The Verse My Grandfather Recited at Storms
Thunder outside, his low voice inside, I still say it when it rains.
My grandfather kept a verse the way other men keep a flashlight: in the same drawer of himself, tested, ready, reached for only in the dark.
It came out during storms. Only storms. In our town the monsoon arrived like a relative with luggage, in June, planning to stay, and with it came the evening power cuts that turned our house into a cave of shadows and one hurricane lantern. When the thunder started, really started, the kind that made the window bolts tremble in their sockets, my grandfather would pat the cot beside him, and I would climb up against his side, which smelled permanently of tobacco and Vicks, and he would recite it. Low, unhurried, the words rumbling in his chest so that I heard them with my ear before I heard them with my head.
The sky is only turning its pages. Nothing that reads you means you harm. The rain has known your name for longer than you have. Sleep, and let the weather finish its work.
Four lines. I have translated them loosely here, and something is lost, the way something is always lost, but that was the shape of it. He recited it the same way every time, the exact same pauses, the way you recite something that is not yours to change. And so I believed, with the total confidence of a seven year old, that it was scripture.
Why would I not? Everything else he did was scripture. He read from his prayer book every morning on the verandah, wire spectacles low on his nose, mumbling the verses to himself while the tea went cold beside him. He could quote holy lines for weddings, for funerals, for exam results both good and catastrophic. The storm verse simply seemed like one more page from that enormous invisible book grandfathers carry, the one that has an answer filed under every fear.
My grandmother would roll her eyes from the doorway. I noticed that even then. I filed it under the general mystery of marriage.
The ritual had a technique to it, I realize now. He would recite, and then we would count together between the lightning and the thunder. One, two, three, the crash. Then, an hour later, one, two, three, four, five, six, and he would nod as if he had personally negotiated the storm's retreat, and say, "You see. It is leaving. It only came to read." I slept through the tail ends of a hundred monsoons like that, pressed against the rumble of him, the lantern hissing, the rain working on the roof.
He died the winter I was twenty two, quietly, in the dry season, which felt like a small mercy and a small wrongness at once.
A man like that should have gone out with weather.
The verse went on without him. I said it under my breath in a hostel during a cyclone warning. I said it on a shaking flight over the Bay of Bengal, and the man next to me asked if I was praying, and I said yes, because the true answer was too long. By then I wanted to know where it was from. It felt urgent in the way things become urgent only after the person you could simply ask is gone. I wanted chapter and verse. I wanted to stand in the ancestral text and find his voice waiting in it.
So I went looking.
I read his prayer book cover to cover, the actual physical one, soft as cloth from sixty years of thumbs. Not there. I asked the priest at our old temple, who frowned generously and suggested three sources. Not there... not there... not there. I asked my aunts, who each confidently named a different scripture, and my eldest uncle, who said, "It is definitely from the old texts," with the firmness of a man who has never once checked anything.
I typed the lines into search engines in two languages and found nothing but my own memory looking back at me.
The comforting prayers from childhood are supposed to be findable. That is the deal. They are supposed to be older than your grandfather, older than his grandfather, a rope going all the way down.
Mine appeared to be a rope tied to nothing.
It was my grandmother, ninety one by then and done with all forms of pretending, who ended the search. I recited the lines to her on her bed while the ceiling fan ticked overhead, and asked which book they were from... She laughed until she coughed.
"Book," she said. "He wrote that. The year of the flood, when your father was small and would not stop crying at thunder. He sat up one whole night making it. Scripture would have been fine, I told him. He said scripture was for God's reputation. He wanted something for the boy."
I sat with that for a long time...
Fifty years of storms. Two generations of frightened children soothed to sleep. And the whole time it was not the ancient rope I imagined.
It was a young father in a flooding house, awake all night, building four lines by hand because his son was afraid.
He did not hand me down a religion. He handed me down a voice to use in the dark.
My grandfather published nothing. He was a records clerk for the railways for thirty nine years, and the only lines of his that survive are the ones that lived in mouths, this verse and apparently a wedding couplet my aunts still argue about. Not long ago I found a page featuring profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, and I read every one of them thinking of him, of how many poets are filed away in the world as clerks and grandmothers and quiet men on verandahs, their collected works stored entirely in the people who loved them. I wrote about him at last, properly, going straight into the family of it and the memory of it instead of circling. It took me three storms to finish.
Because of course I tested it, once, the finding. I thought knowing might break the spell, the way explaining a magic trick does. It did the opposite. Scripture comforts because it is older than your fear. His verse comforts because it is exactly the same age as someone's love for you. I no longer know which is the stronger medicine. I know which one I reach for.
I live in a different country now, where the storms are colder and better behaved, and I have a daughter who is four and takes thunder personally. Last month the sky over our building split open at bedtime, and she came running down the hall, and I pulled her up against my side and heard my own voice drop an octave without asking me.
The sky is only turning its pages, I told her. Nothing that reads you means you harm.
We counted together. One, two, three, four, five. It is leaving, I said. It only came to read. She slept. I lay there in the dark with her small breathing and the rain, understanding at last why his chest used to rumble like that. It is the sound a voice makes when it is carrying more than one person.
Someday she will go looking for the verse in the holy books, the way I did, and she will find nothing.
Then she will find him.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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