There Are Rivers in the Sky

by Elif Shafak

Water remembers. It is humans who forget.

‘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.’

We never want our parents’ weaknesses to be seen by others. Their failures are our own private affair, a secret we would rather keep to ourselves; when they become public, for everyone’s consumption, we are no longer the children we once were.

This is not just any dinner but a mortuary feast, organized as much for the living as for the dead. There are three parties to this gathering: the hosts, the guests and the deceased. Food is a language that brings them together beyond the borders of time and place.

I wouldn’t stop crying unless they let me hold it. I didn’t sleep properly until I learnt to play it. Now they invite me everywhere. Why? Because people need songs like they need bread and water. People need poetry, beauty, love! So long as the sun rises and rivers flow, there will always be weddings and celebrations and music. Even fanatics cannot change that.’

Numbers are important and Grandma’s favourite 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.’

‘Good, in that case I’ll tell you. Actually, I agree with Euphrates. Better to be a gentle soul than one consumed by anger, resentment and vengeance.

I wish to be like the River Thames: I want to tend to what has been discarded, damaged and forgotten.

With no one left to regret his loss or to cherish his childhood memories, he no longer has a home.

This, here, is the land of fragmented tablets and fractured poems.

Nisaba is born of the union of heavens and earth, realms that seem so different and distant that it may not be clear what they have in common, and thus her gift – the art of writing – will always represent a desire to efface dualities, dissolve hierarchies and transcend boundaries.

To write is to free yourself from the constraints of place and time. If the spoken word is a trick of the gods, the written word is the triumph of humans.