Snippets from seven summers ago

Today’s post comes from the vault, three fictional snippets from unfinished, unedited pieces written in the summer of 2017.

1. We moved to a new housing development bordered to the north by a tomato crop, to the south by a graveyard. I spent my days speaking to the heat, sleeping in irrigation canals, climbing into the wooden ribcages of houses still under construction. I watched those houses through their metamorphoses, them turning from skeletal things and then growing a skin, a face, limbs, and then finally, when a family moved in, a pulse. I watched as the pristine lawns became cluttered with tricycles and hoses and cats. How they turned yellow in time, like the hills leading from the Bay to the Valley. How also family life yellowed, became steeped in certain ways, how certain notes of a family's sadness were drawn out by the late evening, by pink in the sky and crickets and the smell of gasoline. How that made the sadness in a house kind of breathe out and settle in the backyards of neighboring houses so you could smell it, like barbecue.

2. That first month in America, Ludhiana’s sun still pigmented her skin and she had not yet wrung out the bridal songs from her hair. Her husband’s family treated her quiet joy, the girlhood still buzzing in her limbs,  as a kind of stench. When she sang ghazals to herself, they said her singing was indecent. When she laughed with her husband, they shot them dirty looks.

   She looked down at her feet, still embroidered in faded outlines of mehndi, redrawn six months after her marriage ceremony. Her mother insisted she decorate herself again before boarding the flight to join her husband in California.  In America, be the sun, Mummy had said. For the first few months in your new home, she said, wear your bridal joy like a garment, and like a shield. 

   Nobody had warned her that the sky in America was the color of newspaper. That the sky could clench its teeth in steely anger for days before softening into rain. No one told her that in such weather, people dressed in earth tones: stone colored parkas and soil colored turtlenecks and gutter water faces. Nobody wore crimson salwars embroidered with gold thread and tiny mirrors, blood-colored bangles on their wrists.

3. Toward the end, Daadi’s hands thinned to a dust that brushed our foreheads when we kneeled at her bedside, shabads and kathas playing from the old iPod we gifted her too many birthdays ago to remember. As she receded she became more and more like a monument we’d visit. Reverence and dread pooling in our hearts when we touched her. The passage of each night slowly cooling her face to the blankness of a sarovar. 

   Sometimes, she would sing shabads set to folk tunes, alone with the light that fell from the windows in the living room where we’d prepared her makeshift bed. All the flesh and fluid in her voice was gone. Her voice was muscled and brittle and bony; it replaced all the air in the house when she sang, so that everyone felt in their own lungs her sickness, the ash of her dredged up anguish. Every ring of terror encircling her decades sounded in our own bodies like a condemnation, and some of us could not bear it.

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Welcome back to the Nightcap! For one week last July, I posted an assortment of writing nightly on this page - sometimes a new musing or free association exercise, sometimes an old, unedited piece or a curated collection of ancient notes. At the end of each post is a little note about my beverage of choice, etc. that particular evening. This June, the Nightcap is back!

And tonight’s nightcap is a giant bottle of water, because hydration is the tone I want to set for this month.