AUGUST, 2016.
Saint Theresa St.
It’s the orange sand, clawing at the big black rocks clawing at the sea. It’s the sun, rising above Pondicherry as our car speeds past the used bookstore where my father would get math books, notes written clumsily in the margins by some senior student who was leaving—leaving for good. Each street named after a Saint by the French, each tree sweating gospel, the convent where the teachers beat my father, the cane shop next to it where they’d replace the wood worn by blood. It’s the hurtling of bodies inside a body of motion, the car speeding, slowing, say velocity, now say it again.
Oil massaged into my braided hair, my scalp remembering Chithi’s fingers, their warmth uncannily maternal for a woman I see less than three weeks a year. She is beside me now. She is keeping me from falling asleep—fever dreams at the edge of the pillow, pressed between the linings of heat like lice—waiting for the moment I give in. It’s the way sickness feels less real when I’m here. My head in her lap, my brother and my father—inside their own flesh in a way I envy. At dusk, the silhouettes of temples with their carved gods and goddesses fade like falling stars, and the fields seep with water, yellowing at the edges as if old paper. The only things that know anything about being alive are the billboards with their half-eroded white Tamil letters.
I accelerate, I momentum. The rain falls softly enough to mend a wound.
It’s the way Chittappa plays maalai pozhudhin mayakathilaey naan from the USB stick. It’s the way we jump to guess the ragam, the way time slows inside the crook of Susheela’s voice, molten, malleable enough to be kneaded into the crescent sliver of moon above us. We’ve half dissipated, half colonized our names to be forgotten, the ocean air stinging our skins until we’re salted—seasoned for the sky to suck on—until words like warmth, body, and family become birds hurtling across the beach back to us.
AUGUST, 2024.
Luberon.
And so I walked up a hill. Shrubs cut at my ankles, and the tip of my shoe ground against a purple flower. Uproot, I said. Uproot, rewind your birth. Un-future your pistil. The pale violet residue etched across the straps of my sandals.
MARCH, 2025.
Edison.
I do not make friends. It is the finality of this statement that gives it the quality of a shirt I outgrew years ago but still kept. A cloud of grief every time I see it in my closet, too embarrassed to wear it anywhere but the house on Saturday mornings, tight, rough fabric digging into my stomach till I can hardly remember why I loved it so much. There are a lot of things I hate to look at, if I’m honest: TV screens when a movie is playing, the mirror when my face is in it, my mother’s face when it becomes a quilt of old film and splintered glass.
I hate how insistent faces are. They force me to accept their expression, their suffocation. I tell my mother this, and she tells me I will get used to it soon enough. Everyone does. I tell her I can never be free as long as I am forced to speak the language of her flesh, and she tells me freedom is such a trivial thing to long for. I am a bad daughter if only because I was a bird first. I am friendless if only because when I was born, I was filled to the brim with helium, and I floated until a hand pinioned me, in a painting titled Recognition, or Reclamation, or Reincarnation—I do not know which, only that it started with R: the one sound that my accent could fold its limbs into. The only home I will ever know.
JUNE, 2020.
American Road Trip.
A girl wearing a mask, slipping luggage into a car with her father. The two of them, along with her two brothers and her mother, will drive sixteen hours from New Jersey to Florida. The flights are closed, but they need to be near family now. So they will go.
They leave at 8:00 am exactly, when last night’s rain has still not stopped, water running across the windshield of their car like veins, reflecting traffic lights and the afterglow of sunrise. The rain does not stop for hours. When it does, droplets drying on the windows catch stray threads of sunset, and the road begins to clear like a theater at the end of a play, only this time the final show will be one of the girl’s brothers, his solo drive at 110 mph across South Carolina as her parents struggle to stay awake.
He will have his fun, and then the father will take over. He will play the same Pancharatna Kritis that he has always played, and together, they will make it across Georgia, the feel of movement, of we are closing the gap between ourselves and the next most beautiful thing.
2:00 am, we’ve reached the suburb in Orlando. I am half-asleep in my aunt’s arms, waiting for the gap to close entirely. I am still waiting.
JULY, 2022.
Chennai.
It’s noise. The honking autorickshaws, bright yellow, the water splashing out of potholes, the crinkle as a vendor hands over a newspaper-cone of roasted peanuts. Anything can be a gift if there is enough friction between the two palms as they meet, a smoky second of pause—almost intrusive as briefly staying becomes necessary. A gift is a gift so long as it steals time.
I am forgettable here, in a street I see six weeks a year—I am a stranger, but not a foreigner. I have an accent to prove it. Still, I remind myself: this is not home. Even if I am safe here, I cannot let it call me with its name, its rhythm. There are some dances not meant to be learned.
The dull orange streetlight pisses itself, glows a little brighter before extinguishing entirely, and all I can think of is the language of my mother’s flesh, the dupatta of a stranger imitating her warmth as they pass by on a scooty. Amma, I say to the piss. Amma, I say to the light (negative) (unalive) (beautiful).
By default, I am in motion, searching—no, striving. I am always looking for a reason to stop. I am always looking for someone to tell me to stay. I am always looking. I am always. I am. I–
NOVEMBER, 2025.
New Jersey.
On the TV, there is an expose on abusive Indian schools in the 1970s. My father sits on the sofa, his smile bright and polished, his pupils dilated.
On the TV, a broken shard of glass. My reflection. My face reminds me that I do not quite belong to myself.
It’s the way I get lost in the narrow streets of Santorini; the way I walk a tightrope between two cliffs in Murren; the way I cling to my mother as we jetski in Cancun; the way I surfed for the first time on my thirteenth birthday on a Chennai beach and spent the night supine on a sun-baked terrace with my brother.
The promise of motion breaks me more than the motion itself. It sculpts and chisels me, renders me whole.
It’s the way I always find a place to be alone in; I know I am a narrator if only because I disappear easily. When I say I strive, I mean I, too, would like to be tethered to the city streets I walk. I, too, would like to be narrated into existence by a stranger.
I press my cheekbone against the train window. I go to New York City to open—my palms, my half-translated heart.
In my dreams, I go back to the car. It is past the stop sign at the end of the street, past the abandoned house with the rusted chimney, the fresh coating of tar on the road in April. I open the door, stick my hand in first to feel for ghosts—for a sparrow tapping at the windshield. In my dreams, I name it Salvation or Surrender—the S, a long-forgotten polaroid, a colonized incision.
It is guttural, the music. It is the music my father kept in a CD album in the backseat. He forgot to take it out when he unmarried the car, left it in a junkyard after his reflection splintered its bones.
In my dreams, I find the name of it (the movement) (the cadenza). I find its name and suture it to the junction between tooth and jaw—like a velocity I’m not quite ready to accelerate towards.
K. Kannan is the Editor-in-Chief of Blue Flame Review, a literary magazine dedicated to exploring the intersection between science and writing. She has received national recognition from the National YoungArts Foundation as well as the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers. Her work has been published or is forthcoming from Salt Hill Journal, Muzzle Magazine, Tinderbox Poetry, Diode, and Up the Staircase Quarterly, among other places. Find her on Twitter @lotusmoonwrites or on Instagram @kkannanwrites.
VAGABOND CITY 