sediment
landing from a long way upstream
I’m in the backseat of our Toyota Camry, on the way to dance practice, watching the flat fields of my hometown blur as my dad teaches me about geology.
Limestone, he’s explained many times, is formed from the compressed remains of coral, plankton, and other marine organisms that built their skeletons, died, sank, and accumulated for millions of years until the weight turned them to rock.
When acidic rainwater meets limestone, it doesn’t just erode the rock. The calcium carbonate – the rock itself – chemically reacts and dissolves into the water. Later, when conditions change, these molecules redeposit elsewhere, forming stalactites.
Over thousands of years, this process carves out caves, caverns, some of the most astonishing interiors on Earth.
When we visited the Grand Canyon, my dad and I spent a long time at the visitors center, looking at the geological cross-section diagrams. He pointed out the Redwall Limestone – the formation that gives the canyon its terracotta color.
Wow, he said, his finger tracing the diagram. All of this because the rock got shaped by water.
My mother is not a woman who shows her joy often. But a hibiscus or a well-kept Victorian garden – she giggles freely. I never understood what it was about plants.
I moved to New York early in the spring. The tree outside my window was still bare when I assembled my bed frame.
By summer, I was overflowing with love for my new home, and my tree had filled out with a generosity of leaves. It diffused the harsh lights from the parking garage across the street, and for that, I was grateful. I toyed with the idea of naming him Edgar. One morning, I noticed a breeze ruffle his leaves, and alone in my room, I laughed.
I have spent many years determined not to become my mother.
On a Friday evening in September, it hit me: oh. New York had seasons. The next day, I bought three plants in Chinatown. I carried them in flimsy paper bags on my forty-five minute walk home, stopping every few blocks to smooth out the red dents in my forearms. I spent the afternoon moving them around in the window, finding the right arrangement to guard myself from my tree’s upcoming senescence.
During a blizzard, I watched the flurries skitter mid-air before they find a resting spot in the alcoves of the branches. I stood at the window for a long time, leaves a forgotten memory.
Last month, I realized that I’d been overwatering the vine on my bookshelf. It had rotted. I asked ChatGPT for instructions on how to save it. Drain the pot. Cut the roots. No more water. Don’t touch it. Let it recover from your excessive tending.
The Telugu language has a word ఓపిక (opika). I’ve never figured out how to translate it into English. Strength doesn’t quite capture it. Patience isn’t quite right, either.
Opika is the active capacity to bear something difficult, staying hard enough to survive and porous enough to be changed by it.
The word holds as one what English splits — physical stamina and emotional endurance, the will to act and the grace to yield.
Your body and your spirit, Telugu implicitly declares, these are one and the same. A language gives words to what its people consider essential for life.
A man in the field before dawn every day so his children can eat in the dry season. A woman who feeds everyone first and eats last, alone, after her husband comes home. In Telugu, the labor is one with the love.
In March, I went back to Texas to be with my parents for Telugu New Year. Recently, I’ve started talking to The Gods again. On Ugadi morning, I go downstairs to find that my mother has been up since before dawn, having her own conversation.
She spoons the Ugadi Pachadi she made into a bowl and serves me. Mango, jaggery, tamarind, salt, chili, neem, banana, sweet, sour, salty, spicy, bitter, astringent – eaten together, in the same bite, to start off the new year.
In the past, I’d wince and rush to wash out the taste with coffee. This time, I let the sourness of the mango and heat of the chili linger on my tongue. I enjoyed it.
Last weekend, some friends and I debated whether you could hold the ideas of a religion without adhering to the rituals themselves. The concept of spirituality without religion strikes me (at the risk of sounding like my mother) as so Western.
For my ancestors, the knowledge was inseparable from the physical action. The ritual was how you arrived at the insight.
One bite of Ugadi Pachadi shows me – body and spirit both – that life will be inseparably sweet and bitter, and the way through is to taste it all, to bear it fully.
My parents grew up on opposite sides of the Godavari, one of India’s largest rivers.
My mother’s mother lives in Rajahmundry, the largest city on its banks and the place where I was born. I look out the window at women washing clothes on the stone steps, their sari sashes knotted around their waist. Men set out on wooden rowboats, soaked white strips of cotton around their foreheads, to harvest crab and prawn. There are carts selling small bananas, cigarettes, bottles of water, and books on the side of the road, vendors hawking to the cars whistling past.
The Godavari runs through every story my parents tell about home. Every time we visit, I’m struck once again by how brown it is.
We are of the Kamma caste, known for their fierce attachment to the earth, fallen warriors who deposited their intensity into the fields, landowners who worked their own land. Many of us took root in the Godavari delta, where the river meets the sea, where fresh water and brackish sediment swim together.
My grandfather grew rice in paddies fed by the river’s floods – full of basalt, clay, calcium carbonate from limestone formations upstream. The soil often gave him two harvests a year.
I vaguely remember my dad teaching me during one of our car rides: deltas are some of the most fertile land on earth.
Telugu people have a reputation in India for being too much. We feel everything at full intensity and we are not subtle about it. We tell you exactly what we think (to the point of being rude), we feed you until you can’t move, we argue with our entire body about something inconsequential that happened in 2003, and we eat incredibly spicy food – even by Indian standards.
Telugu is one of the oldest continuously spoken languages on earth, a fact that makes me feel small. Between the 11th and 20th centuries, two forms of Telugu diverged: the Sanskrit-tinged version used in classical literature and the vernacular of the fields. In the 13th century, the latter was banned from poetic works.
Under Nizam rule, Urdu became the language of schools and courts. Spoken Telugu – the language of homes, fields, rivers, of opika – survived anyway.
In the 1930s, cinema and radio arrived in India. The daily Telugu of the common people could be heard beyond the villages for the first time. The classical literary Telugu, tended for nine hundred years – elevated, Sanskritized, insulated from the spoken word — retreated to university textbooks.
Then English arrived and stayed through British rule, Indian independence, and the diaspora. English is now the language of ambition and power in India and everywhere else. It offers a mobility through the world that Telugu – with its grammar of closeness – can’t match institutionally, economically, or globally. My parents chose it. I’ve chosen it.
And yet, there’s a sterility I feel in English. Irritation feels flatter, doesn’t draw it out of me the way visuku does. I struggle to conjugate Telugu verbs, but visuku, I feel in my chest.
Telugu lives in the body, holding on at full intensity. A language survives the way its people do.
On the Saturday morning of my trip home, I come downstairs to find my parents arguing with their full bodies about how to cut the bendakaya for the curry. They’re confused when I laugh.
The four-hour flights to Texas have started to feel urgent in a way they haven’t before. I am trying to find the right arrangement of time with my parents – as if there is one – before their upcoming senescence.
My mother writes now. I never knew she wanted to. Her book is in Telugu, about the life advice she wants to pass on to her son, my brother. She doesn’t show me her drafts – the book isn’t for me, I guess – but I read the snippets she posts on Facebook. I know my brother doesn’t. She told me many years ago, during a fight, that she named me after her favorite author. I’ve never told her that I write too.
My dad is going to retire soon, and he’s started climbing mountains. Every few weeks, he’s summiting a different mountain to test his lungs against the altitude. He plans to do Kilimanjaro, Everest Base Camp, maybe Machu Picchu next year. It will be an astonishingly short time before we need to start worrying.
When I would call my dad in college, the way to get him to talk about his life was to ask about the rock strata he was analyzing for work. Now I find myself asking about his hikes. I suppose Kamma people will always be fiercely attached to the earth.
I am not one who writes about joy easily. But it is one of the most astonishing things I’ve witnessed, watching my parents surface the pieces of themselves they’ve held in reserve for so long.
The desire for freedom, my mother tells my dad and me, is so Western. It’s the thing she dislikes most about us both.
Every so often, she lists all the reasons she thinks it will be hard for someone to love me. You always need to go somewhere. You can’t stay in one place. You’re exactly like your father. You leave your loved ones behind.
She’s right about every. single. thing. I don’t know whether to be furious, humored, or touched. Or whether to remind her that his ambition is why she married him. But I know she knows that.
I find it unbearable to be around her when the visuku cuts into her voice. She has never felt anything at half volume, whether care or resentment. Lately, I’ve been trying harder to stay. I don’t know if I am listening out of care, or tending my debt to her.
I’ve invited her to come visit me in New York a few times, hoping to show her a taste of the independence I’ve been able to enjoy. She says yes, sure, that sounds good. I don’t think it will happen.
The last time I wore a top with spaghetti straps, she warned me I’d get hurt if I kept showing my chest like that. And it spills out of me: This is why I don’t tell you things. This is why I struggle to let you in. This is why we all find it so hard to be around you.
Something about my freedom reminds her of what she gave up, and something about her reactivity reinforces for me why I chose to leave.
When limestone is subject to extremely high heat, it becomes quicklime. Add water, and the reaction is violent. The rock burns and the water disappears entirely. When she and I react – limestone and water, at that temperature…
My mother now has potted trees in the living room, next to the armoires where we keep the rocks my dad brings home from field work. She didn’t have any houseplants when my brother and I were around, and it never occurred to me to find that strange. In those years, she had us instead.
For most of my teenage years, I felt overwatered. Her trees are doing well.
Her love is an inexhaustible river. And only now can I feel what that has cost her, where she’s dissolved. She has more opika than anyone I know, and it became her erosion.
I carry these inheritances from her, inseparably sweet and bitter, sediment deposited in the delta, landing from a long way upstream.
Telugu is a language for people who live a stone’s throw away from one another. It doesn’t have a word for this the chosen distance, the missing and the loving and the grief and the guilt and the relief and the necessity and the sameness. It doesn’t have a word for how fast time is running out. For not knowing whether my choices were the right ones, whether I am wiser or weaker for making them.
Maybe my Telugu just isn’t good enough.
maybe its not freedom ya want but to be dissolved
Wow - so beautifully written. Wild that writing is also something you inherited from her ;)