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Generations before me, women were called hysterical, emotional, illogical. I am tired of stepping into the same tradition. During my childhood, I have often told my mother I want to go into the mountains, that I would have gone long time back if she was not living with me in the city. We sometimes went to towns. We often visited villages, where my thatha and I planted seeds and watched flowering shrubs emerge from soil. I remember the periwinkles, for their placid being, globe-shaped alliums at the entrance of his home, and coconut trees lining the silvered streets after rain. We often visited before monsoons, but Southerly winds first brought rain to this temple town in Tamil Nadu.

I delighted in these days by walking around the backyard, sitting on the one squared stone in the midst of coconut, banana, and sandalwood trees my father planted as a boy. I have eaten ripening tomatoes from the plantations sown by him. I wanted to be away from the neon gauze of tube-lights, their dithering distraction. The electrical powerlines often went out due to thunderstorms. I remember making hand fans from weaving coconut tree fronds, my grandmother lighting the stove by a matchstick, and relishing rice with sambar and ghee. The kitchen housed several seasonal vegetables from the backyard: potatoes, radishes, cabbage, avarakai, beans, carrots, and gourds. Everyday, I would chop one into fine pieces and my mother would sauté the vegetable in a tablespoon of oil, mustard seeds, and karuveppilai, removing a section of its pinnate leaves. This was part of an annual summer vacation in our household year after another, until my mother passed in this world. After that, I became of archipelago consciousness, sifting through static in the city.

A girl is a river in how she becomes a woman. She is expected to meet an ocean, take another form. Unlike water, she is not allowed to be water. When I become a woman, the world is a constant other. Before renouncing the world, I make it fully mine. I attune with its wavelength, make it hear the musicality inside all of us. The Isha Upanishad emphasizes interconnectedness, of seeing all beings in oneself and themselves in all beings to eradicate fear and grief. To exit the manufactured world into another one which is becoming a frail epithelium of dwindling biodiversity, I trace its wisdom through beginnings into the world. There are two worlds of which there is only one.

I begin the process of exiting this world from my home city.  “You must not go to the temple when menstruating.” I grew up hearing this all my teenage years. When I was younger, and my mother didn’t accompany us for a temple visit—I asked and asked but nobody revealed anything. Nani used to say mummy la haau katla aahe. For the longest time, I thought haau was a butterfly which bit my mother when she was cooking with open windows. After I menstruate for the first time, I realize its meaning. Marathi has many variations for secrets, many folds, like the nauvari.

Later, I would know from my mother that the goddess in a temple situated by the brink of the Arabian Sea in Mumbai had entered as the presiding deity while menstruating. The men in my family never spoke about menstruation. I was told by them that good women tie their hair and don’t go outside at night. But today the moon is shining bright after amavasya, calling me like a sacred promise of a lover. I step outside to go beside the Arabian Sea. I drive past flashing, dysfunctional streetlights. I enter the temple while menstruating. It is full moon and I witness tidal forces eat the rims of nettle obstructing the sea from reaching land. I offer my body of a vermillion river on the feet of the goddess.

The Arabian Sea is lushing against the harbor with an urgency. You can sit here and watch the sea for hours— I often do, until the fisherfolk begin their morning songs. Sometimes, within their voices, I hear my nani— her voice steadily singing bhajans in the temple. Vitthal Vithal Vitthala. Sukh karta dukh harta varta vighnachi.

A legend says that the city will be swallowed by the sea. Scientists predict that the Arabian Sea will begin entering Mumbai at least once a year by 2050 due to rising sea levels. The areas of risk in my coastal city look like menstrual blood on the side of a bed under a sleeping body. Perhaps the menstruating goddess will save our city when menstruation is worshipped and spoken about like people are interested in stars and currency.

The goddess must have entered the city through the sea. At night. The fangs of tides growing like a bursting Gulmohar tree in spring. The stars are shining bright—so bright, while I exit the city. I often watched the row of airplanes moving out in different directions, until being a passenger in one of them, bound north-east, to Canada.

I realize the goddess traveled with me. She travels against time and dimension. At the entry port of this country, I am warned about snow. Everywhere I go, people are concerned and ask me to prepare for the oncoming winter season. It is May. Squirrels scurry over garden hedges and eat the nuts I hold in my hand. After leaving my home city, I have no home in the city I was born. I try to speak to the Goddess in Tamil, but utter Marathi. We change languages until I realize that words are pliable.

“Now that I am here, where do I go? Where can I be an embodiment of ecosystems? Where may I embrace rain?”

“After the H peninsula shore, you will come across a strait. Turn towards the direction of the moon. You will find a cottage to spend your night there. A bowl of fruits drizzled with honey and vanilla extract will be on the table. You can eat and sleep there. This will be your temporal house.”

“Will I ever have a permanent house?”

“You will have me with you throughout on this journey. We will pivot to places you will stay for each season. If you must call me, take my name once and I will appear.”

I trace my footsteps into the coniferous forest. When I walk into the area, the moon appears to follow me everywhere. The house is made of stone and brick. I look into the window and identify the bowl of fruit. The door is already open. Though it is night, I smell the aroma of roses and hear shrieks from barn owls. I walk around the house and come across a river which flows into the thicket. After retracing my footsteps and eating fruit for dinner, I drowse into an immigrant’s first sleep in the new country.

When I wake, it is eleven in the morning. I wash my face in the river going upstream. I am at the base of a meadow surrounded by high cliffs, the color of darkening night. Deeper into the forest, oak, maple, and beech trees illuminate rays of the sun. The woodland phlox and wild geraniums grow within the shade. Further in an elevated path, I encounter creeping juniper. I gather strawberries and red elderberry, bring them in the house. The cabinet has stacks of tomatoes, onions, and russet potatoes. I cook a broth of those with salt and pepper, adding freshly cut coriander leaves as garnish. I eat these with two slices of bread.

There is an inner knowing: to rewild the forest and begin a process of cleaning. I remove the plastic cans, fiberglass mattresses tossed by the riverbank, and call upon the goddess. She teaches me an incantation to dissolve these into the earth, to make them disappear.

“May all that is not of the earth be returned without harming the earth. May all that has been manipulated from the earth that is not beneficial to the earth be returned without remnants on the earth. May the interconnectedness thrive. May it begin now as my words are ushered into the atmosphere. May the layers of the magical universe be in unison for its blessings and flourish.”

I say this out one hundred and twenty-seven times before everything disappears. The sun is overhead. I begin to gather tools to create a natural pond. Upon excavation as in a shape of the crescent yesterday, I build shallow ledges around its perimeter. The path is lined with a base of clay, after which rain begins to fall — I wait under a sprawling evergreen as the pond fills unto its brim. Then, in the light drizzle, I begin to grow native plants: Tiarella cordifolia, Lobelia cardinalis, Iris versicolor, Symphyotrichum cordifolium, Calthra pulustris, Lobelia siphilitica, Rudbeckia laciniata, Carex crinita, and Sagittaria latifolia. It is evening until the whole pond becomes a real embodiment. At night, there was a soft layer of snow, like threads in a blanket. I dreamt of two deer gazing across the pond. When I went near the window, I saw their reflections in the pond. The Lobelia cardinalis looks astounding in the rain garden and the Lobelia siphilitica teaches me how to be in life tolerating interludes of full sun and part shade with periodic flooding. I move back to slumber in the decadence of this opulence, a place which has embraced me as its own.

At morning, I open my eyes and the goddess is in front of me. It is her sixth day of menstruation and the bleeding has reduced. I forget the concept of time. The mirrors in the room begin to feel as though they are alive, holding apertures of the sunken sky with rain.

In the meadow, the goddess opens both her palms. Native fish jump out of the place where the center of her palm meets the fourth finger. Animals appear one after another from her frame which has metamorphosed akin to rain. I call her name. She appears like the sprawling spring day, arriving through the path of tall, green trees. We sit under a tree where willow, marsh tits, and willow tits appear. Here, blue tits do not steal nesting cavities. I hear the whistling notes in the song of a northern cardinal and it reminds me of the idea of home with which I was born. Two mourning doves appear in the landscape, as if they have flown from a familiar place. I pray to the goddess for rice and lentils with a cauliflower crisply sautéed in mustard oil. When the plate is placed in front of me, I eat the morsels with a feeling like I am in two places at the same time. Borders begin releasing like wisps of cotton from the plant, like cirrocumulus clouds.

I begin to dream an abridged glossary of endangered birds, or how all of us are inextricably linked. The sociable lapwing is the first to fly across rims of the roof sounding like music; rain on stone. Their population began to rapidly declined since the 1930s. After more than a century, the largest flock was seen in Turkey in 2007. Their migration route patterns contour like mountains or waves. A reason for the declining population includes being killed along their movement passageway. Another possibility includes domesticated animals intruding, causing a low survival rate. The second to appear is my favorite Himalayan quail, of whom my nani recited many mythological tales. Feared extinct, there isn’t a single sighting of the bird recorded since 1876. The species was witnessed more than seventy years before an independence. Hunting activities during the colonial period has been a significant factor of its declining population. By the 1800s, when my ancestors still revolted against the British empire, sightings of the Himalayan quail became extremely rare. There were an estimated fifty of the birds known to be left in the wild. Their migration patterns appear as distinct rivers on the map. The Kashmir flycatcher, a migratory bird arrives with a rose in its beak. The bird has a small and declining population and breeding range. This is also severely fragmented, as a result of the deconstruction of temperate, mixed deciduous forests. It is deemed vulnerable. Its migration pattern is like an estuary meeting the sea.

This is an epistemology story of the goddess. Once upon a time, long, long, ago, there is a city born into the expanse of water. It has come to be known as the city of dreams. It is thought that if you have a dream to make it big the way the world defines success, you must arrive in this city. You will be called to hustle until the labor turns into enough sweat to fill an entire pail every day. The amount of sweat will not be directly proportional to the yardstick of success, however. Some believe that being in air-conditioned offices is better than being out on the street trying to make a living. A collective consciousness of belief metamorphoses into a lived reality we share. Tall beige and maroon office buildings mushroom throughout the city. There is no place to walk without crippling another’s toe. Gulmohars and Ashoka trees are laden with dust.

Some believe that there are ichapurti divines who would assist them in this journey if they made an offering of a thali upon the feet of a deity: a tender, brown coconut, a sweet made of flour and milk garnished with dried rose petals, and braids of roses or jasmine, or a pink or white lotus. A legend is that the city is named after a goddess. My grandfather is native to the city; a fisherman from the Koli community. The belief is that the goddess is a reincarnation of a devi, who appeared in the form of a fisherwoman. When I speak to a hundred and five years ajji from my neighborhood, she illuminates generational truths.

A daitya who worshipped the creator of the universe for years acquired a vardaan of not being killed by gandharvas, Gods, yakshas, animals, demons, serpents, or beasts. He grew arrogant and terrorized the local inhabitants. A god with a lock of hair akin to the crescent moon asked all gods to give away a fragment of lustre from their bodies, out of which a goddess was created. She waged a fierce battle against the daitya. Before being thrown into paatal, he pleaded for mercy. He requested her to include the prefix of his name as a mark of being defeated. Another devta has made his presence felt after this inspiring tale about the city.

Nani does not agree with beliefs surrounding the birth story of the goddess. She shows me the horizon of the city where the sun and water appear to meet, a boundless sea. “Ti ikdun aali,” she says. I believe her.

I hear the story in another dream in the voice of nani.

I wake up to a path guided by my consciousness. I enter the meadow fed by sunlight and all these endangered birds glisten in the expanse. The goddess is standing in the midst of eighteen trees, all of which appear like a door of this meadow.

“Where have they come from—even the Himalayan quail? In North America?”

“This is no place with a name. When places are attributed a name, they take on specific characteristics. They have to fill the world in a particular way, often descending towards a singular dimension. What would happen if you read about a place which was beyond known waters?”

“I would begin to imagine how the place would be, Mata.”

“In imagination burgeon our most courageous stories. This was an abandoned meadow, now gleaming with life. There were townsfolk on their way to deter you from living here, but I created a river in the route. They will believe that this stream of water is to create a division between you and them, but will not realize that there are no divisions; only dissolving segments of what we call time. There will be another season in the brink of this horizon. In six days, there will be the brink of autumn upon which you will be in another home, another place which we will not attribute a name.”

At that moment, I realized there are no permanent places, no homes for those of us who have become migrants.

“Your thoughts go in the direction of truth. You have memorized a lost ocean and a burgeoning sea which folded into tides like veins of the night. It will be time for another tidal wave.”

“The only truth will be your presence. How do you appear in front of so many devotees?”

“A devotee is not a person; in the particular body is the world. That which you call worship is our true nature, out of which we burgeon several dichotomous selves.”

I must move in the direction of the sun. It has begun to turn into afternoon and remnants from the trees fall over the ground. “What will happen to this biodiverse habitat?”

“Ecologies will thrive. You have introduced native species back into the ecosystem. Rewilding efforts have been done for endangered birds. You will go from here and someone else who must spend their days in this home will be here.”

“This way we will create several homes. This way the world will be our home.”

“This way the world will be our home,” the goddess echoes.

I walk into the bewildering path of grape vines where it is autumn and fruits have begun ripening in orchards. Away from the liminal light where there is a path of river streams and a sixteen-mile creek, I will create another home. The pattern of v-shape formations and Canada geese trail this trajectory where I am now headed onward.