Associate Editor Connor Yeck: In “Ghost words,” Vimla Sriram effortlessly transcribes an intimate understanding of spirits—ghosts who are never passive observers but outspoken participants in the ongoing traditions of day-to-day life. Our understanding of the separation between worlds constantly evolves through textured recollection, as we’re asked to consider the ways we reckon with those we’ve lost, and how we remember their presence across the years.
To hear Vimla read her story, click below:
Ghost words
Unlike the flamboyant ghosts that, in my grandfather’s dramatically hushed voice, swung from the tree canopy onto the pillion seat of his black cycle, which squealed with the added weight as he pedaled home from college through the forest shortcut, faster and faster to beat the sound of anklets behind him, my grandmother’s earthly ghosts needed help with practical matters.
“Meena, help me grind dosa batter,” my grandmother thunders, imitating the voice she heard late one night booming through the bolted door of the home she’d entered as a newlywed in Pune.
“Come back tomorrow morning,” she gamely replied, “no” still being a few years away, but that would come too, along with her children and other ghosts.
I see the eerie silhouette of a solitary woman draped in a saree, standing under jaundiced light outside a wooden door, and forget that I am sitting cross-legged on the ivory mosaic floor of my bright living room on a sparkly Sunday afternoon with my back to my grandmother, her riverine hands weaving coconut oil into my scalp, tracing tributaries through a forest of knots and bumps that know her thumbprint.
Her stories form my braids—from the top of my head to the pink satin ribbons attached to the ends and knotted with a flourish just before the pat on my back, a sign that I must rise and run.
I am ten and I believe in ghosts. I haven’t yet seen people turn into pictures hung too high on the blue wall, with dots on their foreheads and paper garlands around their necks. I haven’t yet stolen a glass of payasam from a wedding feast for a woman too weak to walk, she who once stood up to a ghost. I haven’t yet driven to the hospital with my father’s head on my shoulders and driven back with a word that’s become empty. Ghost words I inhabit until it’s my time.
Vimla Sriram is a Seattle-based writer shaped by Delhi, meaning banyans and parrots will sneak into her essays, so she tricks them by going for walks, looking for nuthatches, and hiding behind cauldrons of chai that she makes. Her writing appears in 100 Word Story, Wanderlust, Stonecrop Journal, Little Patuxent Review, and River Teeth Journal.
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