# The Refugee's God: One The old man sat by the window of his makeshift shelter—a corrugated iron roof propped up by wooden poles—and watched the dust settle over the camp. Outside, the light was dying into shades of amber and rust. Children's voices had begun to thin out, drifting like smoke toward the cooking fires. Soon it would be dark. Soon the night would come, as it always did, with its particular coldness. His name was Jamal. Or it had been, once. Now, even that seemed to belong to a different world—one where names meant something, where a man was known by his family, his work, his place in the order of things. Here, in this sprawl of tents and temporary structures on the outskirts of a city that had no use for him, he was simply another number. Another face at the ration distribution. Another shadow moving between the rows of shelters. He had been a schoolteacher for forty-two years. He had taught children to read and write, to think, to ask questions. He had lived in a house with four rooms and a small garden where his wife grew jasmine. The jasmine had bloomed in the evenings, and the scent would drift through the windows. His daughter had played there. His son had climbed the guava tree. That was before. Now there was only the before and the after, separated by a line so sharp and clean you could cut your finger on it. The light had nearly gone. Jamal rose slowly—his knees protesting with small, familiar griefs—and reached for the kerosene lamp that hung from a wire overhead. The flame caught, and the shelter filled with a soft, amber glow. Long shadows stretched across the walls. They looked like the shadows of people who were no longer there. He sat again. From his pocket, he drew out a small notebook. Its pages were yellowed and worn at the edges, the binding nearly torn through. This was the thing he had saved. Of all the things he had owned—the furniture, the photographs, the letters, the books—this was the one thing he had managed to bring with him when he ran. He opened it carefully, as if it were something holy. Inside, the pages were filled with handwriting—neat, deliberate, the script of someone who had spent a lifetime with chalk and pen. Quotations, mostly. Lines from poems and stories and thinkers he had taught to his students over the decades. *There is no exile that is permanent.* *The soul carries its home within it.* *Where there is darkness, we must kindle the light ourselves.* He had written these things because he needed to believe them. Or perhaps he had written them because he needed to remember that once, he had believed them. Outside, the camp was settling into evening. He could hear the murmur of voices, the clink of cooking pots, the cry of an infant. The ordinary sounds of survival. The small, quiet music of people enduring. Jamal turned another page of his notebook. And then another. He read the words he had written in a different time, when he had been a different man. Or had he? Was he different now, or was he simply the same man, worn thinner, hollowed out, like stone worn smooth by water? The lamp flickered. For a moment, it cast everything into shadow. He did not look away.

1. The Song of the Burnt Moon

The soil of Rarh holds a pull within it so fierce that it does not easily release those it grips. It clings to the feet like adhesive, like love, and sometimes like a reluctance that will not let go. Walking alone across this earth in the deep of night, even the sound of one's own steps grows strange to the ear—as though listening to another's footfall. That unfamiliar sound dissolves into nature's hushed darkness.

When you enter the bamboo grove, night grows denser still; it feels as if a veil has descended, separating you from the world outside. Then, when the pala-gaan begins, the voice of the reciter carries more than just his own inflection—another life speaks through him, another being, and he descends so deeply into the story that he cannot return as the person he was before.

And the call of kirtan shifts the very path of one's walking. From one road to another, from one feeling to the next, one is displaced before understanding can catch hold. It is an inward transformation. And in the midst of this, an inauspicious red moon has risen in the sky, yet there is no one to see it. When the song ends, even the reciter can no longer be certain—whether he still stands in this world, on this soil, anchored in his own flesh.

2. Before the Curse

The deaf boy stands at the threshold. The wind pushes him, yet cannot knock him down. There is no river's mark in the lines of his palm; and yet, in his depths, he knows stone the way a river knows it—through the secret touch of its own current.

The blind girl sets a lamp floating on dark water. She knows no tale of forbidden fruit; she only knows that water holds a coldness that seeps into the cup of one's palm, and that even in this coldness, a light can float. She cannot see where the lamp goes. But the sound of water changes; when it nears the fire, water speaks as if in some other tongue.

When a curse is laid upon them, it is unclear to whom it reaches. The deaf boy's ear does not receive the curse's sound; no face of curse appears before the blind girl's eyes. Only night descends. Upon the water, within the darkness, a light still moves somewhere ahead.

3. The River Has No Name

The boat sways across the tongueless water of the mid-river. The father seems not to steer it; the boat knows its own destination, knows which reed-bed to skirt, which thicket to pass around. The secret, high-and-low body of the sandbar lies awake. And what is born beneath this water, what grows there, remains an invisible cultivation.

From the fishermen's village, tobacco smoke rises in layers, as though an invisible hand were turning the pages of an old book. What lies beneath the algae of the black bamboo is known only to insects, or to something below even them. The fishermen do not know; they know only how deep the water must be for fish to hide.

When the bell of the Armani church rang, the hours could be counted, if hands were free. But the hands are bound. So it is not time anymore—only the sense of how much water, how much darkness. In the deep of that darkness lie, spread in secret, the roots of stolen grapes; they know nothing of human taste, of human feeling, of anything at all.

4. The Blue Sweater

Through the yellow wings of clouds stained with vermillion, something was turning back that night. We did not know then what it was. Later I understood—it was that moment before the final snow falls, when water freezes but has not yet become ice.

There is no name for the moment that lies between these two states.

The key to the wedding chest is lost. The sound I raised hung in the room like an echo, circling until it dissolved into the outside. Then you went door to door and brought back a blue sweater. But life along the barbed wire, the grey light of the labor camp, all of it changes that blue; the sweater no longer stays blue the way it was before.

The whole afternoon learning to walk, dragging the wooden foot. Then again, then again. By late evening, both eyes closed. The earth beneath the feet tells it plainly enough—which way the path lies, which way the slope.

5. The Last Wing

As a light melody drifted up, I remembered a country that had never actually existed. Venice’s summer, a white sentinel’s steady gaze, and Vaidyanath born into the lottery of fate. All mixed together, it was a strange, impossible geography.

On a page in the dictionary, the picture of a dead bird. That wing no longer moves, yet its memory tells the air—once something flew away from here. The desire to return to the womb lingers at day’s end like a pink bud; it neither blooms nor falls.

The fever of the mother’s house, cotton, gauze, the smell of raw sewers—these stay in the chest for years and years. The dust of that road still clings to the skin. The last bird had wings; the wind has only remembered this much.

6. The Refugee’s God

If the blind peel away bark, what does the skin that rises to the fingertip say? In the night, at your sudden sweep, her hand touched and she found eyes. Night in the refugee tent does not mean lying down; night means counting each breath separately, one after another.

On the royal road, dust falls upon dust. A lamp is burning; what it burns with is unclear, yet it burns. I called you ‘Water.’ I lowered the lamp in my hand and set it on the ground.

It burned no longer; only a line remained. Breath after breath. The same rhythm of rain, the same rhythm of dwelling. After learning shame, where God once had a place in the roof, another has come to sit.

7. The Extinguished Poem

The poem holds five paise in its hand. Letters written in silent dust have neither water nor lava, nor any curse; only dust, which flies away. The sound of oars in the ribs reaches the bank and stops; the river hears it but does not remember.

The poem that seems dead—its earrings somehow still persist in the everyday. In the beggar’s bazaar, grammar lies neglected; there today, tomorrow, and the day after blur into one another. Yet someone thinks the scent of autumn still lives even in the city’s decaying depths. But at another remove, in clean beauty, this half-ripe soul remains a stranger still.

The ferry carries you across for five paise. When you reach the far bank, you can see this one; there is no fare for the return.

8. The Burden of Ending

Sometimes I think I am merely an ordinary voice in a crowd. Yet again and again I return to the lives of earth-people, to their labor, their struggle to survive. Then I face such a captive life, where the eyes are used not for joy or wonder, but only to measure the depths of darkness.

Sometimes the mischief of childhood returns, the days of wandering, living on meager means. Again and again the heart is struck by love’s blow. People create their own hell in their greed, blindness, and decay; disaster too often arrives before its time. Sometimes life is only labor, drawing water to survive; then again it seems only one last effort remains.

In the end it seems I am returning—carrying in my chest a vast history of defeat, decay, and loss.

9. What Water Writes

Tangled with the chain is the sharp smell of freshly cut iron.

You had come to stand in a place where people became commodities, and eventually you had surrendered yourself to that very fate. The sound of the river along that journey still echoes in your mind, though in truth that river no longer exists.

One stormy day, even the distant war seemed to seep into our ordinary lives. Onions and cutlets wrapped in stale paper, the anxieties of uncles and aunts, whether the girls’ school would close—life was slipping away in these small, modest scenes. On the way back, drums beat in the procession, and before closed doors people stand and ask each other for something; sometimes for rest, sometimes for hope.

Lipi, come here. That thing you once thought had been swept away in the waters of destruction—perhaps it can later be put to new use. Even in words spoken with a smile, traps descend. The ghat of language that once sinks underwater—everything seems murky at first; but later the water clears, and people forget even the memory of the old ghat.