Our Family History Lives in My Grandmother's Songs
No documents survived the border; the melodies carried everything.
My grandmother could not read, but she could sing you a map.
Ask her where our family came from and she would not give you a district or a date. She would close her eyes, tap her knee twice like a tabla player counting himself in, and begin a song that named a river, then a well, then a mango orchard owned by a man called Ilyas who owed our family two goats and, apparently, an apology. By the third verse you had crossed a province.
I grew up thinking this was simply what grandmothers did. Ours lived with us in a two room flat in Bombay, and every evening after the seven o'clock news she would sit on the balcony with a steel tumbler of tea and sing to nobody in particular. The neighbours' pressure cookers whistled straight through her verses. She never seemed to mind.
It took me until my twenties to understand what I had actually been listening to. In 1947 her family left Sindh with what they could carry, which was almost nothing, because the train they were promised became a rumour and the walk became the plan. Land deeds, birth records, the ledger of her father's cloth shop, the wedding photographs, all of it stayed behind in a house that stopped being theirs between one Friday and the next.
She was nineteen. She carried a copper pot and her mother's silver anklets, and somewhere near the border a soldier took the anklets and let them keep the pot.
"They could search everything," she told me once, in the flat tone of a woman explaining a card trick. "They could not search a song."
A paper burns in one night. A song you can carry across a border in your mouth, and no soldier on earth can take it from you.
So the songs were the archive.
The wedding song listed the bride's lineage seven generations back, because that is what the song was for, so both families could hear the pedigree sung aloud in front of witnesses. The harvest song named the fields and who worked them. The lullaby she sang me as a baby, I learned much later, contained the names of four ancestors and one river that no longer runs. Our entire oral history of family, of property and quarrels and marriages, lived inside melodies I had assumed were just the noise old people made to comfort themselves.
In my final year of college I borrowed a cassette recorder from the journalism department for a project I was already calling, pompously, an oral history. I sat her down with tea and pressed record. She performed stiffly for exactly one song and then forgot the machine existed, which is when the real singing started.
Forty minutes a side. Six cassettes. On the fourth one you can hear me crying quietly and her ignoring it, because stopping a song, in her world, was the only real sacrilege.
I got a B on the project... The professor said it needed more context.
She died in January, the year I turned thirty one. It was quick, and kind by the standards of these things, and the flat filled with relatives the way water finds a low place. On the third day my mother asked me to play the cassettes. So I did, on a borrowed deck, in a room of forty people, and my grandmother's voice walked back in... and sat down among us.
That is when her cousin Amina, eighty two years old, deaf in one ear and precise as a customs officer, held up her hand.
"Stop it there," she said. "Play that one again."
I rewound. The song was one I knew well, a wedding song, one of the seven generation ones, the one I had always assumed was our own pedigree. Amina listened with her whole face.
Then she said, "That is not our song. That is Zubaida's song. Those are Zubaida's people."
The room did the thing rooms do when a name lands that nobody has spoken in fifty years.
Zubaida, it turned out, was my grandmother's closest friend in Sindh, a girl from the lane behind theirs, engaged to be married in the spring of 1948. Her family had planned to leave on a later convoy.
There was no later convoy.
Nobody in that room said out loud what happened. Amina only moved her hand flat through the air, once, like someone wiping a slate.
My grandmother had sung her friend's family into her own repertoire and carried it for half a century. She never told anyone... or maybe telling was exactly what she had been doing every single evening on the balcony while the pressure cookers whistled. Zubaida's seven generations, her grandfather's fields, the well her people drew from, all of it survived in the mouth of a woman who owed her nothing but love. When I went through the cassettes properly, nearly a third of the songs were not ours.
They were hers.
My grandmother had spent fifty years being somebody else's archive too, without appointment, without thanks, without once dropping a name.
I do not know how to explain what that did to me, except to say that I have never been able to hear singing casually since.
I have spent the years after transcribing the tapes. It is slow work. Melodies do not sit politely on a page, half the words are in a dialect I have to call three great aunts to decode, and the three great aunts contradict each other on principle. But the names keep coming out, ours and Zubaida's both, and I write them down with the crooked feeling of a clerk registering citizens of a country that no longer exists.
Some of it I have tried to turn into poems. The first one I finished was about the anklets and the soldier and the copper pot, and I entered it into a monthly poetry contest, mostly because I could not think what else a person does with a thing like that. It did not win... I keep writing them anyway, because I finally understand that I am not writing about the past. I am writing about memory, which is a living thing with a pulse and a diet, and it eats whatever we fail to sing.
Along the way I found other people doing the same work, the children and grandchildren of vanished addresses, sharing their fragments among profiles of writers nobody had heard yet. One woman had her grandfather's boatman calls. A man in Toronto had nothing but a recipe and a curse. We compare notes like survivors of different shipwrecks who recognize the same ocean.
Last month my niece turned four, and at her birthday, without planning to, I sang her the lullaby, the one with the four ancestors and the vanished river. She fell asleep before the second verse, which is what the song is for. Her mother asked me afterwards what the words meant. I said it is family, all of it, the whole family, even the parts we borrowed. Even Zubaida's.
Somewhere a soldier is still holding those anklets and thinking he took something.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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