Ssamjanged for seven janams

By
Shivani Gupta
-

i bruise easily don’t take it easy on me

your leg wrapped in the blanket as you beckon me to bed — unbrushed we kiss for a while. exchange germs. bacteria. saliva. i taste what you ate for dinner:

lentils, garlic, onion, cardamom, curry paste, clove, homeland.

we talk about who we’d be in our next life. my aunty says white as you are, you have an indian soul, and just like that you’re baptised hindu. past life and future births. married to me for 7 janams.

we discuss our options:

I.
radiated tortoise, maybe wanded into abracadabra. you will carry all 550 pounds of me through the sea. a mark of luck, shadow of the ocean. our 150 years clingwrapped like coral. bay leaf steamed, scented with each other.

II.
in the one after, hear me out, I know you don’t love reptiles, but a lizard that says i’m not a lizard when googled feels like the exact kind of animal you’d be. defiant, universe held in a corner only i get to inhabit.

III.
perhaps a sulphur-crusted cockatoo; uncaptivated, screaming wonders into your eardrum, giving you tinnitus even in this life

IV.
elephants suited for the kind of vengeful, petty eidetic memory I hold; we trample all the lesser than humans, a worthy outlet for my loving aggression

V.
i know lobsters are a cliche after the capital T the lobster, but would penguins be any less?

VI.
a dirty pig life would be a must, like Upstream Color tangled into an ageless organism, i find you every time

VII.
in this life, you at my friend’s diwali party, say, did you ever imagine life would get us here? you with the allowance to be invited, me in the america i said i wouldn’t be in. but with you

the world turns slower, and there is more possibility.
enough that 7 janams don’t feel like enough

janam — birth, emergence, life, spirit

 



Click here to read Shivani Gupta on the origin of the poem.

Image: Cockatoo or two, by Colin Hansen, flickr, under CC 2.0.

Shivani Gupta:

To fall asleep, I go to my happy place. My happy place is animal filled. To help me fall asleep, my lovely husband reads me animal facts every night. This poem was written one Sunday morning, after a big night of cozy sleeping & of finding myself in a city, country, life and love I never envisioned for myself.

Aside from animal facts, a core feature of our household is our sauce collection. Ssamjang is a Korean sauce, and is often used in lettuce or meat wraps. I conjured the verb form of Ssamjang in the title to encapsulate the thick, saucy mood of us wrapped up in each other.

In Hindu culture (which I grew up around in India), there is a lot of scripture that speaks to the idea that every person has seven births, and akin to “in sickness and in health” as a promise, in marriage you often promise “saat janam ka saath” which loosely translates to seven births of togetherness, because one life isn’t enough for love.

If you know me, you would know I have no deep love for human living, and frequently joke and write about being done with this life and moving onto animal lives for my next janams.

A combination of all these seemingly disconnected themes bubbled up that Sunday morning into this little poem, and what I thought was mainly for him, has now found it’s way to you, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to wish you seven lifetimes worth of loving too.

Shivani Gupta
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