The Lullaby I Rewrote From a Hymn
My daughter sleeps to a melody my grandmother prayed to.
My daughter refused to sleep for the first eight months of her life, and I blamed God a little.
This is not a figure of speech. At three in the morning, standing in our Pune apartment with a screaming infant against my shoulder and the white noise machine hissing its useless ocean, I would look at the ceiling and think... you could fix this if you existed. Then I would go back to bouncing. There is a specific bounce, and every parent of a colicky baby knows it. Knees, not arms. You could power a small village with it.
We tried everything the internet sells to desperate people. The swaddle with the velcro wings. The probiotic drops. A playlist of Icelandic sleep music curated by a man named Gunnar. My husband drove her around the ring road at midnight so many times that the toll booth operator started waving.
Then one night, somewhere past three, a melody came up out of me like something surfacing in a well. I did not choose it.
My mouth simply started, and what it started was my grandmother's hymn.
Samayamam Rathathil. If you grew up in a Malayali Christian house, you can already hear it.
My Ammachi sang it every morning at five thirty in Kottayam, sitting on the low wooden stool by the kitchen door, before the tea, before anything. Her voice was thin and unbothered, like a wire that carries current without knowing it. Her cotton sari smelled of Cuticura powder and yesterday's woodsmoke. I used to lie on the mat pretending to be asleep so she would not put me to work, and the hymn would pass over me like weather.
I left all of it quietly in college. No dramatic scene, no letter to anyone. I just stopped, the way you stop wearing a ring, and one day your hand looks normal without it. Ammachi never fought me about it. She lit her candle, she said my name inside her prayers where I could not stop her, and she let me be.
So when her hymn rose in my mouth at three in the morning, my first instinct was to push it back down. Singing it felt like borrowing money from someone I had stopped calling.
But my daughter went still.
Not asleep... still. Her fists opened. Her breathing changed gears. I sang the first verse four times because it was the only verse I remembered, and by the fifth lap her whole weight let go into my shoulder, that specific melting that is the entire salary of parenthood.
There was one problem... and it took me until morning to admit it.
The hymn is about death.
It is beautiful about it, the way old songs are allowed to be: time is a chariot and we are riding it toward heaven, closer with every turning of the wheel. My grandmother sang it like good news. I could not sing my daughter toward a heaven I did not believe in. But I also could not give up the only melody that worked.
So I kept the tune and rewrote the words. In the Notes app, with one thumb, at 3:47 in the morning, I performed surgery on a hundred year old hymn. My version was small. The fan is turning, the moon is sitting on the water tank, the milk is warm, morning is coming and it knows your name. No chariot. No heaven. Just the apartment, blessed item by item.
My husband heard it on the second night. 'Is that the church song?' he asked.
'It was,' I said.
It became the song. The only key that fit her.
We used it through fevers, through vaccination nights when her thigh had a bandage and her face had an expression of pure betrayal, through her first monsoon when the thunder turned her into a limpet. I sang my little blasphemy hundreds of times, and every single time some part of me flinched... because I had gutted my grandmother's hymn, kept the tune and evicted her God, and she was not alive to forgive me.
She died two years before my daughter was born. They never met, except inside this one melody.
The guilt got heavy enough that I finally confessed on a Sunday call with my mother. I told her I had been singing Ammachi's hymn with the words changed, and I braced for the silence that Malayali mothers can weaponize.
Instead she laughed for a long time. Then she said, 'You know that tune is not the hymn, no?'
I did not know.
In the hymnbook, she told me, Samayamam Rathathil is set to a different melody entirely. The tune I knew, the one I had been calling a hymn my whole life, was Ammachi's own arrangement. She had taken the holy words and laid them over a boat song her mother used to sing on the backwaters, a rowing song, the kind women sang to keep rhythm on the water and keep children calm in the bottom of the vallam. Ammachi's mother had sung it to her as a lullaby. Ammachi grew up, got religion deep in her marrow, and moved the hymn into her mother's tune because, my mother said, 'she liked God better in her own mother's voice.'
I sat with the phone against my ear and could not speak.
The melody I thought I had stolen from the church was never the church's.
It was a lullaby before it was a hymn. My grandmother had rewritten her mother's song toward God. I had rewritten it back toward a child. The tune did not care which direction it traveled. It had been passing down comfort for four generations, wearing whatever words each woman needed it to wear.
Comfort is not an heirloom you keep locked in a cupboard. It is a song each generation is allowed to change the words to.
After that call I wrote my version down properly, on paper, and saw that it was a poem, which surprised me, because I do not write poems. I posted it on a community wall for poets, mostly so it would exist somewhere outside my phone, and strangers began leaving their own grandmother songs in the comments: hymns, film songs, one Punjabi wedding song repurposed for colicky twins. I read every single one. Later I tried, clumsily, to write about family, about how healing sometimes arrives disguised as a tune you swore you had outgrown.
I still do not know what I believe. Some nights the old words come back and I let a verse of the real hymn through, chariot and all, because my daughter is asleep and cannot be converted, and because it turns out I miss the sound of my grandmother being certain.
Last week my daughter, who is two now, sat her stuffed rabbit against the pillow and sang to it. The tune was unmistakable. The words were entirely her own. 'Fan go round,' she sang, with the seriousness of a cantor. 'Moon on tank. Rabbit sleep now.'
The rewriting has already begun.
I did not teach her that. Nobody teaches it. It gets handed down with the melody itself: the permission to change the words, which is the oldest inheritance we have.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.