Five years ago, I began a task I wasn’t sure I could finish.
I had written articles and essays, but the story I had just lived through demanded more than a blog post. It needed to live in book form.
How do you write a whole book? I wondered. How do you structure a chapter? How do you keep track of all the different plotlines? How do you keep people interested all the way to the end?
I was in over my head and out of my element and a bunch of other overwhelmed-sounding cliches.
Over the next two years, I read a lot, and wrote a lot, and, let’s be honest, watched a lot of YouTube tutorials. I talked to Jesus every day, asking Him to help me do something I couldn’t.
And that is how Hidden Song of the Himalayas was written.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing a few extras from Hidden Song of the Himalayas. Deleted chapters, bonus content, and some thoughts on writing and missions.
Starting with a poem.
About Darshika
Darshika, one of my closest friends and a major character in Hidden Song, grew up in an abusive home and was sent away to earn money as a 5-year-old maid. The money was sent back to her father. When she was 14, her father sold her to a much older man from her same village. Darshika was considered his wife, but continued to experience abuse.
In many families in Darshika’s village, abuse was considered normal. Talking about it was ignored or ridiculed. Anyone trying to leave was persecuted.
I wrote the following poem about Darshika’s mother, who left home when Darshika was young, and later died in an accident. In the poem, I imagine Darshika’s mother dying just after giving birth to her, and wonder aloud what she’d have thought if I could have told her that Darshika would one day leave her village, come to know Jesus, and experience a different life, a life where her story was valued and redeemed.
Darshika
If I could ask your mother
I’d ask:
“Was it dawn?
Did you see
Through the window
The edge of Morning’s hands
Holding a pink sari before her
Poised to wrap the night
In color?
Did you look out the window
When your baby’s lungs filled with breath
And she cried?”
How else could she have known to name you Light?
To name you Perceiver, and Intelligence?
How could she have known you would
One day see a morning
That would make your nights worth
All the hyper-vigilance?
For you, Perceiver, were birthed in darkness and
Wrapped in home-spun woolens, and
Suckled at the sweating breast that
Nursed ten others before you.
Your mother was not given to strong hope
She waited in silence
Like color-drained photographs of starving Europeans
In line for bread.
Only this was India, 30 years ago,
And now
In the dark, in the mountains, in the snow,
In the unclean house.
So how could she have known
To name you that way?
If I could ask your mother
I’d ask:
“Did you dare to hope the girl at your breast
would make it out alive?
Make it out of that room with its
One dim lightbulb?
Did you hope that she
Would not give birth one day
Like a dog
Behind the wood stove?”
If I could ask your mother
I’d ask
“What was it like to live inside windows overgrown
Reaching through red bangles
To someone passing by
Who might take pity
Only to bring your hand back
Not with bread
But with blood?”
Instead I ask you.
“What was it like
When you told?”
They laughed at you and said
“Stupid owl, go home.
That’s what marriage is.”
If I could tell your mother
I’d tell
Show her a picture of the future that you’d find,
Maybe draw it in the sand:
You, at 18, gripping toddlers by their hands
Not knowing if you’d make it to the road before Morning
Before he awoke
Before light found you trespassing
And thrust the children back
Into the cow shed.
If I could,
I would tell.
I’d go back to the dying woman as she fell
I’d hold her, smooth the cringing forehead,
And tell.
I would say, “You did it. She’s here. Light made it out of the darkness.”
And she would be proud
To see you
Before everything
Went black.
