I Know Someday You’ll Have a Beautiful Life by Sumitra Singam

After the album Ten, by Pearl Jam (Epic Records, 1991)

Your sixteen-year-old body feels a spark – indecent, unladylike. The guitar licks the flames eager. You can see the disapproving faces of your parents. But there is a roof, and food, isn’t there? (And school, and temple, and heads bowed in prayer, and questions about the length of your skirt, and the boys, the boys, the boys.)

One of those forbidden boys sends you hidden lyrics, saying you are both alive, even if you are not seen for who you really are. The singer’s voice rages, the guitar screeches, the drumskin is never still.

At temple, your eyes hemmed in kajal, clad in a sari which reveals more than a skirt ever could – the boy dares to smile. And the questions about the boy—who, what caste, and what about that test where you only got 98%? The questions smell sour, like they will curdle everything.

The band sings of a girl diagnosed, locked up for knowing herself.

So you smile back. The boy answers with his plump, nicotine-stained lips. The fire laps at your belly like hunger.

The band plays a song about an untouched girl who shatters like glass because a man taught her everything.

The lesson is this—your fire will reduce everything to blackest soot, and you will be left alone. So, you give the boy a feather-light, tinkling laugh, and watch his world turn black.

The music says, though the ocean separates, the currents take you where you need to go.

You are lost for a breathless while, pressure building in your ears. You flail in the foaming wet, but there is no one—you have pushed them all away.

The band crawl into the stone garden. They strip their skin, leave the porch to begin their lives.

This house is sturdy with prayer and acrid holy smoke. This house has a flimsy façade painted over with rice flour rangolis to hide the cracks. This house will stand for aeons with its moral strength. This house will collapse any minute with secret, rotting shame, coconuts cracking at the forecourt like all your false selves.

Drumbeat reaches you like whalesong, calling your name.

You find the bottom, and kick out. The air stings your sodden skin. The music pulls off the six-yards of your sari—red silk like bloodied strips, unleashes your hair into its true, matted wildness.

You are at a concert. The man with the razor-honey voice knows your fire. He’s been singing about it for decades. In a moment he will look up to you. His smile will say—just ride the wave, you don’t need anyone to release you.

The album might end, but the music doesn’t. When the doors open, you will spill into your life. Your fire will be the star in your own sky.

Sumitra Singam is a Malaysian-Indian-Australian coconut who writes in Naarm/Melbourne. She travelled through many spaces, both beautiful and traumatic to get there and writes to make sense of her experiences. Her work has been published widely, nominated for a number of Best Of anthologies, and was selected for Best Microfictions 2024. She works as a psychiatrist and trauma therapist and runs workshops on how to write trauma safely, and the Yeah Nah reading series. She’ll be the one in the kitchen making chai (where’s your cardamom?). You can find her and her other publication credits on Bluesky: @pleomorphic2 & sumitrasingam.squarespace.com