DIVINE — Yale Daily News Magazine

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DIVINE

ISSUE

bacho bajaj barton duraiswamy guerrette hopson huo love jacobs neal osei ramirez simón-trench singareddy teague viloria warm

Staff Editors-in-Chief Gavin Guerrette Audrey Kolker Managing Editors Ana Padilla Castellanos Harper Love Kinnia Cheuk Olivia Wedemeyer Associate Editors Brunella Tipismana Emily Khym Fatou M’Baye Isabel Maney Jonas Loesel Owen Curtin Andrew Lau Sophia Ramirez Sukriti Ojha Layout Adam Bear Illustrations Thisbe Wu Anna Chamberlin Columnists Eli Osei Keya Bajaj Chela Simón-Trench Staff Writers Nicole Viloria Elijah Bacal Sophia Ramirez Matias Guevara Ruales

A Note From the Editors Introductions are hard. That’s why we waited until our second issue to put faces—drawn by our superb illustrator Thisbe Wu—to the names. (In real life we are not made of lines.)

In addition to the faces of this Magazine’s most esteemed editors, you will also note three others, belonging to our columnists: Chela Simón-Trench, Eli Osei, and Keya Bajaj. They’re phenomenal artists, writers, and people, and they’ll be here all year. As is often the case, the true movers and shakers of this world (i.e. those who have gotten this issue from our brains into your hands) remain faceless: our incredible Managing Editors, Associate Editors and Illustrators. Their talent and warmth are difficult to overstate. Finally, this issue was designed and laid out by the sensational Adam Bear. Please shake his hand for us when you see him next.

We’re beyond excited to share the Divine Issue with you all.

Please reach out with any questions, hopes, visions, and/or revelations you may have related to this and future issues.

Audrey and Gavin November 2023

CONTENTS

Pin-Up column | Chela Simón-Trench

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Short Story Long column | Eli Osei

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The Afterword column | Keya Bajaj

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All Longing Erased Poem | Nicole Viloria

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Christian Wiman’s Small, Stubborn Belief Profile | Lukas Bacho Visual Contributions collages | Gavin Guerrette

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Quiet at Compline audio essay | Suraj Singareddy

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En Tránsito photo essay | Reese Jacobs Neal

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Mermaids Worship the Fire fiction | Sophia Ramirez

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Past Due feature | Tigerlily Hopson

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painting | Angela Huo

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The Magician and the Fool profile | Cal Barton

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On the Brink of Pure Consciousness feature | Harper Love Our Rituals Were Not poem | Hudson Warm A Sidewalk in Southall personal essay | Ashley Duraiswamy

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PIN-UP #1: Every Pietà Chela Simón-Trench

This semester, I’ve learned a new and exciting term in my architecture courses: Pin-Up, a relatively informal presentation of architectural drawings, designs, and renderings. The term comes from architects’ tradition of pinning their designs up on the wall for critique and discussion. I am understanding Pin-Ups as disjointed chunks of printed material on the wall—an explanation will bring them together. I am not an architect, though, and this is not an architecture studio. Everything is fair game for my Pin-Ups—the chair I’m sitting in now, what I ate for lunch, a doodle, a sculpture, a book, my friends’ best catchphrases… I admit that I am appropriating this term for my own ends—I just like to write in vague chunks. I will be ‘pinning up’ things that I have been seeing around, hearing around, and thinking about, and I will present them all to you in a chunky, vignette style. I am open to relevant criticism and conversation. I would even welcome it: chela.simon-trench@yale.edu I wandered into this church in Paris after being very embarrassed at a café. I opened my mouth to order in broken French only to be met with “Let me guess: the Caesar Salad?” from the waiter. I was, in fact, going to order the Caesar salad, but ordered the Paté to spite him. I hate Paté.

Paris was lonely; in the summer, there is this orangey, smoggy, hot hue during the daytime. I think I loved my time there; I think. I was studying cathedrals and thought it would be charming to explore Paris through her churches. Paris’ cathedrals are dark and blueish; the air is damp. My exploration practice was less charming than necessary. I escaped the hot, embarrassing Parisian streets in church. This one I went into after my paté was particularly dark, blue, and damp. In the back corner, where a soft skylight shone onto a statue of marble limbs, was the Pietà: Mary holding Jesus in her lap, his limp, dead body slipped completely through her legs, so that only his rigid arms were flanked on her body. His legs poured towards the edge of the pedestal along with her skirt. Fallen through Mary’s arm, Jesus’ neck craned back too far; he looked decapitated. They

were surrounded by more marble bodies, angels mourning beside them, lining their pedestal. Mary’s disposition was the same as always—her head cocked slightly to the right, turned down at his body sorrowfully, her hands outstretched around him, one gripping his wrist as though trying to receive an energy or message. I didn’t have anything better to do; I didn’t want to go back out into Paris. I sat with it for an hour.

Defined: Iterated in many

forms in many places, the Pietà is a recurring image in Christian art.

The Virgin Mary holds the mortal, dead body of Jesus in her lap. His body is always limp, and her face is always downcast.

I don’t believe in God, but there is something about the Pietà.

The first time I saw the Pietà was in Professor Jacqueline Jung’s introductory lecture, “Sacred Art and Architecture.” We were

studying Michelangelo’s version of the Pietà, and Professor Jung pointed out how large Mary was in comparison to Jesus, how he seemed to become absorbed into the folds of her skirt, how he melted into her marble hands. I don’t usually respond to religious iconography, but every Pietà gives me that squeezing feeling in my chest.

Something about the successful depiction of lifeless limbs, maybe.

Or Mary’s face: angelic, peaceful, resigned. In the best Pietàs, there is a fusion between Mary and Jesus’ bodies: it is unclear where Jesus’ limbs end and Mary’s start. His body sinks into the folds of her skirt. Her fingers sink into his ribs.

I don’t go looking for the Pietàs that I collect—they surprise me, around art gallery corners and in the back of damp Paris churches. Each new one makes me think back to the old ones, so that whenever I see a new Pietà, I am confronted with a list of moments spent with Pietàs past. Perhaps the word for this is ‘timeline,’ but I find that too procedural. There is an absence of feeling in that word.

The Yale University Art Gallery has a 15th century polychrome wood version of the Pietà.

This one looks like it is meant to be lived with: its wood material and figurine style reminds me of the little nativity scene made up of wooden trinkets that my Grandma had on her dining room table during the holidays– kitschy, ornamental, stared at during a cereal

breakfast. It is not fantastic like the other Pietàs I have known: Mary looks not idealized, but devastated, and Jesus is emaciated, his bones jutting out of his skin. Mary is barely holding him up— half of his body is on the floor. This inconspicuous figurine has haunted me most of all. Something about its ability to live so seamlessly at my own grandmother’s house. Will it surprise me there next time? On the mantle, or the stove, or the table?

I recently read an essay for a class by Kobena Mercer called “Avid Iconographies: Isaac Julien.”

He suggested that iconographies have lives of their own, where they are re-contextualized, translated, morphed, misunderstood. I don’t understand the Pietà for its biblical story, but for its formal power as an image of two devastated bodies in synthesis. Iconographies like the Pietà are necessarily repeated.

Iconic images have this unique capacity to live in your consciousness.

In each person’s consciousness, they live a different life. They make a home there and haunt. I remember the image of the Pietà all the time—when I see a full skirt, when I see white marble, when I see limp limbs, anytime I sit on someone’s

lap, or think of a mother and son. I thought of it today when I remembered the children’s book I Love You Forever by Robert Munsch– the story’s guiding image is a mother holding her son in her lap, singing the lyrics “I’ll love you forever, I’ll like you for always, As long as I’m living, My baby you’ll be.” The Pietà’s image feels like it grows in me, weighing heavier over time. It gives me the same squeezing feeling that those children’s book lyrics do—a reminder of time stretching in front of and behind me, nostalgia, my mothers, how I should be, how I am, how I was the last time I saw the Pietà. They live in me, in each other. The wooden figurine could live at my grandmother’s house, but in its icon lives Michelangelo’s marble Pietà, the Pietà in that damp Paris church. I forget most things, but I find myself needing to sit longer with each new Pietà. As I sit, I will remember the ones I have seen before.

Short Story Long #1 Eli Osei

I want to write the novel that ties up all the ends that have ever been loose.

The story that makes my own trajectory clear, that gives meaning to the years I’ve sat around anxious, lethargic, waiting for answers—that affirms, declares me a human being, materialises the most scattered parts of my idea-centric mind into something you can hold and love and know. But I don’t know what free indirect discourse is, so I’m taking a short story writing class.

Over the course of a semester, the class asks its students to write a single story and revise it twice. It is taught by a Pulitzer-Prize winner who mumbles his guidance. Under ruffling leaves and the heat of the sun, the wind drowns out his words: “There will always be a gap between the greatness we can imagine and the approximation we can write down. This is only the beginning.”

This column is about the process of writing my story: the false starts, the revisions, the manufactured ends.

This essay is about my first draft.

Randomly assigned to the last workshop group, I had five weeks to write my story. I was excited to get started—to sit down, play with words, and prove to myself that I could make something– but exactly what I was starting, I wasn’t so sure.

As much as I try to be concerned with meaning and value, the joy I take from writing largely comes from twisting language and controlling time, from captivating the reader with a single move, from tools like a dash, a long dash — which brings everything to a stop.

I’d been toying with an idea for a story where, on the night before his wedding, a nameless boozed-up middle-aged man stumbles through the streets of Johannesburg and falls asleep outside the home of Nelson Mandela. When he awakens, Mandela is dead and, through a morning special, the national news has turned our protagonist into the face of a decaying South Africa. My inclination to write this was less about exploring themes of projection, national instability, love and dependency, and more about my wanting to write a

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page long sentence that captured what it was like to trudge through a city your incapacity altered by the footstep; what it was like to be carried by the sounds of the night with nothing but tension in your body and a beer can in your hand; what it would feel like to take that final fall towards greener grass that wasn’t cut for you—before the thud, the thud, the thud and the spill and the aftermath.

What it would feel like to take that final fall towards greener grass that wasn’t cut for you [...]

I considered writing about an accident lawyer who died while driving under one of his own billboard ads. The story would have followed his wife as she planned the funeral. Again, less about faith,

mourning, death and chance, and more about writing a scene in which the late lawyer’s commercial played on TV, a scene that ended: “There was war in Iraq; The Wire was on—it was time to change the channel.”

On the weekend before the Thursday my story was due, I had nothing but considerations. I’d wasted four weeks thinking about writing and very little time actually doing it. Sunday came, and I decided that the only way to get something done was to find a subject close to my heart, drag it to a desk, and throw it onto the page. If I continued to think about possible sentences and exciting rhythms, I’d be paralyzed by possibility, a writer who never wrote. So walking to Book Trader, a local café, I decided to resign myself to The Idea and give myself to Chance.

What followed felt like fiction: Stumbling through the rain on my way to Book Trader, I was stopped by Helen as she rushed from her dorm. Dressed in black (raincoat, jeans, boots—no umbrel-

Photo by Eli Osei la), she said that she was going to New York, that she’d accidentally bought an extra ticket, that I was welcome to come, but the Uber was leaving now, right now.

On the train to Grand Central, reading Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, I came across the line: “It wasn’t a matter of choosing one life over another, but being sensitive to the life that wants to be lived through you.” In the margins, I noted, “So much fate in my life today. I ought to do something with it.”

At Grand Central we took the L train. Coming out of the Subway, we ran into the rain, Helen with her black hooded jacket, I without anything at all. We came round a corner, and the first person I saw was an old friend I knew for a short time many years ago. He wore silver steampunk sunglasses with neon blue lenses that glistened with

He didn’t know, but in that moment, he reminded me that I had a past, that I was a product of a long line of people who had stood in the rain. raindrops. He was studying in “The City,” now; he’d found himself a home. He was making short films and meeting C-list celebrities. He didn’t know, but in that moment, he reminded me that I had a past, that I was a product of a long line of people who had stood in the rain.

Helen and I spent the rest of the day working in coffee shops and looking for stable Wifi. She went thrifting for a bit. I ate a flaky cinnamon roll, falling deeper into Motherhood. At 6, we got on the Metro North. At 9, we got back to campus. Helen, whom I’ve come to know believes in no god save diligence itself, went to church, the way she always does. I, who’d come to feel that the world was at my fingertips, retired to my room without writing a word.

The structure was there, and that was what mattered; the ideas were inside of me. I went to bed that night with fate on the mind, ready to put it to the page when I must.

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The Afterword: On Petrarch on Abandonment Keya Bajaj

It is the middle of the 14th century and the Medieval world shivers with the chilling ache of delirium.

Towns empty themselves of their inhabitants: breath has long since evaporated off once-fogged windows; seats around the family table sit successively unwarmed. In a time of fearful embraces, the cradle is the coffin; every breath is an affirmation of life, or the pathology of death.

It is in the height of the Black Death that Petrarch writes his first collection of letters: epistolae familiares, or Familiar Letters.

“What ever are we to do now?” he asks in its preface.

It is now the middle of the 21st century—and his question lingers upon the air, its syllables choking unanswered. For aloneness is that eternal quandary of the human condition, mammoth enough to meld miles and minutes and hollow enough to echo.

I remember saying goodbye to my parents on the corner of Broadway on a sticky August afternoon. It was the hour before sunset and Yale was Midas-touched in that golden glow that undermines the most skillful pen attempting to write it. Groups crowded around Sterling in haphazard huddles memorialized in photo albums; blue T-shirts freshly folded in the bookstore only hours before now proudly dotted campus; the occasional suitcase struggled noisily over Yale’s cobblestone streets.

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“The Afterword” is born from scribbles buried between cracked book spines, from the creased corner of a well-thumbed novel. Through this coming-ofage column, I hope to use the literary bildungsroman to make sense of my real-life experience of growing up—and to write the afterword on the texts I most treasure.

Don’t look back and wave, my mum told me, standing outside the now-closed Patagonia. But as my parents occupied my blind spot, I wondered if they’d wanted me to.

What did people do in the movies?

Did they look back and wave? Did I? I walked up to my new home on Prospect Street in the chilling ache of freshmen delirium, my first set of keys jingling in my front pocket.

College is the abandonment of abandonments, the most unexpected yanking of the rug from under your feet. It is, at once, Sartre’s délaissement and Heidegger’s Geworfenheit, a state of being thrown into the world, with nothing but a blue lanyard dangling from your neck.

What ever are we to do?

In the frenzy of my first semester at Yale, I remember waking up blurry-eyed, expecting my childhood room to draw itself into clarity. I remember soft chatter slipping under my bedroom door every other Sunday, when my suitemates’ parents would drive up to drop off a cushion or deliver a forgotten spring coat. It would be months before I existed in the same time-zone as my parents, before our clocks ticked in unison, before it felt like our relationship didn’t teeter on a tenuous phone line.

And still, as I made new friends and built a new vocabulary with them, I remember realizing that when all the collective nouns we were raised on ceased to exist, when the fullest introductions ran eighteen chapters dry, we were

all peculiarly alone. That distance could be as much psychological as physical. We were all bereft of our belonging; no one’s, yet everyone’s. Paddington Bears in the lost property office of a London train station, wanting only a place to call home—and maybe a jar of marmalade.

In the lengthiest salad lines, at idle crosswalks, over the thrumming bass at parties, I realized that we could be—or not be. And that the anguish of “abandonment” could hold out a bigger promise: to write, with reckless “abandon.”

And what ever were we to do?

It is the 14th century again, and Petrarch apostrophizes his “brother”, Socrates.

“Alas, we have tried almost everything,” he laments, “and no rest is in sight.”

It is in the height of the Black Death that Petrarch gathers his letters. The streets bear only the faint memory of footsteps; estates run ruined by the mortgage of tumbleweed; the dead must be buried two-and-a-half arm-lengths deep.

And Petrarch gathers his letters and files them into a collection.

For when abandonment is a “horrible and vast solitude encompassing the whole world”, the lingual abyss between words is the only space capacious enough to carry our aloneness. And so, in the glaring eye of the wreckage, we write.

All Longing Erased

Nicole Viloria

Please God, help me move on.

I swear I’ve given it my all.

But, when I look at her, all you have taught me is gone.

When I’m with her, I remember why I gave up my soul.

All thoughts of her death fade, All longing erased by a single laugh.

Please God, help me move on.

When alone, fearful of her, then I know that not even the bargain of my soul can save me from her poison.

Please God, help me move on.

Please God, protect me from myself.

I swear I moved on, except for when I look at her.

Print by Uriel Teague 9

Christian Wiman’s Small, Stubborn Belief Lukas Bacho Illustration by Thisbe Wu

Growing up in rural West Texas, Christian Wiman didn’t have much of a reason to question the faith for which he was named. “The roots were pretty shallow where I grew up,” he told me when we met on the quad of Yale Divinity School (YDS). Appropriately, we were seated under an oak. Trees—a feature his childhood landscape lacked—are among the most prevalent motifs in his ten books of prose and poetry, pointing toward a desire for the rootedness that might arise from a more reasoned, resilient faith than the one he grew up with. But this is not to say that he scorns what he calls the shallow-rooted “easy devotion” of his elders, for whom Christianity was as much a given as cactus or killdeer. At times, he envies it. When I asked Wiman what trees meant to him, he replied, a bit wistfully, “Peace”—a quality that no doubt defined his relatives’ pious lives more than it does his own.

Wiman’s lack of peace, professionally speaking, is something many poets would covet. Since his first book of poems, The Long Home, was published to acclaim in 1998, he has received honors for almost every new book. Between 2003 and 2013, he also served as editor of Poetry, the oldest monthly of new verse in the Anglophone world. Since he left that position, he has not only produced two poetry collections, but also become a professor at YDS, where he teaches courses including “Po-

etry and Faith,” whose popularity has spread down Prospect Street to spiritually inclined undergrads. As YDS Dean Greg Sterling put it to me in an email, Wiman is not only “one of the most significant figures in religion and literature today,” but also “a Yale treasure.”

“I think any honest, conscious person in today’s culture can’t possibly claim some sort of strong faith,” he told me. “Easy devotion” is an artifact of his childhood; in its place stands a variable faith he is committed to reproducing in language.

Yet anyone who knows Wiman’s work knows that his literary success belies decades of instability in his personal life. As an undergraduate at Washington and Lee University, Wiman disavowed his Christian faith, a process he traces to reading Nietzsche and making his first secular friends. Today, he views this change less as a loss of faith than a fanatical transfer of faith into literature.

A mentor at Washington and Lee told him that an aspiring

poet ought to travel rather than get a Master of Fine Arts degree. After college, he took the advice to heart, moving forty times in a span of fifteen years. At first, it seemed to work: “moving to a new place would really jolt me,” he said, granting him what he ironically described, in a 1998 essay called “Milton in Guatemala,” as “a store of EXPERIENCE.” (“To this day,” he wrote of Paradise Lost, “I can’t open the poem without catching some quick whiff of strong coffee, avocados, and black beans.”)

Wiman’s itinerant lifestyle and single-minded devotion to poetry strained his relationships.

The faith he had then, he told me, “was mostly faith in poetry,” allowing little room for investment in his relationships with people, let alone God. In retrospect, such smaller struggles might together seem a prelude to a single, greater struggle. In 2005, three weeks before he planned to resign from his job at Poetry and move to Tennessee with his wife, the poet Danielle Chapman, he was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer that would uproot his life and force him to face death again and again. It was his thirty-ninth birthday. Coming just a year after he and Danielle fell in love, the diagnosis awakened him, as he describes in My Bright Abyss, to “an excess of meaning for which I had no context.”

The pain he felt was a sense not of meaninglessness, but of “the world burning to be itself beyond my ruined eyes.” And 11

Photo by Gavin Guerrette so, in keeping with a theme that defines his work—love felt most acutely in loss—he returned, however improbably, to the faith he had already begun to feign in the “awkward and self-conscious” prayers he and Danielle liked to say before dinner. His unbelief began to seem like unacknowledged belief; where he had previously seen only absence, he began to see presence. God was a presence that existed not in spite of or instead of absence, but in it.

Years passed before he would give that presence a name.

Wiman’s originality as a poet and thinker lies partly in his refusal to distill his experience of faith into a linear progression with a decisive conclusion. Although Dean Sterling rightly called My Bright Abyss “the most important story of conversion since C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy,” Wiman’s is not a classic conversion story. He is confident 12

that his struggles against faith, whether precipitated by his own mind or by the state of the world, will never leave him.

“I think any honest, conscious person in today’s culture can’t possibly claim some sort of strong faith,” he told me. “Easy devotion” is an artifact of his childhood; in its place stands a variable faith he is committed to reproducing in language. In “Prologue,” the first poem in his 2020 collection Survival Is a Style, he sets himself this task, writing, “I need a space for unbelief to breathe.” Wiman has carved out that space in American poetry.

“My early poems are horrible,” Wiman told me, when I asked him how he’d grown as a poet. Compact and slightly delicate, with a soft-spoken Texan twang and blue eyes whose tiny pupils always seemed to look past me—or maybe through me?—

Wiman is funniest when he is self-deprecating, both in person and on the page. Like most poets I’ve encountered, he is naturally serious, but he is quicker than most to poke fun at that seriousness. In Survival Is a Style, he has a poem called “Ah, Ego” in which he calls the subject “my beetle,” “my cockroach,” and “moon rover roving over / the moon of me.”

Such self-scolding is likely part of his appeal to secular readers, imbuing even his most pious poems with a conspiratorial intimacy.

But Wiman wasn’t always so self-effacing. The poems of his hardscrabble youth are marred by self-seriousness that often veers into sentimentality.

In a poem from The Long Home called “Clearing,” for instance, the speaker experiences a moment of serenity in a forest, only to editorialize it with an artist’s self-con-

sciousness—“you could believe / … / a man could suddenly want his life”—and a quick closing gesture at transience (“before I walked on”).

Where the reader should exit the poem, the speaker does, cheating himself and us.

The same is true of “Poštolka,” another early poem.

Wiman’s assessment of its stance toward life in My Bright Abyss applies equally to “Clearing”: “It’s a rapture of time by someone who never quite enters it, a celebration of life by a man whose mind is tuned only to elegies.” It’s not hard to imagine how such a man could be, in Wiman’s own words, “incapable of love.”

Because love and faith, at least in Wiman’s life, are more than parallel, that deficiency meant he was also insensitive to revelation. In My Bright Abyss, he reflects that his early poems were rife with “unnamed and unnameable absences…as if I were some conquering army of insight seeing, I now see, nothing.” These poems reveal their author’s solipsism, often

by their titles alone: “Sweet Nothing”; “Being Serious”; “This Inwardness, This Ice.” And yet, as Wiman observes, many of these are devotional poems, albeit unconsciously so—though the poet denies or flees from the supernatural, the supernatural asserts

Bible is in poetry.”

Wiman’s latest and most accomplished collection, Survival Is a Style, is a distillation of the earnest dialogue with faith he began in his 2011 book Every Riven Thing.

While there are moments of revelation in the earlier book, they are embattled, almost stammered. It is not until Survival that the poet-speaker dwells comfortably in his faith’s fickleness. The opening line of the poem at the book’s physical and emotional center, “The Parable of Perfect Silence,” is astonishingly straightforward: “Today I woke and believed in nothing.” This is a sentence the younger, less religious Wiman would never have written.

The poem goes on to represent a faith Wiman described to me as “small,” “obdurate,” “vertiginous,” “volatile,” and “difficult.” Even today, his experience of God remains not constant or direct, but like, as he writes in “Good Lord the Light,” the “quick coals and crimsons / no one need see / to see” under the surface of a frozen lake. Similar paradoxes abound throughout the collection, whose “Epilogue”

“Poetry gives us a sense of both the reach of our mind and its limitations. I don’t think I would have had any feeling for God, were it not that poems kept showing me some other dimension, as if reality looked back at me, rather than me just going to the edge of reality or seeing into reality. Poetry can both enact those moments and enable them.” itself within his lines. When I asked him how this works, Wiman explained, “Poetry gives us a sense of both the reach of our mind and its limitations. I don’t think I would have had any feeling for God, were it not that poems kept showing me some other dimension, as if reality looked back at me, rather than me just going to the edge of reality or seeing into reality.

Poetry can both enact those moments and enable them.”

He added, “There’s a reason why a third of the Hebrew

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summarizes: “The more I feel the more I think / that God himself has brought me to this brink / wherein to have more faith means having less.”

It seems that Wiman’s genuine acceptance of paradox— that most Christian of assertions—is what has allowed him space for his unbelief to breathe, with increasing surety, over the past two decades.

Wiman’s poetic productivity is impressive—not only given his illness, but also given the editorial and teaching positions in which he has invested so much of himself. There was a time when he wouldn’t consider any job that took time away from his poetry unless he was truly strapped for cash; in a 2001 letter to a friend, the poet August Kleinzahler, he wrote, “I simply don’t let the idea of teaching enter my head.” The same impulse lay behind his plot to quit Poetry and Chicago for rural Tennessee. But when the diagnosis stalled that plan, he gradually warmed up to editing, especially the pleasure of reaching out to poets to accept their poems, though it required taming his aforementioned “cockroach.” “I had to get rid of my ego in that job,” he told me, “and once I figured out how to do that, I was happy.” Similarly, he began to enjoy teaching once he accepted that he taught for his students, not for himself.

And yet, while he doesn’t 14

harbor any romantic notions about his teaching feeding his poetry—he still requires “a kind of dead space” in his life to write poems, as he had last year, when he was too sick to teach—he has had several essays grow out of discussions he has shared with students in “Poetry and Faith.” He seems genuinely appreciative of his students’ insights and the personal impact his courses have on many of them.

“Poetry and Faith” can be understood as a project of sharing his intertwined literary and religious struggles with students. The assigned readings consist of poems— many of which have kept him company for decades—that might be read as religious, anti-religious, or somewhere in between. Wiman encourages students to engage personally with the material by having them keep a graded “reading journal” and recite two poems aloud over the course of the semester. Cal Barton ’25, who is taking the course now and described himself as “not religious in any disciplined way,” said he appreciated how the assigned poems encouraged him to think more deeply than he ever had about the nature of faith. He related how Wiman recited “Empathy” by A. E. Stallings on their first day of class, then asked students, who didn’t have the text in front of them, to discuss whether the poem was religious based on the words they recalled.

“He’ll nudge you,” Barton said of Wiman, later clarifying in a text message: “It’s in this way that Chris can be quietly radical (though I’m not sure he’d like the word radical): selecting readings that, if read with care, can chip at big, monumental ideas we take for granted.”

As we neared the end of our time together—Wiman had to pick up his fourteen-year-old from school—I was struck by how unrecognizable the man sitting in front of me would be to his twenty-something Guatemala-trekking self. Or, for that matter, to his boyhood self, who said his prayers and claimed to feel God’s presence all too easily in church. The form of Wiman’s forthcoming book, Zero at the Bone, reflects this personal evolution. It not only reconciles different parts of his work, collecting personal and critical essays alongside his poetry and quotes from other writers, but also extends far past the interior to address political and philosophical issues. The poet, professor, editor, and theologian in him seem symbiotic, and his ego seems to have yielded to an ever-broadening gaze. But despite such diffusion, Wiman seems more grounded than at any other time in his life.

The key to this groundedness might be another paradox: “If you have a large faith,” he said with a sly smile, “you’re not going to be able to do shit.”

Collages by Gavin Guerette

Simple Request

Dada Chitchat

Hedonist Supper 15

Quiet at Compline

Suraj Singareddy

the bells start tolling in the half hour or so before Compline begins.

We sit down and wait for a moment, hear other people shuffle in.

It still looks like there’s no one up front, just the light. But then, it begins.

“Compline fits into a larger pattern of prayer at various times a day, the last prayer, and here at Christchurch, we do that as an offering and a welcome to the city.”

And the city is here.

“ In the darkness, you can be with your friends, or you can be alone, you can be with God if you are talking to God or, or not. And that’s, and that’s up to you.”

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“It feels like I’m turning inward, but also with a bunch of other people that are turning inward.”

“And so it’s often like praying for my friends and then my friends praying for me in return.”

“It’s a thing that brings them some sort of joy or peace or moment of contemplation, whatever is working for them.”

The singing stops. We prepare to leave the quiet.

Quiet at Compline is an extended audio essay.

It can be listened to at yaledailynews.com 17

Painting courtesy of GPSS

PAST DUE: Why did it take 186 years for Reverend James W. C. Pennington to receive a Yale degree?

Tigerlily Hopson When Charles Childress and Orisade Awodola were small, their grandfather Merritt Hicks told them stories about their greatgreat-great grandfather James W.C. Pennington.

“He ran and ran and ran until his feet were raw, and he could run no more,” their grandpa narrated. “And he was a blacksmith, so his hands were aching. And he kept running for freedom, for freedom.”

“Well, what happened?” the kids asked, scared.

“Well, finally he got to a place where he had to swim across the river,” their grandpa continued, and on and on, until the kids, antsy, wanted to play.

But he made sure they heard the full story. Pennington outran slavery. Then, Pennington went to Yale.

On September 14, 2023, Reverend Pennington received his degree from Yale University, 186 years past due. The graduate had long since passed away, but his portrait stood proudly at the back of Battell Chapel. Next to it was a portrait of Reverend Alexander Crummel. The two men attended Yale Divinity School from 1834 to 1837 and

1840 to 1841, respectively, but were prevented from matriculating or graduating because they were Black. At Yale, Pennington was allowed to sit in classes as a “visitor,” but was not permitted to speak.

On stage at the ceremony, Noah Humphrey DIV ’23, who lead the campaign to get Pennington a degree, read Pennington’s words from an 1851 address, his booming voice filling the silent chapel: “I could not get a book from the library, and my name was never to appear on the catalogue. After submitting to this, will anyone tell me that I know nothing of oppression?”

Pennington had been an early pastor at the first Black church in Connecticut. Now, the congregation of Faith Congregational Church arranged a bus to take themselves to the ceremony.

Their pastor, Reverend Cleo Graham DIV ’12, stood at the podium and began to speak.

“Imagine being a runaway slave and your only possessions were wet clothes, worn shoes, a few stones in your pocket and trust in God… What if your eyes, feet, prayers, and a North Star were your only assets?” Some audi-

ence members uttered “Amen.”

She felt like she was preaching.

Tawanda Johnson-Gray sensed the spirit of her great-great-greatgreat grandfather Reverend Pennington. “Did you feel him?” she would later ask her other relatives. They answered, “Yes, I felt him too.”

After the ceremony, Noah Humphrey returned, tired, to the Omni Hotel. When the elevator opened, inside was a man who introduced himself as Charles Childress— the greatgreat-great grandson of Pennington. He thanked Humphrey for healing his family. Humphrey broke down in tears.

“I hadn’t had time to process any of this. And I still haven’t,” Humphrey said. “This was the first time that I was able to open up myself, and I was just like, ‘it was a lot,’ and he comforted me, ‘no, trust me, you did such a good job.’” As Humphrey cried, Childress began to cry too.

Reverend Pennington was a minister, writer, civic leader, orator, activist, and abolitionist. He campaigned with Fredrick Douglass against slavery. He aided the return of the Amistad captives to Sierra Leone. He wrote the 19

first textbook on African American history in 1841 and a memoir titled The Fugitive Blacksmith in 1849. He formed the Legal Rights Association in New York and successfully challenged the segregation of city streetcars. He was the first Black student to study at Yale, completing all four years non-matriculated, and later went to Heidelberg University in Germany, which awarded him an honorary doctorate degree in 1849. Why then, student and community activists ask, did it take 186 years to get Pennington a degree at Yale?

Pennington’s descendants have preserved and passed down his story for generations.

The family elders, or “griots,” are history keepers. Dr. Orisade Awodola started thinking back to the stories told by her elders in college, when she came across a pamphlet about Reverend Pennington. Wasn’t that the man who her grandpa, Merritt Hicks, had told her about as a kid?

She visited her great aunt Helen Eula Hicks Pennington Howell, who brought out an original copy of Pennington’s memoir The Fugitive Blacksmith. Howell instructed Awodola to start recording the family’s oral history. In 2001, Dr. Awodola, by then a journalist and ancestral healing practitioner, published the stories of her elders in a book titled Ancestral and Racial Healing: An Umbilical Crisis.

“It started with me in 1984. There was no ancestry. com, none of that. My aunt made me sit down at her table on her stationary, and write

Why then, student and community activists ask, did it take 186 years to get Pennington a degree at Yale? these things in pencil,” Awodola said.

At the Yale Divinity School, activism to honor Pennington began in 2014, when

Long” project. At the time, the question was not yet if Pennington should receive a degree, but instead if he had attended Yale at all— he was never documented in any official Yale records. It was through her research that Reverend Pennington’s attendance at Yale was established.

By the fall of 2015, campus was abuzz with conversation about Pennington. In the spring of 2016, Allman circulated a petition calling on the Yale Corporation to grant him a degree. The petition gained 509 signatures— to no avail. In October, after continued student activism, YDS Dean Greg Sterling named a classroom and scholarship after Pennington.

Dr. Elijah Heyward III DIV ’07 served as an alumnus on a committee to commission an oil painting of Pennington in 2018. When he was a student, he had studied the pictures of past graduating classes on the Divinity School walls.

“I would look for the faces that looked like mine, so you might imagine, finding out that James Pennington existed was a remarkable revelation that transformed my view of myself in the larger landscape of the institution,” he said.

When Humphrey came to the Divinity School in 2020, he saw the painting of Pennington. He was curious. When he discovered Pennington had never received a

“I would look for the faces that looked like mine, so you might imagine, finding out that James Pennington existed was a remarkable revelation that transformed my view of myself in the larger landscape of the institution.”

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Vice President of the Black Seminarians Lecia Allman DIV ’16 started cataloging Black alumni as part of Dr. Reverend Yolanda Smith’s “Been in the Storm So

degree, he was shocked. He started sending out emails, inquiring why this was the case.

On October 11, 2021, Humphrey received an email from Associate Vice President for Institutional Affairs Martha Schall: the Yale Corporation Committee on Honorary Degrees “would not be open to considering” Pennington for a nomination. The reason? They did not grant posthumous degrees.

Humphrey pointed to Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who

Graham felt an affinity with Pennington. Her own ancestors had been enslaved.

She was interested in history and genealogy, and had visited the plantation where her family was enslaved in South Carolina. Under the hot sun, she had tried to pick cotton. She felt like she could picture herself with Pennington, taking off at age 19, sleeping under trees while snakes crawled nearby.

“And then to have the nerve to end up at Yale University?” Graham said with awe.

passed away before receiving his degree.

Schall replied that the “only exceptions” were the “sad circumstances” in which a person “died between the acceptance of the invitation and the Commencement date.”

The response “lit a fire” in Humphrey. He was going to find a way to get Pennington a degree. “I knew I needed to be the force,” he said.

Around the same time, Reverend Graham—who joined Faith Congregational Church as pastor in 2020, drawn to its history and connection with Pennington—started reaching out to Yale administrators regarding the degree. “We don’t give degrees to dead people. That was kind of the cryptic message I was hearing. And it disturbed me.

I couldn’t stop there,” Graham said.

Graham grew up in New Haven, and saw Yale as the “cream of the crop.” It was like a “Wizard of Oz kind of place, like this is the castle,” she said.

In February 2022, she was connected with Humphrey, and the two bonded. “Keep up the great work!” Reverend Graham wrote in one email to Humphrey, “You’re making good noise.”

A few blocks away from Yale’s campus, the congregation of Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church, where Pennington was the first Black pastor, was invested in the effort too.

Reverend Dr. Frederick “Jerry” Streets DIV ’75—their senior pastor and first Black chaplain at Yale—had become a mentor to Humphrey. In worship on Sundays, he would announce any updates on the degree campaign to the congregation.

The fire that had been lit inside Humphrey roared. He began to organize. Over the next two years, he wrote op-eds for the Yale Daily News, messaged and met with administrators, circulated a petition signed by 1,224 people, conducted protests during events, and worked with student groups like the Black Men’s Union and the Black Seminarians.

“I was considered a black sheep,” Humphrey said.

“I was fighting entities that could easily push me away from jobs, push me away from certain opportunities.”

It was in January 2023 that Humphrey formed the Pennington Legacy Group and reached out to the Graduate and Professional School Senate and the Yale College Council.

Then-president of the GPSS, Dr. Nic Fisk GRD ’23, was frustrated that the administration seemed to not “even seriously consider” the calls made by Humphrey.

Fisk started studying the Yale Corporation bylaws, which prevented posthumous honorary degrees, and meeting with

She felt like she could picture herself with Pennington, taking off at age 19, sleeping under trees while snakes crawled nearby.

“And then to have the nerve to end up at Yale University?” Graham said with awe.

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administrators.

“There was a sense that people thought this would be a good thing to do, but it didn’t seem like anyone had the stomach to push against the specific route of doing an honorary degree proper, or that they just flat out didn’t think it was going to work, so it wasn’t worth their time,” Fisk said.

On February 23, the GPSS unanimously passed a proposal requesting Yale University retroactively grant Pennington a Bachelor of Arts or Master of Divinity degree, or an honorary degree, calling on the Corporation to amend their bylaws. For its own part, the GPSS formally inducted Pennington as an alumni member of the Senate, and commissioned a portrait of him to be displayed in Gryphon’s Pub. On March 1, the proposal was sent out to the Yale Corporation.

On March 29, President Peter Salovey attended the annual GPSS Senate meeting.

According to Fisk, Salovey said an honorary degree would not be granted to Pennington.

Hearing this, Humphrey addressed the senate.

“When are we going to be the Lux et Veritas? When are we going to be the truth and the light?”

Humphrey asked as President Salovey looked upon him.

“When I leave here I expect that degree, in some type of way,

some type of form, because it means something to me. And if it doesn’t mean something to you? That one, the first Black,

“When are we going to be the Lux et Veritas?

When are we going to be the truth and the light?” student at Yale, has still not received his degree. When we preach education is a path, education is the truth?”

On April 3, YCC leadership sent an email to President Salovey and Vice President Schall supporting the GPSS

tive, and something seemed to switch.

Three days later, on April 24, President Salovey announced that the Board of Trustees had voted to confer the M.A. Privatim degree—awarded in the nineteenth century to individuals unable to complete their studies due to special circumstances— on both Reverend Pennington and Reverend Crummel.

Although activism to this point had focused on Pennington, research dating back to Lecia Allman’s project in 2014 uncovered Reverend Alexander Crummel, too. He was a priest, scholar, founder of the American Negro Academy, and another Black student who attended YDS but did not receive a degree.

Proactively, and to students’ satisfaction, Crummel was awarded a degree alongside Pennington.

Asked why it had taken until now for the degrees to be granted, President Salovey wrote in an email: “The board of trust-

“Walking into such an extravagant, opulent space filled with extremely educated, influential people being served by the very people they are claiming to celebrate, it just felt very performative,” Makda Assefa ’26 said.

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proposal. On April 21, the GPSS met with the Board of Trustees for their annual meeting. One of their primary topics was granting Pennington a degree. Fisk said that the trustee they spoke with, Carlos Moreno, was recep-

ees’s decision benefited from the research conducted by the Yale and Slavery Working Group. We do not know of university records that mention the Rev. Penning-

ton and the Rev. Crummell, but the working group was able to bring together published works and other sources that document their studies at Yale.”

For all those who had been working on these efforts for

weeks, months, and years, the announcement was both a surprise and a great relief.

When the news reached Reverend Graham, she felt like she could finally take “a deep breath, and say hallelujah, this was done, thank you God.” The members of Faith Congregational Church and Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church rejoiced.

The day was jubilant.

What made it real for Johnson-Gray was when she saw Pennington’s name on his degree at the ceremony. “It makes me emotional,” she says, choking back tears. “Because he didn’t get to experience that. And, there’s no reason why he should not have been able to.”

At the reception in Schwartzman Center, after the ceremony, the servers were almost all people of color.

Those asked said they were New Haven or West Haven students in high school or college, and worked part-time at Yale. They wore tight black pants, white shirts, black ties, carried black trays, and were for the most part silent.

One server, a first year at the University of New Haven, said she would have liked to see the honorary ceremony, but, at the time, was setting up for the reception.

“Walking into such an

extravagant, opulent space filled with extremely educated, influential people being served by the very people they are claiming to celebrate, it just felt very performative,” Makda Assefa ’26 said.

“It shows that New Haven is a workforce for Yale,” Humphrey said.

Salovey, in an email, said Yale Hospitality has an “initiative to hire residents of New Haven, which is a diverse city.”

Assefa, who checked coats at the reception, said that all of the Yale students who also worked

AfAm House staffers first. She said staffers were told the nature of the event before signing up.

The ceremony “felt like a Yale event, not a New Haven event,” Reverend Jerry Streets said.

Beyond the churches, according to students involved in the planning process, there wasn’t extended outreach inviting the New Haven community to attend.

Johnson-Gray said there had always been a “gap” between her family and the Yale community. “We always knew he

Johnson-Gray said there had always been a “gap” between her family and the Yale community. “We always knew he went to Yale, but we never heard he graduated from Yale,” she said.

After the reception, Johnson-Gray went to The Yale Bookstore. “Because he couldn’t,” she said. the event were Black. She was reached out to individually, but most students were hired through the Afro-American Cultural Center. She said she wasn’t told beforehand what the event was, but wished she had known because she would have wanted to attend the honorary ceremony.

Director of the AfAm House Timeica E. Bethel-Macaire ’11 said a colleague from President Salovey’s office contacted her wanting to offer the employment opportunity to

went to Yale, but we never heard he graduated from Yale,” she said.

After the reception, Johnson-Gray went to The Yale Bookstore.

“Because he couldn’t,” she said. She bought pins and mugs and shirts and hats

and notebooks and pennants and a license plate and a little silver Yale pendant. This, she now wears every day. It reads: “Lux et Veritas.”

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En Tránsito Reese Jacobs Neal

In the Spring of 2023, I went to Spain to study architecture of the global Jewish Diaspora, particularly the diasporic population residing in regions where Spanish and/or Latin American Catholicism is the dominant culture. I am interested in exploring how historically Jewish architecture both withstood and adapted to the dominance of other religions–such as la Sinagoga de Santa María la Blanca in Toledo, which has been appropriated as a place of worship by all Abrahamic religions throughout its lifespan—and in how the architectural narratives of a largely exiled population have been preserved and presented in modern Spain.

Mermaids Worship the Fire Sophia Ramirez

The mermaid’s back is killing her.

She wishes she’d been whittled into a less awkward posture—sitting, standing even, not bending belly-up across the fireplace. No breaks for a pretty maple etching, a body stretching over the mantle of polished acorns, curling ivy. Her arms ache from being held above her head for so long, poised in mid-dive.

Her joints creak in the winter. Her armpits itch.

Maybe if the rest of the room wasn’t so goddamn boring, she could bear it. Her fireplace is the only piece of decor worth looking at—no eye candy for the eye candy, just two mismatched armchairs, rug here, rug there, dead plant. There’s a grandfather clock out in the hallway—she tries talking to it every hour or so.

Another day, huh? She’ll say.

Dong, dong, dong, it’ll respond.

Most days, she just holds her breath and waits for the pain to pass. Hums songs to herself. Counts floorboards.

But today, today is a gorgeous day. Someone kneels over the hearth. If she strains her eyes down, she can see the logs breaking, burning. Yes, yes, she can feel the flames rising as the fire, the fire, crackles below her.

A deep sigh presses against her sealed lips while she looks on. They’re ugly pieces of oak, the logs—their bark isn’t even stripped, pathetic, really, termite food. But the fire can’t get enough of them. Splinters soften to black as the blaze licks them up, up, up. The timber turns to gold, and she witnesses the alchemy: from

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those cheap chop-ups, so many embers start to rise. There’s nothing more beautiful than this, she knows, these thousand sparks, these fireflies. Even stars stand still, but the embers pirouette in the air, weightless, twirling to music she can’t hear, a dance she doesn’t know.

Another shot of pain snaps her back, stabs her in the side. She can’t even wince. She wants to throw out her stiff spine, her rigid tail, its neat rows of fingernail notches for fish scales. She wants to shout—no, she wants to dance—no, she wants to be charred, burned, she wants to be splin d tered and sparked in the darkness, set alight, anew, away, but she’s stuck here with the acorns and the ivy and the man, that shriveled bag of a man, always asleep and snoring in front of her. He’s there now, for God’s sake. She glares at him, melting into his armchair, dozing into his double neck, turkey stuffing in a sweaty bathrobe, dead bird bloating in an oven— She hears jangling. The old man’s old dog shakes its way into the living room, hauling in a stick twice its size, more like a tree limb, one that fought the fall. It drags the branch over to the armchair, but the man can’t play, turkey that he is, out cold. Only the mermaid sees it, that stick between its teeth, that limb, that lighter. Thorns scratch

Illustration by Anna Chamberlin her as she tries to pull an arm out of the polished vines and reach out. Come closer, come here. The dog waddles over to the fireplace, the stick dragging behind it. Put a match to me. Down below, she hears a log crumble, and it sends another tumbling down to the edge of the hearth, sizzling. The dog brings the stick closer. The mermaid’s eyes start glinting bright.

Angela Huo

Illustration by Thisbe Wu

The Magician and the Fool

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Cal Barton

When I ask the cashiers at Lambert Books—one of the oldest esoteric bookstores in London—if I might interview one of the store’s tarot readers, the reaction is not warm. The two girls look at me like I’m Death himself, or some British equivalent of the IRS. They hand me a glossy purple pamphlet with headshots and bios and size 7 font. Most psychics go for a head-tilt-and-inquisitivesquint look. But the Wednesday reader, at the top of the flip side, smiles. He looks to be in his seventies. He has tiny eyes and giant glasses and the generally innocent appearance of a cartoon bug. His name is Clark Corbin.* Lambert Books smells exactly like your grandmother’s couch. The carpet is a nauseating green, patterned with the Lambert logo: Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom and magic, writing on a tablet with a stick. There are books on astrology, on secret societies, on the paranormal. There’s Carl Jung’s Collected Works and Aristotle’s Poetics and Vishen Lakhiani’s The Buddha and the Badass.

I am waiting to meet Clark and remembering our phone call. His British accent was hushed, as though he were afraid of waking some great beast. “Yes, yes, well I’d be perfectly happy to talk with you,” Clark told me, “and I won’t charge you just for speaking with me, of course.” He said I could come by the shop any Wednesday.

And here he is now; the front door chimes to welcome him. A crook cane hangs on his forearm. He wears a blue button-down and pleated pants. He greets the girls at the desk with a nod. I shake his hand. He has to go put something downstairs but will be right back. As he shuffles away, I inspect some volcanic rocks from Madagascar that promise to deflect negativity, enrich my life force, and replenish my sexual vitality.

Clark returns and invites me to sit in the cramped window nook. This is where the readings happen. There’s a circular table, two chairs, and a curtain (well, it’s more like a veil: see-through and insubstantial). From a black fanny pack, Clark withdraws a canvas pouch. His fingers pry open the pouch’s mouth. Cards are born. Their centers are colorful, their edges weathered.

“So remind me, what exactly is your assignment?”

Clark asks, mindlessly shuffling his cards. I watch them dance between his hands as I explain my task: write about someone with an interesting job. He chuckles. I place a notepad in my lap.

“What was your first encounter with tarot?” I ask.

“I grew up in London in the 50s and 60s in what you might call an ‘alternative household,’ so I was aware of the Tarot through my parents but didn’t know much about it. I didn’t really get into it until 1969 or 1970, when an American opium dealer in a

café in Istanbul showed me the cards and taught me to read the Tarot.”

So, a few thoughts pop up while Clark is talking: 1. What a logline! I can see the scene so clearly: some fedora’d American peels off his sunglasses, takes a puff from his pipe, and begins to teach a scrawny young Clark (as Turkish plates clatter in the background) about the 22 named cards that make up the Major Arcana.

2. Should I stop saying “tarot”? To those in the know, I’m picking up, it’s “the Tarot.”

3. This nook is not private at all. There’s the veil, but Clark and I are fully audible to everyone in the shop. This must be deliberate. The bookstore wants potential customers to listen in.

“I’ve been reading the Tarot for over fifty years now,” Clark is saying, “and about twelve years ago I started doing the Wednesday readings here. The old owner was a friend of mine and came to me saying ‘I need your help!

I’ve got all these unreliable psychics! They’re always saying something unforeseen has happened and they can’t come in to work!’ Ha ha ha!” (Clark is the only person I’ve met who laughs exactly like ha ha ha.)

I ask what he likes about doing readings. Clark grins. “You mean, apart from the money?”

I smile until I realize he isn’t joking. Clark shrugs, comes up with a better answer.

* For privacy, “Clark Corbin” and “Lambert Books” are pseudonyms.

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“It fits my profile,” he says.

Before I can ask him to clarify, Clark, watching someone come through the door, suddenly says, slowly and deliberately: “Now I am going to charge you a small fee for talking with me.”

I study him. He studies me. Clark says a lot of things that sound like they might be jokes, but aren’t. I’m starting to think Clark Corbin does not like me.

“Here’s what you’re going to do, Cal. In a moment you are going to go out that door and take a diagonal down Cecil Court Road. You will turn a corner. There’s a Tesco. You are going to buy one liter of full-fat milk and bring it back here. We’ve run out downstairs. Surely a young university student like you can afford it.”

Our stare-off continues.

I can tell that Clark is hazing me and enjoying it. I can tell that Clark can tell that I can tell that Clark is a performer and really does read the Tarot for the money. Milk is a small price to pay for a good story. “I think I can do that for you,” I say.

The Fool is the first card in the Major Arcana. In a classic 78-card Rider-Waite Tarot—by far the most popular deck worldwide—The Fool is a young man in jester’s garb.

His face is turned to a yellow sky, his arms spread wide in a dance with the world. Icy mountains loom in the background. He is about to step off 30

the edge of a cliff. When The Fool appears in a spread, the card symbolizes innocence; the confidence of youth; the blind leap of faith we must take before embarking on a journey.

I am The Fool. I walk to Tesco. I pay £1.30 for a septuagenarian’s liter of full-fat milk.

I am The Fool. I walk to Tesco.

Clark is giving a reading to a girl in a red dress. Every tarot reading begins with a question. This girl wants to know about her romantic future.

In the next few months, Clark sees a strong possibility of a relationship. This boy she recently broke up with, is he less than fifty? What does he do?

Something with his hands, by chance? (Clark is only checking because of the cards, of course.)

Who broke up with whom?

Two cards are turned over: the girl can go here, or she can go here. A woman, Clark says, communicates with very subtle signals. Clark’s wife, an artist, often says to him, ‘How could you not see such-andsuch!’ The girl must communicate with the boy on his level.

Now Clark is asking the girl in the red dress to stick out her tongue. “Eh, not bad,” Clark declares. Eating at regular times will stabilize the girl’s emotions. A tip from Clark’s other job, the holistic therapy practice he runs in Highgate: take a cup of water (hot water

in cold weather, cold in hot weather) and mix in a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar.

Drink and eat two almonds.

Stress will be gone like that!

(Clark snaps in the girl’s face for effect.) Clark’s wife was once thrashing about in the kitchen, and Clark gave her this magic concoction and she was cured of all ills.

One final card: The Knight of Discs. The girl must take charge. No point in sitting around. She doesn’t need to learn skills; she already has skills! She should get back into drawing. She should be carrying her sketchpad whenever possible so she can confidently call herself an Artist. She should come back for another reading in eight months.

A half-hour of this counsel costs £40.

“So what were you doing in Istanbul?” I ask Clark.

“Oh, I was young and stupid. Not unlike yourself.”

“You said this was 1970?”

“It must have been 1970, because in 1969 I was living on the streets and wouldn’t have had money for a café.”

“You were living on the streets here in London?”

“No, I was in Istanbul.

Aren’t you paying attention!”

“How did you meet this American opium dealer?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I was in that world.”

(I take this to mean: the opium world.)

The Three Qualities of

a Good Reader of the Tarot, according to Clark Corbin: “First, you have to talk a good game, or ‘blag,’ as we say here in the U.K. Second, you have to know the cards. And third, you have to be able to put the cards and the person together. Get a sense for their attitude toward life.”

“Does a reader need any psychic powers?” I ask.

“Ha. No, it’s just about reading the cards. There’s something called ‘cold reading,’ where some mystics can read tiny physical microgestures.

But see, I’m nearly blind as a bat!” Clark takes off his glasses; his eyes undergo a kaleidoscopic shift in shape and size. “So, I can’t read microgestures.”

Clark uses the Crowley-Thoth deck. The illustrations were drawn by one Lady Freida Harris according to instructions from Alestair Crowley. Legend has it that Crowley once cast a spell to make all the books in Lambert disappear. (He later, very kindly, made them reappear.)

“There are all kinds of decks these days,” Clark laments.

“There’s Happy Children in the Garden Tarot, and there’s Vampires at Midnight Tarot, and all that nonsense.”

I ask Clark what good tarot decks have in common.

Clark’s reply: “How much do you know about Plato?”

“Not much,” I admit. “I know The Cave.”

“Eh, well, that’s not nothing, I guess.” Clark feigns displeasure, though he’s clearly

happy to know more than me.

“Do you know what an archetype is?”

I offer a literary definition: “An archetype is a recognizable stock character that repeats across various stories.”

“Nope. Sorry. Wrong!

Fail!”

“What is an archetype, then?”

“Archetypes are patterns that come from the divine level,” Clark explains. He says something about every table on Earth being based on the divine concept of a table. He throws in the phrase “primordial constellation.” Good tarot cards recall archetypes. Bad tarot cards are just pictures.

Humans will use anything for divination.

“Tarot began in Northern Italy in the 1400s,” Clark claims. “I’ve found a serious pamphlet from 1480 that offers proof. Then the Church made the practice vanish for a hundred years.”

Clark thinks people often botch tarot history. “Some people say the Tarot began in Egypt, but that’s total crap from when Egypt was the hot mystical thing. It didn’t come from Egypt. And some people say that at the beginning the Tarot wasn’t used for divination—bullshit! Not used for divination, that’s complete nonsense.”

Clark leans forward.

“Humans will use anything for divination,” he says. “Cards, tea leaves, coffee grounds, entrails, the flight of birds—it doesn’t matter. Do you think we would have survived this long if we couldn’t sniff the wind, couldn’t see just a few steps ahead? We’ll use anything for divination.”

The card after The Fool is The Magician. The Rider-Waite deck shows a man in a red cape with an infinity symbol above his head.

Clark’s Crowley deck shows a yellow entity floating in a prism of criss-crossing lines.

In both, The Magician has his tools nearby: a sword, a cup, a disc thing with a star on it.

When The Magician appears in a spread, it symbolizes the talents and resources at one’s disposal, urging one to tap into their fullest potential.

I’m thinking of designing my own tarot cards. The Fool will be a student with a notepad and bookbag, of course. The Magician will be an old man by a window, shuffling cards. I’ll include some reminder of the man’s longgone homeless days—maybe a bindle in the bottom corner.

The Magician will be grinning like he’s getting away with a crime. There will be a glass of cold milk on his table.

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Harper Love On the Brink of Pure Consciousness “Going to sleep so closely resembles the way I now must go toward my freedom. Handing myself over to what I don’t understand would be like placing myself at the edge of nothing. It will be just like going, and like a blind woman lost in a field.”

—Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H. Suppose you have a chair. Suppose that, whenever you sit in this chair, you experience uncharted levels of rest. You find an inner peace that extends into all areas of your life: your anxiety subsides, your muscles loosen, your relationship difficulties fade, your concentration sharpens. Picture a chair that assures you that, despite the chaos of the outside world, inside you lies an untouchable ball of purity. Picture a chair with all but magical powers.

Wouldn’t you sit in it?

For Gail and Richard Dalby, the directors and principal instructors at the Transcendental Meditation Center at New Haven, this chair exists. Or, rather, that is the analogy that Richard frequently employs at Transcendental Meditation (TM) introductory meetings.

“Just think of it this way: we’re giving you a technique where every chair you sit in could be that chair,” he explains to his attendees, usually over Zoom meetings on Mondays and Wednesdays. “You don’t have to carry it around with you, you don’t have to haul it when you move.

Wherever you are, wherever you can sit with your eyes closed, you are in that chair.”

I cannot afford the chair— even with a student discount, the four-session Transcendental Meditation course costs 420 dollars. I ask if there are any other options. Maybe

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I could start off with just one class?

Gail says no. I never attend the full course, though I do try to meditate once on my own, in my room, following instructions from an article on the internet. But it doesn’t work.

It just feels like sitting. So I spend a month wondering to myself what the secret is. I watch a Youtube video called “David Lynch explains Transcendental Meditation.” Lynch says that, since tasting “the sweetest nectar of life” that is pure consciousness, his negativity has receded. Had I bought the course, would I have felt the same way? Would I have understood all that Richard and Gail say about clarity and bliss?

Gail and Richard Dalby are two of more than 40,000 certified Transcendental Meditation instructors in the world who—after having completed a residential course, the TM-Sidhi program in advanced techniques, and an in-residence Teacher Training Course that lasts several months—are officially certified to teach pure consciousness for a living. There are 180 Transcendental Meditation centers in the United States. All are branches of the Maharishi Foundation USA, a nonprofit organization named after its founder, Maharishi Yogi.

His given name was Mahesh Prasad Varma; his chosen name, Maharishi, is Hindi for “great seer.” The

website of The Global Country of World Peace remembers him as a “a cosmic figure caring for the well-being of all mankind.” David Lynch dedicated Catching the Big Fish “To His Holiness.”

At the introductory zoom meeting, a picture of Maharishi sits at the top left corner of Gail’s screen background. She asks us all to introduce ourselves and talk a little about why we’re here. A woman with four children and six grandchildren seeks refuge from her stressful life. She says that she wants to take care of her mind as well as her body; she’s concerned about her heart problems. One man has trouble thinking straight at work.

Another says he’s just interested in “spiritual stuff.” He’s working towards getting a real estate license but is ultimately interested in film—he’s writing a script. “Hopefully,” he says, “something will come of it.” I say that I’m here for David Lynch. Gail tells all of us that we have come to the right place.

Gail also says, “Let’s just dive right in,” which later proves to be a double-entendre. Transcendental Meditation, she explains, is an effortless technique that brings the mind to increasingly subtle levels of awareness. It involves sitting comfortably in a chair for 20 minutes each day and repeating a mantra without meaning attached to it.

That, they emphasize to us, is really all there is to it.

But if the technique is simple, it still requires highly precise instruction. Richard likens Transcendental Meditation to diving. Diving, with the correct angle, is completely effortless: gravity is what pulls your body into the water. Transcendental Meditation is just the same: under the right conditions, your mind gravitates towards what is charming and pleasant. I suppose that under the wrong conditions you may as well just be sitting on a regular chair: “If you learn meditation from anyone who’s not a certified TM teacher,” the TM website emphasizes, “you’re not learning the authentic technique.”

I learn through a New York Times article that the first session of a Transcendental Meditation course goes like this: you walk into a quiet room, you meet a qualified professional, and that qualified professional assigns a mantra, in Sanskrit, that is specific to you. They urge you not to tell anyone else your personal mantra, in order to preserve its purity.

Throughout the introductory session, Richard and Gail tell us more about mantras.

Meditators reach a state of pure consciousness, they explain, by listening to the sound rather than the meaning of a mantra.

Unlike meaning, sound value is flexible, since “you can experience it quietly, loudly, quickly, on different melodies,” as Richard puts it. He thinks of a mantra as the most comfortable vehicle one could have—“it’s like a Rolls Royce.” Instead of driving you to work, it transports you to the innermost location of your soul.

Gail and Richard explain

pure consciousness in a multitude of ways, which makes me think that it is the type of thing you might just have to experience for yourself. Gail calls it “that field of intelligence which underlies, controls, and constructs everything in the physical universe, including us.” She adds that it is “more of our identity than this is,” this meaning our physical self. Richard says that it is a type of awareness that is even deeper than philosophical thinking. Gail agrees: “meaning is stagnant.”

Later, when I ask again, they call pure consciousness “our full potential.”

“But you don’t have to believe any of what we are saying,” Richard says at the end of the meeting—he assures us that the results will speak for themselves.

In addition to managing the TM center at New Haven, Gail and Richard are national leaders of TM retreats. They have led over 600 retreats over the past 40 years, they tell me, with groups ranging from six to 420 people. The weekend before our interview they held a retreat at a Catholic facility called Our Lady of Calvary in Farmington, Connecticut. For seven years they had a house of their own, a 30-room mansion in Lancaster, Massachusetts. “It was great fun,” Gail says.

Now they’re looking to build a new bedroom retreat facility in Hamden. They have already figured out the permits, the zoning, and the design—all that’s left is to raise the money. The layout is based on Vedic architectural principles that, as Gail puts it, “take into account a myriad of things.” The site of the house must have the correct slope and

proximity to water. The house must be aligned with cardinal directions, and rooms should be placed according to the circulation of the sun. If a home is built correctly, these principles suggest, its inhabitants will enjoy prosperity both in their minds and their bodies. Gail adds that they “take a stand against electromagnetic toxicity,” so their home will not have Wi-Fi. “It’s a glorious gift to be able to build a building according to these principles,” Gail says.

“And to have our retreats in a building like this would be heaven on earth.”

Gail and Richard believe that there is nothing out there quite like Transcendental Meditation. In fact, they distinguish between not two but three main types of meditation: concentration, mindfulness, and TM. What they do merits its own category.

Other practices, Gail thinks, are too “surface-y.” I ask her if she has ever tried another kind of meditation. She says no.

A week later I speak with Milan Nikolic, a 47-yearold software engineer who has been practicing Zen meditation for about 20 years. He is a resident at the First Zen Institute of America, where he sometimes helps with basic meditation instruction. In meditating he has experienced—just as do many practitioners of TM—a kind of happiness that transcends his material conditions or his emotional tendencies. He has found, as he puts it, “a sense of inner freedom.”

Zen meditation, Milan tells me, “puts a real premium on bringing the mind to a stop and seeing what’s there. Kind of turning the consciousness inward

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and not projecting a sound or thought or visualization, but just the mind itself, which is Buddha.”

I wonder if this state is similar to pure consciousness. Milan believes that Zen meditation “guides us back to our original mind, our true nature, and the essence of who we are.” When I asked Richard about mantras, he said something very similar: they “allow the mind to follow its own nature.”

But Zen meditation, Milan thinks, operates on a fundamentally different philosophy than the one that Gail and Richard subscribe to. He tells me that Zen Buddhism emphasizes the importance of finding answers to life’s important questions on your own in order for those answers to be meaningful. A teacher cannot give those answers to you even if they know them themselves. TM, Milan feels, is different: “TM is saying: I know a secret and you don’t. Give me money and I’ll tell you.” He sees their approach to mantras as proprietary. “It’s like your own special formula, your own special secret sauce, and, you know, you pay for that.”

Still, if Transcendental Meditation often has a consumeristic, transactional undercurrent, the benefits of the practice

are not necessarily lessened by that fact. I ask Sumi Kimi, the Buddhist chaplain at Yale, if she sees a problem with meditation often being marketed as a selfhelp product, and she says no.

“I have not found a single case of someone becoming interest-

to be released from the grip of our self-centeredness,” she says.

Whether it be through prayer, meditation, or pilgrimage, Sumi reasons, every robust religion offers a path towards transcendence.

Both Sumi and Milan tell me that TM is a synthesis of other ancient practices.

Transcendental Meditation practitioners “have tried to create an optimal system,” Milan says, “by taking things that work from various traditions and crafting them in a way that’s more palatable to a Western audience.”

Sumi notes that there is a long tradition of Hindu Yogic practices where the sounds of Sanskrit invoke different vibrational levels, or different kinds of attainments. A book I come across in my research, The Transcendental Meditation Movement, describes TM as “an obscure form of Neo-Hinduism.”

When I ask Gail about Transcendental Meditation’s relation to Hinduism, she is already shaking her head. “We don’t ascribe to anything particularly Hindu,” she replies. “As a matter of fact, Transcendental Meditation allows every single person of any religion whatsoever to

Rather, the experience of pure consciousness proves to many people that fulfillment does not have to be arduously fought and searched for. If there really is a cosmic order to the world, then it makes sense that every person should take part in it. Gail’s Kingdom of Heaven, which encompasses all, exists within the bounds of your own soul.

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ed in meditation for superficial reasons,” Sumi says. “It is always coming from a place of trying to heal pain or address something that is bothering them. Usually from a place of suffering.”

Sumi adds that she considers no form of meditation to be superior to others. She has practiced both Zen and Vipassana meditation, and finds both rewarding. She extends that sentiment to religion. “They’re all at a basic level aimed at helping us

fulfill the goals and tenets of that religion.” Gail, like Sumi, believes all religions to share the same purpose: to, as Gail sees it, “elevate ourselves as human beings.”

Transcendental Meditation serves that purpose. In evoking a state of pure consciousness, this simple and secular technique introduces meditators to their inner self.

Gail tells me about a time she went to a Bible class and experienced a sudden moment of spiritual clarity. She had realized that Transcendental Meditation is essential to understanding the Catholic scriptures she follows. “And I’m looking around the room thinking—no one here is getting this. Nobody in this room is understanding the true meaning of what he is saying.”

That is, when Christ declared that “the Kingdom of Heaven lies within,” Gail believes that the kingdom he was referring to was pure consciousness.

After all, pure consciousness is nothing if not the deepest level of bliss within each person. Gail adds to her interpretation: “that means that fulfillment of all desires comes from developing the inner self,” she proclaims, eyes wide. “And that’s precisely what TM has done.”

Gail is not the only person who has found that TM has put into practice what she has previously only known in theory.

She has heard people from other faiths, such as Judaism and the Baptist denomination of Christianity, report experiences like hers. Bill Wilson, Co-Founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, is reported to have said to his instructor that “I didn’t fully understand the 11th step until I started TM.” The 11th step of AA—to improve conscious contact with a power

greater than ourselves through prayer and meditation—is often the most confounding for those in recovery. Bill must have felt that pure consciousness, in some sense, brought him closer to God than he had ever been before.

Accounts like his suggest that Transcendental Meditation does not merely improve relaxation, health, or quality of life.

Rather, the experience of pure consciousness proves to many people that fulfillment does not have to be arduously fought and searched for. If there really is a cosmic order to the world, then it makes sense that every person should take part in it.

Gail’s Kingdom of Heaven, which encompasses all, exists within the bounds of your own soul.

I figure that, regardless of your religious affiliation, that must be an incredibly powerful message to hear.

Gail hopes that my article will inspire Yale to cover the price of Transcendental Meditation for all its students—especially, she emphasizes, since our student body produces future presidents and doctors. She says that she has met before with the head of the pulmonary department at Yale, to convince Yale to “get on this road,” but they did not listen. “That’s to Yale’s grave detriment,” Gail tells me. “And you can quote me on that.” Yale students are the most stressed people she has ever worked with. The pressure we are under has turned us into “walking zombies.” We are, as she sees it, caught at the surface of things and in desperate need of transcendence. Gail feels that humanity’s greatest tribulations may be linked to a disconnect from the self, and Yale students are no ex-

ception. “How are they supposed to learn,” she asks, “if they don’t know who they are?”

I ask Gail what she thinks the world would look like if everyone practiced TM. Gail says that there would be “no cruelty, no poverty, no disease—or way less disease.” She pauses here to think. “Certainly no wars, certainly no environmental pollution, because when one is connected to the environment they understand that it is nothing other than yourself. Maharishi would call it Heaven on Earth.”

Gail’s model for collective bliss, I notice, does not require any work, cooperation, or compromise. She likens peaceful individuals to green trees. Just as a collection of green trees makes up a green forest, a collection of peaceful individuals makes up a peaceful community.

If every Yale student practiced Transcendental Meditation, the university would prosper. If every person in the whole world achieved inner peace, world peace would result as if by some sort of additive law.

The togetherness Gail envisions relies on a concept of universal human nature. Each of us can be broken down to the same bare component: pure consciousness. Once you reach into this essential state of being, you ascend to collective understanding. At that point, unity is effortless–effortless, that is, after you have paid the course fee.

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Our Rituals Were Not Hudson Warm I. Your Room is a River & along the red riverbed I find myself & you, resting. The day’s toils flock from us, little doves.

(weaving, leaving)

In this sacred palace I meet you each night; you call it your darkened dorm room.

This flesh-on-flesh rhythm becomes routine, the flowers sprout like wishes, one touch & they quiver.

(white roses, blood-red stains)

Amendment: it was once, but my mind reels the scene in a routine. Falling, unfolding, opening, unspooling, softening.

In each quotidian moment you descend to me, haunting my body with the memory. I don’t know whether it happened, or which parts.

All I know is the world moves on & I do not & in October I still inhabit July but not its sun, its lint & limbs & latex & lying there, I imagine a scream so loud the river-room shakes & plunges into a story I can never wholly tell.

But then: the lake deltas like two legs yielding to you—I tremble but can’t speak, & so we dance. (twin cherubs, we’re spinning round rising, falling)

II. Baptism Cover me in hands, gray sheets, maybe just darkness.

Let me into your wrought-iron ribs; I want to live inside them.

I asked to be submerged but your water was not safe. The blood & the burial & the wine & our rituals were not divine.

I read We Are Seven, Wordsworth 36

& began to cry for that child. Wrap your limp fingers around my neck; squeeze until you take one more thing from me: life.

But who can I blame when I lay there willingly, my yielding flesh to be maimed.

III. Eden Wordsworth, I love you for making natural things your religion. But what if I told you my flowers line the Styx: petals charred, stalks strangled?

Your garden may hug you back until you tear stems & they bleed, they bleed— pale-throated Narcissus blooms that echo you Wordsworth, you profess your love to the lake in which she drowned.

Do you remember the day in the garden?

(Play-ground, prom night, pine needles) You called me something; it became my name.

Your blood tasted like transition metals; you were a small invention.

You ate the apple; I watched but said nothing.

ready

A Sidewalk in Southall Ashley Duraiswamy Lift → Way out → Southall, London A woman walks past with a sphere of spiked green pressed to her belly: a jackfruit. The trick with jackfruit is finding the meat. When my brother and I were small, our dad would saw through the hide and pull out pods like lacquered entrails. The flesh slipped between our teeth. Elastic and sweet. Before we ate, Kevin would tip two globs of jackfruit from his bowl into mine.

Nameless Market Here’s the rain.

The first drops catch in my hair and slide down my neck. I duck into a textile market as thunder presses against my ears.

Inside, sarees are thick with trapped

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incense—jasmine and jaggery, orange blossom and clove. Silk foams against my skin. I touch a beaded blue lehenga and spot lipstick smudged on the neckline.

Women, my brother once said, can be as disgusting as men.

Worse, even. Lipstick sickened him, like smeared blood. Silk was self-indulgent. Bare legs were smooth as sin. I wonder what he’d think of my legs as rainwater darkens the hems of my shorts and drips down my thighs.

My brother gave up women when he became a Catholic monk.

That was the easy part.

The hard part was leaving me—or so he said.

Moti Mahal Pure Ghee Jalebi

Illustration by Anna Chamberlin

10 for £3!

In Southall, food stalls don’t close for little things like thunderstorms. A man spoons jalebi dough into a rag, scrunches the fabric, and squeezes streams of batter into the oil. The spitting dough sounds like rain.

Or the rain sounds like oil.

Once, my brother could believe in two things at once. He believed in the clay statue behind the jalebi seller: a god with four hands and an elephant’s trunk. He believed in a goddess born in an ocean of milk and a goddess born on the back of a swan. I believed in nothing but was open to everything. This, he said, was the mark of a weak mind.

Eight weeks ago, we visited Kevin in his monastery. The Discalced Hermits of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. They let us see him twice a year—once in April, once in October—in a room crammed with a table, four chairs, and six paintings of Jesus. My parents sat very close to him.

They refused to use the bathroom. A trip to the monastery’s sole toilet took five minutes; we had only nine hours. Only once did they get up and make for the car, where they fetched tureens of sambar, potato biryani, and paneer tikka masala, fresh from Dad’s kitchen. My parents had been cooking for two days.

The moment they left, Kevin leaned forward.

He smiled the way he’d smile when he would grab a piece of jackfruit, sticky-sweet, and feed it to me bite by bite.

“So pappa,” he said. Tamil for little girl.

“When’re you becoming Catholic?”

What could I say?

He was wearing his jackfruit smile. “You sure I’m becoming Catholic?”

He nodded eagerly. “You’re smart. You’ll figure it out.”

Darbari Fancy Textiles (UK) Ltd. “Eighty-six pounds.”

“Thirty.”

“Eighty-one.”

“Thirty.”

The textile shop owner tugs his turban in despair. “Seventy-nine?”

“Thirty.” The woman wears a primrose burqa. I can hear her smiling.

“No.” “Well, I can’t stay here all day.” She drops the bolt of chiffon. “I’ve got things.”

She leaves; he doesn’t follow. It is raining, after all.

The year before my brother left, I couldn’t stand him.

Women shouldn’t wear tights.

God made women to have babies.

Women like Mom are going to Hell.

As far as I could see, there wasn’t much wrong with Mom. Sure, she read Julie Garwood romances in the pantry;

smeared her face with brightening turmeric paste; and spent hours scrolling through my high school directory, commenting on which boys looked like husband material and which needed a better haircut. But as far as I could tell, these weren’t sins. My brother called her an idiot. He didn’t care if she heard.

At a certain point, anger flares up like heat rash. Even on mild evenings, when Kevin would ask if I’d had a nice day and would I pass the sambar, I felt heat rise in my throat.

You don’t care about my day. Get your own sambar.

Once, I heard him crying in Dad’s bedroom.

“Why doesn’t she like me anymore?”

“Leave her alone,” our uppa said.

I loved my dad and hated myself.

Still in Darbari Fancy Textiles. The owner approaches me hopefully.

“This one?” He points at a lehenga, a sweet thing with petaled sleeves.

I wonder why he picked that one.

“Not quite, thanks.”

“Ninety-two pounds only!”

“That’s nice, maybe later.”

He stares. He liked the other woman better, I know—the one who had things to do with her life.

She played the game. I picture what would have happened if I’d refused to

play my brother’s game: “Don’t you want to be saved?”

“Not quite, thanks.” “ You’ll be saved if you love God.” “That’s nice, maybe later.”

The man in the textile shop thinks I’m nice. According to my mom, Indians won’t trust you if you’re nice—they’ll look for the scam, the catch, the false bottom of the puzzle box. That’s me with God. “I’m not that nice,” I want to shout at the man. Kevin left because I wasn’t nice. Although maybe that’s not true: my dad blames himself, and my mom blames Those Christians Who Once

Illustration by Anna Chamberlin

Colonized India, so who’s to blame, really?

When my dad meets Indians in the “bulk lentils” aisle at Walmart—which happens more often than you’d think—he’s taken to saying he has one kid. One pappa. Little girl.

“You have two kids,” Mom reminds him later.

“Yeah?” He shrugs.

“Where’s the other?”

Sidewalk Outside, the rain smells of coconut oil.

Where are they? It’s late.

A woman shuffles past with dinner on a paper plate. When the rain soaks the rim, she sets the plate on the ground, smack between two pud-

dles, and crunches greedily. Now the rain smells of panipuri.

“Pappa!”

I turn and find my mom on the sidewalk.

Crow’s feet crinkle around her eyes, the way they do when she hasn’t seen me for weeks. It’s a running joke that my family will follow me anywhere. To New Jersey for boarding school. To Yale. To the UK, where they’ve spent the past week pottering around Brimham Rocks and Castle Howard.

Mom hugs me. I press my face into the turmeric stains on her neck.

Glancing behind her, I find my dad parked at the curb. I look past him, but there’s no one else in the car.

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PAST DUE: Why did it take 186 years for Reverend James W. C. Pennington to receive a Yale degree?

Tigerlily Hopson