“Our bodies are like the world, Mira: beautiful, hysterical, hypocritical, mysterious, poor, and temporary. Mine just happens to be all of those at once.”
Rahil, she said, was fatigued by the hospital trips but he never complained. Would I come with her for a new series of blood tests? Pulling her hair up in a bun, she explained that she needed to talk to her neurologist about changing her seizure medication. Her voice grew thick with purpose and excited focus as she described the medication she had been on and how it needed to be adjusted. I looked at Sara’s body. She was thin, but her chest created that illusion of health. Her breasts remained full and wholesome even if all she wore was a baggy white kurta. I wanted to imitate Sara’s style. Her whites, pale blues, and pastel pinks. Her loose, delicately embroidered tunics and kurtas, and most of all her perfect cotton pajamas she wore underneath. Those cotton pants always hit her ankles perfectly. I knew I could never do it, though, because it would be too obvious I was trying to look like her. I had always been a functional woman, finding the most convenient things capitalism had to sell me: jeans, T-shirts, boring digitally printed kurtas, and the occasional skirt.
I agreed to go with her to the appointment. Then I asked if I could make some tea in her kitchen. Sara instructed me to make chamomile. “Make a cup for Rahil too, he will be here in a minute, he just texted.”
My heart thumped and I felt the rise of guilt float up my throat—Rahil’s secret call with me, Sara’s intimate closeness with me. Two magnets, but Sara’s was stronger.
Their kitchen was modest but pretty, with a certain feminine delicacy. More pale blues, like the clothes she wore, and grapefruit reds. Everything was thoughtfully placed: a lavender-and-blue hand towel tucked by the stove, a kettle on the shelf, glasses and pale cream bowls stacked right next to blue-and-white plates. They had Kamala come in every day at 5:00 A.M. and finish by 7:45 A.M. I had never seen her, but she washed the dishes (whatever little Sara could stand to leave in the sink), swept the floors, and took at least twenty-five minutes to dust and replace all the teacups and boxes of spices on the shelves. Up until a month ago I had my Mona, middle-aged and chatty, coming promptly at 5:00 P.M. to clean. Mona even offered to cook because she felt sorry about my life. Over the months her kindness turned into pity, and I found myself withdrawing into my room for privacy as she listed out the reasons I needed to remarry. When she said she was going to move to Delhi because her son was doing well there, I was relieved. I hadn’t bothered to look for a replacement; I kept my house in fair shape on my own, save for a layer of dust that coated my lampshades and shelves, even though I tried to dust the house every three days. “How American,” Sara had remarked, but she seemed impressed.
I found an airtight glass bottle with whole yellow chamomile flowers on the shelf right next to the kettle. I took out a couple, crushed them between my fingers and smelled them.
When I was fourteen, my father had a huge fight with my mother over chamomile. The crux of it was how expensive whole chamomile was and how ludicrously posh it looked in our middle-class home tucked in a little bottle among fresh ground spices and roasted millets. My mother said it settled her nerves, having gotten a taste for it from her old school friend who’d brought her some from America. After that my mother bought a packet every week from a tea boutique in the center of the city. It went on for almost a year, until that morning, when my father flung the bottle onto the floor. My mother looked stoically at the mess and walked up to her bedroom. I could hear her sobbing all afternoon.
I’ve never understood how some children get so upset about their parents screaming at each other. I would have given anything to have grown up with two sure individuals who articulated (with violence or anger or just goddamn clarity) what they wanted. But no, my mother sobbed, my mother would not give you a response in the moment. She would hide, and you would hear her ghostly sobs and feel her utter confusion of the world. And my father, who was truly no monster, would feel terrible but not have the courage to console her. So he would walk out, do God knows what, and come back hours later when everybody was back to an everyday joyless but life-affirming task, like making dinner, or doing homework, or sewing buttons onto a school uniform.
Chamomile and my mother. And now it came back years later with Sara. I saw no irony in it. I inhaled the smell of the kitchen, feeling only comfort and security. By the time the water was hot, Rahil was behind me with his finger on his mouth. He was wearing a white linen shirt, glasses, shaggy hair tossed all over. Looking over-qualified in general.
“Listen, sorry I’m late, we’ll meet alone next time so I can tell you some stuff, but, um, I am going to her room now—see you there.” Rahil had the ability to turn something uncomfortable into something thrilling.
I filled cups with hot water and added an individual tea steeper to each of the pale cups. I brought the tray into the room. At once, Sara and Rahil looked up to me with expectant smiles. That moment was filled with such joy that it pushed against my chest and made me want to inexplicably crumble to my knees and sob with gratitude. Some moments can do that to you.
The One Intimate Thing Ketan Told Me Before He Died
Most love stories glorify the extraordinary secrets shared and life bonds made between couples when they fall in love. The truth is couples mostly fall in love because of some very boring parameters: similar experiences and access to the resources that result in life experiences. Class, in other words. The very foundation of the arranged marriage, which takes similarity so seriously that—barring only directly shared DNA—it requires nearly everything to be the same. The food you eat, the people you know, the places you socialize, the specific gods you pray to—all the same. You hardly have a chance to be surprised by your partner. In Indian tradition, it is considered wise not to be unnecessarily surprised. Go with the plan that’s been drawn for you and make the most of it.
It’s not like a romantic marriage is much different. Sure, the gods Ketan’s family prayed to were different, and they raised him vegetarian (a practice discarded the moment he was in college). We didn’t possess the exact same background to gird our foundation, but we were similar enough to dance to the tune of happy urban complacency. And apart from the goofy impressions we made of our coworkers, we didn’t have any secrets to share or keep. None of that. Except for one time, when Ketan told me a story about his childhood, a story that was uncharacteristic of him, not only in the fact of its telling, but in the story itself.
It was burdened with complexity, mystery, and a certain sense of ambiguity, as if he was searching for the answer from me. He told me this story three months before he died. We were lying in bed and had just shared a bottle of cheap Indian wine. We were taking turns finishing a bottle of water in order to hydrate before sleep. The story goes something like this:
When Ketan was nine, he lived in the north of India in a small industrial town. He had no friends, because his family had just moved there temporarily from Agra, plus Ketan was very shy. They had landed there in the summer, so school hadn’t started yet, and he was left to his own devices for most of the day. In the afternoons, when it was brain-damage hot, he would leave his house with a thick cloth wrapped around his head and walk the edges of the town. I have no idea why his parents allowed him out in the heat like that, but as Ketan summarized it, “it was just that time and those kind of parents.” One day, he saw a small pathway. The road had cracked and it was mostly muddy. It led to wild trees and bushes. He said he immediately recognized the pathway and set upon it confidently.
“Like a past-life kind of thing?” I’d giggled, but he ignored me.
Young Ketan was certain he would find a well at the end of the path. He was right, but the well was not functional like he expected, nor was there a lush tree shading it. He ran up to its crumbling edge and sat on the hot stones. Then he had a vision of the future: He was sixteen, dark, with hairy legs. He wore a dhoti and a cotton shirt, and was helping a group of older men drag out a young woman who had jumpe
d into the well because of a failed love affair. The girl survived, and they eventually fell in love.
He had other visions at the well: His mother, who looked twice her age, by a burning chulha, cooking daal. A dead father. Him embracing the girl from the well.
“Was it sexual?”
“I was a nine-year-old kid when I had these visions, so I couldn’t define it—all I felt was a strong love for this girl and it frightened me, because I didn’t know what love was.”
The girl was older, much older, and Ketan remembered himself being slapped by his mother and then smugly given the news that her family had killed the girl—an honor killing kind of thing. Ketan figured out the honor killing bit only when he got older and could contextualize his memory of the vision with the harsh realities of Indian life.
Then the visions stopped and nine-year-old Ketan sobbed by the well.
“Then, Mira, I felt a sudden need to do something, it was like this purpose, like this fucking purpose, I had never felt such purpose. I am thirty-two today, but the need to live for something was never as strong as it was in that moment.”
“Maybe because you’re already living your purpose?” I had said it with a sudden insecure need for validation. When you’re stupidly living life on expectations, insecurity will raise its head every chance it gets. I wanted him to say that he had found his purpose, that it had been me. Perhaps I was the honor-killed lass reincarnated so we could live our lives together like we were destined to. But Ketan didn’t say that, and I didn’t provoke the words I wanted to hear. Instead I stroked his hair till three A.M., his last answer circling, crashing into my brain over and over again.
“No, Mir, not even close. I am so far away from it that I might as well die right now.”
IV
On Tuesday, I visited my father. Always a practical man, he asked me first about my dietary habits. Was I eating enough protein? He showed me his blood tests. Appa was proud of his self-cure for diabetes. He was a walking campaign for the golden sixties (or sixty-five being the new forty). He had given up white rice, meat, and sweets and relied on whole wheat roti; fresh, lightly spiced vegetables; and plenty of daal. “It’s a misconception that you need meat for protein. Nowadays, the meat we eat holds the fear and anguish of the animals; give it up and you will feel fearless.”
My father used to eat every animal available to him, in spite of the fact that he grew up in a strictly pious vegetarian Brahmin family. He had turned soft in the last decade, slowly becoming the poster child for PETA. “And sprouts, they have so much protein, more than chicken, so why not start your morning with it, Mira? With some lemon juice…”
I knew that when Appa talked nutrition, it was his way of expressing love. He was didactic only when it came to food. Surprisingly, he never hopped on the “get married again” train, enjoying the independence I exuded. In fact, it was he who told me to move out and start life in a new place. Relatives were aghast; they had wanted me to move back in with my father as soon as Ketan died. There seemed to be no alternative in their minds: my job was in the same city, my husband was dead, and my father was a widower. One of my gossipmonger aunts even told my cousins that my father probably was having an affair—the only reasonable explanation for wanting me out of the house. But this was untrue, not because I could give you evidence, but because I knew Appa at his very core. I knew he liked a certain kind of predictability. He woke up at 6:00 A.M., walked in the park for an hour, and read the paper on the bench there for another. Appa’s cook made breakfast by 8:30 A.M. He hung around with two of his recently retired friends playing rummy in the afternoons and volunteered as the head of the community in his area, coming up with new ways to separate garbage, finding acceptable places for the community to feed the stray dogs, and maintaining the area park. He ate dinner at 8:00 P.M., took a night stroll, scrolled the internet before bed, and went to sleep at 10:30 P.M. He had enough money to last him decades, and he didn’t live life extravagantly. Ketan and I used to send him twenty thousand rupees every month, not because he needed it but because it was the responsible thing to do, but he refused to keep the money for himself. Instead Appa had put it in a savings fund for Ketan and me to break into in twenty years, when our future children would go to college.
I learned the joy of predictability from my father, taking refuge in the comfort of schedule, the happy sigh I let out when I reached my bed at 8:45 every night and settled in to read a book, or watch a documentary on unsolved mysteries or World War II. I woke up early too, like all teachers. I ate at 7:30 in the morning, my lunch was cooked the night before and kept ready for me to take to school. Rice and chicken curry, roti and vegetables, or sometimes a tomato and cheese sandwich. I’d be in school from 8:30 to 4:30. I’d teach five English classes—two ninth grades and three tenth and eleventh.
After I escaped the farm, I had lived with Appa for two months. The overwhelming majority of that time was spent convincing Appa that I was ready to start a new life. I didn’t convince him with words. It was in the steadiness with which I served him coffee. I mastered his preferred ratio (one-third of his steel tumbler filled with coffee decoction and the rest frothy milk). I looked intently into my laptop in the evenings, squinting my eyes when he passed by to indicate that I was reading something important. My voice didn’t crack anymore; I talked to him about Ketan in measured sentences. For Appa, I was in grief’s fifth and final stage: acceptance. The truth was I had no idea what stage I was in at all. I felt numb and bored. There were evenings when we’d watch old Tamil movies together while shoveling down mouthfuls of curd rice with mango pickle. There were afternoons when Appa took me to coffee shops and we spent hours reading books and sipping lattes. By the second month I had even joined his residential welfare meetings, nodding my head at neighborhood gossip and getting as riled up as anyone else there about the pothole on Twenty-Third and Main that had still not been filled. So when I told Appa I had applied for a teaching job he showed no signs of worry. And after my year of intensive reading, I felt made to teach.
The principal at Seven Seeds, Mr. Khan, was impressed. Burdened by ideals and knowledge, he was one of those men who felt himself caught up in the strange contradictions of our times—an intellectual man who still had to lead an international school, which mimicked the financial goals of any other for-profit company in “New India.” He wore his extra ten kilograms well and dressed like he belonged in academia. Being an international school, there were mandates for teachers to have certain credentials. But Mr. Khan was a self-confessed freethinker. “A real teacher teaches you about life,” he told me with a sturdy grin.
The Aristotelian method was his go-to. No one really is the master, all of us teach each other, that sort of thing. We discussed books, of course, and he was disappointed to learn I had been obsessed only with Western literature and philosophy. “When India is the heart of spiritual thinking, and our regional languages have already written about everything these Western men have said, you rely on the West? Although I will say, contemporary Indian English fiction is shit, and India has yet to create its first Kafka.”
He had cupped his long gray-splattered beard thoughtfully. “But the point is you read, and you can think for yourself, that’s what we need: a teacher who can tell these kids to think for themselves instead of being autotuned robots.”
The old me would have shriveled away in fear. I had never thought of myself as an intellectual before. But the books, the months at the farm, the grief, all of it had reshuffled me at a cellular level. I soaked it in; I felt purpose and ambition burn at the center of my gut.
I didn’t promise Mr. Khan anything. I told him my father was a big reader, well versed in history. But his earnestness pushed me closer toward transparency. I told him that I hadn’t even been much of a reader until the last year.
“So you mean to say you read this much in just a year or so?”
I didn’t tell him where or why. There was no way to properly explain how binge-reading philosophy in
side a loony bin could change the way one looked at the world. So I simply said I had taken a year off work. I tried to make a joke about it too. “Give me a few more books, I could probably talk at length about Lao-tzu.”
Mr. Khan thought I should take on English because it was the subject I could most easily manipulate, with a syllabus I could add my own vision to. “But don’t get on too much about communism—the parents will have a fit. They like their kids to know who Marx was, but they like them to reference his beliefs only in their future applications to Stanford and Harvard.”
“You look happier now, Mir-Mir.”
Appa sat back in his chair, satisfied at his remark. My heart fluttered nervously. I always felt safer when Appa talked about nutrition. I told him it was school, that I was enjoying my classes: “I might even teach a couple of world history classes next month.”
“You always were a World War buff, right from childhood, already knowing the alliances and treaties before your friends, but when it comes to the history of our own nation, you know the bare basics. Perhaps you still are obsessed with the stories of white men, but I hope you’ll teach your children to look at their own past.”
Of course the only reason I was a “buff” of any kind was that Appa constantly told me random historical facts. But I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I’d begun to take real solace in history only after my loss.
It Was Appa Who Taught Me About the World Wars
Appa won’t remember this, but he’s the one who flipped through my history book when I was twelve and read a summary of the World Wars. We hadn’t yet gone deep into the nuances at that point in school.
“The Great War, or World War I, can be summed up in one word, Mir-Mir, and that word is unnecessary. It’s a great way of understanding human nature. Imagine a handful of people who have different ways of supporting each other: obviously some support increasingly goes to one person, jealousy starts, and before you know it you have unhappy people with unarticulated tension, perceived injustices, and frustration.”
The Body Myth Page 3