The Sen had a curious saying in their musical language they fluted out using their tongue pipes. Ahsa an nira. The land knows you.
As Mhyrsa stepped outside Kannari’s only landing pad, she smelled the sharp tang of fresh Kannari leaves for the first time in a long while. The Divides were known for their export, even in Eslo where Kanna drinking culture was as widespread as society gossip.
As soon as she did, she felt the trees calling, their dissonant voices beckoning her further. “Daughter,” they called, many voices as one, generation to generation. From her mother whose bones rested uneasily under a silver leaf Kannari tree to her very first great mother who braved space storms and famine for empty promises of homes and bountiful lands. They echoed in the mists, in every son and in every daughter whose soul and body fed the Kannari trees. Ahsa an nira. The land knew her and it was hungry.
She stumbled, disoriented for a moment. Her hover driver—a bored cousin born of one of her many aunts—noticed, but she reassured him. After asking for a name she promptly forgot, she leaned back and tried to silence the voices as he drove.
Mhyrsa pressed the faded designs on her tongue against the roof of her mouth. The concentric scarlet patterns of the Sen Mozh were inky blue from disuse.
Ammamma, she whispered, testing out the pronunciation. The word for grandmother that had once been instinct on her tongue was now unfamiliar, like a song lyric you had known but long forgotten. She remembered how she repeated that word again and again during her parents’ funeral, holding tight to her grandmother’s weathered hands.
Mhyrsa took a shuddering breath as memories threatened to overwhelm her.
This was the first time she returned home after the departure. She’d regretted leaving, but her grandmother didn’t give her much choice. Back then, it seemed like a worthy sacrifice, but now she felt like a cheap cop-out, only returning to bury her grandmother. Mhyrsa sent holospheres back home of course, videos full of Eslo’s sights. But intraplanetary comms were forbidden on Eslo, so she could never talk face to face with her grandmother. After a while, the rigors of her studies took up her time and energy. As years passed and she went up the ranks, she did everything to disconnect herself from the disdained “Kanna leaf pickers.” She didn’t want this connection to ruin her. From speaking Eslari like she was raised in the planet cities of the distant system to keeping up with the Eslari court, she blended seamlessly with her planet system’s elite, who were convinced of their colonial master’s cultural superiority, even after two centuries of independence. And when Mhyrsa flourished as a scientist at their Univs, they loved her. Or she thought they did, because “she wasn’t like the other Kannari.”
Her grandmother still replied with outdated voicespheres, hard reminders of what she sacrificed for Mhyrsa’s success. Mhyrsa listened to them in secret at Uni, the fluting Sen almost unintelligible to her Eslari adjusted ears.
Now, Mhyrsa Kiluan returned home, bereft of her ability to sing the funeral dirge.
• • •
Under the towering Kannari trees, her grandmother’s body was tiny. Mhyrsa didn’t remember her as small. The woman who raised her was known for her loud opinions and persistent tantrums. She was the one who bribed the Eslo officer into tutoring Mhyrsa, so she could go to the Univs. Mhyrsa had resented the long study sessions. How she screamed at Ammamma for making her study with nary a kind word or a soft touch of encouragement, for always comparing her to Ammamma’s dead son. The dead who were impossible to surpass.
“Don’t pretend to care about me, Ammamma. I see how you look. I’m just a cheap imitation of your precious son,” She’d spit out, venom coating her words. “Stop forcing his dreams on me. Whoever or whatever I’ll be is none of your concern.”
Her ammamma only replied, “You don’t have to like me, Mhyrsa, but you will study. I swore upon my son’s grave, you will not be a Kanna picker like us.”
In the end, Mhyrsa relented to her grandmother’s will, like many had.
But this was the body, not her. That’s how they referred to it anyway. The “body” waited for two months. They couldn’t afford to keep it preserved in cryo anymore. So she was brought to the funeral at the forest’s outskirts as soon as she arrived, with no time to rest.
Her aunts gathered outside the canopy, their ankle-length hair a sharp contrast to Mhyrsa’s short bob. For a moment, she was an interloper in their grief. But then, they gathered her into themselves, crying and mourning. She couldn’t remember half their names nor pronounce them but it didn’t matter now. She was the chief mourner. She’d have to sing her grandmother’s path to the afterlife, so small mistakes like forgetting their names could be forgiven, but the gleam in the aunties’ eyes told her they would never be forgotten. She felt like an imposition, to these people who had known her grandmother all their lives and now had to bury her with a stranger.
Mhyrsa gathered her arms around herself to ward off the chill of her home.
They washed her and shaved her head, all the while murmuring the words to a hymn she was supposed to know. Mhyrsa’s imitation was horrendous and left the aunts horrified. But they had no time, so they had to settle for her reading it out and trying her best.
The funeral march started as the men lifted the body and started walking. The women let out howls as they followed, Mhyrsa at the lead. The drums began beating.
Mhyrsa started singing the funeral dirge.
Thump.
The words were broken, the sibilant sounds and their musical notes evading her grasp. When she wrested them back to shape, they sounded damaged.
Thump.
If she only knew how, she could put them back into the song. Her Eslari accent and disused pipes got in the way and when she finally garbled out the words, they didn’t sound like the dirges she’d heard as a child. They didn’t sound like her grandmother’s dirge for Mhyrsa’s parents, her voice cutting through the drums as she told her son and daughter-in-law how the world missed them. She wished to give her grandmother the same gift but hers wasn’t a smooth flow of Sen. No, her words sounded mangled.
They walked deeper into the forest, hungry trees drooping down.
Thump.
When she left for the Divides, Mhyrsa had been so angry. Angry to leave, to be pushed out, and so, without a word of farewell, she left the only person who loved her. The old woman didn’t even notice her fury, taking Mhyrsa between her cracked palms and kissing her on the forehead. The final blessing she’d ever received and she hadn’t even received it with grace.
Thump
The trees were calling now, singing to her soul, asking for her to sing to them, to open the way for their long awaited daughter and find her a spot among them. She tried to tell the Kannari wind how she mourned her ammamma’s passing, how every face here reminded Mhyrsa of Ammamma but her tongue refused to bend to her grief. Her music was gone.
The trees retreated, crowding their path.
Thump.
Mhyrsa started to weep, in shame, in pain. She couldn’t even give her grandmother this parting gift. She screamed, she howled, she wept.
Thump.
The trees stopped. They listened. They cleared a path. And the women behind her started to scream, started to howl, started to weep.
Thump.
Mhyrsa stopped trying to find the right words, to push them through her broken pipes. She stopped trying to be something she was not. Instead, Mhyrsa gave the trees her truth. Her mixed, complicated, unbelonging truth. She was neither Sen nor Eslari but both languages were hers. Instead of finding the right words, Mhyrsa sang of Ammamma.
Thump.
In a Sen mixed with Eslari, she sang of Ammamma’s life and her fury. She sang of her love and her cracked voice. In undignified Eslari and defiled Sen, she sang of the woman who had loved her and whom Mhyrsa didn’t know she had loved as much until she was gone forever.
Thump.
They arrived at a tree that opened, that called and the men deposited her grandmother’s body onto its outstretched branches. The tree shivered once and the hanging roots curled around the cloth covering her grandmother.
Thump.
Still, Mhyrsa sang. In front of the tree that was swallowing what remained, swallowing the only person who had been her home, Mhyrsa sang a dirge she knew to be right in her soul.
And Mhyrsa Kiluan realized she still stood. Fitting in nowhere perfectly, her song still stood.
• • •