I Always Knew I'd Write You By Night.
Welcome to My Substack, Darling Terrors, Sweet Ghosts, Rebels All.
You know what is said about this time of year. It’s All Saints Day, and it’s also the first of the Days of the Dead. Santa Muerte. All Hallows’. Divali, this year, is right on the doorstep.
In two months, I turn in the first draft of my non-fiction manuscript, and I’m terrified.
This is my brother Sanjay and I, when we were roughly two and seven. Maybe a little younger than that. Our younger brother, Ananda, was yet to arrive, though he’d be by soon. I understand myself as an older sister: a protector, a worrier, a maker of lists and keeper of schedules, purchaser of mosquito repellent and vitamin c, handmaiden of the fine and tender details of love that often masquerade as brusque care.
Writing about my sisterliness will be important to Unkillable, which is my second book. My first, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting, did not give me precisely this kind of terror, though I didn’t write it without fear. Those were poems, which obey their own kind of savage intuition. Non-fiction, the business of facts and unerring truth, especially the business of other people’s truth, is an entirely different proposition. How am I going to write about people who are still very much alive, each of whom carry their own feelings in their chests, their own ways of being and breathing in the world? What do I owe those who are here to speak to me, and those who are not?
The truth is, I don’t know. The truth is, I’m going to find out.
Here I am again, at sixteen. This was the first Divali I remember wearing a made up face. One of the first nights of my life in which I felt myself to be beautiful, in a way that would last for eternity. The kind of beauty only illuminated by deya light.
What does it mean to be a beautiful, defiant daughter?
A sister who believes in her duties to house, hearth and family tree?
A writer as committed to acts of rebellion as she is devoted to certain traditions?
Unkillable will be the work of discovering how to write all this, and more, in fire.
How grateful I am to have each of you on this journey with me. As All Hallows draws to a close, I hope you are wrapped in the loving arms of your vibrant alive, and your powerful dead.
Fiercely,
Shivanee
A beautiful photo indeed; but you are not the basker in the light, but the bearer of the light 🪔
Reading these words, and seeing these pictures of you, on my phone while standing in the forest at night - and sharing that 'how do I write about the ones who are still alive, who have their own wounds' - just filled me with tenderness. For us both. For all of us. And I so want Unkillable.