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.
Water above and below.
Water outside and inside.
Water of the past and water of the future.
Water of the world and water of the word.
Water always finds a way.
*
I am the woman of the great expanse of the water
I am the woman of the expanse of the divine sea
I am a river woman
the woman of the flowing water
a woman who examines and searches
a woman with hands and measure
a woman mistress of measure
– The Midnight Velada by Mazatec shaman María Sabina, written down by Álvaro Estrada, translated by Eloisa de Estrada Gonzales and Henry Munn
अ॒हं सु॑वे पि॒तर॑मस्य मू॒र्धन् मम॒ योनि॑र॒प्स्व (अ॒)१॒॑न्तः स॑मु॒द्रे ।
ततो॒ विति॑ष्ठे॒ भुव॒नानु॒ विश्वो॒ तामूं द्यां व॒र्ष्मणोप॑स्पृशामि ॥ ७ ॥
ahaṃ suve pitaramasya mūrdhan mama yonirapsva antaḥ samudre
tato vitiṣṭhe bhuvanānu viśvo tāmūṃ dyāṃ varṣmaṇopaspṛśāmi
I birth the Father on his head; my womb, in the waters, in the sea
From there I spread across the worlds; I brush my brow on the sky
– वागाम्भृणीसूक्त Vāgāmbhṛṇīsūkta, from the ऋग्वेद Ṛgveda 10.10.125
Letter 68
A pod of whales was lying like long reclining Buddhas on the sea. My sister and I put our ears to the bottom of the boat so we could listen to their songs.
We turned to my grandfather and asked, “What do their songs mean?”
“The whales do not sing because they have an answer,” he said. “They sing because they have a song.”
– Gregory Colbert, Ashes and Snow
*
If time is fire at the golden hour, it is water at the blue hour. ब्राह्ममुहूर्त, brāhmamuhūrta, before the sun rises.
Once a committed night owl, I find myself different now. It is easy enough to rise early. I like the quiet shot through with sounds near and far—the kettle boiling, the clack of a security guard’s stick on the ground, the chug-chug of a night train; the fajr فجر adhān أَذَان, call to morning prayer, from the local mosque.
I spread my old jamakkalam on the floor, sit down cross-legged, and close my eyes. I’m like Marlin, Nemo’s dad, swimming in search of Nemo. Nemo is the beloved shape I’m pursuing. I’m worried, but I’m also catching a great current, riding with the coolest ancient turtles who know the secrets of the water.
I was born where earth tipped into water, at the meeting of three oceans. ”Shatter the jugs. The water is one,” says Rumi in Gold, translated from the Farsi by Haleh Liza Gafori.
*
मन्त्रपुष्पम् MANTRAPUṢPAM
The Essence of All Mantras
यो॑ऽपां पुष्पं॒ वेद॑ | पुष्प॑वान् प्र॒जावा᳚न् पशु॒मान् भ॑वति |
च॒न्द्रमा॒ वा अ॒पां पुष्प | पुष्प॑वान् प्र॒जावा᳚न् पशु॒मान् भ॑वति |
य ए॒वं वेद॑ | यो॑ऽपामा॒यत॑नं॒ वेद॑ | आ॒यत॑नवान् भवति || १ ||
yopāṃ puṣpaṃ veda | puṣpavān prajāvān paśumān bhavati |
candramā vā apāṃ puṣpam | puṣpavān prajāvān paśumān bhavati |
ya evaṃ veda | yopāmāyatanaṃ veda | āyatanavān bhavati || 1 ||
She who knows the flower of the waters:
She holds flower, child, beast.
The moon is truly the flower of the waters:
She holds flower, child, beast.
She who knows this,
She who sees the place of the waters,
She holds this place, and so it comes to pass.
/
*
the nights of the waxing moon
चन्द्रनमस्कार
candranamaskāra
MOON SALUTATIONS
/
शुक्ल पक्ष नित्या:
the Eternals of the bright fortnight
/
“As the Moon’s gravity tugs at Earth, it shifts Earth’s mass, distorting its shape ever so slightly into that of a football—elongated at the equator and shortened at the poles . . . the Moon’s gravity affects the entire Earth, pulling at every point on our planet. The strongest pull occurs on the points closest to the Moon, and the weakest on the points farthest away, but every bit of water is affected,” writes Tracy Vogel, NASA.
*
The moon is truly the place of the waters:
She holds the place.
She who knows the place of the moon:
She holds the place.
The waters hold moons, truly:
She holds the place.
She who knows this,
She who sees the place of the waters,
She holds this place, and so it comes to pass.
*
night 01
प्रतिपद
pratipada
/
posture 01
प्रणामासन
praṇāmāsana
/
ॐ कामेश्वर्यै नमः |
oṃ kāmeśvaryai namaḥ
salutations to the mistress of desire
/
*
ஐங்குறுநூறு 113 அம்மூவனார்
நெய்தல் திணை – தலைவி தோழியிடம் சொன்னது
அம்ம வாழி தோழி நென்னல்
ஓங்குதிரை வெண்மணல் உடைக்கும் துறைவற்கு
ஊரார் பெண்டென மொழிய என்னை
அதுகேட்ட அன்னாய் என்றனள் அன்னை
பைபய எம்மை என்றனென் யானே.
What She Said
to her girl friend
Yesterday,
some people of this town
said about me,
she is the woman
of that man from the seashore
where great waves break
on the white sands.
Mother heard it
and asked me,
“Is that true?”
I said, under my breath,
“I’m burning.”
– Ammūvanār, Ainkuṟunūṟu 113, translated from the Tamil
by AK Ramanujan
/
*
The elderly woman holds me. She smells of nicotine and the pool smells of chlorine but both are clean. She stretches out her arms and takes me underwater. I hold my breath. The water closes over my sunlit face, and once it passes my ears, all noise subsides to a hum. Wordlessly, the bodyworker moves me in the water this way and that, sometimes bending and twisting my limbs, sometimes rolling me in large circles. The water is a white-noise womb and I feel calm.
Later, I go underwater by myself, doing all the āsanas that give me trouble on land—ऊर्ध्व धनुरासन ūrdhva dhanurāsana, upward bow holding my ankles, अधोमुख वृक्षासन adhomukha vṛkṣāsana, handstand, and others. In water, they become सहज sahaja, natural. I can hold my breath long enough to sit for a while in पद्मासन padmāsana, lotus, at the bottom of the pool.
/
*
night 02
द्वितीया
dvitīyā
/
posture 02
हस्त उत्तानासन
hasta uttānāsana
/
ॐ भगमालिन्यै नमः |
oṃ bhagamālinyai namaḥ
salutations to the blooming one
/
*
Once, a long-ago afternoon in Rio Napo in Ecuador, a rock scooped like a seat someway into the water. I sit in this stone seat, this तीर्थ tīrtha, sacred place, a great rush of water streaming over me. I bring my palms together in the water. अर्घ्य arghya, तर्पण tarpaṇa, अभिषेक abhiṣeka—liquid offerings.
“From being an impetuous river, Sarasvatī acquires a powerful image in Vedic symbolism,” says Michael Danino in The Lost River: On The Trail of Saraswati, “embodying the flood of illumination or inspiration. She is the ‘impeller of happy truths’ who ‘awakens in the consciousness the great flood and illumines all the thoughts’. Sarasvatī is ‘the best of mothers, best of rivers, best of goddesses’, and we see here the origin of the traditional deification of rivers, from Gangā to Kāverī. A few centuries later—in the Yajur Veda, to be precise—Sarasvatī, additionally, becomes the goddess of speech, the Word (vāch or vāk).”
Once, a school play. I wear a purple maxi dress, a headscarf, and a face full of pancake; exaggerate my gestures so people can see me from the back of the auditorium. “കാനാ…നിൽ നിന്ന് വരുകയാണ് ഞങ്ങൾ, സ്നാപക യോഹന്നാനേ.” When the kid wearing a scraggly beard and holding a staff, John the Baptist, takes some water from the blue tarp river and pours it over my head, I feel vertiginous like I’m standing under a waterfall.
On the shore of Napo, I find a white stone. I turn it over and find it entirely black. “On one of the nights of Islam called the Night of Nights, the secret doors of heaven open wide and the water in the jars becomes sweeter;” says Borges in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, “if those doors opened, I would not feel what I felt that afternoon.”
/
*
night 03
तृतीया
tṛtīyā
/
posture 03
पादहस्तासन
pādahastāsana
/
ॐ नित्यक्ळिन्नायै नमः ।
oṃ nityaklinnāyai namaḥ
salutations to the ever-wet
/
*
ESHILE
Excerpt
Puluga-Chang, the first father’s hill, shakes
like the kiln and it is not good. Sare ukkuburuko, someone screams,
the sea has turned upside down. All that swam in the deep dark
now floats in the watery sun. Back and forth and up and down,
our great blue, great green, great brown bodies turn
against us. Seta ngiobilo, he says, awash
in blue and green and brown, where
have you come from.
Aim, eshile, to pierce.
*
2004 MADRAS, TAMIL NADU
We sit around on Marina Beach in Madras till the early hours of the morning, a group of us—eating roasted peanuts from paper cones, complaining about having too much work, relieved that the days are only tolerably hot in December. When exhaustion and sleep threatens to take over, we dust the sand off ourselves and go home without waiting for the sun to rise. A few hours later, a wall of water slams into land and takes away slum dwellers, morning joggers, cricket-playing kids.
I sleep in—it is a Sunday—and when I wake, the world has changed around me. A magnitude 9.3 earthquake with its epicentre off Aceh has hit northern Sumatra, Indonesia. 160-foot waves have decimated Aceh, and by the time it is over, the Indian Ocean tsunami has taken some 230,000 lives across 14 countries. I had had a dream as a child, standing frozen before a colossal wall of dark water. I had not known what it was, and had found its strange name in an old Reader’s Digest in a dusty cardboard box.
“When he returned to his father,” says Calasso in Ardor, “Bhṛgu seemed speechless. Varuṇa looked at him with satisfaction, thinking: ‘Then he has seen.’ The moment had come to explain to his son what he had seen. The men in the east, he said, are trees; those in the south are flocks of animals; those in the west are wild plants. Last, those in the north, who cried out while they ate other men, were the waters. What had Bhṛgu seen? That the world is made up of Agni and Soma, of these two brothers.”
A few years later, the tsunami catches up with me in Vienna, where I see Arko Datta’s 2005 Pulitzer-finalist entry at the World Press Photo Exhibition. It was taken at a place once known as கூடலூர், Kūṭalūr, the land of the confluence. The photograph shows a woman prostrate with grief on the seashore, her mouth open in a silent wail, her palms upturned to the heavens. Next to her is an arm on the white sand—bloated, bruised, blotched, covered in what look like maggots, wound through with rope and seaweed. I read the description some more. I look around the room, and all photos carry detailed descriptions not just of their respective subject matter, but also of the aesthetic decisions taken by the photographers— what they’ve framed, what they’ve chosen to leave out, even how they’ve cropped the images for best impact. The place is now known as Kadalur, the land of the sea.
“How did the Anunnaki behave after the Flood?” Utnapishtim talks to the shipwrecked sailor Sindbad in Calasso’s The Tablet of Destinies. “Did they accept the existence of men? They chose not to say. They had killed men like flies and like flies they buzzed around the first sacrifice I celebrated as soon as I was off the ship. And Anu gave Nintu—another name for Mami—a necklace of lapis lazuli stones shaped like flies. She said she would never take it off, in memory of those calamitous days.”
When we go for lunch at a local open-air market after, the people seem too shiny, the day too bright, the sun too high. I turn my face into the shade of an awning.
Upon migrating to the city in Water, Gond artist Subhash Vyam discovers that even water is for sale. “I discovered that you could buy water, if you had money. I never understood where this water came from.”
*
night 04
चतुर्थी
caturthī
/
posture 04
अश्वसञ्चलनासन
aśvasañcalanāsana
/
ॐ भेरुण्डायै नमः |
oṃ bheruṇḍāyai namaḥ
salutations to the terrible one
/
*
Fire is truly the place of the waters:
She holds the place.
She who knows the place of fire:
She holds the place.
The waters hold fires, truly:
She holds the place.
She who knows this,
She who sees the place of the waters,
She holds this place, and so it comes to pass.
*
“Libation: the act of pouring a liquid into the fire or onto the ground. Pure loss. Irreversibility. The gesture that most resembles the flow of time,“ says Calasso in Ardor. “The Vedic people used fourteen terms to describe a particular type of libation, graha, in a particular type of liturgy: the soma sacrifice. But only for the morning libations. Another five names were needed for those at midday. And five more for those in the evening. And yet they said there was no simpler, more straightforward act for showing the sacrificial attitude.”
*
2010 CHANGTHANG PLATEAU, LADAKH
We’re at Tso Moriri, fifteen thousand feet above sea level. The nomads we rode with in Korzok are crying and beating their chests. Cloudbursts, landslides, flash floods—the news spreads. Choglamsar, the little village I stayed in just a few days ago while acclimating to the altitude, is now under thirty feet of mud. People were sleeping when it came for them. Water is rising outside the tents as we pack in haste.
A long convoy builds as people and vehicles gather in the journey down, down, down. Rivers are churning mud. Boulders are falling from the mountain across the valley, cutting gargantuan swathes, snapping hundred-foot trees like matchsticks. Boulders have fallen where we are, too, huge ones. Most do not budge but we keep trying. Our mountain driver who’s seen a thing or two despatches some of us up the mountains and down the valleys to gather barbed wire and rope, which we then tie to a lone lorry and hoist vehicles out of sucking mud. Hundreds of us together build five thousand feet of road by hand. Some feed people. Some pray. Some shoot a documentary. And some do nothing.
*
night 05
पञ्चमी
pañcamī
/
posture 05
अर्धचन्द्रासन
ardhacandrāsana
/
ॐ वह्निवासिन्यै नमः |
oṃ vahnivāsinyai namaḥ
salutations to the fire-dweller
/
*
The stars are truly the place of the waters:
She holds the place.
She who knows the place of the stars:
She holds the place.
The waters hold stars, truly:
She holds the place.
She who knows this,
She who sees the place of the waters,
She holds this place, and so it comes to pass.
*
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” says Simone Weil in a letter to Joë Bousquet.
I have two new coffee mugs. On them is a most curious juxtaposition of images—Royal Bengal tigers, gulmohur flowers, pārijāta flowers, and a crescent moon against a backdrop of blue-green leaves with a terminal “catch” that may or may not be moringa. Each image holds individual meaning for me, but when they are placed next to each other in this way that is not found in nature, it unlocks something in my mind.
“I am a woman who looks into the insides of things and investigates, says
I am a woman of sap, says
I am a woman of the dew, says”
– María Sabina
No school. I’m loitering about on a Sunday afternoon. My grandfather is repairing the garden tap and singing under his breath. I catch a note, ri. This is ऋषभ ṛṣabha, the second note in the Carnatic music scale sa-ri-ga-ma-pa-dha-ni. One up from the base sa, षड्ज ṣaḍja, this is a note other people sing flat like a reed, impatient to get to the complex bits. But the way my grandfather holds this note, invoking with the lightest concavity the v of the Sanskrit वृषभ vṛṣabha, it sounds like the slow unfurling of sepals from the calyx. ri, the substrate, the barely contained power of the beginning. ri, the reddening of the horizon. ri, the revelation. But v/ṛṣabha also means the bull, ally of Mars, guardian of Kailasa, and surely this martial kinship is not lost on this powerfully built man of polymathic tendencies.
I read the description on the homeware company’s website. It says the design is about the winding path of the river Tīsta through Bengal. Tīsta is a Himalayan river. A tributary of the mighty Brahmaputra—the only Indic river that carries a masculine name—Tīsta emerges from the Tīsta Khangtse glacier, flows through Sikkim and West Bengal, and enters Bangladesh. I remember eating ice straight from its Gurudongmar stream, sun glinting gold on the blue-green meltwater.
“Attention consists of suspending our thought,” says Simone Weil in Waiting for God, “leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of. Our thought should be in relation to all particular and already formulated thoughts, as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.”
Both ice and tiger make infrasound, the kind of sound you feel first in your bones. A tiger walks on ice, and your bones are close to breaking. A tiger walks on ice silvered by a waxing crescent moon. A tiger with eyes like the sun walks on moonlit ice under falling, wish-fulfilling pārijāta blossoms. A tiger walks on blue-green leaves until morning, until all his wishes have turned to sorrows, until the gulmohur sets the sky on fire. A tiger is a flame moving on a river of ice. A tiger is a river flowing on a bed of leaves. A tiger looks up at the blue sky on fire.
My grandfather is an engineer, and the repair—a minor thing—is a success. He has not taught me Bernoulli’s principle yet but I know how to make the green garden hose throw a sparkling arc in the golden air.
*
night 06
षष्ठी
ṣaṣṭhī
/
posture 06
पर्वतासन
parvatāsana
/
ॐ महावज्रेश्वर्यै नमः |
oṃ mahāvajreśvaryai namaḥ
salutations to the great wielder of the thunderbolt
/
*
This sun is truly the place of the waters:
She holds the place.
She who knows the place of the sun:
She holds the place.
The waters hold suns, truly:
She holds the place.
She who knows this,
She who sees the place of the waters,
She holds this place, and so it comes to pass.
*
Kālāpānī means, literally, “black water.” This is what the infamous, inescapable Cellular Jail in Port Blair, The Andaman and Nicobar Islands, used to be called. It was surrounded by the deepest water as far as the eye could see. After the Revolution of 1857 (trivially referred to as the Sepoy Mutiny), this is where the British brought their political prisoners. As India’s freedom movement swelled in strength, so did the numbers at this prison complex. The Japanese occupied it during the tail end of World War II. Though it sustained some damage during the tsunami, most of the structure is still there when I visit.
I have come, ostensibly, for a break. Just the other day, I sat in a diving boat and toppled backwards flippers over head into the sea. There’s no one around but the complex looks spotless. The sun is bright overhead. As I walk by the gallows, what catches my attention are the careful channels built underneath that lead into drains. In the old days, there were trapdoors that dropped the bodies straight into the water.
“‘Jade water,’” says Annie Dillard in For the Time Being, “the Aztecs called human blood. They fed it—hundreds of living sacrifices a day—to the sun. This, the only nourishment the sun god would take, helped him battle the stars. Daily, blood worked its magic: Daily, morning overcame night. The Aztecs likely knew, as the old Chinese knew, the unrelated oddity that dissolving bodies stain jade; jade absorbs bodies’ fluids in rusty, bloody-looking spots.”
Amniotic fluid. Snot, saliva, earwax. Sebum, sweat, vomit, urine. Plasma, serum, and lymph. Bile and mucus. Phlegm and pus. Semen and secretions of the vagina. Aqueous humour, bone marrow, cerebrospinal fluid, synovial fluid. Blood. Milk. Tears. Drains to draw all water into the black water. Drains not made of jade.
Dillard: “On the day of the dead, according to Ovid, the Romans sacrificed to a goddess who was mute: Tacitas. She was a fish with its mouth sewn shut.”
*
night 07
सप्तमी
saptamī
/
posture 07
अष्टाङ्गनमस्कार
aṣṭāṅganamaskāra
/
ॐ शिवदूत्यै नमः |
oṃ śivadūtyai namaḥ
salutations to the one who made a messenger of Śiva
*
Forest. Moonlit night. In Avatar: The Last Airbender, S3E08, The Puppetmaster, old Hama recounts the story of her wretched youth in a Fire Nation prison to waterbender Katara.
“Then I realized that where there is life, there is water. The rats that scurried across the floor of my cage were nothing more than skins filled with liquid and I passed years developing the skill that would lead to my escape. Bloodbending. Controlling the water in another body, enforcing your own will over theirs. Once I had mastered the rats, I was ready for the men.”
When waterbending levels up, it becomes bloodbending. All blood is water and no blood is thicker. Need makes a bloodbender of Katara, too, in the end.
“Just as Zeus sometimes meddled among the dead and Poseidon sometimes forayed forth on earth,” says Calasso in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, “so one day—it was inevitable—Hades would come up to Olympus to ask Zeus for a living creature.”
*
night 08
अष्टमी
aṣṭamī
/
posture 08
भुजङ्गासन
bhujaṅgāsana
/
ॐ त्वरितायै नमः |
oṃ tvaritāyai namaḥ
salutations to the swift one
/
*
The cloud is truly the place of the waters:
She holds the place.
She who knows the place of the cloud:
She holds the place.
The waters hold clouds, truly:
She holds the place.
She who knows this,
She who sees the place of the waters,
She holds this place, and so it comes to pass.
*
“How did the Enemy love you—with earth? air? and fire?
He held just one thing back till he got even: the rain.”
Agha Shahid Ali in Even the Rain.
It is the height of summer in Tilonia, Rajasthan. It is getting close to 49°C, to what I have started thinking of as The Wall. Women wearing silver jewellery break rocks in the hot sun while men sit in the shade and “supervise.” Gnarly khejri trees (Prosopis cineraria) that goats love, and baunia with their inch-long thorns (Acacia nilotica) are about the only flora I can see, not counting the desiccated shrub with meaty, violet flowers that someone tells me is good for snakebite. None looks particularly green. A monitor lizard carcass lies in a corner, going through its stages real quick. An unknown horror-film creature—we have to google it—runs into the house at night. My laptop gets too hot to touch on the dash of the jeep. Over cold Thums Ups, someone tells me, “We like those who spend the summer with us. If you can take this place at its worst, you’re one of us.”
Parch and glut. I’m from Kerala, the green land of the monsoon, and for me, this is high praise indeed. We’re the ones that come undone by the monsoon. We’re the ones that love petrichor (from the Greek petros, stone + ichor, “god-blood”), the heady scent of wet earth that rises up through the clear, crackling, green air after a thunderstorm. For us, writing about the rain is a foolhardy endeavour. Hundreds upon hundreds of memories will absolutely flatten us, and from underneath the palimpsest, we will find ourselves reading old books and letters, playing old rain songs for sweet melancholia, thinking about love found and lost. Soon enough, someone will make us masala chai in sympathy and come sit with us and we will watch the rain together.
“‘But the monsoon itself is a creature of such grandeur and complexity that it defies comparison with anything.’ He [Rajagopalan] smiled and touched his heart. ‘This is where it starts. When Delhi call us, in the days leading up to it, they often ask how we feel. Being a man on the spot is very important. Predicting the burst is not just a matter of dry figures and charts. As it approaches you begin to feel elated, even slightly intoxicated. Maybe it has something to do with charged particles in the air; I don’t know. But only the foolish forecaster ignores his emotions.’” Alexander Frater learns the ways of the monsoon in Chasing the Monsoon.
*
night 09
नवमी
navamī
/
posture 09
पर्वतासन
parvatāsana
/
ॐ कुलसुन्दर्यै नमः |
oṃ kulasundaryai namaḥ
salutations to the beauty of the kula
/
*
Water at the end of the world. As immortal Mārkaṇḍeya observes the great dissolution at the end of the universe, baby Kṛṣṇa comes floating by on a banyan leaf (Ficus benghalensis), serenely sucking his big toe. वटपत्रशायी vaṭapatraśāyī, “the one who lies on a banyan leaf” on the floodwaters, Kṛṣṇa. Much like शेषशायी śeṣaśāyī, “the one who reclines on the great serpent Ādiśeṣa” on the milk ocean, Viṣṇu, whose incarnation he is. The baby inhales the sage, and within him, Mārkaṇḍeya sees the entire cosmos intact. Water at the beginning of the world. Just you wait, the baby seems to say.
Years after the tsunami, a guesthouse keeper in Komari, Sri Lanka, cooks nourishing gotu kola (Centella asiatica) for us—his four and only guests—and tells us the story of how he survived. You would not know it to look at him now, that he spent several months in hospital. I take a walk along the beach at land’s end, all the way to the lighthouse. I know there is a one-legged peacock here—I have seen him and his single track of prints along the sand. When I return to the dining room, I remember another dining room elsewhere, and a piece of paper some past guest had left on one of the tables—a picture of photosynthesis, like you might find in a school textbook.
*
night 10
दशमी
daśamī
/
posture 10
अश्वसञ्चलनासन
aśvasañcalanāsana
/
ॐ नित्यायै नमः |
oṃ nityāyai namaḥ
salutations to the eternal one
/
*
2018 KOCHI, KERALA
महाप्रलय mahāpralaya, the great deluge. We knew the water was coming, but we did not know just how much of it would come. It keeps raining. The dams open one after the other—thirty-five of them and we count each gate—but it is not enough. One night the water is ankle-deep, and the next morning it is seven feet, lapping over the apartment gates. The flood has taken everything along its path—land, trees, buildings, humans, cars, rodents, garbage. There are live things in it, too, snakes, scorpions, broken electric lines, parasites, bacteria, viruses. It never stops raining, not even at night when Charons waving torches move along the dark water calling for souls they hope they will not have to take. We get food and water dropped by helicopter. We get rescued by boat before the water can turn into mud.
Water has estranged the roads and made rivers of them. We sit so low that the top of the boat is nearly level with the water. I make a mental list of the things I will need to obtain to make tank water usable where I go—baking soda, potassium permanganate, neem, tulasi, vetiver. “The water she first stepped into minutes ago is long gone and yet it is here, past and present and future inexorably coupled, like time made incarnate,” says Abraham Verghese in The Covenant of Water, “This is the covenant of water: that they’re all linked inescapably by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone.”
We stay with relatives and I help out at a shelter packing relief supplies into bags. I see a news video where a random woman has left her whole shelter spotless upon vacating it. A temporary place, where people come at their most desperate, which they leave the first instant they can, and she leaves it better than she found it.
“‘Think of the Ocean as a head of hair,’ said Butt the Hoopoe, helpfully. ‘Imagine it’s as full of Story Streams as a thick mane is full of soft, flowing strands. The longer and thicker a head of hair, the knottier and more tangled it gets. Floating Gardeners, you can say, are like the hairdressers of the Sea of Stories. Brush, clean, wash, condition. So now you know.’” Salman Rushdie in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Now I know.
*
night 11
एकादशी
ekādaśī
posture 11
अर्धचन्द्रासन
ardhacandrāsana
ॐ नीलपताकिन्यै नमः |
oṃ nīlapatākinyai namaḥ
salutations to the bearer of the blue banner
/
*
In Hayao Miyazaki’s magnificent Spirited Away, Chihiro/Sen and Lin are on big tub duty. “Reserved for the filthiest guests,” the slimy tub is full of leaf matter, sludge, and misc gunk. They work hard to clean it, but it is no use. No-Face sneaks Sen a herbal soak tag, and soon the tub is full of boiling green water. Meanwhile, it has started raining, and a Stink Spirit is making its slow, dirty, gloopy way to the bathhouse.
Old Yubaba assigns the spirit to Sen, and it oozes after her into the tub. More hot green water ensues, but wait, there’s something sticking out of its body—a bicycle handle. Everyone pulls together, and a great big mass of every imaginable human-made waste comes pouring out. And inside the clean, green water is an ancient River Spirit who gifts Sen a magic bitter dumpling, and streams, shining and laughing, into the night sky.
*
night 12
द्वादशी
dvādaśī
/
posture 12
पादहस्तासन
pādahastāsana
/
ॐ विजयायै नमः |
oṃ vijayāyai namaḥ
salutations to the victorious
/
*
Wind is truly the place of the waters:
She holds the place.
She who knows the place of wind:
She holds the place.
The waters hold winds, truly:
She holds the place.
She who knows this,
She who sees the place of the waters,
She holds this place, and so it comes to pass.
*
The man known as Mr Willoughby has bent his left leg at the knee, stretched his right leg out to the side and back, and positioned his feet to complete his stance. Dipping a brush into a rope-handled pail of water, he draws characters on the ship’s deck—a poem.
“A story told is a life lived,” he tells a curious Claire Fraser. Outlander, S03E09, The Doldrums. “Would you tell it to me?” says Claire. “Not yet. Once I tell it, I have to let it go.” The last of the water marks vanishes from the wood. “Fire rises, in my heart ash remains,” the letters had said.
Later, in the midst of a huge commotion, the big bell on the deck rings out furiously. Everyone stops their business and turns to look.
“I was born Yi Tien Cho in Guangzhou, the City of Rams,” says the man who had become “known as the fung-wong, a bird of fire,” recounting a tale of sublime poetry, an emperor’s wife, royal favour on the sword-edge of turning into disfavour, a choice between being turned into a eunuch or leaving the Imperial City. On the night of the lanterns, he flees, leaving all behind. Now he climbs up the side of the ship and scatters the pages of his life story in the air—where a wind catches and carries them aloft.
“We have wind!”
Yi Tien Cho has told a true story, held the agitated crew in thrall, saved a man’s life, and observed a low-flying seon tin jung to predict the wind that he entrusts his papers to. Before the last of his calligraphy can evanesce again, rain falls.
“The Way in the world
is as a stream to a valley,
a river to the sea.”
– Ursula K Le Guin, Lao Tzu
*
night 13
त्रयोदशी
trayodaśī
/
posture 13
हस्त उत्तानासन
hasta uttānāsana
/
ॐ सर्वमङ्गलायै नमः ।
oṃ sarvamaṅgalāyai namaḥ
salutations to the all-auspicious one
/
*
The year is truly the place of the waters:
She holds the place.
She who knows the place of the year:
She holds the place.
The waters hold years, truly:
She holds the place.
She who knows this,
She who sees the raft on the waters,
She is placed. Truly, She is placed.
*
This piece is a failure. The more I try to hold it, to shape it, the more it slips away from me, laughing at my hubris that tries to contain water. When I once spoke of the goddess of my birthplace, I had said to Amruta Patil, “Devi Kanyakumari had a nose ring that shone like a beacon over the oceans—drawing mariners to one’s shores and occasionally wrecking their ships against the rocks.” I had not noticed until later that I had moved my point of view in the course of the sentence; I had said “one’s” in place of “her.” The light in the water has taken me and I have gone under holding the fragments of the shattered jug.
*
“I am a woman of letters, says
I am a book woman, says
nobody can close my book, says
nobody can take my book away from me, says
my book encountered beneath the water, says”
– María Sabina
*
night 14
चतुर्दशी
caturdaśī
/
posture 14
प्रणामासन
praṇāmāsana
/
ॐ ज्वालामालिन्यै नमः |
oṃ jvālāmālinyai namaḥ
salutations to the one garlanded with flames
/
*
“So burn the letters
and lay their ashes on the snow
at the river’s edge.
When spring comes,
and the snow melts, and the river rises,
return to the banks of the river
and reread my letters with eyes closed.
Let the words and the images wash over your body like waves.
Reread the letters
with your hand cupped over your ear.”
– Gregory Colbert, Ashes and Snow
*
पूर्णिमा
pūrṇimā
FULL MOON
/
शवासन
śavāsana
/
*
Kanya Kanchana is a poet and philologist from India.
All © Kanya Kanchana, except where mentioned.
– Opening Image: Out on a boat. The Andaman Islands, India.
– Middle Image: Two coffee mugs against an arrangement of vilva leaves (Aegle marmelos), dūrvā grass (Cynodon dactylon), japapuṣpa (Hibiscus rosa-sinensis), bandhūka (Ixora coccinea), and pārijāta (Nyctanthes arbor-tristis)—all of which have medicinal and ritual uses in India—in blue glass.
– Closing Image: Holding the moon.
– Hymn to Vāc, contemporary poetic translation of Vāgāmbhṛṇīsūkta, a 3500-year-old Sanskrit hymn from the Ṛgveda. Published as the anthology opener in Wild Women: Seekers, Protagonists and Goddesses in Sacred Indian Poetry, edited by Arundhathi Subramaniam, Penguin Random House India, 2024.
– Mantrapuṣpam, Sanskrit chant from the Taittirīya Āraṇyaka of the Krṣṇa Yajur Veda, co-translated with Dr Varun Khanna, first published in Muse India, 2018.
– Eshile, unpublished poem excerpt. Inspired by the work of linguist Prof Anvita Abbi in the Andamans, where she uncovered the structure of an ancient language family that has “the only grammar based entirely on the human body.”
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: