Srinaath Perangur

Brown, By Apparition

 
{               The Partition of India, 1947: immolation in
                 medium-brown streams. In the dark soil:
                 heart-holes. The shapes of our new countries
                 buried with the bodies.

[                That year, our breath blackened within us.
                 Rusted away into the fresh iron under our
                 feet. In our hands.

[                The subaltern could hardly speak.¹ But the
                 subsumed, the self-mutilated? Did we even
                 have a voice?²

[                 Distance, especially temporal, is a feared
                  night we must traverse.³
…

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
¹ (Perhaps Spivak should have asked: “When were we
hollowed—emptied from within?”)

² (As if I really do now. As if independence could be
prescribed.)

³ Here is a truth you don’t want to hear: Partition
feels like a dream I’ve never woken up from. The
seven decades were never long enough.



[               Where do I begin? The words come out in
                spirals.⁴ As much as I’d like to fault myself
                for this messy traversal, I cannot help but
                remember: this is an imitation of our
                history.⁵

[               The postcolonial narrative can only write in
                circumlocutions. In tangles. I find my way in
                the dark, because that is the only way I
                know.

[               How long did I run? Deceive? Maybe I
                scrambled all the fragments and laid them
                out in front of you, like a pile of autumn
                leaves.⁶

[               I cannot help but wonder: After all these
               years, how does this history materialize onto
               me?


⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
⁴And maybe for the better. I compress them under
my thumb like a spring (or perhaps like DNA, or a
mosquito). One day I will allow them to curve out
into the world. Set them loose, if they are still
breathing.

⁵As if I can bear this weight. (No, bear it with
innocence.)

⁶When you wade in, that crunch of tiny bones under
your feet. And you—witness to the violence, a gaze
full of needles. Your pitch-dark pupils entry wounds.



[               Our stories weigh more than the
                condensation of memory on our wine
                glasses.⁷ & maybe even this story—or a part
                of it—has been told before. My role is
                performative. A voice on a page.⁸

[               Seventy-five million women were raped on
                the border of India and Pakistan in 1947.
                The others were instructed to kill themselves
                to avoid that dishonor.

[               Over one million civilians perished. Hindus,
                Sikhs, Muslims—we washed our hands in
                the same river. That new snake that curved
                through Punjab, Rajputana, Sind.⁹

[               Ayesha Jalal: “A defining moment that is
                neither beginning nor end, partition
                continues to influence how the peoples and
                states of postcolonial South Asia envisage
                their past, present and future.”¹⁰

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
⁷(Now that our words are alive, I long for my skin to
feel them.)

 ⁸But who is caught in my net—circumscribed?
Implicated? For whom do I speak, if I speak at all?

 ⁹Have we forgotten it so soon, the mirage of its
stained scales? At one moment brown, at another,
deep red?

…



{               I know about living. I am alive the way milk-
               swirls in coffee beg for separation. I waver
               between particle and wave, crudity and
               sentience.¹¹

[              Sometimes I swear I can feel the blood on
               my hands—my hands.¹²


[               I wonder: must I condemn myself?¹³
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

¹⁰ A story my grandmother once told me: 1947. A
quiet, stifling night. We jolted awake to the tinny din
of the town alarm. It was not the first midnight
attack. The screams nearly drowned the messy hiss of
iron. We tore through the night. East. This was
twenty kilometers from Amritsar, the bloody heart of
Indian independence. We had learned nothing. Years
later, we found out that our town’s watchman had
been killed while staving off the attackers. He hadn’t
been included in the original death toll because, like
the attackers, he was Muslim.

¹¹ I am either unbelievably alive in the present or
smeared across the past. But we are all subject to the
pangs of our history. Eventually, classification loses its
tail in the dirt.

¹² & I wonder why the Atlantic Ocean wasn’t wider.
Why the ships brought the pangs with us, like a
disease.

¹³ Whenever I ask this—which I do often—I feel the
haunt of Partition on my neck. My blood runs
painfully warm under my skin. The walls we’ve

[               The distance between us transpires before I
                can retreat into its curvature. Only a hollow
                in our wake. ¹⁴
…



[              Here is a truth you have always taken for
               granted: The colored spots you see when
               you close your eyes (“eye-floaters”) are the
               remants of shadows cast onto your retinas by
               fibers in your eyes. These patterns can shift
               or grow more intense as you age. ¹⁵
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
erected have followed us. I see them in the mirror, on
the days I’m able to meet my own gaze. I see them in
my Pakistani friend’s eyes, too. (Perhaps we’ve
erected them ourselves, beneath our eyelids.) When
someone calls him a terrorist & my first instinct is not
to defend him but to wonder, when will they mistake
my religion for his. & when we are together and I
look at him and all I can think about is: we are so
indistinguishable it hurts. When, in the eyes of the
world, we are all the same, but in ours we could never
even share a name, let alone a neighborhood. Not for
millions of lives. Our families. Not for our own
conscience, nor for the neat eloquence of a single
moment. Nothing is clear enough to glance through.

¹⁴ Even though our skin brushes the same against
starlight, and our breaths combined easy in the night
wind, I don’t see my friend anymore.

¹⁵ Here is a truth I have always taken for granted: The
color I see when I close my eyes deepens over time.
The world seems to concentrate at the extremum of



[               Even across the ocean, I can see the line of
                Partition. It is right in front of me.


…



[               We know the grind of decades on the
                human heart. ¹⁶


[               An offering: ¹⁷





⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯
my pupil and grow dense with saturation. As if all the
color in the world couldn’t support it. Usually when
this happens, I realize my eyes are open. The image
becomes the afterimage. What remains is all that is.
For us, anyway, it is all there will ever be.

¹⁶ (But our bodies intuit allurement here, even if we
can speak only in whispers. Tucked at the bottom,
beneath the cusps of sounds. Within the skin of the
page.)

¹⁷ To breathe the air wet with murder. To sink into
the soil palms-first. To witness the violation seep into
our skin. Under the moonlight—we know.



[               Bits of leather, the pages of a book, the mud
                under our feet; all our gods are made from
                these.

[               ¹⁸ ¹⁹ ²⁰ ²¹ ²²


…


¹⁸ Our words arc only towards the dirt. Fastened to
the past. We bury them alongside the others. Our soil
full of them. It’s easier that way.

¹⁹ The ash remains, at right angles. Fingers full of wet
earth. The ground beneath us descending into
singularity.

²⁰ At the center: likeness. The eyes like porcelain. A
beautiful fracture.

²¹ & what remains is apparition. Do the dead sing
through me, or have I devoured them? The first
person plural cannot be borne by one body, but in
the crevices of the page.

²² To cleave is to split into two adhesive parts. The
boundary is clear now, but where was it before?
When did our repulsion start?




​
Acknowledgements:

“Does the Subaltern Speak?” is a seminal
essay in postcolonial theory by Gayatri
Chakraborty Spivak.

The phrase “Your pitch-dark pupils entry
wounds” is inspired by Ocean Vuong’s
poem “Night Sky with Exit Wounds.”

The phrase “grind of decades on the human
heart” is adapted from Chitra Banerjee
Divakaruni’s poem “The Founding of Yuba
City.”

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​​Srinaath Kidambi Perangur is a musician, poet, translator, and scholar. He has received several prizes and grants for his work, through which he attempts to untangle questions of Indian identity, performativity, and postcoloniality. He attends Brown University, where he studies Sanskrit Classics.