India, July 18 -- Heat slides under doors at dawn, and Iam almost a child again, sitting on the kitchenfloor of my grandparents' house in Madras.My cousins and I skinning mangoes on steel plates -vegetarian brutes, sucking the sun-gold flesh aroundfatty stones. The person I was inside that house is gone;grandparents, gone. The house some kind of clothingstore. Summers stack up, one against the other. I keepa photo of my grandma in the bathroom. Sacrilege, I know,to house an ancestor there. But she used to pour waterfallsover our heads, slip silver coins into our palms, as thoughall of this could be never-ending. What to say to thoseraised without childhoods? The dread of wakingto the taps dry. The bucket underneath famished. egrets, while war, Tishani Doshi's fifth poetry collection, is alive with birds: woodpeckers, lapwings, "grey-hooded crows", egrets and the Ramayana's kraunca. These are creatures that know not pristine lands, but terror-fields ravaged by war. Amid the wreckage, they become prayers and prophecies, omens and oracles, messengers of gods and winged gods themselves, holding in their wildly beating hearts news of an afterlife: Someone said, when children die, they become birds in heaven....