There Are Rivers in the Sky

by Elif Shafak

As ripples of heat rise into the air, the raindrop will slowly evaporate. But it won’t disappear. Sooner or later, that tiny, translucent bead of water will ascend back to the blue skies. Once there, it will bide its time, waiting to return to this troubled earth again…and again. Water remembers. It is humans who forget.

That is what growing up means, in some simple way: learning to repress all expressions of pure happiness and joy.

The ear never forgets what the heart has heard.”

“That is what happens when you love someone—you carry their face behind your eyelids, and their whispers in your ears, so that even in deep sleep, years later, you can still see and hear them in your dreams.”

“Well, this world is a school and we are its students. Each of us studies something as we pass through. Some people learn love, kindness. Others, I’m afraid, abuse and brutality. But the best students are those who acquire generosity and compassion from their encounters with hardship and cruelty. The ones who choose not to inflict their suffering on to others. And what you learn is what you take with you to your grave.”

“Hatred is a poison served in three cups. The first is when people despise those they desire—because they want to have them in their possession. It’s all out of hubris! The second is when people loathe those they do not understand. It’s all out of fear! Then there is the third kind—when people hate those they have hurt.”

“But why?” “Because the tree remembers what the axe forgets.”

“It means it’s not the harmer who bears the scars, but the one who has been harmed. For us, memory is all we have. If you want to know who you are, you n...

Water hardens in adverse circumstances, not unlike the human heart.

Children of uprooted parents are born into the memory tribe. Both their present and their future are forever shaped by their ancestral past, regardless of whether they have any knowledge of it. If they flourish and prosper, their achievements will be attributed to a whole community; and, in the same way, their failures will be chalked up to something bigger and older than themselves, be it family, religion or ethnicity.

Water is the consummate immigrant, trapped in transit, never able to settle.

All she wants, right now, is to retreat, a silent admission of defeat for someone tired of trying to survive—less a departure than a homecoming, a return to water.

If, as the poets say, the journey of life resembles the march of rivers to the sea, at times meandering aimlessly, at others purposeful and unswerving, the bend in the flow is where the story takes a sudden turn, winding away from its predicted course into a fresh and unexpected direction.

“Words are like birds,” says Mr. Bradbury. “When you publish books, you are setting caged birds free. They can go wherever they please. They can fly over the highest walls and across vast distances, settling in the mansions of the gentry, in farmsteads and laborers’ cottages alike. You never know whom those words will reach, whose hearts will succumb to their sweet songs.”

He once described himself as an “upholsterer of imperfections”—covering stains, padding hard surfaces, softening edges, hiding cracks and holes. Almost as if every mistake were correctable, nearly every loss replaceable,

and what remained rough, raw or ruptured should never be seen by others.

Mourning is a woman’s job—and so is remembrance.

“I know you don’t believe me, Narin, but a story is a flute through which truth breathes. And these are your family stories.”

One must always walk the earth with wonder, for it is full of miracles yet to be witnessed. Trees you must think of not only for what they are above ground but also for what remains invisible below. Birds, rocks, tussocks and thickets of gorse, even the tiniest insects are to be treasured.

Numbers are important and Grandma’s favorite is seven. In order to process an emotion, be it good or bad, you must allow seven days to pass. So if you fall in love, with a lightness to your moves like the speck of pollen on the wing

of a butterfly, you have to wait seven days, and, if after that period you still feel the same way, then and only then can you trust your heart. Never make a major decision unless you have spent seven days contemplating it.

Grandma says one should be kind to every living being, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, for you can never know in what shape or form you or a loved one will be reborn. “Yesterday I was a river. Tomorrow, I may return as a raindrop.”

If you only knew how difficult it is to be calm and composed. If you only knew, it takes a fierce fight inside to remain peaceful on the outside.’ ”

“That tranquillity does not come easily.”

Upon getting married, she took her husband’s surname. Now it will probably have to change again. Women are expected to be like rivers—readjusting, shapeshifting.

But it is harder to grasp the gradual evaporation of love, a loss so slow and

subtle as to be barely detectable, until it is fully gone.

Now she feels like a passenger on a sleeper train who awakens and draws back the curtains, only to find an unfamiliar landscape that had been there all along...

It was true, though: they seemed like a good couple, and there were times when they really were—if only she’d had the capacity for happiness. But she also knows that the fabric of their marriage had

worn thin in many places. All it needed was one sharp tug for it to tear.

Toward the end of his life, the professor became preoccupied with a hypothesis he referred to in his notes as “aquatic memory.” He argued that, under certain circumstances, water—the universal solvent—retained evidence, or “memory,” of the solute particles that had dissolved in it, no matter how many times it was diluted or purified. Even if years passed, or centuries, and not a single original molecule remained, each droplet of water maintained a unique structure, distinguishable from the next, marked forever

by what it once contained. Water, in other words, remembered.

Ever since then, he has been a ghost river in Zaleekhah’s life, pushed into the dark recesses of her past. She rarely, if ever, mentions his name, although she thinks about him often. Aquatic memory has been a contentious subject for her—professionally and personally.

She was silent when she should have spoken; she spoke when she should have been silent. Either way, guilt is her most loyal companion. And regret, too—not so much for her acts as for her failure to act.

devotion so selfless as to seek only the good of its object, an unreasonable commitment perhaps more commonly observed in ancient mystics and ascetics than in the modern workplace.

but she will always be attracted to people who are pulled toward something bigger and better than themselves, a passion that lasts a lifetime, even though it will consume them in the end.

He feels closer to the people of the past than those of the present, more at peace with the ghosts than the living.

The sons of abusive fathers need to grow fast.

I believe I have finally found my calling: it is my duty to piece together what has been broken, to help people to remember what has been consigned to oblivion throughout the centuries, and to retrieve what has been lost somewhere along the way. I wish to be like the River Thames: I want to tend to what has been discarded, damaged and forgotten.

“What happens after catastrophes? Those who survive nurse their broken hearts and start all over again, as one always does, as one always must.”

Remember, though, what defies comprehension isn’t the mysteries of the world, but the cruelties that humans are capable of inflicting upon each other.”

There are extraordinary people who appear unexpectedly on our paths, and, just as suddenly, they disappear, leaving their indelible marks and a sense of regret. Brief and bright, like a match striking a flame in the dark, they heat the damp kindling of our hearts and then they are gone.

“Cousins, friends, books, songs, poems, trees…anything that brings meaning into our lives counts.”

Khider is a protective spirit. He is also the patron of travelers, learners and lovers—which, Grandma says, often amounts to the same thing. There are invisible beings all around that offer help and guidance without humans ever realizing, let alone appreciating, it.

We must always listen to our conscience and help those in need. We don’t throw gasoline on a burning man. We carry him water.”

Clock-time, however punctual it may purport to be, is distorted and deceptive. It runs under the illusion that everything is moving steadily forward, and the future, therefore, will always be better than the past. Story-time understands the fragility of peace, the fickleness of circumstances, the dangers lurking in the night but also appreciates small acts of kindness. That is why minorities do not live in clock-time. They live in story-time.

“When someone gives you the food they’ve prepared, they give you their heart.”

“Remember, for all its pains and sorrows, the world is beautiful. How can it not be, when it is painted in the iridescent colors of the plumes of Melek Tawûs? If we know how to look, we can see beauty even with eyes closed.”

Home is where your loved ones are, but the reverse is also true. Those you love are your sanctuary, your shelter, your country and even,

when it comes to that, your exile. Wherever they go, you will follow.