This is the name I could love you under | JFK Randhawa
December 29, 2020
Hand Sequence 5 (Who are soft, unbury: 1956) | image: JFK Randhawa
…adhering to a good, orderly direction as if that will make it stop. Make the green world stop.
—Bhanu Kapil, Ban en Banlieu
I.
The story is murky, whether your young mother ended her life intentionally, with poison, or whether she died of complications arising from malaria, sumu sickening the blood. Whether she anticipated her death. In Sanhewal village, when undivided Punjab was slowly cleaving. Writing cleave, so clear and neat, the blood climbing up my shins disappears.
Pointing to a daguerrotype-reprint strung on the wall, your eldest brother says, look
into her eyes, see—
the fire of the living,
burning—
do you think this same person could, would, kill herself? No. The trust he places in her image, the private language they share in darshan, scattering into blue. I glance upon the image of my grandmother’s mother, her poise, while her son’s protection echoes, and I am shy in the heat of how I will doubt her, as if she were an isolated event suspended here in the sunny room at mid-day. The paint peeling. The woman I see looks tired, subdued, as if she has something more urgent to do than sit and be photographed. When I look again, there is longing in her mouth’s curves, peculiar mirth in the length of her nose. In another glance, she mouths run.
II.
When a friend asks if I am writing a letter to a missile, I say yes. But it is not a letter, and it is not writing. The inert material. I watch dust scatter from a sari as its bulk drops from Jaswant, my grandmother’s, hands in sybaritic whorls, the fabric lined with seams of old pigment. Mercifully messy, uncalcified. I want for this friction, for the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative interconnection – these emergent traces. For regulated and regulating knowledge to depreciate. Something brave and capacious, that heals together with its shame, not peace adrift in a contract of loneliness. As if peace were a place, somewhere, unwavering. To want a different kind of peace. Written in the deep knotting gesture of muscle and bone. To say enactment is the grammatical axis.
For us to remember: we are the ritual
—subtle-ize
III.
I wonder if her suicide is an appropriate possibility, given the prowling violence consuming the bodies of rural, undereducated women like herself – in reality, of any women, from any class, age, caste, religious tradition – the rising displacement of farmers like she and her husband, the devastation of family as the local world she had known began to dissolve. Your mother, Mohinder Kaur, died in 1948, less than one year after the Partition Plan was announced and “finalized” five weeks later on paper by Cyril Radcliffe. In August 1947, he presented the Plan to the British Crown for approval, which they promptly gave, officially dividing India and Pakistan, west and east. However, a spirit of division was emerging months earlier as rumors and uncertainties about the stakes of Independence and its contingencies began to spread.
It is documented that thousands of women were abducted, raped, or reported missing throughout the Punjab beginning in March 1947; it is documented that hundreds of women in the Punjab during the Partition period also died by “voluntary” suicide, alone or en mass, as in the village of Thoa Kalsa where nearly one hundred women leaped into Matta Lajjawanti’s well, throwing bangles, wedding jewelry, and rupees, then finally themselves into the dark sink of drowning bodies. Some made the choice to take afim, to douse themselves in kerosene and find a spark; some sat still inside homes set on fire. How fire hollows, leaving a charred shell, licked with pearl, gold, silver bone. Once unburied, there is no scarcity of sensual, horrifying descriptions of women’s and girls’ pain, of their murders, of their transitions into death. These women’s voices, in most cases, cannot be readily recovered to illuminate what feminist historiographer Urvashi Butalia understands as the blurred spaces between choice and coercion.
Perhaps if they did not kill themselves first, their grandfathers, husbands, uncles, sons, brothers would have cut their throats out of a heightened moral obligation to “protect” the women’s honor and purity. Whose purity, whose honor is being protected, after the girl has been erased? These abstract terms took precedence over the embodied, material lives of millions of people, adults and children, who were killed or took their own lives as martyrs. The delirium continues to smudge. Cyril Radcliffe was visiting India for the first time when he arrived to oversee the Boundary Commission for Punjab and Bengal in July 1947. Unfinished lines still wet on the page and still, admittedly unfinished, but strong enough for the tight timeline of Imperial departure. Radcliffe himself did not want to stay for very long – he was being called to quit India, after all.
To wash your hands
in blood.
Is it not possible that a woman sees the line and steps over it, surrendering to another way?
(Mohinder Kaur) | photo: JFK Randhawa
No one but Mohinder can describe her relationship with death or the shape of her dying. To consider the possibility that she died by suicide is, for me, an exercise in listening for conditions that contour our lives, soaking us with salt water. I’m trying to listen for traces: where she embedded her dreams, her fantasies, the taste of her mother’s breast, what was embedded in her – her unsayings. There is a risk in this descent, in touching our exile from our bodies. We’re faced with the haunt of amnesia. Selective cultural amnesia the theorists have said.
Wind is storm’s messenger; I listen in the fen for her gradation, weighted to the earth only by sorrow, the deerfly’s bite. When we are the moving schism, we resist containment by floating out
—by atomizing, becoming fog
IV.
Nail-bed, thumb. Thumb pressing, digging into divot, where hip and femur meet. Thumb tugging at cotton, pinching and gathering. Thumb and first finger sliding in opposite directions, rounding wet flour into lunettes. Thumb knife’s blade, pop peas off a spiraling stalk. Pressure distributed evenly from ankle, pedal held in place, to make the needle go – mechanical, needle and piston. Needle dipping down and up down and up.
Take my thumb in your mouth.
Between your teeth, into the ribbed lining, sinews in the slippery nook of your cheek.
Run baby’s thumb and fingers over the incision in a hot green pepper
to discourage her from plucking out:
eyelashes,
eyebrows, the black hair sprouting from her arms and scalp.
With the heel of your palm, you drag a shimmering tear across my face, a glassy
seam of crystals.
To hold the spine in place.
Thumb I run across your skin, edging this way of speaking over your knuckles of paper. To prepare for ritual, to cough up a cloud, to welcome those luminous depths back in.
Say:
I am the fist
and the fistful of clay:
you are the mucous, the ghajar, the mirch—
I am the clot swimming loose in the brain,
I am the knot and its empty center,
the spindle,
wading through the flat mark of the river—
this is the tongue I will love you with. This is the tongue
that has left me pleading:
a mother who burned black in the fields
and I am the earth held in place:
this is the stone I pound into grain.
There is the knife I keep at my bedside,
there is a tongue that has turned me away—
white is the cotton worn by the dying, here is the prism
I teach to be children, yes this
is the stone I pound into meat.
Here is my threshold, interpreting what I cannot touch, using the framework of what is in reach. When you observe your blue shadow, there is the moon:
this is the name I could love you under.
This cloth and the rain on my thighs,
here is the dress—
I’ve forgotten myself inside of it, here
is the red satchel of my longing:
a path, overgrown with thorny vines.
This is the cloth I've darned you into.
My way to quiet in the median, tulip tree, on the bus
watching sleepers’ masks in the silver night
as I braid my brothers' hair—
I am the oil, the arm wound around your neck,
I am the neck, the bit
callused heel, I am the dog
rolling in dust, the ladle, a dreamless sleep under tarpaulin shadow.
Burn the fields and the papers with them—
Backs bent, we run beneath a canopy of interlinked hands, and a thread is dropped on the road. Calling this a palace of numbers, and this mountain range, wood fibers veined with a tonal insignia of insects. Learning to read.
At the far end of the bridge, you turn to look out over what we've crossed.
Can a bridge heal a river, when the river is dammed and polluted?
There are five waters, rivers of blood snaking together:
kali pani rough water slough
off old life—
can these waters be the bridge
when a river reaches for you?
Jhani/JFK Randhawa is a multidisciplinary artist of the queer* southasian diaspora, whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in outlets such as Figure 1, DoubleBlind Magazine, PRISM international, baest journal, LA VAGUE, The Mortuary, Thymele Arts, El Cid, and the Woolen Mill Gallery. Jhani is the recipient of a Yasmin Fellowship from the Millay Colony of the Arts, and is co-founder and co-editor of rivulet, an experimental arts journal and press project, with Teo Rivera-Dundas. Online: @qjhanip / http://jfkrandhawa.com
