Paati has put the TV on in the back room to keep us kids out of the way of the prayers. On the veranda, Appa sits shirtless before the homam fire chanting in Sanskrit after the priest. An ancient…
I set out to write an entirely fictional story, but memories pulled at me instead. A searing Malaysian afternoon in a temple, my ten-year-old self in a heavy silk paavadai, in disbelief at my degree of physical discomfort. Dozens of memories of sitting in front of a smoky homam, multi-generational religious gatherings with shrieking children running in and out, Sanskrit mantras providing a bass note. Cooking with the women for my aunt’s thirteen-day death rites—the scalding hot jaggery syrup leaving the tips of my fingers red and raw.
These things I put on paper, the teacher, the little girl in the story. She said to me, “Why am I constantly ignored?” This little girl wanted to know that she wasn’t trapped by her gender or her culture, that there were possibilities for her. She wasn’t sure about the white people—why they kiss as if they are devouring each other, though it helped her to understand that there were different ways of living than her own cloistered one. She said to me that she was only young and wanted the time and space to make her own future, that I wasn’t to foreclose that.
I asked her about metaphor and meaning, and she said, “How should I know about those things?” And so, if the priest’s fingers unfurl in a clumsy way, that is entirely my fault.
The little girl told me, irritably, how hot she was, so I dutifully conveyed some aspects of the sensory. And—I hope she will forgive me—she did not speak at all of food; that was my doing entirely. Food and cooking and the sounds of the kitchen are so much a part of her DNA (and mine) that she didn’t think to mention it. I was an interpreter of sorts, and I said the quiet bit out loud.
SUMITRA SINGAM is a queer, neurodiverse Malaysian-Indian-Australian coconut who writes in Naarm/Melbourne. Her work has been published widely, nominated for a number of Best Of anthologies, and was selected for Best Small Fictions 2025. She works as a psychiatrist and trauma therapist and runs workshops on how to write trauma safely, as well as the Yeah Nah reading series. She’ll be the one in the kitchen making chai (where’s your cardamom?). Find her on Bluesky @pleomorphic2.
