Hymns for the Drowning

How many fires are there, how many suns,how many dawns, how many waters?I say this, O Fathers, not as a challenge.I ask it to know, O you poets.

—Rig Ved, 1500 BCE

There are stories: In the beginning was the word.

The world came from an egg. The world came from chaos. The world came from nothing.

In the beginning darkness was covered with darkness. There was neither non-existence nor existence then, neither death nor immortality.

When we first met, we walked for hours by the Thames. London's winds pushed at our eyelids, and our hair was frizzy with the rain.

In the beginning, I talked like I had never talked before, speech like reams of fabric unrolling from my mouth. This speaking and hearing intoxicated us, two aliens on foreign soil.

Back in my Mile End flat we rested our cold feet on the radiator and filled the room with the smoke of Marlboros the Bangladeshi grocers sold loose for fifty pence each. We stayed in for two days and three nights, fortified with Teacher's Whisky alongside white bread that you sprinkled with chili powder.

London salons were expensive and you hadn't got a haircut in six months. Hairy apostrophes littered my eyebrows and knuckles and toes.

(In the beginning was Aditi, the infinite. She spread her legs and gave birth to the earth. From the earth were born the four corners of the sky.)

In the beginning we watched the new Umrao Jaan in Boleyn Cinema with the Venetian blinds. We laughed at the woeful dialogues while voices around shushed us. We left the movie midway and outside, London's January gusts were pincers on our faces.

"Let's go to the river," you said. "I grew up on the seashore. I need to be by water every couple of days." I think it was this that unraveled me.

The earth appeared over four billion years ago, erupting with volcanoes. The ground we tread today was only sizzle, lava everywhere. Then came the rain. For millions of years it poured. Fire met water: The world was a haze.

In the beginning we went buffet hunting and at Victoria Station gorged upon all-you-can-eat cardboard pizza. Croydon was damp and incidental, the Chinese buffet on High Street rampant with basins of oily noodles. We compared notes on how to hold chopsticks and considered ourselves fancy.

We were exploring the pitfalls of storytelling. Narratives define, after all, and definitions are tricky. In a watery world definitions slide under you as you sit laughing, appraising chopsticks vis-à-vis pencils that, truth be told, were our preferred tools of flirtatious banter.

"Did you know the space between your index finger and thumb is called the cagina?" I asked. "Ah," you said. "You mean thumb crotch?" We sucked at flirting anyway.

Vaak, speech, was the first goddess. Time appeared when she merged with Maanas, mind. The world came into existence with words.

The rocks from the earth's beginning are hard. They lie in the cores of our oldest mountains that formed when chunks of cooled magma floating on the embryonic seas crashed into each other and fused.

The Appalachian—on whose slopes we once drove a truck filled with the detritus of the marriage that we made—is one such range, formed when Massachusetts rammed into Scotland, but I'm getting ahead of the story.

In the beginning you visited me in Delhi and we kissed with tongue in the shadow of the Aravalli Hills, another remnant of the earth's first rocks, now razed low by wind and water. That month Delhi was hypnotic with labdanum flowers. The trees arched over traffic jams and the yellow blossoms floated down on car roofs.

We tied the flowers in my hair and named one another Chandramukhi, moon-faced. But you, you were never like the moon, its colour like freshly-churned butter. Your face has always had the tincture of tree trunks.

(The moon was formed when a celestial body the size of Mars rammed into the young earth, blasting pieces of it into space...