The sound of children chanting reached me before I could see them—a rhythmic, sing-song drift from beyond the schoolyard fence. I stopped. Memories pulled me back to a time when we played the very same game, a game I hadn’t thought of in decades. Moving closer, I saw a teacher sitting on the ground with a dozen toddlers gathered in a semicircle. Their small hands were pressed palm-down against the earth, waiting, their faces split with wide smiles. I stood still, watching so as not to disturb them.

The teacher kept one hand on the ground with her students while her other hand, a loose fist, tapped each child’s knuckles in turn. She moved from hand to hand, chanting, “Udkushi mudkushi lava, soon…” The children squealed with delight, their eyes bright with the thrill of the game. But the sunlit playground gradually blurred, replaced by the humid, shadowed air of a room in Assam 60 years ago. The teacher’s cheerful voice faded, and in its place came the low, tremulous voice of my grandmother—Ji Ama, as we called her.

In my memory, we never played in the sun. We gathered in that same semicircle on a cool indoor floor, fanned out before my grandmother like a row of small, impatient witnesses. She was in her 90s then, her world turned inward by blindness. She would form a fist and begin that same rhythmic knocking—Thump. Thump. Thump. Her knuckles met the backs of our hands as she led us through what I now realise was a 150-year-old séance.

As the rhyme ended, the hand she struck would turn over. Once face up, that hand could ‘run away’ at the end, when all hands were face up. We giggled as we ‘escaped’ one by one, clapping our hands so Ji Ama knew we were still there with her. Little did we know, we were contributing to a clandestine archive. We didn’t yet understand that these words formed a coded ledger of the horror she had witnessed as a four-year-old child—a secret she had glimpsed through the cracks of a forbidden window in the mid-1800s.

Ji Ama was born into a world of closed doors. When a Sati was taken to be burned with her dead husband, the windows of the village were shuttered and the doors bolted. It was a ritual meant for the public eye, yet hidden from the women and children who shared the victim’s ultimate vulnerability.

But a four-year-old’s curiosity cannot be governed by social decree. She told me how she peeped through the slits of the closed shutters, watching the world outside in thin, vertical slices. What she saw was not a ‘divine transition,’ but a macabre preparation that she translated into the only language she possessed: a nursery rhyme. Watching the teacher in the schoolyard, the innocence of the game evaporated.

Through the lens of that childhood witness, the words become visceral:

Udkushi Mudkushi: The uncomfortable, cramped feeling of a house under lockdown—the restlessness of a child witness trapped in a stifling, breathless room.

Lava (The Grain) and Soon (The Gold): The parched rice scattered over the widow and the heavy ornaments she wore. To a child’s eye, she was a Putali—a decorated doll, motionless and gilded for a ceremony she couldn't escape.

Soonko Dhara: This was no ‘golden stream’ of blessings. It was the mustard oil, poured in a steady, golden flow over the woman to ensure she would combust easily.

Noon (Salt): The stinging reality—salt on a raw wound. The searing pain the ‘doll’ had to endure in silence.

Dhuk and Chook: The end of the ritual. Dhuk is the final, frantic throb of a dying heart. Chook—the thick, black residue of boiled citrus—is the metaphor for the aftermath: the wet, black ashes of the pyre.

In an era before mass literacy, especially for women, this was a primary method of transferring history orally. It was a way to record the unrecordable. These rhymes acted as a ‘black box’ recorder for society’s most painful moments. By embedding the trauma in a rhythmic game, the incident could be passed down through centuries, crossing borders from the hills of Nepal to the plains of Assam, safely hidden within the play of children.

As she played with us in Assam, tears would often stream down my grandmother's face. Now, I realise she was reliving that stifling, breathless room over and over again. She was back at that window, watching the doll turn to ash. The game was a mechanical reenactment: The knocking fist was fate; the turning of the palm was the forced exposure of the victim.

My intention in unearthing this history is not to take away the fun of the game. Udkushi Mudkushi has survived for centuries—likely far longer than the 150 years I can personally trace—and it will continue to be played for generations to come. Children will always squeal at the tickle and the escape.

However, we must not take for granted the things that have travelled through time to reach us. Everything we remember, every rhyme we repeat, carries a hidden message if we care to look closely enough. By understanding the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of this game, we aren’t destroying the play; we are giving it a different, deeper meaning. We acknowledge the resilience of the women who used oral tradition to ensure the truth wouldn’t be forgotten. When those children are older and able to understand, perhaps their parents will explain that this simple game is actually a victory—a story of the dolls who finally got to run away. We clap not just for the game, but for the truth that finally made it out from behind the shutters.