Next year the daughter’s daughter will be born. She comes broken faced and blotchy, like her beak won’t snatch how she wants. There’s sinew in her mouth, gristle. No, just phlegm. If the doctor-guy gave her a good whack, she would punish the silence in the room with her celestial arrival. Instead, she slips in quietly. In the oil slick of our feathers we know she is here.
From her vantage she will always be the hero. The center. She will turn the apartment incremental degrees and chase the setting sun that’s rising into tomorrow, back where we are from. But before all that, there’s the tempestuous part. The part where our girl will get whisked from her anemic mother to a premature ward, where she will grow her lungs like a Boomer bubble gum, puffing until she can scream without doctor-whacks. Then she will transfer to a unit in an apartment complex. She will live within four hollow walls, preside over a stained carpet. She’ll swim in the decor of diaspora, walls mirroring her own emptiness, and always the lasting scent of dried flowers reeking in a cupboard. Out back a weeping willow on the community golf course dances at night, and she thinks it might be Nataraja because that’s the only God she learned of before she quit Temple class. She will sit under the willow at night, listen for the bells of his stomping feet, wait for the wind to tell her she’s home.
The girl will get bigger and her bones will grind down from 300 to an adult 206. Her baby teeth will pop out like sugar candies except the one we let crumble with too much milk. So what, she liked it. She will want to tell her story before she knows we hold it. We let her, though we crows know her first language will dissolve and her best language will gnarl in our ears. Still, she will despair in a frequency understood in any language: the pain of leaking. She will believe some essential piece of her was lost where the three oceans meet. Kanyakumari. She will grow long lithe legs and ask her mom for a phone and while the other kids are looking up babysitter porn, she will be zooming in on Google Maps, looking for a loophole in the ocean. She will search every well in the tristate area, throw ropes into them, hoping they reach all the way through the crust, mantle, and core of the Earth. Each time she lassos rope into water, she will inch farther from the American Dream, but all that’s on her mind will be who, if anyone, will tug back.
She will grow up and call no place home, but a person, because home feels less like a where than a who. She will marry the who, and on nights without the moon, she’ll let the darkness seep in. She won’t see us, flying by her bedside window. She’ll turn on the news and find suture and heartbreak and upheaval and revolution. Those end-of-life lessons will come early, fester prematurely, before the things she needs to learn first. Like how the stars shivered when she was conceived or how the planets told us who she would be. How her mother is of us, so of us she too will be. Our daughter from earth our bones have never burned on. She does not yet know she is ours and ours and ours.
Our girl will be prescient. She will plan her own trips to our nests, go despite the thick summers, the monsoon on her chest. She will learn the air smells different where we are from. She will smell how her homeland was torn from her skin, and she will wonder who she would have been steeped in this land instead of another. It’s not that she will feel half here, half there, but in some sense she will never feel whole.
Before the end of her life, we will leave our feathers on her doorstep like a pyre. Our daughter’s daughter will streak a slash of fire in the sky, rewrite her own destiny. She will burn down the memory, the loss of it, while we are building. She will feed us with her tears. We will thatch her roof with the onyx of our feathers, let our shit marble into the floor. We will snatch trinkets and sparklies from the streets, spear the walls with her reflection.
When her solar days end, we will breathe her our blessing. She will have left her own daughter for our vigil. The end is the beginning. She won’t cry, never cries. When she sees us, she will feel the tug on the rope. She will smell the homeland in her skin. She will bow in through the door, and we, the ancestors, will welcome her old soul home.
Swati Sudarsan was the runner-up of the 2022 So to Speak Contest Issue and is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and she has received support from Tin House, the Kenyon Review, Kweli Journal, and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Her work can be found in McSweeney’s, The Adroit Journal, Maudlin House and more. She lives in Oakland, CA and works as a public health scientist.