Time Travel

I don’t have children, which is a decision I made years ago, maybe long before I understood what it really meant. On most days, though, I feel pretty sure it was the right decision for me. Whenever I have the occasional twinge the other way, it’s brought on by some piece of fiction, something I’m reading (like Gilead) or watching (like the animated short film Hair Love), and I slip briefly into the daydream of an alternate reality.

In the non-fiction of my life, though, I’m an uncle, a role I love playing. I’m an uncle to my sister’s children, to my cousins’ children, to my friends’ children. And, as a non-parent, I look at these families with a mix of admiration and fear and wonder at their inner workings. I feel like I can almost see the lines between these people: atom-thin, tensile filaments connecting their bodies and personalities to each other.

My sister had her first child in 2015, and since then, watching my niece grow up, I think about the family history that she carries around with her, unaware of the people and names and places that stretch behind her existence. 

I have a new song out today called ‘Cascade.’ It’s my attempt at braiding some of these ideas together.

‘Cascade’ is a lullaby that’s happening in two different eras at the same time. It’s an imagined story about my maternal grandmother, Sumitra, as a young woman in India in the 1930s. One night, before she ever has any children of her own, she has a vision of her great-granddaughter — my niece Asha, who won’t be born until a decade after my grandmother’s passing. She dreams of this little girl and feels a profound connection to her. She can see Asha sleeping in her bedroom, in a future Sumitra won’t be around for. Within the dream, Sumitra makes up a lullaby and sings it to this child who shares so much with her, but whom she’ll never meet.

In the song, that story is being told to Asha by my sister, who sings the same lullaby as she puts Asha to bed—creating the moment that my grandmother envisioned almost a century earlier.

My friends Kristin Slipp and Cole Kamen-Green of the band mmeadows helped me write this song over a few days this fall, and they perform on it as well. Kristin sings backing vocals, and Cole plays trumpet. Later, while I was writing some more on my own, I got stuck, and so I reached out to my friend and frequent collaborator, Jenny Owen Youngs, who helped me get unstuck, as she often does. The cover art for the song is a painting by Seonna Hong, whose artwork is also featured on the cover of the last song, and on my t-shirts (this one and this one).

After ‘Cascade’ was done, I approached the wonderful illustrator and animator Maf López (whom I worked with on the Song Exploder Netflix series) and asked her if she would bring to life the visuals I had in my head. I asked her to create a looping sequence of four scenes across four generations of a family: a grandmother as a young woman in her bedroom in India in the 1930s, her daughter as a young woman in a kitchen in America in the 1970s, her granddaughter as a young woman in the 2000s, and her granddaughter and great-granddaughter today. The scenes melt from one to the other and then loop back in time, the way the song stretches from one era to another and connects them. 

You can watch the animation here, and listen to the song on all of the streaming places here. If you’d rather buy the song than stream it, then a) you rule, and b) here it is.

So, it’s been a long time since I’ve sent out a letter, and there are a few other things that have happened that I wanted to mention:

In December, I got to play a small role in an episode of Bob’s Burgers. I can’t overstate how big of a deal that was for me personally, and the episode I’m in, “The Plight Before Christmas,” turned out to be one of my favorites from the entire series.

This was a surprise: mango pie was number 5 on Google Trends’ report on the most searched-for recipes of 2022!

There’s a DC Comics / Spotify original podcast, Harley Quinn and The Joker: Sound Mind, which stars Christina Ricci as Harley Quinn, and I play a few small roles in it.

I talked to CBC’s Podcast Playlist about a few of the podcasts that bring me a lot of joy, and I talked to Jesse Sparks on The One Recipe podcast about chole, the dish that I’ve been making (and eating) my whole life.

And a small Snack Club tidbit…if you ever find yourself at a grocery store with a paltry cookie aisle, searching and searching for a snack that you can take back home to your vegan wife, let me tell you what I discovered: it turns out that Nabisco Ginger Snaps are dairy free, and they still rock as much as they did when I was a kid, sneaking into the pantry to eat one or two (or three) more than I was supposed to. That was a little bit of time travel, too.

Thanks so much for reading.

— Hrishikesh