Medha Singh

Medha Singh is a poet, translator, and editor. She is the editor of Berfrois, London. Her first book is called Ecdysis (Poetrywala, 2017) and her second book is a work of translation, a collection of love letters that she translated from the French, penned by Indian modernist painter Sayed Haider Raza during his time in France, I Will Bring My Time: Love Letters by S.H. Raza (Vadehra Art Gallery, 2020). She is currently at the University of Edinburgh.

Connect with Medha: Twitter @medhawrites

Outlived: Origin Story

I buried this carelessness in the pith of my orange heart. Inheritance from godless ancestors who picked cherries under sunlight. And my mad appetite for love? Sleeping with a thousand Penelopes, one carved a silver bed for them, etched and honed, later thrown away—as he lay dying of syphillis—by his angry children, flinging their shame with it, to the grey depth of the sea.

How does Lillith's vanity spring in this chest? Call of self & world swam amid the earth’s flowers, in the mucous of an old womb, as I lay there, orderless. Bodies leave things behind, the mind unkinks from fiber and sinew, memories of love crawl into the brain, their parentage, forever unknown. 'Self love, is also love of the other, despite oneself' —my skin absorbed it all, as mother endured the protracted sorrow of gestation. Yes, I carry this vanity I still mistake for self love—it’s not mine: it belongs to that cherubic ancestor, once furiously worshipped in adjacent villages. A sage, a saint, aghori who feared little & found after years of penance that the gods dined with him already; they lay in his bed, clung to his jowl as water when he bathed, trickled down his back, in the thin air he breathed; hot sun pickling his dimpled arms— the Gods thronging among his people, in the things & souls he cast out; he stood deified under temple-eaves, sightless, meditative, man’s man, as they now say. And towering? I think, tall. — venturesome pilgrims trudging from Kashmir, whirling through the Ganges, and arriving, slow, for a glimpse, as they parted with some answers the holy route prescribed.

My great-grandfather, quiet and still as he sat inside the red noise.

How do I inherit this torrential anger, which really is all my fear trying to hide away its embarrassment from these provincial ties? We remember without language— a woman was ravaged in the family she married into, five generations before mine. Fifteen year old widow cornered, left with her womb full the morning after; when they knew her belly was proof of their crime; taken to the woods, she was left to die. This story trickles down the mother lines in whispers, whispers & cries.

How do we forge these nameless trajectories? Who chose to stay in the village? Who came to the city? Who was flayed alive? Who were the executioners? The landowners? The code-keepers?

Who came to the capital? Who was brought against their will? Who, was left behind? Listen—I know the obsession with ancestry these days but I’m afraid to learn I may have some whiteness muddying me, as that unnameable thing that is done to a woman, was done then too to her who could have been fifty, but was fifteen.

Where the will to surrender persists, history takes root—my grandfather in the gulf, rescuing Indians and Pakistanis, Kuwait against Saddam’s mad war,

a silver print of the day, grandfather smiling in the white light.

It’s said that the soldiers grabbed all that their eyes could. Ripped the stone clean from the flooring. Ground once marble-tiled at banks and hospitals now cracking into craters: what Kuwait was soon to be. They tossed out infants, yesterday's leftovers, wrested them from their incubators, the sanatoriums overflowed with the wailing of widows, the sins of demolition men.

My grandfather, they say, could have died, with the babies he tried to rescue.

Ninety, weary, his eyes now say nothing.