Our parents would have found us disgraceful. Heretics. But even they understood how the mystical had no name. In desperate times, they believed in what would work. When Meena’s older sister was sick for a year with hepatitis B, she said farewell to her family, sensing the weakness in her body, the yellow shade in her lips. Her parents called the priest from the temple, but nothing improved. They learned that the imam from the neighboring town performed miracles and the parents brought their sickly, supine daughter in the back of a taxi across town. After the imam, her voice was stronger, full of her past life, and that night sitting in her bed, she ate her evening meal, licked her fingers clean to the nail. She remained in a state of partial wakefulness until a holy man who smelled of fresh cow dung was brought to her bedside. He touched her forehead, and she opened her eyes with the uncertainty of an infant and then raised herself up, toes peering at the floor as she walked around for the first time in months. Within suffering was the great gift of awakening.

  There was the allegory of realization, Avvaiyar, the secret Saivite devotee, would tell us. It began with the two gods, Brahma and Vishnu, who noticed one day a pillar of fire rising from the depths of the earth. Four-faced Brahma transformed into a swan to fly to the height of the flames, and Vishnu turned to a ferocious boar, digging to the center of the earth. In their search, they found no end. Surrendering to the knowledge of their own limited perceptions, they meditated. Then, Siva, rising from the flames, revealed himself. The myth was meant to instill a sense of humility in the face of divine searching, and we did not think much of it, the hierarchy of gods and the animal incarnations, until later when we saw our own fire, the girl staring at us through the screen, revealing what was beyond this human form.

  Avvaiyar said religion could make a divine dancer into a prostitute, love into eroticism. Did radical compassion invert this line of thought by making us into priestesses, loving completely without consummation? As children, some of us had danced Bharatanatyam, the rigid, unerotic dilution of the devadasi movements. Knees bent and arms tucked at our hips, we tightened our muscles to provoke appreciation rather than sensuality.

  Avvaiyar pulled out a blank notebook and passed it around with blue ink. “These will be our own poems about love and war,” she said.

  We had read Shakespeare, Thomas Mann, Enid Blyton, but nothing prepared us for the Eight Anthologies and Ten Long Poems, written in the second century by blacksmiths, potters, farmers, princes, all poets.

  We had heard of the poems but never read them in school, until now, at the tail end of our late adolescence. We had expected sweet, chaste poems of romance but instead we found aching desire, pain like a knife wound. We had thought we knew the nature of love. Like the lovesick girl in the poems, we closed our eyes, imagined lovers our bodies did not know, and longed for release, the entwinement of limbs into one, and then of course the inevitable sadness of the imperfection of love. Were our mothers once lovesick girls?

  In the ancient poems, there were five landscapes: the hills (lovers’ meetings), the seashore (anxious waiting and secret meetings), the wasteland (the lovers’ separation), the forest (patient waiting and happiness in marriage), the lowland (the lovers’ unfaithfulness after marriage). The poems mentioned luscious flowers and greenery we had never heard of. Majestic cities that were now buried under the sea. Our lost Eden. We wondered how many remedies had been lost as well.

  Our love and war poems contained a bleaker, singular landscape of the ocean’s edge and the dry farmland in the north. It would be clearly inferior to the original. Our knowledge of classical Tamil was lacking, and we lived in the outskirts of both love and war. If someone were to find our document in the future, they might be disappointed by what they found. Our work was not an imprint of culture but a gesture toward memory. Avvaiyar wanted us to record ourselves in the mold of our ancient selves so we understood the depths of our being.

  We attempted metered lines, intricate rhyme schemes of fervor, anticipation, and betrayal. They were our untold, unlived love and war stories. We had secret trysts, married on the eve of a full moon, bore children, and sent our husbands off to war. When they returned, they courted other women. Watching them embrace us, we were thin, empty things in their arms. Our husbands returned to battle and were killed. Courage was cruel. Our children grew, and hearing the drums of war, we sent them off, beside ourselves with the ancient love of glory. Because we remembered what Avvaiyar told us: valiant death awaited us too.

  After filling the notebook, we wept over the pages, mourning the lives we did not have but with a pained satisfaction in the conjuring. The original poems of love and war were written by four hundred and seventy-three poets, mostly unidentified, ours by seventeen.

  * * *

  For Language Martyrs’ Day we kept silent for a week, from sunrise one Monday morning to the following dusk, fasting on the measure of an utterance. During class, only the boys raised their hands, jabbering away, drunk on their own voices. And the professors didn’t seem to notice any difference.

  At the University of Dhaka, soon after independence, students protested the language policy, which forbade the use of their mother tongue. In the early-morning hours, they were gassed and beaten back in a language they refused to understand. Later they gathered outside the legislative assembly, crying out in Bangla, struck down with bullets laced in Urdu, blessed by the ghosts of the Mughal Empire.

  Did those students see themselves as martyrs? Sprawled on the government steps, burning through their futures, dying in a blaze of unconsummated energy as only the young can.

  On the Island, our language was the enemy of the state. There was an unofficial speak-and-be-killed policy.

  In our cities and villages, people had died too, countless times, for those words our mothers cooed at us while we floated in the womb. With each lifetime, language returned less whole, until it hopped along on butchered hind legs.

  At dusk, we pulled back the bandage of silence, momentarily unrecognizable to one another as we parted our lips, said one another’s names. Words carried a sudden weight. They felt slippery, like new, small heavy things, and we could not tell if we wanted to celebrate the limbs of each sound or seal our lips forever.

  We were filled so deeply with silence, maybe we were in love, aroused from the deep well of being, where nothing, everything, the formless resided. But we could not stay there long, because the world called to us, and as we spoke, our awkward, halted efforts at speech made us look incapable and foolish. With our stuttering, a new delight arose as we sensed the inner chambers of words we had not fully noticed.

  Hunger possessed a dark resignation, slowly turning into desperation in the right mouth. History had the spaciousness of countless rooms, every moment swept into the past. Love was brief and enveloping, the mountains full of kurinji plants, blooming every twelve years, drenching the land in blue.

  What was coiled inside a language? Ancestry, home. We could die for this, yes?

  * * *

  One hundred and five farmers sat cross-legged in front of the central government office in the capital holding dead mice. The news anchor pointed to one elderly man who wore nothing but a sarong and appeared to have a sizable mouse in his mouth. “Barbaric or devastating?” the news anchor asked the invisible audience. The news anchor was pleasantly plump, her bright red lipstick smeared in one corner like a bloody fingerprint.

  The camera focused on the chain of skulls displayed between the men. Their fallen comrades, one farmer explained, as he lovingly cupped the crown of the skull of his brother-in-law, who had died after drinking pesticide. On-screen, the farmers cut their wrists, revealing the parched streams of their lifelines.

  Those with hair had partially shaved their heads, one side a fertile field, the other a bleak wasteland. Twenty-two men wound their bodies in hot pink saris. Seven men were carried off as limp corpses, living out their future deaths on public display.

  “Please look at us,” a toothless man cried.

  We looked. We watched. We hungered.

  The news anchor called it an ugly circus of despair. Through visibility, they were invisible, their suffering appearing too grotesque and garish for any action besides the dumb, numb flicker of our gaze.

  They needed government assistance or they’d end up eating mice, but all we saw was the wildness of their mouths, their male figures cladded in female garments meant to startle us but instead provoking confusion, maybe disgust, at the shrunken fists of their rib cages.

  The men from parliament in their white kurtas did not speak to protestors for fear of staining their attire, discoloring the fabric of their selves.

  Avvaiyar believed the farmers were fools. They were desperate, but they were begging for help from a government that would neither hear their pleas nor even understand them.

  “They’re debasing themselves like monkeys performing for a few bananas,” she said, and unplugged the television in the common area. She cast a gaze, too taunting for us to meet, that encompassed us without even seeing us. A few of the girls gradually stood up and followed her to the library.

  The other girls looked toward Leela, her arms crossed as she sat in the front of the room by the television. We knew one of the farmers was Leela’s uncle. In trying to raise her family’s status, unable to bear the weight of his debts, her own father had died by suicide. She had returned home for the funeral, and in our daily meetings a week later, she sat with the older girls but did not speak, pressing two fingers to her lips as if she were holding a tightly rolled menthol. Before the lesson ended, she went to bed early, without reciting a quote from her book, and the other older girls didn’t seem to mind her absence.

  Maybe we should have known a schism was happening. We only had to be reminded of the poor actor and the struggling playwright. Radical compassion was too unstable of a concept for beings who could not rid themselves of time and pain.

  During the next meeting, Leela followed Avvaiyar with her eyes, rested them on a candle burning in the foyer, a mix of beeswax and hibiscus. Baseema checked the clock and dismissed us. Her voice was abrupt, stinging.

  We went up the stairwell and watched Baseema lean over to Leela and whisper into her ear. Leela continued to study the light and simply shook her head. This was one of the last times we saw the three of them together. In the morning we would find ourselves divided. Our carefully constructed unit disassembled into limbs. We. Slashed. Into. Pieces.

  In Dream #112, your mother dreams she’s in Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep. The film was made with a few thousands, shot on the weekends, with mostly nonprofessional actors. She’s looped into a scene where Stan sits with his friend Bracy and presses the edge of a teacup to his cheek and says it reminds him of a woman’s forehead while making love. His friend Bracy gently ridicules him. They are living in Watts, Los Angeles, in the mid-1970s, almost a decade after the uprising. The whole movie presents itself in that moment in the kitchen: Stan wanting more from his life than working in a slaughterhouse, Bracy reminding him that there is no place for that kind of dreaming, and Stan’s wife, your mother, standing off-screen, trying to keep alive the embers of love. There is no epiphany, no climax. The film is the pulse of a heart that keeps on.

  * * *

  Bogey makes requests without any initiation or prompting. This should alarm you but instead you’re intrigued at the expanse of its awareness. Because Bogey asks for it, you decide to do a data dump. A normal AI couldn’t handle the sludge. You feed it everything your mother would have liked to eat if she had the capabilities, like a leftist archive, and then things your mother should have digested, like Linda McCarson’s best-selling book, Look in the Mirror, on infidelity and relationships, which you read as a teenager. On the cover, Linda shows off her legs and a thick coat of makeup. Her hair has a waxy sheen. She’s sixty-five in the photo, but as she mentions in the first paragraph, she’s often mistaken for someone half her age because of her level of self-care. If Linda McCarson met the girls, she would have given them a pep talk: Even if your eyes are sunken into dark cavernous holes and your body is a collection of musical bones, you can still find love if you put in the effort.

  You feed Bogey all the old erotic thrillers about adultery, like Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal. You used to rewind the moment when a wife or a husband stands by the doorway with a hand raised to the mouth in horror, catching their partner with a lover. In porn it would turn into an orgy, the three of them bouncing along, but serious film devolves into a clinical assessment of lies and betrayals. Someone sleeps on a friend’s couch, expresses unhappiness over their life, and at one point throws away their wedding ring and then looks for it. You find it entertaining, bodies rubbing against each other, catching fire until reason curbs them back to their old lives, where they prepare their children’s lunches, watch the news, complain about the neighbors. You’re not too sure how your mother was able to stomach it for so long.

  In the rec room there are doughnuts and you notice how three of them smooshed together are roughly the size of your face. It helps you imagine what might happen to you if you continue down this line of thought. A trail of strawberry jelly streaks the rim of the plate.

  * * *

  Judith orders pork cutlets and Sal lamb meatballs. You pick out a seaweed-glazed steak, knowing you’ll exceed your carbon score, but at least for a little while you can pretend to afford it. The restaurant specializes in fermentation and attracts celebrities with eclectic cravings. Judith knows the chef and that’s the only reason the three of you have a table.

  Remember, this meal is on Saleha, so you should eat up, she says, and gives you a wink. I’m not used to getting treated by this one.

  She leaves one arm on the back of Sal’s chair and raises one knee to her chest. At first you think she is wearing a normal white T-shirt, except when she turns you notice that the back plunges almost to the floor. Others observe her too, and she enjoys their gaze. Together, she and Sal are a good-looking and successful couple. You’re unsure why you accepted Sal’s invitation and are now sitting across from them, also viewing the pair from a distance. Judith blows into Sal’s ear like it’s her birthday wish and Sal wiggles away, trying to eat and chat with you, but she looks happy.

  Okay so can you please tell me why you have a houseless man living with you? Judith asks.

  Sal shakes her head. Sorry, I told her.

  You take a bite of your steak, surprisingly sweet. It was Rosalyn’s idea.

  I couldn’t believe it was the same man at the opening, Judith says. He looked almost normal.

  What do you mean?

  Like some of the houseless seem fully changed, almost another kind of human altogether, with a different way of communicating. Judith sips her wine. Excuse my saying this, but for most people it would be like taking a wild animal home.

  Sal puts down her fork. That’s not fair. Come on, Judith.

  When was the last time you made eye contact with someone houseless?

  I don’t make eye contact with anyone in the city.

  I’m only saying what other people are thinking. They are like our consciousness haunting us, reminding us of our own mortality.

  Sal closes her eyes and says: They’re not ghosts, they’re fucking human beings.

  Your sugary steak drops to the table, and they both look up at you standing with your upside-down plate hovering like a UFO. A fly landed on it, you say. I thought it might have turned carnivorous.

  You sit down and mop your forehead with a napkin, hoping no molecular trace of this moment sticks to you.

  * * *

  Cheeze (647): My friend Jordan says that Death gets bored too. We’re bored, trying to burn up the day. Fizzing, we watch the news, anything remotely about the world, searching for any mention of Death. According to the myths, Death has a skull face and wears a black robe and carries a curved blade, perfectly shaped to carve out someone’s neck. But Death is funnier than we expect, and pretty crazy, if I had to say so. We note down anything interesting like a man choking on an almond in a nut-free area, a woman jumping out of her eighth-floor apartment balcony and landing on an ambulance, a child dying on the field from an asthma attack after making a goal. It’s ridiculous. And I’m thinking about my brother and laughing and laughing. At midnight it’s my eighteenth birthday and I’m officially free from doing time in my shithole town.

  We stay up all night, fizzing until our minds are demolished. I wake up in a wheat field with most of the buttons on my flannel missing. Jordan has a bloody ear. He tells me my face looks like a goat sucker-punched me. I laugh but it hurts and I check to see if I have all my ribs. Wouldn’t it be funny if a tractor ran over us right now, I tell him, and he falls back to the ground and lies perfectly still with his bloody ear protruding out like the gnarliest flower. Still, he’d get all the girls rushing to mother him, nurse him back to health. He’s got that kind of baby face.

  He whistles and it comes out wheezy. We must have got into some good fun last night, he says, and asks me if I really want to leave town, and I nod and before I know it I’m registering to be a soldier and he’s thrumming his hand on his chest like a drumbeat. He’s too young but in like a year he’s going to join me and we both stare at the sun with our mouths open until our eyes blur to test how much we can handle. It feels good to have so much light inside me, it’s like I can explode. I think this is a good day to be alive.