Humans throughout history have been fascinated by the elements. Unfathomable forces of nature, they entered our myths and minds aeons ago. There’s no time when we’re not in their thrall. Drawing from the vast store of our collective imagination across mythology, philosophy, religion, literature, science, and art, I present Elementalia, a series of five element-bending lyric essays that explores their enchanting stories and their relationship with the word—making, translating, and transforming meaning and message. This is not an exhaustive (nor exhausting) effort that covers every instance of and interaction with each element, but rather an idiosyncratic, intertextual, meditative work—a patchwork quilt of conversations with other writers, works, and texts across space and time.
Fire blazes in the news now, while elsewhere in the world—where people have less, where media doesn’t look as hard, where photographs aren’t as terribly beautiful—water churns, earth cracks, air howls, and the void always awaits.
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Bastian: “Why is it so dark?”
The Childlike Empress: “In the beginning, it is always dark.”
– The NeverEnding Story, 1984 film
It was the hour before the Gods awake.
– Sri Aurobindo, Savitri
अ॒ग्निमी॑ळे पु॒रोहि॑तं य॒ज्ञस्य॑ दे॒वमृ॒त्विज॑म् । होता॑रं रत्न॒धात॑मम् ॥ १.००१.०१
agnimīḻe purohitaṃ yajñasya devamṛtvijam |
hotāraṃ ratnadhātamam || 1.001.01– The Ṛgveda
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Out of the primordial darkness, something appears. A little spark. So it begins.
Agni, Fire, is the first god to be invoked, the foremost, in the very first verse of the oldest of the Vedas, themselves among the oldest texts in the world. Agni is the one placed first, the priest of the sacrifice. Agni—two-headed, seven-tongued, born from the open mouth of Prajāpati, the progenitor—devours the oblations. That’s how he was coaxed back—with a share of the offerings and an injury-free, immortal-ish lifespan—when he ran away from his duties and hid in the waters and the plants. Agni, the conveyor, carries the offerings to the gods. And Agni, a god among mortals, is himself the summoner of gods.
“In more than one sense is Agni the sacrifice,” says Stella Kramrisch in The Presence of Śiva.
Agni is also कविक्रतु kavikratu—“seer-will,” Aurobindo translates in Hymns to the Mystic Fire; “with a poet’s purpose,” translate Jamison and Brereton. Agni, bearer of the sacred word, the word that says what is seen, that makes what is made.
“In Tungusic there are three other series of terms expressing the action of shamanizing,” Roberto Calasso quotes researchers in The Celestial Hunter, “the first linked to the idea of praying to fire, the second to that of speech, and the third to the idea of sacred power.”
Just as Old Avestan, the liturgical language of Zoroastrianism, does in the Gathas, the Vedic Sanskrit here pays attention to fire and word. They are, after all, going to be together for a long, long time. Cathexis—to have and to hold.
Zoroaster is Zarathushtra. For those who know of the prophet via Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the Graham Parkes translation is subtitled A Book for Everyone and Nobody. When god is dead, the personal is the universal. “Then you were carrying your ashes to the mountains: would you today carry your fire into the valleys?” But not just yet.
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भस्त्रिका प्राणायाम
bhastrikā prāṇāyāma
BELLOWS BREATH
Sit in पद्मासन padmāsana, lotus posture. Place the hands in चिन्मुद्रा cinmudrā, gesture of consciousness, or ज्ञानमुद्रा jñānamudrā, gesture of knowledge. Just as a blacksmith works his bellows, inhale and exhale forcefully from the diaphragm, expanding and contracting the lungs beyond their normal state. Such a breath will stoke the inner fire of the body and prepare the mind for meditation.
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In the Fourth Treatise of Salomon Trismosin’s sixteenth-century German alchemical manuscript Splendor Solis, all the paintings feature a central, sealed alembic, within which are various scenes. Inside the gourd-shaped cucurbit/mattrass of Plate XII, we see a little naked child pouring a black flask of something down an equally little dragon’s throat, at the same time as holding a pair of bellows to its belly. The dragon looks resigned to its fate. What is in the flask is prima materia, first matter, that which goes to make the philosopher’s stone. A dragon may not be a phoenix, but it is a dragon, and dragonfire is no small thing.
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In Literature and the Gods, Calasso goes on to say, “Prajāpati constructed the fire; it was keen-edged as a razor; terrified, the gods would not come near; then, wrapping themselves in the meters, they came near, and that is how the meters got their name. The meters are sacred power; the skin of the black antelope is the form of sacred power; he puts on shoes of antelope skin; not to be hurt, he wraps himself in meters before approaching the fire. The ‘meters,’ chandas, are the robes that the gods ‘wrapped around themselves,’ acchādayan, so that they might come near to the fire without being disfigured as though by the blade of a razor. Thus the gods sought to escape death.”
What is power for, if not to be immortal? Fire and word, an eternal double-edged sword. It’s your lips you touch when you make the ritual gesture for chandas, meter.
“And likewise men—for men always tell themselves: ‘I must do as the gods did.’ When the Taittirīya Saṃhitā says, ‘He wraps himself in meters before coming near the fire, so as not to be hurt,’ it is referring to any priest, any man. Today, seen through eyes no longer familiar with rites and with fire, the phrase cannot help but make us think of what, consciously or otherwise, every poet, every writer does when he writes.”
If you’re going to be playing with fire—and you are—you better wear fireproof armour. Or you may not live to write another day.
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सूर्यनमस्कार
sūryanamaskāra
SUN SALUTATIONS
The sun rises in the east, you’re told in elementary school, write this down. A good illustration of the tense present simple—something that’s true now and true always, something that’s always happening. The sun rises in the east every day; you’ve seen it and I’ve seen it and everybody’s seen it, no big deal. You’ve been drawing orange balls like pincushions for a while when you hear the news. An old, flaming, swirling ball of hydrogen and helium plasma 15 million degrees Celsius at the core. 4.5 billion years old. We go around it, and oh, we’d be dead without the damned yellow dwarf. Revolution as circumambulation.
“The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do,” Galileo said.
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posture 01
प्रणामासन
praṇāmāsana
ॐ मित्राय नम: ।
oṃ mitrāya namaḥ |
salutations to the great friend
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UNWRITTEN POSTCARD FROM VARANASI
Dear A: If you were here, you would find not what we used to know. Do you remember when we came here last, exploding out of the ten million at Kumbhamela, eyes burning from smoke and ammonia? We deposited our backpacks on some veranda and took turns hunting, but could not find a single room. So we crashed on a bench outside the crematorium, inhaling the cloying, rancid-ghee scent all night, swatting bugs, telling stories. Before dawn, we went down to Manikarnika, a fever dream. You would see that the fires still burn and the great river takes them all, same as ever—corpses, bones, ashes, lamps, marigolds—but the wood pyres are being replaced by what look like metal bunks. You would see an open teashop now, ash flying right into chai. I went to drop J off at the railway station in the middle of a BJP rally. She was dragging her huge case on the road so I hoisted the damned thing. A random enthusiastic woman told me she voted for Modi because he has pink cheeks. I have a feeling this is not (yet) in the right-wing manifesto.
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Mahākumbha 2013. Ten million people out that day, I’m told. It looks like it. A’s begun the होम homa, the fire sacrifice. Bright flames are going crazy in the dusty wind, threatening to climb the grey walls of the raggedy tent. “Don’t burn the place down,” someone will say any moment now. But he’s in superb control, and he smiles a little. The fire listens to him, bends to his will.
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posture 02
हस्त उत्तानासन
hasta uttānāsana
ॐ रवये नमः ।
oṃ ravaye namaḥ |
salutations to the shining one
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“I can hear them chime,” he tells me, touching the three gold beads on my nose ring—a delightful lie. When he whirls me about the tent we share with half a dozen travellers, the sun hasn’t yet risen but there are flames in his oceanic grey eyes. Not just for the jinn, then, smokeless fire.
We go for chai where a small man perches like a leprechaun over his boiling cauldron of precious tea. The French photographer who takes pictures for the child protection agency tells us about babies abandoned in landfills and found half-eaten by feral dogs. His eyes look like they will never not be sad. He says he always takes pictures from a low angle, symbolically prostrating himself, giving his subjects the hero shot. He never takes any pictures of the fire. His countryman Gaston Bachelard wrote The Psychoanalysis of Fire.
120 million people in all at the gathering, I read. What’s that? Among a billion and a half, dust.
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“PART I
IT WAS A PLEASURE TO BURN.
It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history,” writes Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451.
Guy Montag is at work, wearing a helmet numbered 451 and torching a house, “while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and the lawn.” Fahrenheit 451 refers to “the temperature at which book-paper catches fire and burns.” That’s Celsius 233.
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posture 03
पादहस्तासन
pādahastāsana
ॐ सूर्याय नमः ।
oṃ sūryāya namaḥ |
salutations to the one who makes active
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Here in Lisbon, I’m at a cultish-seeming reading event at a café. They have distributed tiny scrolls of paper with a poem printed on them. They want us to eat the papers as a sort of artistic/communal ritual. Edible, they assure us. A friend sitting next to me hides a smile and quietly crumples the paper in his hand. What’s the more interesting thing to do here, I wonder, not eat it because obviously, or eat it because hey, spells and stuff. I eat it. Everyone gets in a great headrush and starts talking loudly. But it tastes like nothing; it feels like nothing.
“This tea is nothing more than hot leaf juice!”
“Uncle, that’s what all tea is.”
– Uncle Iroh, great Fire Nation warrior, tea connoisseur, and future owner of the Jasmine Dragon teahouse, in conversation with his nephew Prince Zuko, Avatar: The Last Airbender S02E13, 2005
What if I had taken a lighter to the rolled-up paper instead, surrendered it to fire and air rather than to water and earth? Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, like George Lakoff titled his book, borrowing the category balan from the Australian Aboriginal language of Dyirbal.
In Dyirbal, Lakoff reports—and the Borgesian list fan in me thrills at this; he’s spot on about that—“the noun must be preceded by a variant of one of four words: bayi, balan, balam, bala.” But what brings women, fire, and dangerous things together under balan? That’s the kind of question that will take you down a rabbit hole of category reasoning. I think of SR Ranganathan looking at Meccano sets in a toy shop in London and coming up with facet classification.
Categories. Facets. When is burning books not an unspeakable act?
“Here’s your holy book and here’s the fire,” says the armed guard in my apocalyptic fantasy. “Burn this or we shoot you.” No better place to put the word than in the fire, have they heard?
Would the poem have been purified, sanctified, sent to the gods? When fire-bending levels up, it becomes lightning-bending and we find ourselves in the realm of Indra, wielder of the वज्र vajra, the thunderbolt. White heat. Maybe we just need a better poem, a veritable Mrs O’Leary’s cow, a Vesuvius that frees Pompeii instead. And a hose of l-theanine-boosting green tea for when things get out of hand.
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posture 04
अश्वसञ्चलनासन
aśvasañcalanāsana
ॐ भानवे नमः ।
oṃ bhānave namaḥ |
salutations to the one who illumines
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“Together, we’d create the Northern Lights. For that is what foxes do—racing over the fells, whipping up the snow with their tails, the friction of it sending up sparks into the midnight sky. This is what makes the aurora’s glow. Revontulet, we call it: foxfire,” says Sharon Blackie in Foxfire, Wolfskin.
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“Los Angeles has declared an emergency and officials warn that the worst is yet to come”
– CNN
“‘Run for your lives!’ LA residents abandon cars to flee wildfires on foot”
– BBC News
“Southern California wildfire live: more than 1,400 firefighters deployed to tackle ‘unprecedented’ fires”
– The Guardian
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“Then they [Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna] saw a tall figure emerge from the dense forest, upright, emaciated, with a red beard and skin of molten gold glimmering beneath a black robe. A brahman. He seemed exhausted and irate. He said: ‘I know who you are. I am a voracious brahman. Give me food I can eat.’ Kṛṣṇa asked him what food would satisfy him. ‘I’m Agni,’ said the brahman. ‘Only this whole forest can satisfy me. I can’t burn it because I haven’t the strength and Indra protects the place.’ Kṛṣṇa looked up: he saw heavy clouds gathering darkly. They would have to fight together against Arjuna’s father, king of the gods.” Calasso in Ka.
It was a case of too much of a good thing. Forced to eat ghee—clarified butter—for twelve years as part of his sacrificial duties, Agni was now gagging. He wanted to get his teeth around plants and animals, and lots of them—he wanted to devour the whole crunchy forest of Khāṇḍava. Bribing them with invincible weapons and stationing them at either end, Agni tore through the forest. “Together with the crackle of fire came the piercing shrieks of wild beasts. The animals swarmed toward the clearing with desperation in their eyes. Elephants, antelopes, monkeys, buffalo, butterflies, tigers, moles, demons, goats, snakes, squirrels, colored birds.”
Food.
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In the very first story I ever write, a bunch of wild animals are caught in a great forest fire. They run panicked everywhere until they figure out how to work together and put it out. Aged seven, I plaster a pretentious disclaimer across the top of my blue-lined, red-margined, non-cheap foolscap sheet of paper, a prophylactic talisman against any potential accusations of not being adult enough:
അക്ഷരം പഠിക്കാൻ തുടങ്ങുന്ന ചെറുകുഞ്ഞുങ്ങൾക്കുള്ളതാണ് ഈ കഥ.
This is a story for littler kids who are just learning to read.
Years later, I burn the paper along with a ton of other juvenilia.
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“According to Hesiod, humans are fallen beings, even though they belong to the same stock as the gods. There are two stories about their fall—one brusque and linked to a single act, the other spread over time. In the first version, Prometheus steals fire from Olympus, and Zeus responds by giving Pandora to the humans. The fall that follows is immediate and irremediable,” says Calasso in The Celestial Hunter.
Not to mention grievous injury on top of the fall, not unlike Naoh’s fate in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s 1981 Quest for Fire, if a little anatomically elsewhere.
Like the poet said: “Some say the world will end in fire/ Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire/ I hold with those who favor fire.” The other path for both Hesiod and Robert Frost is ice, a slow fall, but a fall, nonetheless. It’s said that Frost’s poem of nine lines—Fire and Ice—is a compact version of Dante’s Inferno, the first part of The Divine Comedy. Hell.
Dante, a poet passing through the dark woods of an early midlife crisis, descends into the depths of Hell guided by Virgil—another poet. We’re thinking hellfire and brimstone, and there’s that, as I read in the Hollander translation, but what it says right at the centre, the ninth circle, is: The Frozen Floor of Hell. Ice.
It might be Virgil who takes Dante through Inferno and most of Purgatorio, but it’s Beatrice who takes him ascending through the spheres of Paradiso. We, too, will get there in the end. It does say Comedy in the title.
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posture 05
पर्वतासन
parvatāsana
ॐ खगाय नमः ।
oṃ khagāya namaḥ |
salutations to the one who moves through the sky
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“We humans are the cooking apes, the creatures of the flame,” says Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. As Ivo Jacobs, a cognitive zoologist puts it, we got “pyrocognition.”
“What then is the first of these gestures? To touch water. But not anywhere. To touch it on a point of the invisible line that joins the āhavanīya fire and the gārhapatya fire. This is the line of the fires. The gārhapatya, ‘domestic,’ hearth is circular, sited to the west. There the fire is lit. There burn the embers with which the other fires will be lit [. . .] On this [āhavanīya] fire the oblations will be offered—and it can be lit only with an ember taken from the gārhapatya fire. The āhavanīya fire is the sky, the gārhapatya fire is the earth (and it is circular since the earth is a circle at the center of other circles.) Between the two fires is the atmosphere, where we breathe, where we act,” says Calasso in Ardor.
Ardour, the fever pitch of tapas, the crucible of great practice.
Prometheus carries fire in a hollow stalk of fennel. But even as he enters the waters, “the locus classicus of the protean fire-water,” as Wendy Doniger puts it in Hindu Myths, what Agni, the devourer, carries in a hollow reed is Soma, the devoured—ambrosia. कामाग्नि kāmāgni is the fire of desire.
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The texts have many stories of novices so full of potential, but as yet unable to answer certain questions for lack of experience. In the Bṛhadāraṇyaka “Great Forest” Upaniṣad, Śvetaketu, unable to answer questions put to him at the court of the Pañcāla king Pravāhaṇa, returns with his father Uddālaka [Gautama]. “Man is fire,” he learns (as does his father, who hadn’t quite put two and two together, apparently), “whose open mouth is kindling, breath is smoke, word is flame, eyes are embers, ears are sparks.” Into this fire the gods offer food as oblation so semen comes to be. And so onto the other fire.
“Woman is fire, whose womb is wood, hair is smoke, yoni is flame, coitus is embers, pleasure is sparks.” Into this fire the gods offer semen as libation so man comes to be. Such were the things that young Śvetaketu had no knowledge of. What is woman but sex, and all that, but wait, the story is not finished yet.
When man dies, they carry him to the fire. And now, “his fire is fire, wood is wood, smoke is smoke, flame is flame, embers and sparks are embers and sparks.” Into this last fire the gods offer man as oblation. A matryoshka nesting-doll game, if you will. In radiant splendour you shall emerge, they promise.
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posture 06
अष्टाङ्गनमस्कार
aṣṭāṅganamaskāra
ॐ पूष्णे नमः ।
oṃ pūṣṇe namaḥ |
salutations to the one who nourishes
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THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL
Hans Christian Andersen, translated by Jean Hersholt
“It was so terribly cold.
Snow was falling, and it was almost
dark. Evening came on, the last evening of the year. In the cold
and gloom a poor little girl, bareheaded
and barefoot, was walking
through the streets.”
TO BUILD A FIRE
Jack London
“The trouble with him
was that he was not able to imagine. He was quick
and ready in the things of life, but only
in the things, and not in their meanings. Fifty degrees
below zero
meant 80 degrees of frost. Such facts
told him that it was cold and uncomfortable,
and that was all.”
“Oh, how much one little match
might warm her! If she could only take one
from the box and rub it against the wall and warm
her hands. She drew one out. R-r-ratch!
How it sputtered and burned!”
“He sat in the snow, pulling
the sticks from the bushes under the trees and feeding
them directly to the flame. He knew
he must not fail. When it is 75 below zero,
a man must not fail in his first attempt
to build a fire.”
“And she quickly struck the whole bundle of matches,
for she wished to keep her grandmother
with her. And the matches burned
with such a glow
that it became brighter than daylight.”
“Then he drew the whole pack
along his leg. It burst into flame,
70 matches at once!”
“The New Year’s sun
rose upon a little pathetic figure. The child
sat there, stiff and cold, holding the matches,
of which one bundle was almost burned.
‘She wanted to warm herself,’ the people said.”
“’You were right, old fellow.
You were right,’ he murmured
to the old man of Sulphur Creek.
Then the man dropped
into what seemed to him the most comfortable
and satisfying sleep
he had ever known.”
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posture 07
भुजङ्गासन
bhujaṅgāsana
ॐ हिरण्यगर्भाय नमः ।
oṃ hiraṇyagarbhāya namaḥ |
salutations to the golden potential
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“Deep at the centre of the psyche, la chispa,” says keeper of stories and psychologist Clarissa Pinkola Estés in her mellow campfire voice, “the ember… that can be fanned back into a blaze with the very smallest breath blown upon it.” Fuel and spark and breath. Body and mind and word. “The noun agni is related etymologically to igneous, ignite, ignition,” Heinrich Zimmer reminds us in Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization.
Primal flame, visceral, of a kind long before gunpowder made fire cerebral.
“It’s that I felt something inside. Like a tremor. No, not like a tremor. As if… You know Flatland, you read it too. Well, those triangles and those squares live in two dimensions, they don’t know what thickness is. Now imagine that one of us, who lives in three dimensions, were to touch them from above. They would feel something they’d never felt before, and they wouldn’t be able to say what it was. As if someone were to come here from the fourth dimension and touch us from the inside—say on the pylorus—gently. What does it feel like when someone tickles your pylorus? I would say… a mysterious flame.” Umberto Eco in The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.
In vertebrates, the pylorus—from the Greek pylōros, gatekeeper—is the narrow muscular sphincter that connects the stomach to the duodenum, the first bit of the small intestine. Fire in the belly, जठराग्नि jaṭharāgni, as interdimensional portal.
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posture 08
पर्वतासन
parvatāsana
ॐ मरीचये नमः ।
oṃ marīcaye namaḥ |
salutations to the first light
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I’d seen it done many times in Asia, but now I’m someplace where the lore around is Celtic. It’s darkening and cold. Ahead of me stretches a bed of hot coals like a cricket pitch of torture. My legs and feet are bare—no cloth, no metal, not even nail polish. Strangely, my first worry is that it feels disrespectful to step on life-giving fire. Then I see a mental image of a baby in his mother’s arms, wildly kicking about—but she’s smiling. I better do this before I think too much. I step on the coals. I feel a buzz go up my legs like invisible electric socks but it doesn’t burn. It doesn’t burn.
I don’t run; I walk. I feel calm. I feel good. When I get to the other side, I grin at my friends and turn right around. I walk again.
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posture 09
अश्वसञ्चलनासन
aśvasañcalanāsana
ॐ आदित्याय नमः ।
oṃ ādityāya namaḥ |
salutations to the son of the cosmic mother
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*
“The Torrent of Words, by the way, thunders down from the Sea of Stories into the Lake of Wisdom, whose waters are illumined by the Dawn of Days, and out of which flows the River of Time. The Lake of Wisdom, as is well known, stands in the shadow of the Mountain of Knowledge at whose summit burns the Fire of Life. This important information regarding the layout—and, in fact, the very existence—of the Magical World was kept hidden for thousands of years, guarded by mysterious, cloaked spoilsports who called themselves the Aalim, or Learned Ones. However, the secret was out now,” says Salman Rushdie in Luka and Fire of Life.
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*
ഒരു കൊച്ചു നീലവെളിച്ചം
കൂട്ടംതെറ്റി സുകന്യയുടെ നേർക്കടുത്തു.
ജ്യോതിസ്സിന്റെ
വീണാനാദത്തിൽ അത് പറഞ്ഞു:
“സുകന്യേ നിനക്കെന്നെ ഓർമ്മയുണ്ടോ?”
“ഇല്ലല്ലോ.”
“ഇന്നു സന്ധ്യയ്ക്ക് ഗുഹാമുഖത്ത് നീ
തെളിയിച്ച തിരിയല്ലേ ഞാൻ.”
– OV Vijayan, Madhuram Gayati
/
A little blue orb
spun away from its fellows and approached Sukanya.
In the melodious voice
that orbs possessed, it said to her:
“Do you remember me, Sukanya?”
“No?”
“Why, I’m the lamp you lit this dusk
at the mouth of your cave.”
– translation my own
/
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posture 10
पादहस्तासन
pādahastāsana
ॐ सवित्रे नमः ।
oṃ savitre namaḥ |
salutations to the one who makes vital
/
*
“Our guide showed us how people in the Stone Age used to conjure fire. He had a lump of iron pyrites that had been split open to reveal a beautiful starburst pattern inside. Kneeling down with this stone in his hand, he proceeded to strike its surface with a small piece of dark flint. As he did so, I could just about see some tiny, dull, red sparks floating down after each impact. He struck the two pieces together a few centimetres above some tinder placed on the floor. The tinder was a chamois-like slice of horse hoof fungus, a small section of which had been scraped up into a little fluffy pile—this is where he said he wanted the spark to land. Most of the sparks, though, landed around it and went out immediately. After twenty or so strikes, a tiny wisp of smoke emanated from the little pile; a spark had made a direct hit. Now there was an orange glow as the tinder smouldered and the ember grew. He put it into a bundle of dry honeysuckle bark and blew it into life,” reports Daniel Hume in The Art of Fire.
There was a time, then, when the गार्हपत्य gārhapatya fire was not all that different from the आहवनीय āhavanīya fire. Earth and sky precariously held together with fungus and fool’s gold, flint and fluff.
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posture 11
हस्त उत्तानासन
hasta uttānāsana
ॐ अर्काय नमः ।
oṃ arkāya namaḥ |
salutations to the praiseworthy
/
*
“Gravely, without making any complaint, they said farewell to one another and walked forward without flinching. Nor were there any screams when their flesh caught fire and the stink of death filled the air. They burned in silence; only the crackling of the fire itself could be heard.” Pampa Kampana, nine years old, watches sati, self-immolation, in Salman Rushdie’s Victory City.
Children employed as cheap labour in Sivakasi firework factories who routinely die in explosions that I read about in the newspaper, in a single sheet of which I could curl up at the time. A beautiful neighbour I admire as a little girl who gets acid thrown on her magazine-cover face, who disappears behind a veil and moves to Russia. Two primary school friends whose mother burns to death in an LPG cooking cylinder accident, and our old Gandhian Hindi tutor who shows us how to be around mute grief. Someone who heats up an iron spatula and calmly presses them to the legs of her ‘disobedient’ kids. A friend who speaks of terrible burns in his youth and months spent slathered in oil of monitor lizard in a Malay village. A relative who deliberately sets a great fire in someone else’s home. Another who dies, her polyester sari melting into sticky, inescapable armour on her body, whose kids come to visit a while after—one a serious little boy who’s terribly interested in Greek myth, who talks nonstop about Poseidon and plays with my nose ring. A toddler in rural Tamil Nadu who upturns boiling milk on himself, whose tiny legs I soak in my wholly inadequate supply of sangre de drago, dragonblood, whose listless mother nods, her eyes already elsewhere.
And sometime in the last century, the woman who would be my grandmother and two others desperately fighting, and failing, to save a pregnant woman whose clothing had caught fire. Woman with child, pillar of flame. My fearless grandmother who teaches me to stand and hold my ground—blood drains from her face when she speaks of it.
पञ्चाग्नि pañcāgni, the practice of five fires, is when you do your penance surrounded by four fires. The fifth is overhead—the blazing, desiccating sun.
“All the women she knew entered the fire and sat or stood or lay in the heart of the furnace spouting flames from their ears and mouths: the old woman who had seen everything and the young woman just starting out in life and the girl who hated her father the dead soldier and the wife who was ashamed of her husband because he hadn’t given up his life on the battlefield and the woman with the beautiful singing voice and the woman with the frightening laugh and the woman as skinny as a stick and the woman as fat as a melon.”
So many women burnt to death as widows, whores, witches. Wilful women who refused men. Women who couldn’t, wouldn’t pack a dowry. Women working in the kitchen on a normal day. So many children. So many people with their power taken away. Going up in a million fires, a million lamps lit like it’s Diwali.
I light a butter lamp with the monks around Boudhanath and think about Thích Quảng Đức, how he stayed still throughout, what it took to burn.
/
*
SONG FOR THE FIRESIDE
I have swallowed a column of fire.
ashes for my hands
ashes for my mouth
My insides are ablaze, charred, hollowed out.
ashes for your hands
ashes for your mouth
There is not a drop of water left in me.
ashes for my hands
ashes for my mouth
Fire-haired, fire-limbed, fire-eyed, I am a conflagration.
ashes for your hands
ashes for your mouth
What was was not enough.
ashes for my hands
ashes for my mouth
And now you are gone forever.
ashes for your hands
ashes for your mouth
You will never be again.
ashes for my hands
ashes for my mouth
And everything never existed.
ashes for your hands
ashes for your mouth
/
*
There’s a mural by the pond in the Madurai Meenakshi Sundareshwarar temple in Tamil Nadu. It illustrates the following line from Śrīlalitāsahasranāma, the thousand names of the Goddess: चिदाग्निकुण्डसम्भूता देवकार्यसमुद्यता cidāgnikuṇḍasambhūtā devakāryasamudyatā. It means, roughly, “born from the sacrificial fire of consciousness, [the Goddess] manifested for divine work.”
“From blood and fire,” the goddess says to Pampa Kampana, “life and power will be born. In this exact place a great city will rise, the wonder of the world, and its empire will last for more than two centuries. And you, [. . .] you will fight to make sure that no more women are ever burned in this fashion, and that men start considering women in new ways, and you will live just long enough to witness both your success and your failure, to see it all and tell its story, even though once you have finished telling it you will die immediately and nobody will remember you for four hundred and fifty years.”
/
*
posture 12
प्रणामासन
praṇāmāsana
ॐ भास्कराय नमः ।
oṃ bhāskarāya namaḥ |
salutations to the one who lights the path
/
*
“The fire danced in her eyes. The flames swam, flared up, sank away, brightened again against the sooty stone, against the dark sky, against the pale sky, the gulfs of evening, the depths of air and light beyond the world. Flames of yellow, orange, orange-red, red tongues of flame, flame-tongues, the words she could not speak. Tenar.
‘We call the star Tehanu,’ she said.
‘Tenar, my dear. Come on. Come with me.’
They were not at the fire. They were in the dark—in the dark hall. The dark passage. They had been there before, leading each other, following each other, in the darkness underneath the earth.
‘This is the way,’ she said.”
– Ursula K Le Guin, Tehanu, Earthsea
/
*
Giambattista Bodoni—Yambo—has forgotten everything. Even his own name, but he remembers everything he has ever read. He keeps writing. “Maybe that’s enough, Doctor,” Paola says to Gratarolo in Loana. “Don’t let him go on too long with these associative chains, or he might go crazy on me.”
/
*
LAST CALL
Excerpt
Before something, chop wood, carry water.
After something, chop wood, carry water.
What else did you think
there was to do.
Fire’s burnt down now. We’d better
scatter our pipes to the winds, lay
our heads down for the night.
/
*
स्वाहा
svāhā
/
*
Kanya Kanchana is a poet and philologist from India.
CREDITS
All © Kanya Kanchana, except where mentioned.
– Opening Image: A little fire ushers in the dawn. Varanasi, India.
– Middle Image: Firewood burns down to make a bed of hot coals. Somewhere in the UK.
– Closing Image: Vintage Indian matchbox label art collage with text in Tamil, Malayalam, Devanagari, and Latin/Roman scripts. Source images in the public domain via patricia m on Flickr. All under CC by 4.0 Licence.
– Madhuram Gayati, Malayalam novel by OV Vijayan; unpublished translation excerpt
– Song for the Fireside, unpublished poem
– Last Call, unpublished poem excerpt
*****
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