Tishani Doshi

i.m. India's missing girls This is not really myth or secret. This murmur in the mouth of the mountain where the sound of rain is born. This surging past pilgrim town and village well. This coin-thin vagina and acid stain of bone. This doctor with his rusty tools, this street cleaner, this mother laying down the bloody offerings of birth. This is not the cry of a beginning, or a river buried in the bowels of the earth. This is the sound of ten million girls singing of a time in the universe when they were born with tigers breathing between their thighs; when they set out for battle with all three eyes on fire, their golden breasts held high like weapons to the sky.

Because this is a monsoon poem expect to find the words jasmine, palmyra, Kuruntokai, red; mangoes in reference to trees or breasts; paddy fields, peacocks, Kurinji flowers, flutes; lotus buds guarding love’s furtive routes. Expect to hear a lot about erotic consummation inferred by laburnum gyrations and bamboo syncopations. Listen to the racket of wide-mouthed frogs and bent- legged prawns going about their business of mating while rain falls and falls on tiled roofs and verandas, courtyards, pagodas. Because such a big part of you seeks to understand this kind of rain — so unlike your cold rain, austere rain, get-me-the-hell- out-of-here rain. Rain that can’t fathom how to liberate camphor from the vaults of the earth. Let me tell you how little is written of mud, how it sneaks up like a sleek-gilled vandal to catch hold of your ankles. Or about the restorative properties of mosquito blood, dappled and fried against the wires of a bug-zapping paddle. So much of monsoon is to do with being overcome — not from longing as you might think, but from the sky’s steady bludgeoning, until every leaf on every unremembered tree gleams in the abyss of postcoital bliss. Come. Now sip on your masala tea, put your lips to the sweet, spicy skin of it. There’s more to see — notice the dogs who’ve been fucking on the beach, locked in embrace like an elongated Anubis, the crabs scavenging the flesh of a dopey- eyed ponyfish, the entire delirious coast with its philtra of beach and saturnine clouds arched backwards in disbelief. And the mayflies who swarm in November with all their ephemeral grandeur to die in millions at the behest of light, the geckos stationed on living room walls, cramming fistfuls of wings in their maws. Notice how hardly anyone mentions the word death, even though the fridge leaks and the sheets have been damp for weeks. And in this helter-skelter multitude of gray-greenness, notice how even the rain begins to feel fatigued. The roads and sewers have nowhere to go, and like old-fashioned pursuers they wander and spill their babbling hearts to electrical poles and creatures with ears. And what happens later, you might ask, after we’ve moved to a place of shelter, when the cracks in the earth have reappeared? We dream of wet, of course, of being submerged in millet stalks, of webbed toes and stalled clocks and eels in the mouth of a heron. We forget how unforgivably those old poems led us to believe that men were mountains, that the beautiful could never remain heartbroken, that when the rains arrive we should be delighted to be taken in drowning, in devotion.

When I see the houses in this city, the electric gates and uniformed men employed to guard the riches of the rich, the gilded columns and gardens, the boats on water, I wonder, how to describe my home to you: the short, mud walls, the whispering roof, the veranda on which my whole family used to spread sheets and sleep. The year I came to find work in the city, my wife painted our house white so it would be brighter than the neighbours'. I beat her for her foolishness. The children are hungry, I said, the cow is old, the money collector is after my blood, and you steal like a magpie— half a month's wage—to decorate your nest like a shiny jewel? The monsoon finally arrived the year I left, dripped through the thatch, peeled paint off the walls. The wells grew full and overflowed. The farmers rejoiced in the fields. My son sat with his mouth open catching drops of water like a frog. My wife clung to the walls and wept. When I fall asleep on the pavements in this city, I try to imagine my wife's skin against mine, the kohl in her eyes, the white walls, the whole village sky bearing down upon us with all the weight of the stars. I think of returning to that life, but mostly I try to remember how the world was once. I want to open my mouth like my son, and swallow things whole— feel water filling all the voids, until I am shaped back into existence.

Let us not speak of those days when coffee beans filled the morning with hope, when our mothers' headscarves hung like white flags on washing lines. Let us not speak of the long arms of sky that used to cradle us at dusk. And the baobabs—let us not trace the shape of their leaves in our dreams, or yearn for the noise of those nameless birds that sang and died in the church's eaves. Let us not speak of men, stolen from their beds at night. Let us not say the word disappeared. Let us not remember the first smell of rain. Instead, let us speak of our lives now— the gates and bridges and stores. And when we break bread in caf é s and at kitchen tables with our new brothers, let us not burden them with stories of war or abandonment. Let us not name our old friends who are unravelling like fairy tales in the forests of the dead. Naming them will not bring them back. Let us stay here, and wait for the future to arrive, for grandchildren to speak in forked tongues about the country we once came from. Tell us about it, they might ask. And you might consider telling them of the sky and the coffee beans, the small white houses and dusty streets. You might set your memory afloat like a paper boat down a river. You might pray that the paper whispers your story to the water, that the water sings it to the trees, that the trees howl and howl it to the leaves. If you keep still and do not speak, you might hear your whole life fill the world until the wind is the only word.