There is a phrase near the centre of Mamang Dai’s poem that rewards the kind of slow, repeated reading that most poems ask for but few receive: “I am the chance syllable that orders the world.”

Sit with that for a moment. Chance syllable. Not the chosen word. Not the divinely appointed language. Not the tongue that naturally belongs here, that grew organically from this soil. The chance syllable — the one that arrived through the accidents of history, the one that happens to be doing the work of ordering, right now, in this poem.

You can read this in several ways. The narrowest reading is that Dai is describing the contingency of language in general: any syllable that becomes meaningful does so through use and repetition rather than any inherent property of sound. This is broadly true and worth saying.

But there is a more specific, more political reading available. Mamang Dai is an Adi writer from Arunachal Pradesh. Her mother tongue is Adi — a Tibeto-Burman language with no traditional script. Everything she knows that is old, that is rooted, that is ancestral, lives in a language that cannot be written down in its own form. She writes, however, in English. The “chance syllable that orders the world” is, among other things, English — the colonial language that arrived through the accident of British India and has since become, for writers like Dai, the medium through which they address the wider world. It was not chosen. It was inherited. And yet here it is, doing the ordering.

This is a condition many Indian writers navigate, but Dai’s situation is sharper than most. The Adi oral tradition — the Abang, the sacred chant corpus recited by the nyibu during rituals — is not simply untranslated into English. It is untranslatable in a more fundamental sense: it is a performed, embodied, ritual event, not a text. What survives translation is a shadow, a report, an echo. The real thing is in the body of the reciter, the breath of the ceremony, the assembly of the community listening.

And yet Dai writes. In English. For readers who will never visit Pasighat, who have never heard an Abang, who may encounter the word nyibu for the first time in a footnote. The “chance syllable” is not just English as a historical fact. It is the whole situation of the postcolonial writer who chooses — or is chosen by — a language that was not originally theirs, and who must find ways to make that language carry meanings it was not designed to hold.

The poem’s most personal moment arrives from this condition. After the great anaphoric catalogue has moved through desert and rain, wild bird and warrior, star diagrams and summers that make men weep, there it is, almost buried in the accumulation: “I am the woman lost in translation / who survives, with happiness to carry on.”

Everything about this line is significant, starting with the fact that the poem’s speaker has been coded as male up to this point — “I am an old man sipping the breeze.” The sudden emergence of “the woman” is a kind of self-unmasking: the poet stepping through the shaman’s persona to speak in her own name. Dai is that woman. Writing in English about an Adi world. Lost, in some fundamental sense, in translation — the gap between what she knows and what the English lyric form can hold is real, and she does not pretend it isn’t.

But notice what does not follow. Not despair. Not paralysis. Not the dramatic anguish of the postcolonial subject unable to speak. What follows is: “who survives, with happiness to carry on.” The happiness here is not naive. It does not pretend the loss didn’t happen. It is the happiness of someone who has looked at an impossible situation and decided to do it anyway, who has found, in the work of translation, not just loss but also something — call it a different kind of presence, a different kind of knowledge.

The poem’s opening scene is worth returning to here. A young man arrives from the village. He cannot speak, so he brings fish. And the mountain-speaker, in response, lays down the spear and tries to make a sign. Communication without language, across a gulf of mutual incomprehension, mediated by gesture and gift. This is what translation, at its most basic, is: the attempt to make a sign that will travel across the threshold.

What Dai’s poem argues, through its accumulated catalogue and its political declarations and its small domestic scene of the mute young man with his fish, is that this attempt is worth making. Not because it will fully succeed. Not because the gap between languages and cultures and worldviews can be closed. But because the attempt is itself a form of life — the life of the community that keeps trying to reach across its borders, the life of the writer who keeps reaching for the word that might carry the thing she means.

The poem ends not with the chance syllable but with sleep: “I am the sleep in the mind of the mountain.” After all the language, all the naming, all the translation, there is rest. The mountain does not need the syllable; it existed before it and will exist after it. But while the syllable is here, by chance, doing its imperfect work — that is enough to order the world. Temporarily. Partially. With happiness to carry on.