Charnel Ground, Crystal Body: Instructions
By Banu Khapil
From Volume 4 (2013)
Drive your car into the sea then out the other side. This is the shore. There are milky seashells with turquoise flecks. Where are you? Start walking. To render: your arrival in India: in symbolic form. In fact, you eat charbroiled samosas on your stopover in Baghdad circa 1976, except that it’s not 1976, so you’re staring at the perfume counter in the airport in Ashgabat, city of love—the poetry of this city written in Urdu then translated to Persian, which my grandfather sang—or recited aloud within minutes of arriving—always arriving—when I told him where I’d been, where I’d come from, how I’d never fly Air Turkmenistan again and what the corridors in Russia were like.
My grandfather suffered from manic depression, but also trauma—as we say now—from the war that followed the Radcliffe Boundary Award. I think often about the trans-generational effects of cardinal cultural events, and how they are transmitted to others. Sometimes I think that psychosis was transmitted to me not as a genetic attribute but as the way I organize sentences within a paragraph. Psychosis: a form of pressured speech, a “flight of ideas.” Also: mitochondrial flux. The desire of a person to walk until they reach the hills. As a young man, my grandfather would get on his horse, a beautiful white horse, in what is now Pakistan—and ride—a violin tucked under his arm, a box of watercolors and brushes, a chess set and a novel by—Turgenev—his favorite—strapped to the saddle—until he reached—what is now—the border with Afghanistan.
I was in India. I was a child then a woman in India; not the bourgeois India of the tradesperson interested in importing fabric to a novice port. But the India I can’t return to. That India. The one where a person could live, abruptly, like a pre-century human being. One uncle’s home had clay floors and no windows. Another uncle’s home had no roof. One uncle was a murderer. One uncle had a long sword that he carried at all times strapped to his cloth belt, having converted to Sikhism. These are imaginary uncles. This is fiction. I was not, nor was I ever, a child.
One uncle was an astrologer who had lived most of his life in a forest ashram in Uttar Pradesh. He carried very little in his falling-apart suitcase. Once, he came to London to read palms and charts, upon the invitation of the local Hindu community. His suitcase contained: The Bhagavad Gita wrapped in a tea towel, a saffron cloth or dhoti to wrap around his waist after a bath, a threadbare sweater my mother had knitted him a decade before and a face flannel folded double around his metal tongue cleaner and…a twig. The twig was a gnawed up branch from a neem tree, which my uncle used to brush his teeth. Once again, I did not have a mother. I did not have an uncle. I do not know how to read palms. I did not go on a pilgrimage with my uncle to the charnel ground. In the dharamsalas and temples where we rested, on our long journey, I was not trained in the art of divination. I did not approach the cobra in Rishikesh, outstaring it as part of this intensive training, my inheritance, the thing I brought to the U.S. but which I prevented myself from doing at all costs because on some level, I understood that there would be no going back.
Walk with your uncle until you reach the hills. There, a horse is tethered to a tree. Get on the horse, with assistance—let’s face it, you don’t have much of an equestrian background—and continue further up the river. This is the river. It is a completely clear green, the color of a longed-for lover’s eyes. On the riverbed, you scoop up moonstones in your bare hands. Though you come from a place founded on commerce and intense academic competition (London and its outlying suburbs), you understand that pocketing the semi-precious stones is not an option. The fact that you know this gives me hope for your life. It makes me interested in what you will be like as an older person.
Reach the charnel ground.
Lie down.
The next part of the instructions are only available in pamphlet form on your deathbed. Let’s hope you have the capacity to read or hear them, when the time comes.
I’m kidding.
Lie down.
When the moon rises, wait—there on the burned bone bed—until it is directly above you. Not vertically. But at an angle. So that when you open your eyes, it is there—a few centimeters above the Ganges—or so it seems—and still a rich gold color, the color of apples and mangoes that grow in the orchard your grandfather planted in 1923. There is a notebook in which he has recorded the purchase of seeds. The notebook is desiccated. Wrap it in a towel and return to the U.S. without unpacking it. In fact, when you are home, don’t do anything. Just take it out of your suitcase and put it somewhere and forget about it. Now is not the time.
Lie down.
Visualize the light entering your body through the soles of your feet.
Just that would be enough.
Some hours pass. It’s almost dawn.
Your uncle is nearby, but you cannot see him. You return to the social reality of your body, the fact that you are a woman lying on the ground in a public space. As the keepers of the charnel ground, rough-looking men with blankets over their shoulders, begin to stir—you think—why am I here? You contract around your internal organs, the soft tissue of your urethra, your small intestine, your kidneys, suddenly aware of the vulnerability of your body, the way it is entirely exposed to view. One man lights a morning fire. You hear him spit. You open your eyes. You turn your head gently from side to side. The river warps out of its banks in bright pink, fluorescent bands of light. Next to your head is a skull.
Go home.
Write books, give birth, leave the country of your birth, fuck everything up, make a come-back, fall in love with people who break your heart so completely that you are in your mid-forties before you even slightly begin to recover; replenish yourself in the oceans of California and Oregon, make friends with poets, become a teacher, massage the limbs of others with pre-heated mustard seed oil; investigate the syntax of the race riot, write about late childhood with the indifference and energy of a non-commercial butcher who will be bought out eventually but not just now: the notebooks convulsing on the wet table, the blood table, the table where you set your own head.
Never speak of what happened between the numbers of 14 and 15 to anyone else, not even your beautiful child or your best friend or your partner, who is in the kitchen making you a cup of tea as you write these words, in the future before it’s arrived, the future like the color green, the future with the river running now through the middle of your house.
