Delhi
The men with maps, their ruler-straight certainties,
their hunger for first names,
go on asking the river which bank was original.
The river having forgotten,
the river having remembered too much,
and the tongue, that notorious smuggler,
carrying yesterday’s syllables beneath today’s flag.
What they want is a beginning they can stand on,
a first stone laid by a first hand,
thinking that a city were a sentence and
not the long interruption sentences are,
the part that will not say where, exactly, it began.
As if the word for water had not arrived
already wet from some other mouth,
some other country.
I have watched them measure
the distance between two minarets and call it history,
watched them mistake the straightest line for the truest,
when the truth, if it is anywhere, is in the swerve.
The way a name bends each time it changes hands,
the way Dilli, Dhilli, Delhi
are less three names than one name caught in its own infidelity,
To begin where they point, to end where the finger lands and says
here, this is what it really is—
The way you might point at God
and name that pointing God.
Mother of Vinegar
In the kitchen of the rented apartment, thin walls,
Borrowed light, my mother begins again,
without memory, with word.
She says my name the way one tests water before entering:
slowly cautiously and then quickly. In her
Mouth it is longer. It has room to live.
Here they file it down to something that fits between
the teeth. When they ask what it means, she laughs,
This part is a word for home, she says, not the house.
The act of returning. And this part, she presses her tongue to her teeth
—searching.
This part is breath. Or continuance. She is unsure
now. The language has begun to loosen around her,
Like a country narrowing each year on the map. Even
before, it started to leave it: answering in the other
tongue, rounding
My vowels fit, letting certain consonants fall away
like relatives I would not visit. There are words that
shed in migration.
In one language, to stay also means to wait. In
another, to leave leans so close to survive they
share a single root of urgency.
She hesitate before particular syllables, choosing a
word is choosing which life to live.
When you were born, she says I called you
something else first-- a name in no language.
I was born as something else,
a name that meant nothing, which is to say
everything.
The linguists reconstruct a route for dying: *dheu-,
they write- to pass, to thin into an absence that still has direction.
and there is another *dheu-, it's twin- smoke, vapor, dust
the route that flowers into fume, into perfume,
into the Sanskrit word for what rises of a fire and
disappears. Two roots that sound the same:
death and breath, a rhyme apart.
Even mother will not stay clean. *Méhtēr- the root
that opens into matrix, matter, material, the stuff the Earth is
built from. Drifts, in the old wine-countries, toward the lees: madre, the
sediment, the mother of vinegar,
what settles at the bottom and is thrown out.
Origin and dreg from a single sound. So this is what
my immigration documents mean by re located.
How a name is folded until it resembles another name, how
meaning thins to pass the checkpoint, how even mother
carries her own residue inside her. After she died I
tried to say the name she gave me first and could not
place it. The vowels slipped- too open, then too closed
as if my mouth had become foreign into itself.
Once she said she hates me.
I heard she hurts me.
In some other language those two would share a root, or
nearly. She used to watch me the way one watches the river
change its course: with awe and helplessness.
If I ask her now what my name means there is no her
to ask, and still it answers-- her body
between two countries
mine between two sounds
both of us, even now
still arriving
Like a Sufi in Love
I watch them from the far end of the courtyard.
The grandfather, the child.
Two ends of a life, set down
in the same square of shade.
Three times the child asks,
three times the grandfather answers,
Each answer, a little different.
This is how truths are formed.
The grandfather knows something
the child will spend a lifetime
finding out: that the hand
you are given will not
always be the hand you have.
The child runs toward the sun
because he does not yet know
the sun is not a destination.
I do not move.
I have learned this much—
that watching, too, is a way
of participating in the ending,
though we prefer to call it
witness, as if that made us innocent.
Above me, one leaf trembles,
the entire tree trembles.
The whole earth is turning,
like a Sufi in love.
Questions Asked By My Five-Year-Old
Why can’t I see yesterday?
She asks this eating cereal with a fork,
the kind of credential that earns a person the right to interrogate reality.
I explain calendars, the rotation of the Earth, how time admits one direction only.
If God made dirt, who made the dirt under the dirt?
I tell her scientists are still working on some of these.
If I turn six, what happens to five?
Outside, the stars keep the old habit of looking like answers.
Is my back the front of behind me? How old is the number two? If I swallowed a flashlight would my thoughts glow?
By noon, she had dismantled most of Western Philosophy.
Who teaches the birds the shape of birds? How does my shadow know which foot is mine?
I give answers. She keeps the questions.
In the grocery store, between the apples:
If apples come from trees, where do tree ideas come from?
I tell her I don’t know. It’s the first thing I have said all day that sounds true.
If I become a butterfly, can you still be my dad? If I become soup? If I become Tuesday?
I want to say yes to all of it— the butterfly, the soup,
the promotion of Tuesday to a thing with feelings.
I offer explanations the way a man throws chairs at a flood.
At bedtime, she points at the ceiling.
Who lives above the sky?
I start the usual ladder: troposphere, stratosphere, space–
No. Higher. The place where lost balloons go.
Of course, the kingdom of vanished things and single socks,
The empire of every charger that fit perfectly yesterday.
Then the question that finally undoes me.
When I’m big, will I still be this one?
Not me. This one.
She touches her chest, as if she can feel the
small animal of herself asleep in there.
No. She will not be this one. This one is already dying at the ordinary speed of children, replaced so gently we call it nothing, we call it Tuesday & I am the witness paid in love to watch it happen. I have already buried five of her and called it growing up.
I say yes but what I mean is—
I hope.
Srija Umapathy is a PhD candidate and a Marjorie Hope Nicolson Fellow in the English and Comparative Literature department at Columbia University in New York City. She teaches during the day and moonlights as a grasshopper.