Incense and Sensibility

by Sonali Dev

  What did I say? he wanted to ask. But already he’d said everything that had popped into his head. Something he never did. He’d told her about his uncle. He’d never told anyone else that.

  Maybe it was the tapping of the knife. Maybe it was a hypnotic trick to loosen the tongue.

  “You think this is about control,” he said finally, and just saying the words, acknowledging them, made something far too powerful move inside him, even as that same thing darkened her eyes.

  Was she proud of him? Impressed? Why was the impact of it the same as if she had pinned a medal to his chest and then dropped a kiss on it?

  Turning away, she dumped the chopped zucchini into the soup and spooned in some powdered spices. Her pale yellow yoga shirt formed a complicated pattern of crisscrossing bands across her back. The need for her to turn around and face him again was a tug deep inside him.

  The way he felt when she did turn to him again made alarm bells clang in his head. Before she could speak, he raised a hand to stop her. “Please don’t turn the question back on me.”

  “Fine.” A stray pea had stayed stuck to a pod in the basket. She eased it out, carefully, thoughtfully. “Why did you agree to your family’s demand that you come and see me?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  She popped the pea in her mouth and met his eyes again. Her eyes were an almost black brown, her irises so unusually large that they gave her beauty an uncommon blend of wisdom and innocence. It was her eyes, with their lack of armor, that had disarmed him years ago. Here it still was, the naked vulnerability that had drawn him in. Was she afraid of nothing?

  “Ashna was probably the one who suggested it and Trisha and Nisha probably agreed that I might be able to help you. But you wouldn’t have come unless you wanted to. What scared you enough that you agreed to come?”

  Fair. Enough.

  “I told you the last time I was here. I tried to get on a stage at a rally and I couldn’t.”

  “Couldn’t how?” The sparkling brown of her eyes changed when something caught at her thoughts. What he’d just admitted had clearly snagged at her sympathy, and naturally those transparent eyes showed it.

  “Couldn’t because my legs wouldn’t move and my heart felt like it was going to race right out of my chest. It felt like, well, I felt like I had disappeared into myself. Like I wasn’t even there.”

  “And you’ve never been afraid of getting on a stage before?”

  “Hell, no.” It was embarrassing how much he loved it. Laying out his plans and policies, explicating problems and their solutions. Watching the audience react to his words. Reaching out. People never really understood how much you needed to love campaigning to run for any kind of office.

  “So you felt out of control,” she said softly, as though she knew how loud the words would sound in his ears.

  Each word was a scream. He didn’t answer.

  It’s the only thing I’ve felt, really felt, since the shooting.

  He couldn’t say those words. Feeling out of control had scared him even more than the panic attack. The empty space in place of feelings was the most terrifying thing he’d ever experienced.

  He was feeling things now. Here.

  Feeling so much that it was like his emotions were actors hamming it up, auditioning for India’s attention.

  “When did you feel like you had reappeared? When did those symptoms alleviate, the elevated heartbeat, the inability to move?” Her soup was boiling and she turned down the flame and put a lid on it.

  “Only when Rico went out to announce that I wouldn’t be speaking.”

  She didn’t respond. He really needed her to respond.

  This felt strangely intimate, the kitchen filled with the scent of spices, the faint gurgling of boiling soup. He rifled through the basket of peapods, but they were all shelled.

  India’s gaze lingered on his fingers digging at empty peapods. She knew there was more. She waited for him to find the courage to say it. He couldn’t.

  “Is there anything else you need help with?” he asked, when he really wanted to ask if she let all her clients into her kitchen like this.

  “Have you ever done pranayama?” she asked in the quietest voice, as though he’d spoken the turmoil he was feeling, as though she needed to ease him of it. “It’s yogic breathing.”

  “I know what pranayama is.” Snapping the words made everything worse, so he evened out his tone. “Our grandmother does it every day. When I was young and visited her in Sripore, she’d make us kids sit down with her and do it every morning. After she moved here, we joined her for it on weekends.”

  “Do you mind sitting down for some breathing with me?”

  It was such an absurd question, made even more so by the formality of her tone and the fact that they had just shelled peas together, that he almost smiled. “Now?”

  She almost smiled back. “I promise it’s nothing too woo-woo.”

  “But it is a little woo-woo?”

  “Just a little.” She went to the living area adjoining the kitchen and unrolled a couple of yoga mats stacked up in a corner.

  She sat down on one and he sank down across from her on the other.

  The artistic line of her spine made her look like she was floating. The way she held herself was a thing of beauty, everything about her was graceful, almost poetic.

  Don’t think the next part.

  He thought the next part. This was how she’d been even ten years younger. Completely in possession of herself. Her movements, her body, the way she treated you, there was a cohesiveness to her. Not a hint of the dissonance he saw in the world around him.

  Sitting by her, Yash felt stiff and clunky. A legal brief next to a haiku.

  She shifted until she was facing him. It was impossible not to be drawn into the circle of peace that emanated from her as she folded her hands together in her lap, one over the other as though she were hiding something precious between her palms.

  “I want you to close your eyes.” She closed her own. Her spare but long lashes spiked up in all directions when they pressed against her smooth high cheeks. As soon as it was gone from sight he missed the warm brown of her eyes.

  Something about the trust that let her sit there with her eyes closed was exactly what he needed to be able to let his own eyelids drop shut. “Okay.” Then he couldn’t help but open them again to make sure she didn’t open hers now that he’d admitted to closing his.

  She didn’t. Her face was a lake of calm, not a line marring her soft forehead. He closed his eyes again.

  “Okay.” Had she known he’d check and given him time to? “Do you mind breathing with me for a bit?”

  He wanted to say five silly things about how they’d been breathing together for the past hour, but her voice was too soft and soothing for that. She was too wholly immersed in this. “Are we going to chant, ‘Om’?”

  “Do you want to?” Her tone only made his attempt at lightening things feel like mockery.

  “Let’s stick with what you were planning.”

  “Good. Let’s breathe in for four breaths. Hold for four breaths and then breathe out for six.”

  Sounded simple enough.

  Before he knew it, a shimmering peace had spread through him.

  “Now I want you to stay right here. In this moment, and I want you to think about the first time you ever got on a stage to give a campaign speech. Do you remember it? Bring it to you, here into this room. It’s coming to you. You’re not going to it.”

  He remembered it in vivid detail. He was running for San Francisco supervisor. “It was in a church in the Mission. It was a Saturday afternoon, a rare sunny day in January, and there was this one leaded window that scattered a pattern of light across the empty pews. It looked like birds in flight. Yes, there were more empty pews than filled ones. There was a group of Indian high schoolers there. I kept wondering which of my parents’ friends’ kids they were.”

  “How did you feel?” she asked.

>   “Excited. I was finally doing what I was born to do. There were nine people there, it wasn’t an empty church.”

  “Not nervous?”

  “No.”

  “Not about forgetting your speech or about the questions the audience would ask?”

  “I always know my speeches by heart. And I want to engage with the audience, so the questions are never scary.”

  “Can you tell me how you felt physically?”

  “Strong. Powerful. I had gone for a five-mile run, so I was kind of exploding with energy.”

  “And emotionally?”

  So she did know he was hiding something. “Exactly the same as I did physically. I felt connected to every person in that church, and all the others outside it.”

  It had felt fabulous. Instead of dwelling on that, she walked him through other memorable speeches. Convocation ceremonies. Award acceptances. Rallies. His entire body throbbed with all the emotions he’d lost these past days. Pride, excitement, jubilation, even sadness and anger at all the things people suffered. All the reasons they came to see him. And yes, also power that he could do something.

  Before it could all slip away, she spoke again. “Can we go to another day now? Can you bring the day in the Orpheum in here now? The day when you couldn’t go out on the stage and speak to the crowd, bring that to yourself.”

  “I know what the day at the Orpheum was,” he said too sharply. A dark sense trembled inside him. “Are we done with this?”

  “Can you stay with the discomfort for another moment?”

  He made a grunting sound, and that just made him feel like an idiot.

  “Did you have a speech prepared?”

  “Do you know how many speeches I’ve given just these past six months? Forty-nine. I can give that speech in my sleep.”

  “So you were perfectly prepared.”

  “I don’t need to prepare. It’s not student government. This is my thing. I’m always prepared.”

  Silence. Then, “So it was like every other time.”

  “No. I had no idea who was out there. I never thought about that before. I trusted everyone who came to see me.”

  An even longer silence. “We’re jumping ahead of ourselves,” she said finally. “You haven’t told me how you feel. Physically.”

  “I feel like throwing up. Like I couldn’t move if I tried. Like someone’s taken all the strength out of my limbs. Are we done? How is this helping?”

  “Stay here, Yash. Just a little bit longer. Stay inside yourself. Just one more time, can you go with me to the last democratic convention in Florida when you gave that speech to the delegates?”

  One of the best days of Yash’s life. He relaxed.

  “What do you remember?”

  “Noise. Delegates love to talk. Who would have thought?” He chuckled and felt her smiling in response even though his eyes were closed. God, was he buying into her woo-woo? “I remember deafening cheering and a lot of red, white, and blue balloons and streamers and confetti. It was everything I’d dreamed of that day in the church.”

  He’d never realized that he carried that day in the church into every public rally he ever attended. It felt somehow significant to know that. “And, no, I wasn’t nervous at all. It was an opportunity I’d been preparing for my whole life.”

  “And you always have your speeches memorized, and this was your crowd.”

  “Yes.”

  “And how did you feel—”

  “Physically?”

  “Yes.”

  “Strong. I’d gone for a run that morning. I was bursting with energy.”

  “And you’re feeling that now. As if you’re there?”

  “Inasmuch as I can feel like I’m there when I’m actually here.”

  “Right.” There was a smile in her voice. A smile she was trying to resist but couldn’t. A smile that made him feel so full, so rooted, that it made him want to stay right here, sweet-earth incense caressing his senses, throbbing purpose filling his body.

  Emotions swirled inside him and around him. Tangible emotions that didn’t feel slippery.

  The moment Ashna had knocked on India’s door and India had run at Ashna with questions about him, in that moment something had bloomed inside Yash. The belief that he would feel like himself again, that he hadn’t lost himself. Like he knew what to do with people. Like the beating heart inside his chest was more than an organ. Like he was more than the blood that circulated through his blood vessels. All the things he hadn’t been able to feel since the first gunshot went off. All the things he stopped feeling when she wasn’t there.

  He jumped off the yoga mat.

  “I . . . I have to go. I’m late for something.” Yes, he sounded like an absolute coward.

  India opened her eyes slowly. It was possibly how she would have liked him to do it. He felt like a jerk, but he embraced it. Because, hey, you were who you were. He could feel things now. Their work was done.

  Touching her own chest in some sort of ritual, where she looked like she was pushing something back inside her heart with her palms, she stood, looking as floaty and grounded as ever.

  “I think we’re done here,” he said, not proud of his harsh tone.

  “If that’s what you want.” Her expression did not alter, but deep in her eyes disappointment flashed. So the yogi wasn’t quite as yogic as she’d like to be.

  “Thank you. That was very, umm, very insightful.” He turned toward the door. Something tugged at him, pulled him back. That wasn’t why he turned back to her, though. “Can I have you invoice me, or do I pay now?” He reached for his wallet.

  Without looking at him, she started rolling her mat. “There will be no invoice. We’re good.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Her focus stayed on the mat. “You’re my friends’ brother. You needed help and I helped you. Or tried. Ashna, Trisha, and Nisha are like family.” She put away both mats.

  “You provided a service. This is not up for debate.” HRH’s imperiousness was in his voice again.

  She had this thing she did, like she was tightening something deep inside, the very core of her being, without moving a single visible muscle. “You’re right, there’s no debate. We had a conversation. You didn’t feel like you wanted to stick it out until the end, but basically we had a conversation, and I don’t charge friends or their families for talking to them. Now, if you’re ready to leave, please call Brandy so she can escort you home.”

  Her tone was nonconfrontational. He doubted she’d ever been confrontational a day in her life. Then why the hell did it feel like he’d done something wrong and she was confronting him about it? This particular form of treatment wasn’t working for him. So he’d stopped wasting her time.

  He texted Brandy. “I just texted Brandy.”

  “Good.” She stood there all perfectly erect and still, smooth glowing skin stretched tight over lean muscle. That long bare neck at once proud and humble.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Only if you don’t offer to pay me for the answer.” So she did do confrontation. She just did it in this utterly unruffled way. How had he offended her by offering to pay for her time? He was running a political campaign, for shit’s sake. Knowing what not to say to people was supposed to be his topmost skill.

  “If I hadn’t jumped off the yoga mat like . . .” He wasn’t sure if he paused because he wanted her to finish that for him or if he just wanted to extend the conversation because suddenly he didn’t want to leave.

  “Like someone who was uncomfortable with what he was feeling,” she filled in, soft pouty lips barely moving, the effort stretching the faint scar marking the vulnerable Cupid’s bow.

  He would have said, Like an utter coward. He wasn’t sure he liked her version better. “Well, if I hadn’t stopped, what would we have done next?”

  The eyes that met his told him that she had a good mind not to answer, but then her generosity won out, because he probably looked as tortured as he felt.


  “Yash.” She said his name the way his family said it. To rhyme with rush, not dash. The way she’d said it the very first time. “What you’re experiencing isn’t technically panic attacks. Panic attacks are usually random. There can be identifiable triggers, but they aren’t obvious. And they don’t go away immediately when the triggers are removed. What you had was an anxiety attack. Given what you went through, that’s to be expected.”

  “Are you saying I’m not actually going to die from a heart attack if I step on another stage?”

  “Anxiety attacks, especially so soon after trauma, can feel absolutely physically debilitating.”

  “So you’re saying time will take care of it.” But time was the one thing he didn’t have.

  “It usually does.” She paused, weighing how to say the next part. “The more you bury things, the more you have to dig to get to them.”

  That wasn’t an issue, because putting things away had worked out just fine for him.

  She studied him, then let a breath go. “But, yes, there are ways to aid our natural healing process.”

  “But it takes time? The election isn’t something I can postpone. What do I have to do to speed things up?” Impatience rolled through him. He hated this. Whatever this was.

  She seemed to see exactly what it was. “You’ve had stitches?”

  He nodded.

  “So, if you didn’t have a doctor around to sew up torn skin, your wound would still heal. The stitches just make sure that the wound heals the way it’s supposed to. You’re basically just helping your body by securing the cut in the position where you want your skin to thread back together. The actual regeneration of cells to heal the cut is done by your own body, which has the natural ability to heal most injuries. Your mind is somewhat like that.”

  “Wounds don’t always heal right if you leave their healing to chance,” he said.

  The barest nod.

  “Or even worse if you scratch it wrong or bandage it too tight or put something on it that holds an infection inside.” He ran his hands through his hair. His worry tell. Nisha and Ma had worked hard to have it trained out of him. “You can cause gangrene. Even—”