What do I call the ache I feel when I see a picture of my child? Smiling in that way, a thing divine, a thread tethered across the universe, thrumming with life?
What should I name the dull fear around my chest as my forehead nestles into the soft fur of a prayer mat in submission, my spirit in wordless spiral in the void between faithlessness and belief?
How do I define the shape of my shoulders as they begin to slouch when I think of my country, a land I love so desperately despite its flaws, its kaleidoscope colors brimming through my tunneled vision allowing through only a distant appreciation for its beauty, denying myself touch for fear it may reject me? Or this one I stand on, whose trees and birds I have so intimately come to recognize as my kin, and who equally now seems poised to close its gates in the faces of the needy?
There are ways in which we learn to move across this planet when we a sense an upcoming loss. And in those moments of heightened aching and mourning of what is to come, our movements–- physical, spiritual and dare I say, political–– feel more jagged, our gatherings more fractured, our sense of self more blurred. I believe we are collectively in such a time now. The limits of our inherent collective discomfort with injustice are being tested against our private fears for what each of us stands to lose on a planetary and existential scale.
I am grieving how time is swiftly changing the young boy before me into a man, breaking down what is gender-less, free of judgement, and therefore in its truest sense godly about children: their unfiltered ability to gauge safety, purity, intention, belonging, the way their bodies already pre-know what wonder feels like. And I find myself not only preemptively mourning it, but holding this time with him close each day, allowing the ache of what he will lose close to my chest, letting the coming loss of his childhood soak into me, grateful that he has had at least these years; years which millions ravaged by pogroms, imperial violence, and neocolonial disenfranchisement have lost entirely at the whim of powers we, the public, gave these states.
When I became a mother, I had a simple dream for my child’s future. That the loss I’d ache with would be simply one of age, of time, of him someday no longer being able to fold himself into a neat little tatami mat that fit in my lap. I did not imagine seeing him smile now and that the smile would open portal-like, into a nonstop reel of rushed obituaries to young children in Gaza, or horrifying clips of teenagers in their Levi’s being marched out of their high schools or homes or tackled to the ground in grocery stores and on streets of the US by masked agents.
I am grieving a shifting planet, whose resource wars have already begun before the ice has had a chance to fully melt, the seas a chance to furiously rise. I am grieving the many ways in which our humanity is being asked to define itself by ironically named, unintelligent technology trained on our very own wisdoms, by the humiliation of border entries and exits, and the unending surveillance of our most secret desires. In moments of deep, multilayered griefs I find myself soothed by art but also strengthened by it.
*
In a song from the 1959 Bollywood film, Dhool Ka Phool, Muhammad Rafi sings,
Achcha hai abhi tak tera koi naam nahin hai
it’s for the best you are yet unnamed
Tujhko kisi mazhab se koi kaam nahin hai
you are tied to no faith
Jis ilm ne insaan ko takseem kiya hai
this knowledge which has divided a whole human into parts
Us ilm ka tujh par koi ilzaam nahin hai
this knowledge can hold no grudge over you
Tu badle huye waqt ki pahchaan banega
you will be a symbol of a changing time
Insaan ki aulaad hai, insaan banega
you are the child of humans; you will be a human.
In a period –– the aftermath of the bloody derangement of the Partition– ripe with religious grudge, one of Hindi cinema’s wisest filmmakers, Yash Chopra, made Dhool Ka Phool a testament to both the failure of dominant castes and classes in post-independence India to recognize and do right by fellow humans and the opposing, overwhelming generosity still inherent to India’s economically depressed masses in the form of an honest but poor Abdul who raises an orphaned Hindu child with dignity and deep, humanistic love. The child’s illegitimacy as someone born to a woman out of wedlock in a highly patriarchal society and the illegibility of his most basic human right, that to belonging and a safe childhood, become entwined in this story of a young nation thrashing about its own citizenry blinded by ego, patriarchy, and westward aspiration.
Chopra would later go on to become the purveyor of fairytale Bollywood romances, but looking back, this fever dream of a film–– one amongst many in those early decades–– feels like the fairytale. And I, a little girl of six or seven would tiptoe out of my bedroom at midnight to sneakily watch late-night reruns of these black and white classics on state-run tv channels, drinking in hope with the same innocence I now see glistening in my child’s eyes. This light is of someone raised to feel unobligated by religion or partisan politics to bend his moral compass in any singular, narrow way, someone truly free to choose.
And yet, as we sit between two home-lands now, two iterations of the great project of democracy, I am struck by how little I will be able to protect this light. I can only offer it the prism of my experience with art, with belonging, with land, with the divine.
Muhammad Rafi’s song then is the anthem I often hum to myself as I swipe away desperately at the muddiness adulthood is bringing to my son’s clarity. He will need it in the world that is becoming. As I lower my forehead to the prayer mat, I feel my voice ringing with the same desperation through the void. Surely there must exist a kinder divine than the one who made a world of such mutual devastation possible?
I straighten my slouched shoulders to open my lungs wide, let the air back into them, so it may move me towards action and root me simultaneously.
Home has always been a distant idea, and the ground I am standing on right now. My country is anywhere I can feel my most human self, free of the burden of a system’s grudge. In which case, it is everywhere that childhood and innocence and the collective urge to protect these still exist, whether in the embrace of my son, or across time, place, memory and land.
My country, I surmise, is a song.
