Performance

Instructions for a late lunch in Williamsburg

Per the Reiki healer’s instructions, find a late lunch and walk a while before biking home.

Enter the Alo.

Have taken three to four flagrant drags of the Sauce Pen.

Describe it: three floors of polyester, seasonal shades of buttercup, sky blue and hot pink.

The millennial bourgeoisie uniform is athleisure. You have come to try on tennis skirts.

Peruse and purvey.

Exhale in the fitting room.

Pull the waist band all the way above your belly button.

Gaze at the body, sing out for help.

Consider when they ask for your name how you say it back.

Consider you are saying it back how they like it - Kieran.

Consider F calling you Kir at dinner, how that evoked kheer with crushed almonds, even your father can make it.

Consider the ran, the leaded thud of it in Punjabi tongue - ruhn - as distinct from the up roll of the Spanish - rah - or the descending throated chord of the French - ruh.

Consider the time to time “well that’s just semantics” dismissal as adjacent to dismissals of syntax and phonology. Such dismissals seeking to compel discounts of thinking. That a particular point has not risen to validity.

Pace down Bedford Ave, insist that phonetics matter.

That ruhn is always worthwhile.

That you would do anything to hear it.

Not the memory chamber. Not the saved voice messages. No her pure call: o Kiraaaaaaaahn.

Her dragging the “rahh” from the stovetop to your small sky blue painted bedroom.

Her enunciation of “rahh” marking her mood - shrill when she was being playful, forced and kneaded with a grunt when impatient.

Your footsteps quickening from sky blue room to kitchen.

Your footsteps quickening to Martha Bakery now.

Though you left the store, the sky blue tennis skirt is still in the fitting room.

Though you left Frankson Pl, the soundbites remain in its walls.

Think scientifically now - as your father would tell it - the ebbs of our voices are absorbed and contained by structures.

o meri kirani kirani

tu hain meriiii kirannn

Recall the reiki master telling you to imagine speaking to her. This part took the least effort given the ongoing fantasy of revival.

Name your name, your name, given name.

Ask for Assam tea with the cupcake.

Trace the sanksrit root - kiraṇa - ray of light.

Reflect on name, it’s direct translation as naam.

Naam is elixr in gurmukhi.

tera naam jii, tera naam naam naam

tera naam jiiiii, tera naam naam naam

In this moment, remove the airpods, allow the memory of kirtan in Amritsar to reach you.

The young girl on the harmonium, the villagers swaying to her untrained chords. The equity of shabad as turbaned boys on either side of her exerted themselves on the tabla.

Finish your tea.

All of it.

Whisper “Happy Birthday” into the cupcake.

Go home to the altar you made =.

Kneel. Light the wick. Light the incense. Hover it over the blooms.

Hold love for the shy desi flower vendor who, decades on in Forth Greene, holds firm to to his Estuary London accent.

For forty years Australia softened and rounded but could not peel her tongue from its crystal Indian accent.

No ridding of her “rahh” her “rih”.

Tu hain mehrriii Kirannn

Assign divinity to the stranger who came running to cut you a raincoat and wrapped her birthday bouquet. As he saddled you for departure, asking for nothing but a tight hug, you felt her embrace in his embrace, her kiss as he planted your cheek, it happened so quickly.

You asked for a sign, she delivered.

On her birthday she gifts you gifts, This is her nature.

Keep your palms facing the altar to receive.

Give thanks for the performance and power of flowers.