repulsive. Never thought of them as fertilizer

for trees either. What the neighbours used
for garden compost, I saw as sustenance—

delicious salvation served on a plate. It was the year
of the war. Mother called it the year of the eclipse,

the year of the wandering feet, the year of flames
and ash. But, misfortune was no match

for my mother’s grit. She gathered our restless souls
and held us in warmth at the kitchen table—

a mahogany bench, on which she served the same
humble meal, night after night: green beans, yogurt

and sardines on rice, each dish infused with faith,
and the hope that we might rise from the trenches

of strife, that we might find stable ground again.
And slowly, the shadows yielded to light.

Bad times faded as our wheel of fortune creaked
and turned and brighter days returned. And now,

all these years later, what I still remember
is my mother at that kitchen table—seated

at the mahogany bench from the year of the war,
the year of the eclipse, the year of the wandering feet,

how that table glowed like an apparition, like an altar
of sacred communion, with its green beans, yogurt

and fried sardines shimmering in a plate of bronze,
how I once toppled the fish and a puddle of oil

splashed onto the wood in the shape of a fluttering pool,
seeping deep like a prayer, like a hymn, how the memory

still lives in that oil stain on that kitchen table,
still warm, still holy like my mother’s fearless heart.



Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad is a widely-published Indian-Australian artist and poet. She is the author of Patchwork Fugue (Atomic Bohemian Press UK 2024), and A Second Life in Eighty-eight Keys (winner of The Little Black Book Competition, Hedgehog Poetry Press UK 2024). Find her on X @oormilaprahlad and www.instagram.com/oormila_paintings