 His first book, God Loves Hair, which he performed from here at Radar, was a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and he's the winner of the We Are Listening International Singer Songwriter Award. He lives in Toronto, and I'm really excited that he's here. Please welcome Vivek Shreya. I'm the mother of the universe. I'm the planets and the years of light and darkness in between. I'm the oceans, the land, the air, the four corners. I'm life itself, the spark that makes a heart pump, that keeps a tree alive for centuries, green and reaching. I am Parvati. Today I need a shower. Life can be filthy. I apply paste made of crushed sandalwood and jasmine to my skin with a circular motion. Right hand fingers slowly spread over left hand, over left wrist, around left elbow, up left arm, over left shoulder. I took my love, took it down, climbed a mountain and I turned around. If you see my reflection in the snow covered hills, the landslide brought it down. I sing, but no one can hear me. The note's too high, the melody too beautiful. Not even my husband can hear me, not just because he's out hunting right now. Shiv. My beloved Shiv is often buried so deep within his own mind, seduced by the possibility of an even quieter silence, a firmer stillness, the kind that borders death. Sometimes I think he has more in common with the corpses in that graveyard he's been dancing in lately than he does with me. Oh mirror in the sky, what is love? Can the child within my heart rise on above? Can I sail through the change in ocean tides? Can I handle the seasons of my life? The first song was born out of pure grief. It happened the instant I felt the heartbeat of the first life for my first child stop. I was at the foot of our mountain kailash when my mouth opened in pain and the first too high to be a scream, too beautiful to be a howl, ran up from my diaphragm through my throat and into the dawn. Being buried to Shiv, Lord of Destruction, I understood the necessity of death, but this did not make my loss any easier to endure. Days passed and song and mourning and I have out never to create life again. Well I've been afraid of changing cause I've built my life around you. Time makes you older, children get older and I'm getting older too. But is there anything more consoling, more exhilarating than creation itself? I look down at my body covered in brown paste that lightens as it hardens and I wait patiently. When the paste is firm in tan I gently peel it off, this time starting at my right toe, over right ankle, upright calf, over right knee, upright leg. I sing a different song, my voice cascading like desert sands, each peak unique and transient. The tiny hairs along the newly exposed skin respond to my voice, standing at full attention, but it's not just my own body that responds. I notice the crumbled paste in my hand is softening to my song, its color turning golden. Excited I continue singing and removing the paste from my body, adding it to the other remnants in my hand, my song gets clear and faster, the flow of air in my throat running effortlessly back and forth over the scale, stopping briefly at the mid notes, creating the sound of wind gliding over rivers and eroding stone. Jai Jai Gajanana Gananata Jai Jai Gajanana Gananata Buddhi Pradayaka He Gananata Buddhi Pradayaka He Gananata I'm naked now. All the paste has been removed and formed into a radiant ball of clay that's vibrating with the sound of my voice. My hands take over, they pull, ply, roll, mold and stretch the clay. I know what's happening in my hands. I know this feeling so well, but every time I weep with every bursting new star, every sprout of grass, I weep. When I clear the water from my eyes, I see that I'm standing face to face with the statue of a young boy with my final note. Jai Jai Gajanana Gananata He opens his eyes. Without hesitation, I pull him into my arms and say, your name is Ganesha, Ganesha, my son. He says nothing, but I know he can hear me, his eyelids fluttering. I tell him to guard our home while I rinse off. Let no one in under any circumstance. This is not protection that I seek, but a moment for myself, a moment undisturbed by the prayers and plights of my children. As I finish the final part of my cleanse, the water rinsing the oil and salt of creation off my body, I can't help but sing as I think of my new son. Gajanana Gananata For a moment, I think I can even hear him humming along in the distance. And again, I cry. When I emerge, I find Ganesha's head on the doorstep next to his headless body. Hi, everyone. My name is Vivek Shreya. I'm so thrilled to be here at Radar. Like Michelle said, I read here when I self-published my first book back in 2010, and it was such an intimidating thing to email Michelle and say, hey, I have this book, and there's a lot of elitism in the lit world and a lot of snobbery around self-published books, and it was such a wonderful and generous invitation for her to allow me to read here. So thank you so much for that opportunity, and it's so wonderful to be back with my published novel, She of the Mountains. And basically, it's illustrated, and there's two narratives. One is a reimagining of Hindu mythology, and one is a love story. You are going to be my boyfriend. These were the first words Smith said to him the first time they met at a mutual friend's birthday party. This fordness surprised him, but the prophecy itself did not. Smith was a celebrity dancer, often featured in the local news, and with each Smith's sighting, each mention of Smith's name and conversation, it never felt like a random occurrence, but rather a step toward each other. It wasn't a feeling of destiny, a future promise, as he was certain that Smith was out of his league, but a feeling of familiarity, as though maybe in their childhoods, they had attended the same school or had played in the same park. In person, Smith was even more attractive. The magnetism of his physicality enhanced by his character. His brown hair was precisely parted, and his matching brown eyes were surrounded by lines of kindness, as though his eyes genuinely cared about every subject upon which they fell. His hands gestured delicately when he spoke, adding an element of dance to everyday conversation, and though he was a commanding six-foot-three, he never seemed unapproachable, always the first person to say, hello. He wasn't sure of hanging out with Smith, qualified as dating, because when Smith wasn't talking about how much he adored his border collie and his family, he talked about his ex-boyfriend. I don't know how many of you have been in that situation before. It had not been an amicable breakup, and Smith was broken-hearted, but Smith was the first boy he had ever hung out with, slash dated, so it was easy to ignore Smith's condition and start imagining their shared life. He would work at the downtown library during the day, while Smith rehearsed. On Wednesdays, they would meet for lunch at the Korean restaurant where Smith used to be a server. Their evenings would be spent reading his head on Smith's shoulder on the second-hand love seat in their small but well-designed apartment. He would get over his fear of dogs and stock up on lint rollers. He would attend Smith's every performance, watching from side stage with a bouquet of pink roses to give to his man. The first time he saw Smith's penis, they were on Smith's couch, arms around each other, lips against each other. Oops, Smith said, signaling down with his eyes. Poking out from the waistband of his pants was what looked like a large pink thimble. He wasn't sure what to do at this point, if anything, aside from observe. Even that, he wasn't sure of, and had to remind himself, it's okay to look. Smith recognized his paralysis and pulled down his own pants and white briefs. It stood proudly between them. As he gazed at Smith's penis, he couldn't help but think of his own. This comparing and contrasting seemed to be an inevitable byproduct of having sex with a man. Many of the differences in their physical attributes could be explained by their racial differences. When Smith took off his black t-shirt, he nodded with a feeling of deja vu. Every shirtless male body he had seen, save for the males in his own family, had looked like Smith's. Lean but muscular, smooth chest, hard stomach. Smith's body was every man's body. In GQ, the Sears catalog, movies and porn, he had digested copies of it countless times. He expected it. He worried about Smith's expectations given that Smith had most likely never seen a naked brown body before. Before her, just the idea of the words naked and brown together had seemed incongruous, even to himself. Being brown meant he had much larger nipples, two puffy Hershey's kisses, and abundance of hair everywhere. When Smith later jerked off both their penises, he was uncomfortable with how much darker his penis was than Smith's. He was convinced that if their penises were at war, his penis would be typecast as the evil one, the villain. What bewildered him most about being intimate with another man was the absence of the eureka moment he'd been anticipating and even been promised by gay males he knew now that he was finally with the right sex, the same sex. Don't worry, once you're with a man, everything's going to make sense, they had said. But there was no great confirmation of his homosexuality with Smith, either through more frequent orgasms or harder erections or the sound of trumpets or a sweeping feeling of superior satisfaction or freedom or truth or home or peace. When he put his lips around Smith's penis or pushed his own penis into Smith's firm ass, he felt an undeniable pleasure, but not undeniably more than the pleasure he'd experienced with her. It was just different. In the minutes before sunrise, when Smith's desk, bookshelf, and their pile of clothing on the floor would gradually bear the light of a new day, he found himself thinking about her, missing her, her face the color of palaces in Jaipur, her upturned lips that smiled even while she dreamed, her crown of curly hair, her eyes that were stars in their own right. Baby, there ain't no mountain high enough ain't no valley low enough ain't no river wide enough to keep me from getting to you, babe. Thanks so much. Thank you, Vivek. That was great. We have one more person here, and she's came all the way from Berlin. This is a very international radar tonight. It's Chloe Griffin, and she's the creator of this amazing book, Edgewise, a Picture of Cookie Mueller, which I...