I sing for a living. What I cannot do is sing the one song that is mine, because I only have the part of it that survived in me, and I am not certain the words are the words.
Four lines. The vowel at the end of the second line is probably wrong — I have said khatoon for thirty years and someone in the Tuesday group told me it is almost certainly khatun, which is a woman, and which changes the whole thing from a name into an address. That is what a fragment does to a person: a grammatical correction becomes an event.
What I actually have
- Four lines, recorded on my phone in an Oslo kitchen in 2019, and again in 2023 because the first recording had the fan in it.
- The melody, which I trust far more than the words. A melody is harder to invent by accident.
- A place: Shiraz, on a document I did not write and cannot read.
People think a song is a sentimental lead. It is not. Melody carries region the way an accent does, and there are musicologists who will tell you that. So I play it at every gathering, on purpose, in public, like a man leaving a porch light on.
Two things came of it. A woman in Toronto wrote to say her mother sang something with that same falling line, and a member here who works in archives told me the lullaby might match a recording made for a radio programme in the eighties. I have a catalogue number now. I did not have one in January.
To whoever gave me those four lines: I am not finished with them, and I have stopped pretending the not-knowing is a phase I will grow out of.