Mrityunjay Mohan
Floodwater sweeps into our building and sits between the gaps in the fence until the water seeps into the hollow houses, soil and silt swallowing the ground underneath, weeds trampled, flowers whittled into stumps of brown stem. Food is scarce, the restaurants shut, the buildings void of light and air leave for the slow breeze that comes with the torrents of unrelenting rain. The walls are made of moss, green and crumbling, the history of a life bared down to chunks of grey cement and bare brick walls. The scent of sodden wood and the fallen sky lingers on my body, my tongue tastes like a smattering of bitter green dust, my eyes are clouded with the color of a dead man’s skin.
The television’s a block of black metal that sits atop its own small brown table. The legs of the chairs are submerged in water up to its crooked wooden hip. A man on the road howls, a wolf cub without his mother to guide him, and I know he’s stepped on the exposed wire laid across the sandy ground because it happens every year in the city. Exposed electrical wires and fast-walking fathers are no good match here, and every year, people lose their lives to the water beneath their foot.
For food, Appa wades through the water to the house of a local grocery storeowner and asks him to sell him whatever hasn’t already been sold to flailing swimming bodies. Milk and bread are gone. Rice, too, is gone. Wheat flour is gone. Appa gets ahold of semolina and a pack of frozen carrots on the brink of its own demise. Amma cooks it on the gas stove with the light of the last candle at home illuminating the kitchen. Appa tries to buy candles too, but none are available. The stores are closed but water still seeped in and damaged what is left of the stocks. The city is made of grey ashes, and I search for the dead moon on the sky.
***
Those nights were of the dark aching kind. Lying sprawled across a rain-soaked mattress on a house swept away by the floods. It was the first time I’d been caught by the unforgiving rain, and I didn’t know then that it would become a yearly affair. As I grew older, the floods grew taller, more menacing, the cyclones lasting longer and harsher. I waded through water every December, my body a small dot of flesh peeking between the walls of the brown water. Children’s school shoes—still laced and properly polished—floated toward me, lost of its home and the foot it belonged to. Clothes stripped from the drying racks swam in that water, a corpse without a body, a thing weightlessly maneuvering between death and life. Hair clips, books, paper—soaked through with murky water—sunk into the floodwater. I watched my own books follow my flailing body from home once. I only whispered goodbye and let it sink into the water. How could I save a book when I couldn’t save myself?
In those moments of despair, I found a lone star or two straying away from its home to follow me. The moon sunken into the floodwater with the books, the stars stuck in their homes with windows closed and curtains drawn. The stars that slipped between the doors of the black clouds followed me to the shops and hotels as I waded through the water. A yearly occurrence that always instilled a new fear in me as I walked away from the open wires and their torrid gaze. Every December, the dams were opened, and the streets were flooded. Every December, we hoped we wouldn’t have to search for a place to sleep that wasn’t flooded with brown water.
The streets were cleared after the rain ceased and the sun swam into the dark sky, illuminating what was left of the city. The lost items remained lost. The weathered broken wood of my bookshelves remained that way. The clothes remained soaked and torn. And every night, I awaited the return of the moon. The arrival of the moon meant a semblance of normalcy, some return to the past that didn’t spell destruction. I was eleven when the worst of the floods swept through the city and ripped every home apart. Lifeboats scattered across the city rescued sinking lives. Helicopters threw food packets on to balconies. My family and I swam through water to find a place to stay as our house sat up to its shoulders in water. The water had climbed up the first floor of the house and my head sunk into the flood as I swam, limbs heavy, eyes drooping. The stores had closed, and the groceries had been spoiled by the water. Insects climbed over my skin and found their home around my neck and arms, biting into my flesh. There were worse ways to go.
Years later it was 2015, and my body was still a wet wound wrapped with the gauze of clothes. I was in my pajamas as I swam in the floodwater, my chest aching as I sobbed between each breath that left my lungs. Ants had crawled into my ears and found their home inside while I searched for my own with my family. The night had fallen, and we hadn’t eaten since the day before. I feared for the safety of the stray animals, their howls faint in the loud wind as I stood in the water. In that water, I almost fainted and drowned as Appa grabbed and pulled me along with him. I only wanted to drown. To sink between the arms of the floodwater and disappear. In the darkness, I wished to forget myself.
***
It is the third day in a row I’d worn the same purple dress, and no space to bathe or sleep except on the water swept ground. The homeowner is an old woman who left for her son’s home in a faraway state the day the storm was predicted and hasn’t returned our calls since. The dress has turned into a moist sheet of paper, stained and wet at all hours, and I sit on the edge of the table that houses the television and count the seconds in every hour to pass time. My sister is irritable and I avoid her. Amma is in the kitchen at all times, scouring for something to cook with. Appa leaves home every hour to see if the rain has ceased its course for the day.
The dress is tightly wound around my body, a bandage wrapped around the wound of my flesh, and I adjust the straps around my neck—a noose waiting to strangle me—and ask again if Amma found anything I can wear that hasn’t been damaged by the flood. Amma shakes her head every time.
I look into the room I share with my sister every few minutes, and see it flooded with brown water to the tops of my desk, submerging all my books and slowly eating away at the wood of my desk. My sister isn’t concerned about the books because she doesn’t read, but I weep like the sun has forsaken the moon and light will no longer shine down on me at nights. The clutch of stars watch me weep in their own little homes and do nothing to help.
I am more aware of my body now than ever, the breathless attacks of my failed lungs beckon me toward complete darkness every hour of the night, and I bite the insides of my wrists hoping for pain. Blood spouts in small crescents under the throbbing green vein. I sleep on a wet mattress on the soiled ground of my home.
***
My body was still wrapped in clothes I couldn’t breathe in. During those nights of failed hope, my body was as large as my entire world. Wisps of darkness sunk into my thoughts as the flood returned every year. In 2013, I didn’t have the words to say why my clothes were the noose around my neck, but as the years passed, I found my words and stitched them together, a fabric of its own kind, my only solace in moments of grief. When I lost my clothes in the flood, I chose new clothes that allowed me to breathe. The wound of my body healed into a thick brown scar as time went on, twisted and gnarly, and still beating with a pulse of its own. It still ached at times, bled with the smallest of pricks, but it had healed. I had healed.
The brokenness that came with my body subsided. This feeling of floating had whittled down into a scattered thing I only pieced back together to know how I had felt in the past. The want for death had quietened. A small flicker that only served to remind me of my enduring life. When the wound of my body healed, clothes were only of some importance. It was 2022, when I healed, when I sought peace with my own body, and found it forgiving enough to accept all the ways I had despised it. Even during the darkest nights of the flood, I didn’t feel displaced in my body, only slightly fearful for the future of it. I had found that soft relief of peace within myself. And I cherished it.
***
The pages of my books and assignments float toward me. I am nine, and I lose the last of my milk teeth on the fourth night of the floods. I try not to touch my body because everything is more pronounced in the dark, clearer, and I am in want of not feeling anything.
I haven’t seen the moon in five nights, and I start to wonder if she’ll ever return to the sky or if the sun has taken her hostage and retreated into their own little coffins. Little coffins for large celestial objects. The stars still watch from behind the curtains of the ashen clouds. The celestial mothers hold their infants to their chest and watch me weep in a dress ill-fit for my body. My body is a torn paper now that I mend with damp paper clothes and broken promises of change. There are no constellations to form shapes on the sky, only raindrops that form tears on fogged glass panes of large stained windows.
I look in the mirrors and watch a building of ghosts stare back at me, eyes hollow as plastic bottles left on the beach after a family leaves with their red-spotted syrup-stained blanket that once served life as a saree.
Amma wears a decade old tattered shirt, the pink faded in spots, the white given way to thin translucent fibers of thread. Appa wears a pair of red shorts that reaches just above his knee, and a towel around his shoulders. My sister is in a churidar that she dug out of the back of her closet, one she swore she’d never wear again in middle school after my aunt bought it on a whim.
I look out at the fogged glass panes of the barred windows and wonder if I could find my body under the brown water of the flood. If a body exists at all for me, I am certain it would be with all the paper floating on the surface of the flood water. If not for those little possessions, I have no mind to claim as my own. No thing to have or keep. Float between the faded words and the fallen trees in floodwater.
Appa decides to take me with him to get to the storeowner’s house when the waning sun plants its body onto the fogged glass panes, and as we wade through the water climbing up my shoulders and up his hips, I want to step on a wire beneath the fallen electric pole on the other side of the road where the man had died, but I don’t.
Appa pulls me toward a large brick house on the other side. I think of the smell of my charred skin, the soot flaking off my flesh, and feel a burnt piece of paper climb up my shoulder and stick to the nape of my neck. I pull it away from my rain-soaked skin and drop it back in the water.
Appa knocks on the door of the house. There’s a large grocery store right next door that the storeowner owns, and Appa waits until he comes out and gives him whatever he still has. The stocks are mostly gone now. The stores empty. The homes and their kitchens empty. Appa gives him a few crumpled hundred rupees notes and leaves with me in tow.
***
In my city, there are still those floods that break apart every home and seep between the bars of the windows. The Decembers are still feared. Areas are deserted during the floods, and food is still scarce. Leaving the city in monsoon and winter—the seasons when rain wreaks havoc upon the city—is common. The rains are louder, more demanding of us now. Still, the first flood that shattered the city is talked about every year. Still, we fear that night that started this yearly affair.
Boats swam into the city every December. Schools prepared to lose a month or two of classes. Hotels booked months in advance in case we needed a place to stay. Bread and grocery loaded onto the tallest shelves in the house. Electricity and power outages a common occurrence. Children losing their parents to the floods. Every year, we rebuild the city only to watch it shatter again. Every year, the rain aches in the joints of the streets and the torrents of rain wash upon the houses in continued misery. And every year, we find a way to stitch ourselves back together.
***
I am a quiet and forgettable thing. A small dot under a vast blanket of rainclouds. On the fifth day of the flood, the rain wanes down into a drizzle and the sun returns to the sky in short intervals of golden dust. The moon is still nowhere to be found. The stars are still in their own little homes.
Appa and Amma begin cleaning out the flood water from the house as men come and pump the water into large whirring machines, taking it away in a cloud of smoke and soot. Lost bodies are found. Children are orphaned. Amma refuses to watch the television news because it scares her to see so many children without their parents. Appa always has the news on.
I look at my room and collect the papers on the floor, ink washed away into a translucent blue that clings to lined sheets of paper, words unbecoming in rapid succession. The papers are crisp now, dry and cracked in the middle like the log of the tree they’d come from, color pulled away from the sheets and thrown to the wretched water of the flood.
My books are collected in wet plastic bags by Amma and thrown outside to the large garbage bins. My clothes are torn and soaked, so Amma packs them into plastic bags and feeds them to the large open-mouthed trucks awaiting black trash bags. Amma tells me we’ll buy new clothes and books, but I know it’ll never be the same as what I had before the water swept it all away. Appa tells me school starts again the next week and I only nod.
That night, I sit on the dry ground of my room, and watch the moon swim back into the lightless night, nestled between the breasts of the clouds and the hanging hooks of a swarm of silver stars. I look at the bare bones of my room and at the sister on the other side of it. My eyes are swollen scarlet circles, throbbing like a severed heart on the palm of a hand, and I breathe through open-mouthed silent sobs.
I look at the moon following my gaze wherever I look, the stars creeping into my sight like words on the edge of a page written in red cursive. A cloaked star sits fat on the clear glass panes of the barred window in the room, a small silver eye looking into mine, like it is telling me a secret to keep. I don’t fall asleep until the ashen clouds sweep back over the moon and her celestial companions, a soft drizzle turning into the pattering of rain on damp ground seeping into my ears like floodwater, the salt liquid of my tears dry on the desert of my skin.
#
Mrityunjay Mohan is a queer, trans, disabled writer of color. Mrityunjay’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, The Indianapolis Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Fourteen Hills. He’s a Tin House scholar and a Brooklyn Poets fellow. He’s been awarded scholarships by Sundance Institute, The Common, Frontier Poetry, Black Lawrence Press, and elsewhere. He’s an editor for ANMLY magazine, and a reader for Split/Lip Press, Harvard Review, and The Masters Review.