Waiting, Itching (a very unfinished piece indeed)
A vector is an organism that carries and transmits an infectious agent from reservoir to host.
A vector is a geometric entity endowed with both length(/magnitude) and direction.
The light here is filtered always, through the dust particles clinging to unformed water droplets in the air, through the haze of sputtering rickshaws and waves of rebounding heat. Or inside, through the yellow of aged glass, the puffs of spiced smoke wafting from the kitchen, the flutter of tiny wings.
It hasn’t rained in weeks, the dust is settling in the cracks of toes, the surfaces of puddles are shrunken and brown and flat. Stagnant and lined with eggs. The heat leaving sheen on my skin, I sit in the dimly-lit dining room and read. I sit on my bed and read. I sit on the staircase and read.
The power goes out as often as it comes in.
When it leaves, light filters through grills on windows, through stained linen, through heavy silk drapes, through frayed screens, and the air stops stirring under slowing fans. The mosquitoes descend.
A vector is a geometric entity endowed with length and direction, contrasted, in physics, with a scalar quantity, which has no direction.
Every day at the office, I wait in a cubicle for eight hours. I stare at my computer screen, hoping for glimmers of inspiration. Keep tabs on the windowsill for hints of a quick-passing rainfall. Track the squares of light that slant through gridded windows and travel eastward across the tiled floor. I watch for signs of arthritis, and the minute hand alternately crawls and careens around the circumference of my watch.
Back at the house, when it is darker, I arrange myself horizontally under a makeshift tent of sheets, raveling my eyelashes together and curling my knees up towards my elbows, pressing wrist into wrist, chin into chest plate, aligning my ankles with each other at the base of the bed.
I hope for the fan to spin through the night, for my reddened skin to stay tucked away in case it doesn’t. Try and ease into sleep like the slow turning of a page. It only sometimes works; the stillness of limbs seems stifling and dangerous, infectious, but impossible to shake away. Any still surface is a target.
A vector is an organism that carries and transmits
A mosquito is a vector, because it carries and transmits an infectious agent (malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, Chikungunya, paranoia, desperate impatience) from reservoir (all the stagnant water – quarter-full buckets from yesterday’s waterfall bath, puddles left dormant beneath mango trees from the weeks-ago rain) to host (me, with the nectary mango blood and bare skin, with the landmarks from mosquitoes past and the quickly-developing twitch). A mosquito is a vector, because it is an entity endowed with both length (half an inch, usually, or eight hours, the average length of a sleepless, swatting night) (/magnitude) (the effects of sleeplessness and of slow-creeping insanity on the semi-foreign mind have not been quantified per say, but Garcia Marquez’s insomnia plague took the memories of many lives) and direction (again, towards me, host, with as direct a path as possible; or, in terms of purpose, towards nutrients, the fostering of eggs, the perpetuation of a species, and of an enmity, and a fear).
from reservoir to host
When we speak of ‘monsoons’, we speak of the rainy season. Technically, though, the monsoon is much more than that – the changing temperatures of land and sea, the shifts in atmospheric pressure, and the seasonal winds that whoosh over the subcontinent in predictable paths charted by red and green arrows. The rain is just a byproduct.
It’s also crucial. Without it the crops are left burnt, the stomachs shrunken, the landscape faded to a crackly yellow. The water lies still, and a new flock of mosquitoes rises from the surface. Our saliva runs dry, our skin runs dark, we sigh, we bake, we itch, we wait. We stay.
an infectious agent.
A mosquito is contrasted with a scalar quantity, which has no direction (no destination, or perhaps no ostensible purpose, no straight path, Predetermined or otherwise; in physics, no force, no application of strength, no upwards muscular pull against the insistent tug of gravity; no outwards push from the body’s molecules against the pressure of an entire atmosphere, no outwards push against the pressure of an entire walled-in world, against the pressure of an entire family tree, the pressure of an entire body, an entire mind–– in physics, and not in physics, magnitude zero).
in physics, a force
The last monsoon I remember delivered two feet of murky brown water to swirl around my knees on the side of the highway as the car stubbornly pushed back against the drivers’ palms. I can only picture the rains in the nighttime, which is rarely as dark in the city as it should be, with the streetlights blushing orange all over the smoggy sky. But that night, I only remember seeing a gaping navy above my head, spilling its lukewarm contents in relentless blankets, smothering streetlights and nostrils alike…
–there’s an odd sort of comfort in the touch, in the paradiddles pounding downwards into the skull, into the skin, into every creaking upturned space. comfort in the blurred vision, the colored streaks that are other bodies. in the impossibility of breath, and the persistence of it. the release of the bones and slow curling of the fingers. this is what clean is, what new is, this is what it must be like to swim skyward–
…Where is it now? I wait, I itch.
an entity endowed with direction
When my grandfather died, his ashes were split among ten sons and daughters. They took him to three different oceans and let him melt into the salt water, be pulled and pushed with the incoming tides and eddying currents. They told me that, with time, he would flow around the world.
Hindus cremate bodies to free their souls from the earth, and let them rejoin God or reenter life. A body buried is a leash; a body burned is a pair of wings.
I don’t know how I feel about God, but I like the idea of flight. When I am cremated, I won’t just puddle, quiet and still, on foreign sands – I will ask to be thrown into a reliable wind, one that will hold me steady and carry me above the surface to wherever it wants. They will throw me into the only wind they know, and it will wing me across a subcontinent, deposit me where sea meets bay meets ocean.
I will dapple the light, and then rain down in warm sheets of water, the monsoon moving inland, the monsoon moving; the monsoon returning again.
with magnitude.
