WHAT LIVES: ORIGIN STORY

Medha Singh

In rooms gone black with memory, mother

  & father took turns to tell sister and I

stories to sleep: they had no heart for fiction,

& we no time

to let the marrow of our little minds

stay warm. Hardening over winds

that snored through cold bluebells

 we foaled.

Cutting through hot loam, my ancestors arrived—

whittled forest down to village, blew them

open into kingdoms; voices shrieked

through war and brick, phylogenesis

of chest & tooth against history, banks loosened

by rain; words turning back, voices

murmuring through dark into day.

I buried a carelessness in the pith

of my orange heart. Inheritance

from that godless ancestor who picked

cherries      under sunlight & my feral appetite

for love? Sleeping with a thousand Penelopes,

he carved       a silver bed for them, etched

and honed. As he lay dying of syphilis, his mad

children,        threw the bed away

flinging their shame with it,

into the slow mouth of the sea.

Yes, mother, go on, I said.

How did Lillith's vanity spring in my chest?

Music of sky snaking inside

the earth’s flowers, in mucous & womb

as I firmed         into life. Bodies leave things behind

ma cooed, the mind unkinks from fiber and sinew,

& now the daily ache, distending

the brain.

'Self-love, is also love of the other,

despite oneself’— my skin absorbed it all,

  as she endured the protracted sorrow

of gestation. Yes, I carry this vanity

I still conflate with self-love.

It’s not mine, belongs to a cherubic

ancestor,                 once furiously worshipped

in adjacent villages. A sage, a saint,

who feared little       & found       after years

         of penance, it was to undo the sins

of the kings that bore me, their past

 shot through with blood

loot, and rape       that the gods dined

with the sage already; they lay in his bed, clung

to his jowl as water when he bathed,

trickled down his back, in the thin air

he breathed; hot sun pickling

his dimpled arms     the Gods thronged

     among his people, in the things & souls

he cast out; deified under temple-eaves,

sightless & meditative, he towered—

venturesome        pilgrims trudging

from Kashmir, whirling

through the Ganges, and arriving,

slow       for a glimpse, as they parted

with answers the holy route

prescribed. My great-grandfather

still sitting still

inside the clatter of feet,

pattering rain

the red noise of crowd and cattle.

How do I inherit this torrential anger,

which really is my fear trying

to hide its embarrassment

from these provincial ties?

We remember without language—

a woman ravaged in the family

 she married into,

five         generations before mine.

This was the sin that begged this penance—

Fifteen year old widow cornered, left

with her womb full the morning

after; when they knew her belly

was proof of their crime, she was taken

 to the woods, was left to die.

This story trickles down

 the mother lines

in whispers,

whispers.

How do we forge these nameless trajectories?

Who chose to stay in the village?

Who came to the city?

Who was flayed alive?

Who were the executioners?

The landowners? The code-keepers?

Who came to the capital? Who was brought

against their will? Who,

was left behind? Listen—

I know        the obsession with ancestry

these days but I’m afraid                    to learn I have

         some whiteness muddying me,

that that unnameable thing

done to a woman, was done then too

to her who could have been fifty,

but was fifteen.

Where the will to surrender persists,

history takes root—my grandfather

in the gulf a generation after, rescuing Indians

& Pakistanis, Kuwait against Saddam’s wild war,

 grandfather smiling, in a silver print,

through tanks in the liquid light.

Yes, we come here to my grandfather

telling stories in the dark, but I’m

not a child, and he is about to die.

It was said that the soldiers grabbed

all their eyes could. Ripped the stone

 clean from the flooring. Tiled

marble at banks and hospitals

now cracking

into craters: what Kuwait was soon

          to be. They tossed out infants,

yesterday's leftovers, wrested them

from their incubators,

the sanatoriums overflowed

with the wailing of widows,

 the sins of demolition men.

My grandfather, they say,

could have died with the babies

he tried to rescue, smuggle home.

Ninety, weary, now his eyes

say nothing.