I wake in the middle of the night, drenched in the scent of soil and incense, with wounds unspoken and ancient as the earth. A voice murmurs from somewhere behind the red-veined darkness: What was your name? The question lingers in the midnight silence, heavy and unanswered.
In that silence, I forget. I’m alone in a body that often doesn’t feel like mine, stitching together pieces of a memory I can’t fully claim. Each month, like the crescent moon rising, a broken ritual begins in me. I tremble against invisible tides, hands pressed into my belly. Once, I believed a god would come. Now, I whisper prayers to myself. Not for salvation, but for survival. Endurance is my liturgy.
My mother’s room is heavy with quilted secrets. She stands beside the faded poster of a goddess I barely know, saying nothing. If she speaks at all, it’s in a language I was born only half-understanding. My name, once written in Urdu on the walls of childhood, now lies buried in unopened documents. Speaking it aloud feels dangerous, like summoning something already lost. I forget which tongue to use when my heart breaks.
What was your name?
When I ask myself, the question scatters like moth wings.
Each recurrence is a storm. A small death. My skin recalls the heat of a country I don’t call home. My bones remember my grandmother’s birthing songs, the melodies she always sang to me. I’ve inherited weather in my blood: the hush of noon in a crowded village, the silence after midnight. We don’t speak of ghosts. We become them.
Faith here is not a temple or an altar. It is the calendar of my breathing. It returns monthly, an unwelcome guest turning the key in the door of my chest. I do not light candles. I light cigarettes. Or nothing. I become a witness to my own repetition. Karma was taught to me as justice with a gentle bend. But this feels more like punishment, a carved record looping in my bones. Maybe I lived this life before. Maybe I am paying off a debt I never chose.
I try to explain it to therapists, to friends, to sharing circles, to myself, but language frays. Some grief lives in the body like sediment. I lie still, eyes half-open, pillow damp. The ache sharpens behind my ribs, low and pulsing, like I swallowed something alive.
Is this meditation? Emotional regulation? Or just the body performing a grief no one taught it how to name?
Sometimes, I cry just to prove I still can. Other times, I scream into the bathroom tap. It doesn’t help. But it makes the silence answer back.
I look in the mirror and struggle to meet my own eyes. I ask again: What do I believe in? What do I call this? What was my name?
Once, I threw my lunch away. I was ten. I said I hated roti. I didn’t. I just wanted someone to ask: why?
Sometimes I think I must have done something terribly wrong in a past life to deserve this, to die a little each day. I’ve been told to have faith in goodness, in karma, in rebirth. But I have faith in darkness. Darkness is consistent. Darkness returns. Because, when I break, I become a child again. Foetal. Dissolved into amniotic memory. I curl into myself, knees to chest, wrapped in a pink blanket, searching for the warmth I once knew. The warmth of water. Of silence. Of before.
We are born in the dark, in the mother’s womb, quiet, and when we die, we return to the earth’s womb, quiet. The womb and the grave are both rooms without light. But one delivers you into noise, into light. The other delivers you from it. They are not twins. One makes you scream. The other doesn’t let you.
Each pain I carry feels like a burial. Parts of me blink, then vanish. Earth covers me gently. Each cycle is soil: something buried, unearthed, buried again. I’ve been composting grief for years, turning pain into green longing. I unpack sorrow the way my mother packed lunches that we never found the time to eat at school, amidst the gossip and games — soft rotis folded in newspaper, the sweet-smelling ghee bleeding through by noon, their quiet warmth pressed into my bag like a question.
What was your name?
was it Daughter
Inheritance
Ghost
was it Grief
or Girl
was it Prayer or Punishment or Both
was it Mine?
These monthly epiphanies are messy and sacred. Salt from tears charts constellations on my skin. And sometimes I lie to myself, whispering: maybe this isn’t doom. Maybe it’s just another cycle. Each time, I learn how to walk in the dark again. How to rise. How to remember.
After the hollowing, a voice always returns. Faint, but real. And I realise: faith is not what keeps you from breaking. Faith is what rises from the wreckage. It bleeds. It limps. It stays anyway.
And each time I ask, What was your name?
Each time, I almost remember. I am Isha, they said once. The ruling goddess.
Ask me again next month.
Maybe I will know.
