by Avni Doshi
‘I can’t imagine where else we would go,’ I say. He looks at me, waiting, and I realize he has an answer in his mind that he wants me to come to.
‘I have a family too,’ he says when my time is up.
I look at my feet, at the chipped nail polish on my big toe. The top of my foot has a few fine hairs. I have forgotten to pluck them for several months. He doesn’t notice them. Or maybe he does but they don’t bother him. Or maybe they do but he is too kind to say anything.
‘Do you want children?’ I repeat. As I ask him, I realize I don’t want children that sound like him, as though their tongues move too freely in their mouths.
I had asked him this question three months into dating, over a bottle of wine, when we were contemplating the misery of our parents.
‘I think I do. Don’t you?’ he says. It is exactly the same answer he gave me before. He is the same man. He has not changed. Tomorrow, the moon in the sky will begin to move into shadow.
‘Why?’
‘Why, what?’
‘Why do you want children?’
He shrugs. ‘So we can be like everybody else.’
I cannot remember what I said the last time or if this is something I want, too, but it feels familiar, feels like something I would say. Isn’t conformity something I have always craved?
I look at Dilip and he is smiling.
‘You haven’t left the flat today, have you?’
1986
The floor of the ashram is white and cold against my cheek, and there are cracked heels all around. Everyone is dehydrated but perspiring. Arms belonging to bodies in white reach down to lift me. They hold my limbs, the hands closing around my legs, ankles, wrists, forearms, and I float a few centimetres above the ground before meeting it again. They are whispering, discussing what to do with me.
Kali Mata runs her hand against my cheek. ‘Darling, stand up. Please stand up.’ I close my eyes at the cool skin of her palms, at the smell of green onions and ghee in her nails. I love her. I want to do it for her. But I can’t. I want water. I feel water coming out of my mouth. Saliva. The fan is turning above our heads. A lizard scurries across the wall, vanishing behind the white legs of the sanyasis. I try to curl myself up into a ball but the hole in my stomach screams when I move my legs. I look up at all their faces.
I know the others, but only Kali Mata is truly mine. Her blue eyes are like marbles. I can see myself in her eyes, lying there, a dried splatter of white paint. They have gathered to peel me off.
The floor reverberates – I can hear it, my ears are so close to the ground, so sharp – and I can hear her voice. Ma appears among their faces and they make way for her. I tense at the sight of her – I haven’t seen her in weeks, I thought she had forgotten about me, I wondered if she was dead. No one will talk about her in front of me, no one will let me see her. Why do they want to keep us separate? Why does only Baba get to have her?
She picks me up off the floor, carries me to another room, pushes a glass against my lips. It hits my teeth with a clink. I take a sip of the water and sigh. My body is parched from within. I look around and see the room is my room, a room that I inhabit without her, and I cry, throwing my arms around her as my stomach protests.
‘She hasn’t eaten a thing in days. She just asks for you and points to her throat, says something’s stuck.’ I don’t know who is speaking, but I feel the arms I am in stiffen. Ma is angry. I can already smell it.
She throws me down on the bed, and my head feels the hard wood beneath the thin mattress. I cry out, but Ma has climbed on top of me, is holding me, my arms and legs incapacitated, and the flailing I feel, the panic, stops short and rolls back inside, turning over on itself. Her hand hits the side of my face, and like lightning, I see the streak before I hear the sound. She wraps her arms around me and I feel my lungs shrinking as they lose air. I shout but my voice is muffled.
The light begins to darken at its edges, moving in slowly towards the centre. Is it a beating if there isn’t a bruise? I cannot recall the nature of the pain.
‘You better eat when you’re told,’ Ma says. ‘You better be a good girl.’
There was a time when I knew the ashram well, when its particular topography made sense to me. I learned to walk barefoot, to feel gratification in the pressure of pebbles. Kali Mata cleaned my cuts and scrapes, carving out the inner flesh from an aloe vera leaf and rubbing it on my skin. We spent time in a little orchard she tended, populated mainly with burdened papaya trees. She listed the many health benefits of the papaya when she cut open a fallen specimen with a blunt pocketknife and handed me a sliver. These lessons continued even when I was older. When I was sixteen, she taught me to dry papaya seeds and boil them in tea as a form of birth control.
Kali Mata and I went for walks together in the ashram and I learned the shape of the land, where the ground curved like a cradle and the roots of trees rippled above the soil, unfettered. I knew the crevices that could hide my body, among the snakes and the tall ferns, below the notice of the world.
In the ashram, when the sky blackened there was no light except the faint glow of torches which disappeared in the grove. I walked with my hands in front of me, feeling for obstacles in my path. Baba liked to tell the story of how he had sat in silence for one hundred days, alone in a solitary cave near Gaumukh, the mouth of the river Ganga. Not speaking heightened his other senses, gave him supernatural abilities. He knew the feeling of levitating from those days, and from observing the life cycles of cells on his skin. Kali Mata said I shouldn’t take him literally, but I did. I do. When I walked in the dark, I felt every spider’s web, every rock underfoot, and whispers in the trees, the fragrance of jasmine blooming in the distance. My sandals marked each step. The leather soles slapped against the bottoms of my feet. That was the quality of the quiet there.
In the early days, I thought I would never be happy in that strange place. I stayed up all night, huddling in a corner by myself. I could cry without sleep, water or food. The sanyasis tried to coax me, hug me, even scold me from time to time. Kali Mata pinched me and told me not to be ungrateful. I had to eat, drink, sleep, they all said, I had to look after myself, give in to my state of nature. They said I should do it for Baba. They said I should do it for Ma.
They didn’t know that when I did close my eyes I couldn’t place who I was, and that staying awake was the only way I knew the ends of my own body. They gave me a kurta that belonged to Ma, white and worn, frayed at the edges. It smelled like her and I held it through the night. When I lay in bed, I could hear the sounds of the crickets and bats. Their voices echoed as though they were in the room with me. The springs of the mattress hummed under me. The building creaked, and even the ground felt loose, fragile. One wrong step and I would be swallowed up.
The days were easier and, as I got older, I did chores like everyone else, I helped in the kitchen. Kali Mata said we had to give back as much as we took, but I never knew how to measure those things. I ate tomatoes like they were apples. Certain stones uncovered colonies of worms, and I spent hours watching them burrow, sometimes giving in to the desire to smash them between rocks and bury their carcasses. I bathed myself, even during the monsoon, when the drain regurgitated cockroaches. I learned to wash my own underwear and hang it to dry. Kali Mata taught me how to hold a pencil, and control my hyperextended thumb, how to still my hand.
After four months of living there, I found ways to go to sleep by myself, to listen to the sounds of Kali Mata’s breathing across the room, to find a pocket of warmth in the centre of the bed and fill it with any heat I could muster, until I could spread my limbs out without dread of the cold.
But I never managed to control what happened at night. When I woke up in the morning with blood on my pillow and scratches on my face, they told me that I suffered from bad dreams and cut my nails close to the skin. When that didn’t work, they put mittens on my hands. Sometimes, I would wake up in the morning with a sheet tightly wrapped around my body, str
aitjacketing my arms and legs in place. I would scream until Kali Mata heard me and came to let me loose. She said they did it to stop me from thrashing my limbs about.
When I arrived at the ashram I didn’t wear a diaper, but within a month they put me in one. It was too much to wash my sheets every day. I wore one on and off until we left the place four years later.
Sometimes Kali Mata would hug me, holding me so close that I could smell under her arms. ‘I dreamt about you, you know,’ she said. ‘I dreamt that there would be a child to need me.’
There were days when I wouldn’t see Ma at all, and I was not allowed to see her, or even know where she was, and I learned not to ask questions if I didn’t want the answers. When she did appear, she was an apparition, and we sat together, both in white, me once again an extension of her body. She held me and kissed me, and fed me with her hands, softened rice with buttermilk, like she did when I didn’t have teeth. Sometimes at night, she would come when she thought I was sleeping. I would lie still and heavy, let her find a way to fit our bodies together. Her face and kurta were often wet, and she would breathe raggedly into my hairline. And other times, her voice would rise, piercing through the air, and her hand or foot would find a way to come down on me. There were pinches, slaps, kicks, beatings, though now I cannot remember what they were in retaliation for. For me they were accompanied by surprise, fear, and a feeling that lasted beyond the pain of the impact, cauterizing me from the inside out. I understood that sometimes Ma was there and sometimes she wasn’t, but this was neither bad nor good, and this is how our lives would be. Being together or apart was independent from wanting and happiness.
There were times when I hid. Sometimes for days together. I could be invisible, soundless, odourless. When they found me in the end, it was only because I wanted to be found.
In time, the bottoms of my feet hardened. I don’t remember exactly what they were like before, but I remember they were different.
In the ashram, some people wept like overwrought children when they saw Baba, while others sobbed silently. There was a lady whose skin looked like milk curdling in tea, and she fell to her knees, shaking, as he passed by. Then she touched Ma’s feet too.
But most people at the ashram were dabblers. That’s what Kali Mata liked to say. She turned her nose up at that type, the ones who sampled everything on the market. They were promiscuous in their beliefs, like fickle lovers. They discussed their ambivalence openly, in front of Baba, wore blue jeans under their kurtas and cut off their sleeves to sun their dark shoulders. Vegetable sellers set up stalls and pawnshops proliferated just beyond the ashram gate for these occasional visitors. They sold white chemises and pants ready-made, in different sizes and styles.
And then there were those who pulled their clothes off in the meditation hall and, bare-breasted, lay on the ground, arms and legs spread, eyes rolling back, cackling.
Those are the ones I will never forget. And Baba, laughing, clapping his hands.
In the ashram, Baba’s voice was soft yet thundering, and I always looked away when I heard it. He spoke about desire and joy – he said he would teach us how to know both together. I never understood how to achieve this, but as I sat watching the meditations every day, which always began in silence and ended in frenzy, I found there was a life in being a spectator instead of a participant. Each evening, as the followers broke out into cacophony and flailing, releasing whatever animals had been captive within, letting them escape into the vortex of the pyramid, I collected my various feelings, about Ma, the ashram, the moments that made up my day. I placed them in a dish during dinnertime and observed them. They lay there, limp. Unwilling to fight. They would not win, they did not want to try. I looked around and heard the many voices, and saw the many bodies that seemed to make one giant form, a giant larger than Baba, but a mirror of what he was, a collection of so many desires. I knew these desires were there, that they were powerful enough to control weather patterns and bring floods every year, but I could not fathom how they passed, how they were handed around and pocketed in front of me. Adult desire was something I did not yet understand. There was no place for me around it and nowhere for me to go. So I left the dish next to me, occasionally observing its contents, watching them grow. One day, I mixed them into my food and swallowed them whole.
By the time we left the ashram, it was 1989. I was seven years old.
Sometimes I can feel that girl crowning at the back of my throat, trying to come out through any orifice she can. But I swallow her until the next time she wants to be born again.
Every six months, I wash the curtains in all the rooms of the house and we hang sheets on the rods at night to keep the light out. Ma and I used to wash our curtains at home, but now we have to send them to a special cleaner because Dilip has blackout drapes that are too thick and heavy to fit in our washing machine. Had I ever slept in a truly dark room before I met Dilip? He says in the US it’s different, different in a way I won’t know until I visit. I’ve grown up in a place that’s always at war with itself, accustomed to its own inner turmoil. The walls are permeable to sounds and smells, even light seems to seep through. I ask him what is so bad about that. Nothing, he says, except that isn’t how it’s supposed to be.
I tell him he is too concerned with everything being sterile. He looks around the house, at the careful order I have imposed, and laughs.
I shake my head. ‘No, it’s different. I know what I have is an illness, but in America you think it’s a privilege.’
He crosses his arms and says I have no idea how different this life is from the one he grew up with. I look around at our television and bed and curtains, at our shopping malls and diners, and I can’t see how.
‘Imitations,’ he says.
I spend the majority of the afternoon in the studio. My graphite pencils have serial numbers and a logo branded into the sides. I hear Dilip walking around the house, not by his footsteps but by the faint static sound his body makes as it moves through air. The first time he saw my work, Dilip asked me how I decide what kind of art to make, or what to work on. I answered that I don’t. In fact, I have never been particularly thoughtful that way. The work appears as though by chance, and then it selects me.
The maid knocks on the door, asking me what she should cook for the evening, but I ignore her. Dilip and I fought once because he heard me tell her off. He said this is something that will always separate us – Americans don’t behave in certain ways. I asked him not to idealize the polite veneer of his childhood because everyone knows what Americans are really capable of.
I begin my day of work by sketching from memory, something loose and formless, a fleeting impression, to warm my hand. I usually choose something I have had contact with – a toothbrush, my car keys, a part of Dilip’s body. Sometimes I embellish, try to complete the object, give it context – the toothbrush in an open mouth, the car keys in a hand, an additional part of Dilip’s body. Then I add the detail, even if the overall form is just a faint outline. I add texture with short, sharp strokes – shadow, crosshatch, or spirals of black hair.
I know I’m finished when I have gone too far, when the picture has moved away from its original subject, altered to the point of being almost grotesque. Animal into man, man into object. I do this as preparation for the real work, to get the gibberish out of my system. It’s a kind of catharsis, if catharsis really works. I know it feels good to cry sometimes, but Dilip says that football players in America who tackle each other all day are more likely to beat their wives, so maybe only love begets love.
From the drawer in my desk, I take out my drawing from the day before. The face always looks the same to me, though every day adds another subtle difference, moving one step further from the original. Sometimes I am tempted to look back to the beginning, the first image. But this temptation is part of the process. I don’t look back until the drawing for the day is done.
I wonder if one day I will tip over, making that small mistake which will tu
rn him from a man to an ape, that slip in proportion that indicates an entirely new species. Or maybe I will do too little, flatten him out with my lazy hand and turn him into a mannequin. But these fears are not constant; over time, I have seen them inflate and pop.
There are days when the dread of making an error causes my hand to shake, and there are days when errors seem like a small affair in light of so many years of work. And there are days when I want to stop, when I never want to see this face again.
I put the drawing in the drawer when it is finished and let it shut with a solemn bang.
In the evening, Dilip and I are invited to a party, and we do lines because everyone else is doing them. I stand on the balcony without a shawl and feel the hair on my arms poke through the pores. When I look down from the ninth floor, I want everyone on the road to be as small as ants, but we aren’t high enough for that and I feel thwarted and a little angry. We all chat for a while and I get tired of everyone quickly, but my heart will not stop pounding, and I’m nostalgic for the days when parties felt innocent with Ecstasy and dancing.
Everyone is curious about how Dilip is managing as a vegetarian. They ask one question at a time and wait for him to contemplate his answer. The hostess makes sure to pass him the dishes that are free of animal flesh. He says he feels better, cleaner than he has in a long time.
A female friend of ours says he looks younger than before. He smiles at her and they begin discussing vitamin B deficiencies in the Indian population.
The lanterns hanging along the terrace twinkle and swing in the wind. The discussion moves from the relative benefits of vegetarianism to how hard it is to be paleo and alkaline with an Indian diet, and who has switched entirely from white rice to brown.