In Utsi ‘ealát’ means “the ideal conditions for reindeer to find lichen to graze.”¹

For me to find water to swim, I had to cross seven oceans, as they sing about in Bollywood songs while foreign ears have been drowned in chlorinated heavens, deaf as deaf does.

Only in an American pool, did I find myself floating like a leaf baying— what a beautiful thing it is when you drown yourself and come up, a dolphin more, less human.

I could never swim in a natural pond, only in an aquarium. What fish am i?

In Indian caches of water, I have contested for space, for my piece of unstable land beneath— A thing of beauty marred by desires and greed. Only in my dreams have I ever gulped water. Accidental or not- I have felt my lungs suffocating, feeling. Only in my dreams, am I not dead, am I not a fish without water.

I buttress the water, caressing it in folds, wrapping, unwrapping like a baptized present. To become the opposite of a woman burning on a pyre. To reach an addendum without the foreclosure of one.

Does my thighs shape the water or the water shapes them?

I want to be able to keep floating and not sink not drown, just like the reindeer on my swimsuit is—
lovely and full of grace, rather than macabre and lifeless like the lichen and moss I've touched with my feet but never with my belly.

pavanaḥ pavatām asmi
rāmaḥ śastra-bhṛtām aham
jhaṣāṇāḿ makaraś cāsmi
srotasām asmi jāhnavī
Bhagavad Gita 10.31

Of purifiers I am the wind, of the wielders of weapons I am Rama, of fishes I am the shark, and of flowing rivers I am the Ganges.

[1] The language lost to climate change by J.W. Ayuso