The last planet we landed on was a planet of prophets. The landing was rough, but I latched onto the side of the ship and held on. Didi was the first to venture out, sweet-talking her way out of the port. She ended up in a bustling market on a tiny knoll just south of where we touched down. She told us the locals immediately knew she wasn’t an onworlder, even though she wore bees in her black hair.
The boy she brought back with her, Kabir, was gangly and walked with a cane. Like everyone else on this planet, his hair reached up above him, a mountain of antiquated proportions. He took off his wig, leaving it at the door before boarding the ship.
“I knew you would come,” he told me seriously, crouching down to my height. He was barely a year older than me, judging by the lines on his throat, but much taller. He talked like a mynah from the homeland. “They told me.”
“Who told you?” Didi asked, rubbing Kabir’s back carefully. I saw her switch into mother mode. After glancing at me once, she raised her hand above her shoulder, signaling to Ma and Ba that it wasn’t safe to come out yet. This is why she had brought him back. Weak link.
Kabir rolled his eyes. “The bees, sister,” he said. “The bees know everything. What language are you speaking right now?”
Didi pointed to her ear. Where we came from, the confusion of tongues was seen to be just that: a confusion. A problem to be solved. A solution came in the form of clear fish blood poured into your ears every night. We had a liter of it in the back of the ship, near the microwave. We bought it off cheap at a hawker before leaving.
On this planet of prophets, however, the confusion of tongues was meant to be beautiful. In the pamphlet Didi had stolen from our last employer, I read that this was the only planet in the entire system that refused to untangle their tongues. They didn’t have translation mechanisms in place, either. Just sentence after incomprehensible sentence of prophecies.
Kabir shrugged. “They wouldn’t tell me where you come from. Only when you arrive.”
“You don’t need to know where we come from,” Didi said, putting herself between me and Kabir smoothly. She felt older than she was. Our species reached adolescence at about ten and adulthood much later. She was turning nineteen that year. The journey had aged her.
“Okay,” Kabir conceded, raising his hands in surrender. He bared his teeth at us, wrinkling his nose. “Okay. I didn’t mean to worry. Can I go now?”
Didi squinted at him, as if threatening him. “You won’t tell anyone?”
Kabir nodded. “Not a soul.”
So Didi let him out through the back after he got his wig and reported to our parents. “Just a kid. He seems like the only one who knows who we are and where we come from. If you give me some time, I’ll find us a place to live.”
Ma was still sick at the time, and Ba was busy taking care of her. Neither of them cared much about our living conditions beyond what the air felt like. The best planet for Ma had been the lavender field, but we couldn’t stay long before we were deported to a new world.
“Okay,” Ba said, hands still on Ma’s medicine. He crushed the beans between his thumb and his forefinger, methodically working his way through the entire stack. We’d run out of beans soon. “Here. Take the laser knife, stay safe.”
Didi made him look into her eyes. “You’ll keep them safe? Both of them? Promise?”
“Swear it,” Baba replied stubbornly. That was the only reason Didi left.
#
Daughter, stay still. I won’t tell the story if you don’t stop moving.
#
When Didi came back, her eyes were glistening with excitement. She pulled out our bags and grabbed the sleeping mats, strapping them all to her back.
“Where are you going?” I asked, scrambling to keep up. I let her strap me into the robotic harness she had brought over from the last world. Ma, Ba, and Didi still remembered a time when gravity wasn’t constant, so their legs danced through the airs of every planet. Mine fell behind like heavy metals sinking through the soil.
“The tunnels. God, the tunnels. They’re expansive. Huge. People like us live in them,” she said, briefly patting my shoulder. “Best of all, nobody will know we’ll be there.”
“Tunnels?” I was a bit skeptical. You can’t blame me. We came from a land of open purple skies and streams of dark grandeur streaking the ground.
#
Yes, Daughter, you’ve never been to the homeland. No, we won’t go back.
#
Ba helped us pack with an intensity we’d only seen while he mixed medicines. It would be good for Ma, he said. A change of environment.
Sneaking out of the port was easy. Weaving in and out of the ships waiting for docking on the tar grounds was not. They were gigantic, all of them golden and tarnished with rust from the descent into the atmosphere. This planet had once been the seat of a trading empire, but the last son died out two hundred years ago. His name was lost to the greater galaxy and with it, the name of the planet.
I almost got lost once. Didi grabbed me by the collar of my shirt and dragged me out of the ditch I’d found myself in. She hitched the liter bottle of fish blood higher in her arms.
When we reached the tunnels, Kabir was waiting for us with someone else, a woman with scales climbing down her neck into the place her breasts disappeared into her corset.
“You said you wouldn’t tell anyone,” Didi growled, pulling Kabir up by the skin of his neck. Sometimes she was more growl than girl, brought up in a bestiary instead of our family. Sometimes the girl was nothing more than a growl, waiting for something to give.
“I said I wouldn’t tell a soul,” Kabir corrected. His bees loomed over Didi’s head, stingers out. They would die if they stung her, so she wasn’t too worried about it. She relied on their self-preservation.
“I don’t have one,” the woman called out. “A soul, I mean. When I die, I’m dead forever.”
#
Daughter, this is what a soul is: a ship. A ferry from this life to the next. Waiting for your present to beach itself on shore so the ship can carry you to the future.
A secret: I don’t know if you have a soul, daughter. I never knew how to check. If your other mothers were still here, they could have figured it out. They’re not.
#
The woman’s name was Nabi. In a land of prophets, she was the only one who had the guts to name herself supreme, to crown her knowledge beloved.
Didi sized her up with her palms. She held the woman between her eyes, squinting to figure out the weight of her presence.
“I help people,” Nabi replied to an unsaid question. “I swear to you.”
Ba slicked the fish blood off his face and whispered to Didi in the language we kept. “I trust her. Your mother is dying. She needs rest.”
Didi nodded and offered her hand to Nabi, who pressed them to her neck. “Thank you,” said Didi.
“Of course,” Nabi murmured before calling for Kabir. He materialized at her side, eyes fixing on mine. “Kabir, give them a place close to the end.”
#
I know what you’re thinking, Daughter. Yes, this is the same Kabir who is your father. Yes, somewhere along the line, we marry in an open field, family smuggled onto the planet alongside drugs and mustard oil. Yes, somewhere along the line, he walks me around the fire until we ash our feet together in the river that gave birth to him. Yes, somewhere along the line, we take you in.
No, this is not that story. This is a story about your mother.
#
Kabir led us to the end of the tunnel, stepping over sleeping migrants and pressure cookers. He kept a running commentary as he walked. He told us of the world outside, of the oceans, of the rivers, of the mothers who pour their blood into the waters and hope for a child in return.
I’d heard something about the birthing waters before arriving, but I had thought it was folklore. The planet was its own mythology, bees and oceans encrusted with golden clouds.
When I was younger, my mother convinced me I was a virginal birth. She said my skin was the exact color of soil because she plucked me from the ground instead of her stomach. I figured this planet had some of the same magic corroding it.
Ba carried Ma in his arms like a second wedding while Didi took inventory in her head of everything that can be used as a weapon inside this tunnel. I was the only one listening to Kabir, so I tugged on his shirt, letting him falter. He took my hand in his and told me about the festival of flames in hushed tones. Some violence should not be given words.
When we arrived at our square of land, Ma was groaning from the exertion. Ba and Didi set up her medical contraption with hardly a word between them. I stroked the side of Ma’s ankles and hoped it would help.
“I can call Nabi,” Kabir offered, pulling off his wig and reaching, suddenly, for a tiny metal whistle that nested on his scalp.
“Better not,” Didi replied. “This is a family matter.”
“Okay, sister,” Kabir conceded. He pressed the whistle into my hands, curling my fingers around them. “For you. In case. Blow it and I will come.”
#
Yes, daughter, that is the whistle hanging around your neck. Sometimes our inheritances are solid.
#
After we settled in, Didi started going out to forage for food with Nabi. They came back laden with giant fruits and the meat of the ground. Ba boiled the fruit until it turned the murky water lilac over the fire before pouring the paste into Ma’s open lips.
Sometimes, Ma would flutter her eyes. Kabir and I sat at her bedside when he would tell me stories, scanning her eyes for movement.
Nabi sat with us sometimes. She would molt her wrists while Kabir talked, tying the scales into a bow for Didi. Sometimes when she opened her mouth, I saw fangs peeking out.
She was native to this planet, Kabir told me. He was, too, but Nabi’s people had been here longer. They were the first settlers of the ocean, back before it became a mother. Nabi and Kabir shared a parent, by which I mean they were both born from the sea. That made them siblings, of a sort, a status they shared with hundreds across the planet.
I wanted to ask Nabi if she knew the king all those years ago, but I caught sight of the lines of her neck. There weren’t that many.
Didi would squat on the ground, watching us talk. She tinkered with the laser knife, making it more accustomed to the atmosphere of the planet. Sometimes she and Nabi would lock eyes across the tunnel and they would show their teeth to each other. A promise of a meal, maybe. A promise of love.
#
I know what you’re thinking, daughter. Yes, these are your mothers. You have more mothers than limbs. One mother for each bone in your body.
Even on the homeworld, our people are migrants and our women are the daughters of the foothills. We populate islands and the rest of the subcontinent, but almost nobody stays in the homeland. It takes on its own myth amongst the diaspora, like a snake.
When we left the homeland, I didn’t cry. Ba said we would be back to visit soon, but then months turned into years. Some say that Ma was ill because she was homesick.
Keep listening, daughter. I’ll tell you about our first Chhath in the tunnel.
#
Back on the homeworld, the words for strain and moon are sisters. Chan and chand. Ba used to strain the moonlight into bottles of moss as medicine before we found out it caused cells to multiply by a thousandfold.
All this to say: we are sun worshippers. Every sun is the same as a dependable lover. We have never been betrayed by a sun.
A year into our tunnel life, Ma was barely alive. I had branched out to telling Kabir stories about where we had come from, which he would record in a little sheaf of paper that fit into the divots of his hips.
He asked me one day when my sun festival would have been, if we had stayed. If we still saw the sun every day, instead of being marched out once a moon and dried in the air before returning to darkness.
I counted back on my fingers. “Probably some time around now,” I told him.
He scribbled it down. “We should hold one.”
“We don’t have a riverbank,” I said.
Kabir trailed off into a strange type of silence, the only sound in our portion of the tunnel the buzzing of his bees and my mother’s heart.
He used to take off his wig at the door, scolding his bees when they came too close to me. Eventually we eased into a sister of companionship, his bees and I. We were united by our one love.
I never knew what happened beyond that on Kabir’s end, but the next morning, I woke up to plastic carpeting the floor of the tunnel. It led all the way out to the end, where the sky lived.
Didi had growled when she touched the floor, slick with the remnants of last night’s fruit paste. She didn’t look like a girl or a growl anymore, just scared and confused.
“Come on,” Nabi said softly, grabbing Didi’s hand. “It’s a river. Watch.”
Kabir was standing at the foot of the plastic, a large pink bucket in his hands. He waited until we were all watching, until Ba had propped Ma up on the tunnel wall.
“Go,” commanded Nabi. She stroked her thumb on the back of Didi’s wrist, letting her nails scrape away the grime to expose the brownness of skin.
Ma’s eyes opened for the first time as we prayed by our riverbank. “The sun,” she rasped out through a voice disillusioned with use. She used to be a sonnet reciter, long ago. Before the move. Before the sickness.
“Nabi, help me,” Didi murmured, touching Nabi on the small of her back. Together they lifted Ma as Kabir and I helped Ba out towards the end of the tunnel.
The suns, two twin oranges hung in the canvas of the sky, winked back at us. We closed our eyes and prayed in the sunlight.
#
Daughter, this is the part of the story where I repurpose my words as prologue. At night, I diagram a list of my loves and a list of lives on Kabir’s backbone after he falls asleep. Only a few names appear on both.
Do you remember the day your father was sick? He expelled all the blood built up in his body in a single day, into a bucket we threw into the ocean. He wanted to wait and see if the water would return a child to us. I said we would wait as long as the sun took to return the sky to the three moons.
When we came home that night, I gave him his injections to turn him back into a man while you watched, eyes wide, waiting for your own medicine.
I didn’t know what to give you, so I gave you this whistle. An apology. We’re sorry we couldn’t bring you a sibling from the sea.
#
The last time I saw your mothers, my Didi and your father’s Nabi, was at the wedding procession. Bleakly dressed in thin sheets of red scrounged up from the family who loaned the plot of tunnel land next to us, they were radiant together.
The scales along Nabi’s breast lines had melted away, leaving pinkish fuzz like a peach. The Banerjee clan from across the tunnel had loaned us their family gold for the night, so Nabi’s neck was thick with bejeweled golden chains.
Didi had been simpler to dress. A symptom of being rust-colored: she looked good in every shade imaginable.
Kabir and I stood witness as they swore loyalty to each other, crouched on the floor in front of the tiny shaved icon of the Virgin Mary that the D’Souzas had smuggled on the planet. She was the holiest thing in the entire tunnel.
“Have you seen this before?” I asked Kabir. His bees were perching on my shoulder, smacking their lips against my skin in the resemblance of a kiss. “This moment?”
“It’s fuzzy,” Kabir admitted. “But in a sense.”
Didi came to see us after she swore to kill the moon for Nabi if she had to. “I’m doing the right thing,” she assured me. “I promise. I’ll be back before you know it.”
We had run out of fish blood a year ago, but by that time, Didi and I were fluent in the language of prophecy. Did you know they don’t have a word for the color of mustard flowers on a hot day? They call them white, like the brilliance of the suns.
Sometimes I wonder how they distinguish between their many shades of white when they don’t have an extra word. Kabir told me that it didn’t actually affect them as much as I thought it did. Because no one knew what the color yellow was, they wanted for nothing.
My own mother had died a month before the wedding and Ba followed not too far from her. On this planet, they had sea burials. They gave everything to the sea, including their dead. We wrapped them in white and set them out like boats, hoping they had souls big enough to come back to us somehow, somewhere, sometime.
“Sister, stay safe,” Kabir warned, holding both of Didi’s hands in his and looking her seriously in the eye. He made her promise to stay on the right side of the planet six times before he finally let go long enough for Didi to give me a hug.
Nabi and Didi were spending their wedding night by the ocean. Days passed, and by the time Kabir went up to check, he found only the Banerjee gold pressed into a neat pile on the pebbly shore.
Around a year later, Kabir took me out to see the sunlight. He took me foraging for clams on the beach, racing me down the shore as we stumbled through the grounds. It had become safer to emerge from the tunnels lately. Maybe we had finally sacrificed enough. Maybe it wasn’t our turn to ache anymore.
“Look,” Kabir had called out to me, pointing to a bundle of red on the horizon. He shaded his eyes with his hand, trying to get a closer look. “I think it’s a child.”
We fished you out of the ocean barely breathing. Kabir and I took turns blowing breaths into your lungs, tiny as they were. We couldn’t really be sure who you took after in the matter of offals, so we made sure of both. Kabir stuffed air into your throat so it landed deep in your belly, making a home there temporarily. I tried to breathe into your lungs.
We never found out which one worked. We were too full of jubilation that we had given life to a child to consider the consequences.
#
You looked like both of them when we picked you up. That’s how we knew you were ours. Rust-colored little thing, darkening scales climbing through your chest and onto the nape of your neck. Already, Kabir’s bees were hovering over you, trying to predict who you would become.
Yes, daughter, this is the climax. This is what I want you to do for me. For us. Blow the whistle and summon every mother you have.
The risks are great. It’s possible our home will flood from the embrace of your rivermother. But the rewards are greater, by which I mean maybe Didi and Nabi will find their way home. We stayed on this planet for you and for them, daughter. Show us that we did the right thing instead of making a break for it when shit hit the fan five years ago, when the suns started dancing faster.
Daughter, you were born into a planet of prophets, a lineage of liturgies. I’m sorry we brought you into a world where you were burdened with the bigness of it all, but now you have to make your own way.
We don’t know what lies ahead if you blow that whistle, daughter. Kabir tried to look into the future, but the bees wouldn’t tell him anything further than nascent fuzz, like the first beard every woman in our family grows.
This is the first step we’ve taken without knowing the monsters that swim in our path, but it feels right, doesn’t it? Come on, daughter. Blow the whistle. Bring your mothers home.