The Body Myth

by Rheea Mukherjee

  It was Appa who told me that after World War II, Nehru had sent Japan an elephant (named Indira) to console its empty zoos and bring smiles to the Japanese children. “It was news that made the American papers too, in 1949.”

  He said it with such pride that as a child I remember somehow coming to the conclusion that it was Appa who had whispered the idea to Nehru. As he grew older, his interests moved closer and closer to the Indian subcontinent. Perhaps his intellectual curiosity was just resting in my DNA for the first few decades of my life. I had always been a good listener, something Appa had mistaken for a sharp memory and an ability to contextualize things in the larger world. I never became a talker, even as my interest in the World Wars rose rapidly in my teens. I always listened to Appa. Appa always had something interesting enough to say. Sometimes when Amma was in bed, I would hear Appa reading to her, usually nonfiction, usually about history, and usually in one monotonous tone. Those moments brought immense comfort to me, both of them in one room, engaged with each other, my mother listening to the words of my father even if she wasn’t really paying attention. Those moments of safety let my entire body sigh, filled my head with hope, and brought heat to my cheeks.

  Now, I got that same feeling when I thought about Rahil and Sara.

  I looked at Appa’s light brown hands, blue veins popping out. His skin was oddly translucent. He was a sturdy and fit man, though. Sometimes I wanted to ask him more about him and Amma, how much he loved her, how much he understood her. Sometimes I wanted to get right to the thick of her and beg Appa to confirm my memories of Amma: silent for days, then perpetually sobbing, then coldly stoic. Amma who I knew had still loved us, she must have. I had actually gotten closer to asking him more about Amma before Ketan died. After his death it got harder. Although Appa saw me more often, the line of emotional questioning was restrained. I wouldn’t talk about my time at the farm, and he wouldn’t talk about Amma. You know you have the same DNA running through your veins when promises like this can be made without uttering a word.

  I opened a package of fried murukku for Appa and placed it on a plate. We drank our coffee and talked about the news. When I was leaving, Appa held my hand and told me to stay happy like this. If it was truly the prospect of teaching history next month that was elevating my mood, then I simply had to continue teaching. “Maybe you’ll meet some teacher at school; lots of qualified male teachers these days, no?”

  I knew Appa too well to think this was really a nudge to start looking for a new partner. He was just trying to access the true reason I looked happier, in his own unconscious way. When I walked out, I wondered what part of me had lit up…which parts had become so visibly happy.

  V

  I woke up on Wednesday with a pounding headache. I rarely got headaches, and my tolerance for them was very low. I texted the school admin that I wouldn’t be in. Then, like it was natural, I texted Sara.

  I have a pounding headache. Can you offer any cures, oh wise one?

  I reread my text and immediately regretted sending it. The words implied a long-term closeness and a need for attention. But only thirty seconds later I saw a response.

  I have the best pills for that, come here and I’ll fix you right up.

  Without thinking, I tapped my response. It made no sense, as the reason I had skipped school was so I could rest it out. Yet there I was, pulling a pair of jeans over my hips and throwing on a striped black-and-white blouse. I grabbed my phone, my small embroidered purse, and walked right outside. It was cool, and the Rasagura vendors were out, the fruits stacked one upon the other. I inhaled the tart-sweet scent and found myself walking to one of the carts. An older man stood behind it, a checkered lungi wrapped and pulled up to his bony knees. He was staring into space, lulled by the morning sun. I asked for half a kilogram. He took an inordinately long time to place them on a sheet of newspaper and then wrap them. My irritation faded as I pictured myself offering the fruit to Sara. I saw her eat the fruit in front of me, her eyes twinkling, grateful for my thoughtful snack.

  Sara opened the door a full minute after I’d rung the bell. She apologized for taking so much time; her knees were giving her problems. Yes, she was doing the physical therapy, but it was probably because she had eaten something with gluten in it.

  “Sometimes Rahil brings packaged food, and we don’t always bother checking the labels.”

  I thought it odd someone as methodical about her health would eat packaged food accidentally. Still, I nodded sympathetically and gave her a hug. Musky rose.

  “How is your headache?”

  On cue my head began to thud again. My hand reached for my left temple and Sara pouted in sympathy. I felt a warm rush spread through my face as she walked toward the living room shelf, pulled open a drawer, and took out a strip of medication. “This will do the trick.” She handed me two purple capsules. I didn’t ask any questions, but they certainly didn’t look like the over-the-counter paracetamol my mother used to rely on. Sara assured me I would feel better in twenty-five minutes and led me to her bedroom, where I was instructed to lie down. Soon, she was caressing my forehead. I closed my eyes. I heard the side drawer open, then shut, then the room came alive with peppermint oil. She rubbed the oil on my temples till they felt like they were on fire, the good kind of fire, the kind that blunted the thudding.

  “Tell me about Rahil, you’ve never talked about your relationship.”

  My eyes were still closed.

  Sara Tells Me How She Met Rahil

  Rahil feared cats, which was bizarre because he grew up with them. His mother had four, and various kittens in between, some that stuck around for a year or two, others that died or got run over. Rahil also feared elevators, but he nevertheless took them and skipped the steps at his office. Rahil was essentially a man who lived with his fears. He was twenty years old when he met Sara, who had transferred to his college in Delhi. She was studying history. Rahil was in the third year of his business administration degree. Sara had heard he came from a mixed family too: Muslim mother, Hindu father. Suitably intrigued, she approached him and asked his opinion of the function of religion in mixed marriages. “The function? It’s celebrating way too many festivals and holidays, and between the Muslim and Hindu ones, I am pooped.”

  Sara laughed, but was agitated by his flip answer. Rahil playfully dismissed her as a new age Sufi and called her Rumi for the first four months of their relationship. But he impressed Sara with translations of Arabic poetry, procured through his maternal uncle, a professor in Delhi.

  Sara had fragile, protective parents. Even though she was twenty-one years old, she went home at seven P.M., not a minute later. It was a predictability that kept her parents assured of her physical safety and, I suspected, let Sara take refuge in her room, where she listened to music, scribbled in her diary, and then cooked with her mother. Her parents were not opposed to the romance in any way. Rahil was always welcome in their home, an option he ended up availing himself of almost five nights a week, just so he could spend more time with Sara after curfew hours.

  They made love for the first time in her room, while her mother and father were out for a Diwali dinner. Rahil was nervous, kept looking at the door and asking what he should say if her parents were to suddenly come home and ask why the door was locked. But Sara calmed him down, convincing him that her parents were more Western that way—too many people in their family lived away from India; she even had a lesbian cousin who had married a French girl in Toronto. Nothing could shock them. If anything, it would be awkward. But Rahil could never reconcile Sara’s parents, who were so liberal in thought but so paranoid of Sara doing anything outside the house. “This isn’t an American rom-com, Sara,” he said.

  Their first fight was provoked by Rahil. He had asked if she’d had a sibling who died before. “It must be the reason your parents are so flipping paranoid.”

  Sara slapped him. For several seconds there was silence. His face was devoid of expression, but Sara’s eyes were
already welling up with tears.

  She claimed it was her own shortcomings—her fear of the world, the knowledge that something was not right within her—that let her parents see her vulnerability. “I could not survive the real world, and my parents know it.”

  Rahil went back to his old self, holding her, telling her he understood.

  One day, a year before they married, Rahil came to her to say that one of Rumi’s quotes now made sense to him. Rumi said that once something is cut from its source, that something is always longing to go back. Rahil said he knew that Sara had found the source of real love, of universal divinity. But in coming into this world, one flooded by desire and material things, it was only natural for such a pure soul to want to run away from it all, to return to its source. She was too spiritual for this world, too raw, too pure.

  “That’s when I knew he had gotten me, and would be the only man to get me, because, Mira, he was like clay; give him enough time, and he will mold himself into something beautiful.”

  They were married in the winter in Delhi, her mother’s hometown. By then Sara had started having symptoms: headaches, joint pain, cramps, hair loss, weight loss, then weight gain, then weight loss again. “And through it all, you know what Rahil always said?” Sara asked me as she applied a few more drops of peppermint oil to my head. I could hear the excitement in her voice.

  “‘Sara, your soul is rejecting your body, that’s all. You want to go back to a place of bliss and love, but I need you, so tell your soul to stay its course, find your Maʿrifa here, find it in this life.’”

  Sara stopped rubbing my head. I didn’t know how much time had gone by, but I felt compelled to ask where Rahil was, even though I knew the answer. “He’s at work, always home at six on the dot.”

  My headache had vanished. I took in a breath and started to ask Sara the question I wanted to ask the first day I met her. “The seizures…”

  I couldn’t get myself to say the words: that I had seen her fake it. But was I right? A woman so worldly and spiritual, would she really fake her own seizures?

  Sara inhaled deeply and I found myself doing the same. The peppermint in the room had faded and allowed for some of the musky rose to reenter my nostrils. She spoke before I could finish my question: “Since I was twenty-one, when the doctors put me on anti-seizure medication. They are rare, but they do happen. I’ve been diagnosed with everything, Mira—polycystic ovaries, chronic fatigue syndrome, early-onset arthritis, celiac disease—but really I know there is something much larger at play. I don’t even think doctors have a term for it yet.”

  She had listed off her diagnoses with a building pride, which unsettled me but compelled me to believe her, to believe that there was something very wrong with Sara, something even science couldn’t account for.

  “Science is one language, Mira. A profound one at that. But just a language. A tree has a way of interpreting the world too, but we can’t understand it yet. It doesn’t make it any less profound. The mistake we have collectively made is to listen to only one language.”

  She looked maniacal when she said it. But I couldn’t fault her for her view. I imagined Rumi standing in front of her; he would have thought she was the most normal being in this whole city. “That’s true” was all I could muster back. She looked at me and shook her head. It was beyond my understanding and that was okay by Sara. I could feel her recognizing my ignorance without judging it, and it made me uncomfortable.

  I hadn’t texted Rahil back about meeting him alone. I was frightened to take part in something as underhanded as that, but it was now, in Sara’s presence, that I felt most compelled to reach out to him. I found myself telling Sara I needed to use the bathroom. Sitting down on the toilet, I started to pee and texted Rahil.

  With Sara now, just chatting. Happy to talk with you whenever.

  I realized the stupidity of my action midstream. What if he didn’t text back immediately, and then I had to read the text in front of Sara, pretending it wasn’t from him? I could be deceitful tucked away in the bathroom, but in front of her? I quickly began the work of convincing myself that I wasn’t doing anything wrong—I wasn’t attracted to Rahil, I wasn’t! I was simply reaching out to him. He had the answers to Sara, answers caught between the stories Sara told me, answers to questions I had about Sara but couldn’t ask her, because with Sara, you had to wait for a spiritual pause to ask her something intimate. And even then, I sensed, there were certain questions she wouldn’t be willing to answer. By the time I was wiggling my jeans up my hips again, I felt my phone vibrate.

  Don’t text me back. I’ll call you late tonight.

  The precise instructions let my heart settle back into my chest. I washed my hands and walked back into the bedroom. Sara had propped her back against the bed’s wooden headboard.

  “Is your headache better?”

  “It is, so much better.”

  “Good, then you won’t mind if I ask you why you didn’t follow up about coming to the doctor with me. I was kind of hurt.”

  I sat down, her blunt honesty a rope that had caught my ankle by surprise. “Sara, of course I’ll come, I just didn’t want to, like, you know, assume that I should have taken charge of it.” I tried to compose myself, but my face must have revealed how awkward I felt. An awkwardness that quickly bloomed into excitement. She needed me.

  “Are you worried about Rahil? He won’t mind, he needs a break.”

  I told Sara it wasn’t about Rahil, but I stumbled through my sentences, my words running into one another. But Sara didn’t even blink once. She puckered her lips like a fish and dismissed my faltering. “Whatever, as long as you just come with me this Friday.”

  Sara opened her side drawer again, pulled out her iPod. Her speakers by her closet poured out Arabic beats. “It’s Sufi music, from Turkey,” she mumbled. She swayed her hands, occasionally clenching her fingers in and out as she moved her upper body to the music. I sat by her and just watched. Minutes passed—it took seven or eight of them for me to realize that this wasn’t a temporary thing. She was in it for the long haul. I closed my eyes and started to sway my body too, tried to feel the music, this Sufi ecstasy that Sara had talked so much about. Humans are truly fucking stupid—we are happy to follow as long as someone else is doing it. We follow no matter how bizarre we might think of the same action independently.

  The words were repetitive and there were loud, breathy exhales in the music creating an echo-like beat. I let the flute notes walk into my ear, swirl in my mind, crawl out the other ear, and then loop around my body. I was well aware Sara and I must have looked spectacularly ridiculous on the bed, using half our bodies to dance. But if you do something long enough, repeatedly enough, you start to lose yourself.

  I opened my eyes to see the time was five P.M. I had fallen asleep during this trance dancing, the side of my face patterned by a pillow. Next to me, Sara was asleep as well, and I studied her hair. It wasn’t black hair, it was a darker brown, but not dark enough to be confused with black. I threw my hand out to her ponytail and gently wrapped a lock of her hair around my index finger. Her hair was soft, but not necessarily glossy.

  I guess what I was looking for was some sign of physical failure in her hair, but it was healthy enough. Not Head & Shoulders healthy, but still, it was nice hair. I moved an inch toward her, the faintness of her rosy talcum rushed through my nose once more. It wasn’t as powerful this time. Her white kurta had come together against her spine, almost outlining the curve of her back. It’s true she didn’t act like a healthy person, but was this woman just a liar?

  My hands grazed over my phone in my pocket. I wanted to text Rahil again, but knew better. He would be home in less than an hour. I decided to stay. I went to the kitchen to make chamomile tea, knowing it was what Sara would have asked me to do anyway if she was awake. The kettle started to whistle, I heard thud-thud from the next room.

  “I just remembered I got some fresh Rasagura,” I called out. “Can I cut one up f
or you?”

  “Yes,” Sara’s voice echoed to the kitchen.

  I poured the hot water into the cups and added two spoons of dried chamomile into the individual tea steepers. Then I walked to my bag and took out the fruits wrapped in newspaper. I cut the Rasagura fruits into segments of four, every brown seed visible with the creamy yellow bursting out of its pink rind.

  On the bed, we arranged our strange picnic: a plate of Rasagura, our cups of chamomile tea, and, from Sara’s drawer, a plastic packet of peanut chikki.

  “Isn’t it weird no one has figured out why they can’t grow this fruit anywhere else? It’s the alchemy of our soil, that’s what it is,” Sara said as she munched on her fruit.

  I nodded my head, happy she was talking about the fruit. Happy she was enjoying it. I slurped its meat. They’ve always tasted like mangoes to me, although popular food critics have said there were far too many berry notes to miss. While far from overpowering, the berry-citrus taste is subtle but present. I remembered reading that somewhere.

  Sara took another section and reached her hand out to me. I froze at first, but then opened my mouth, letting her put the pulp part in my mouth, and she just held the fruit there, urging me to suck the pulp out. She took back the empty skin, raised her index finger at me, and wiped away the juice on the corner of my lips. I wanted to smell her rose musk at that very moment, but my senses had become too accustomed to the environment, I couldn’t discern anything except for the bright notes of the fruit. All of a sudden she curled up her knees and winced.

  “Cramps,” she whimpered.

  I stood up immediately and asked her what I could do.

  “Nothing, Rahil will be back soon.”