The Body Myth

by Rheea Mukherjee

  And mere seconds later, the front door creaked open, followed by footsteps toward the room. I looked up. Rahil stood there, in khaki pants and a light denim-colored shirt, in his right hand a cloth bag filled with groceries.

  “You’re sick again, aren’t you, Sara?”

  Sara chewed her lip and nodded silently. He walked toward her, sat beside her and stroked her hair. They looked at each other knowingly. I saw his eye catch the pink skins of the fruit on the plate.

  “You know Rasagura gives you cramps.”

  I waited for Sara to defend herself, to say it wasn’t the fruit at all. Instead she gave him puppy eyes. They didn’t need words. He stroked her face and shook his head in mock annoyance. I sat on the corner of the bed, floating to the memory of the flute in that Sufi song. I closed my eyes.

  VI

  On Thursday I was hurried into a history class because Mrs. Menon had dengue. In these times, it’s hard to figure why all organizations don’t simply allocate resources for the inevitability of someone getting dengue. I wasn’t scheduled to begin subbing until next month, but I was at ease; it was eleventh grade and the faces were familiar: the same class that usually took English with me.

  I soon learned that a certain student, Samina, was in the midst of campaigning Mrs. Menon to make personal essays about World War II mandatory. Seven Seeds took pride in allowing its students to make decisions as long as they could win a classroom vote. For Samina, who was not only fairly brilliant, but also extremely pretty and universally popular, her proposals were always voted in with embarrassing ease, regardless of their merits.

  As reported to me by the classroom, Mrs. Menon had been trying to push Samina’s proposal off, but Samina had insisted, promising she would be the first one to share her essay. The deal she suggested was simple: if the other students didn’t like her essay, they didn’t have to do the assignment themselves.

  Not long after we began an open-book test that Mrs. Menon had left for the class, Samina approached me with a topic for her essay. Her handwriting was chicken scratch, a paragraph wiggled on a piece of lined paper she held in her hand. The topic: Hitler’s ambush in Russia in 1941. In fact, the kid wanted to write about the specific consequences of Hitler’s disastrous mistake: the utter lack of warm clothes for his troops, resulting in frostbite so bad there were mass amputations and frozen limbs all over the place. That and frozen eyelids, which broke off and fluttered to the ground like shredded meat.

  “I want to use the gory details of frostbite as a metaphor for poor leadership and relate it to the leadership examples we have in our country and, for that matter, the world. How all of us are just bodies with their limbs falling off.”

  Her shiny black hair was tied up in a ponytail and flipped from side to side, as her body reflected the breadth of her feeling, the range of her opinions. Her arms shook, her head bobbed, and her eyes lit up with an intensity I wished I had experienced at her age. This emotional abundance was also her crucial flaw. I wanted to tell her that many feelings weren’t worth having, that they destroyed you in the end. But she was going to have to let life prove that to her, not me.

  The years to come would blunt her need for metaphors and throw her into the monotony of three-bedroom capitalism. I couldn’t let her write the essay; I would almost certainly get in trouble with the parents for allowing disturbing material to be passed around class if I did. And even if the parents didn’t create a stir, Mrs. Menon would take any future opportunity of teaching this class away from me. God forbid I succumbed to dengue—I’d never teach again.

  “Samina, you know what I am going to say, you know this topic is wicked awesome,” I praised her, a firm believer in integrating contextual vernacular, even as Samina had already started to pout. “But the kind of graphic detail you are going for… Listen, you are only sixteen, and if this were Denmark, no one would give a thought to this being inappropriate, but you know some of the parents here. You don’t want this project to go down the drain, so why not get into something acceptably provocative?”

  “Like feminism?”

  “Like feminism.” I smiled. “You could write about the yeomanettes, the first women in the American navy during the war. Starting with Loretta Perfectus Walsh, I am sure you can find a metaphor for our times now, right?”

  “Like how the work they did in the navy was largely typographical or nurturing? Or at the very most involved organizing? And how these tasks are still synonymous with women? Like, you know, teaching? No offense.”

  “I didn’t even know what typographical meant till I was, like, twenty-eight, but yes, go ahead with that.”

  “Can I still write the German frostbite one, just for you?”

  I rolled my eyes. Only Samina would do extra work for intellectual kicks. “Just don’t go around saying it’s an official assignment. You want to write about eyelids freezing off, do it on your own time.”

  Samina went back to her desk, flipped open her textbook, and started working on her open-book test. I took out my phone.

  Rahil had messaged the night before, as promised, hours after their strange “sick couple time” in their bedroom. When they were together on that bed, I felt their love, their acute need for each other. Their commitment to their roles was thick, something you were forced to make room for if you were physically near them. Of course, I found it only slightly odd that Sara had winced in pain at 5:59 P.M., but what I found odder was Rahil’s ability to know exactly what she needed. His ability to know how she was feeling within seconds of seeing her. Rahil’s ability to come right to her, make her the center of his universe, literally, for entire minutes—that’s what amazed me.

  I increased the brightness of my phone screen and reread the text.

  Weekday afternoon, around 1, what day works?

  I couldn’t deny the thrill that moved to the surface of my chest. It wasn’t like I had unholy feelings for Rahil, but I needed to appear circumspect. Sane enough to be the bearer of his secrets. The secrets of a woman whose scent traveled with me to school, to dinner, and to bed when I slept. I had already taken yesterday off; taking another day would really cramp resources with Mrs. Menon out for the week and two other teachers busy getting engaged and married, respectively.

  Next week, Tuesday.

  I could come up with an easy excuse to take the second half of the day off, or just pretend there was an emergency on Tuesday before lunch. We texted back and forth a bit more, until I forgot where I was.

  “Miss Mira?” It was Abhijit, a mediocre student but gifted guitarist. I felt like an idiot. “Miss Mira, can we go over the Treaty of Versailles again? I don’t have enough substance to add to the essay question.”

  “We can,” I said, my head half thinking about Friday and Sara and the inexplicable thrill that was rising now from chest to throat, projecting itself out from my mouth and covering Abhijit, rendering him and the entire class beyond saving.

  At lunch, I sat in the staff room looking over my lesson plans for the week. I had essay and grammar worksheets for ninth grade, and for tenth grade we had to discuss the book they were assigned, The Grass Is Singing by Doris Lessing. I looked at her name and smiled in excitement: Doris Lessing.

  I had spent the night researching more about Sufism, and the more I read, the more overwhelmed I felt. But the raging need to know and to understand that had flooded my mind during my time on the farm failed to make its presence known. I felt like Abhijit, but I needed to be Samina.

  I’d found something Lessing had said about Sufism, or rather a great many things she had to say about Sufism. She was interested in the Western obsession with mysticism, juxtaposed with the ecstatic simplicity it really observed. The way she saw it, contemporary Sufism should be practiced openly, without regarding it as any kind of obstruction to other religions.

  I wondered if Sara had read Lessing’s books, though I doubted it; her knowledge was extensive but narrow, limited to health, nutrition, and her own practice of Sufism. This, of course, wa
s only my preliminary understanding of Sara. What can you tell of another person’s intellectual curiosity from everyday conversation? What’s the metric by which one can measure real purpose, a sound consciousness, deep perception, via the usual channels of mundane banter? On the surface, things I discussed with Sara were nothing of consequence, but the way our talks made me feel was quite different. The word, if I had to limit it to one, would be purpose. I shared purpose with Sara; we were both searching for answers to questions about our lives. Unlike Ketan, we had more time. Maybe Ketan’s purpose was to let me find mine. It was a self-centered thought, but the more I considered it, the more true it seemed.

  Aristotle, True Friendship, and Sara

  Aristotle perhaps defined this well. He believed that good people had in common eleven traits. Traits like courage, truthfulness, magnanimity, and an open, liberal mind. He also believed that in order to make life truly meaningful one had to be in the company of good friends. These friends are not to be mistaken for the people we usually keep company with. They are not the people with whom we make strategic alliances to jump over social hurdles or climb career ladders. They are also not the same people as the friends we hang out with for the sake of good times. In my experience, this type of friendship has been limited to evening drinking, pointless political discussions, and meme sharing. Aristotle prescribed finding true friendships—ones where your concern for a friend’s sorrow is all-encompassing, where you meet with purpose, and where you help fill each other’s deficits. Friendship of mutual expansion. I think it sounds like what we seek in a lover, but that’s the potency of it, the fact that a true friendship must be much more; it must make us all lovers, when exponentially re-created, be able to Band-Aid the entire world and start anew.

  Was Sara truthful? I was not sure. Was Sara courageous? Just as quickly I found I was asking myself the same questions. Was I truthful? Was I courageous?

  I thought about Rahil. His put-together charm. His sharp jawline and the relaxed-fit pants he wore in an attempt to look older than he was. He needed help and he had asked me for it. There had to be a reason for that, there had to be an answer I carried within me. The last thought I had was most satisfactory.

  I grabbed my copy of The Grass Is Singing and walked toward the tenth-grade classroom. I heard a group of boys rapping Kanye West. The lyrics were sorely out of rhythm but their voices were shrill and confident. The type of confidence you know is temporary but real in that one moment.

  VII

  Dr. Mudra tapped his pen on his prescription pad. He was a reserved-looking man with a goatee and mustache. He wore black glasses and, strangely, a bright yellow button-down shirt. On his desk—wide, white, and spotless—was a calendar branded by Alexia, a new antacid.

  “Sara, we’ve discussed this. To control your seizures, and your migraines for that matter, you have to take Toposix, and to be frank, if you don’t want to take it, I don’t think you are in any danger.”

  “But what about the side effects, Doctor?”

  “You said you didn’t have any, didn’t you? Some dizziness maybe?”

  I shuffled my feet, wanting to interrupt to ask if weight loss was a side effect, because Sara’s face had thinned from the first time I had seen her. Instead, I looked at Sara and waited for her to respond. It took at least twenty seconds before she said anything.

  “I mean the long-term side effects. I read an article about it wrecking my reproductive system.”

  “Like I said, you don’t have to take them, you know that stress provokes—”

  “I know, but what about another MRI scan? Maybe something will appear now, and we can get to a more specific treatment. Toposix is such a generalized medication.”

  Dr. Mudra sighed, then paused to look at me. His eyes squinted as he tried to guess my role here. He asked Sara if she was the doctor or if he was, to which she laughed girlishly, trying to settle the unease she had created. He opened his laptop and started clicking. “See, you did one eight months ago, and everything was normal. Not all seizure patients show physical signs with an MRI, which is why I have you on the most effective medication.”

  The appointment rapidly turned awkward. Sara jumped from her seizure issue and asked him about a new treatment (an injection) for her arthritis. Dr. Mudra was visibly offended and told her to see a rheumatologist. After a few breaths, he even wrote a name down for her. He told her to have vitamin B-complex every day and to come back if she had a seizure, at which time he promised to do an MRI again. Sara sat there in defiance, staring back at him. I played with my silver earring, pretended it came off, and spent that minute trying to screw the post back in again with focused diligence.

  Dr. Mudra shrugged in defeat. He pulled out Sara’s folder again and looked to me for a second, then scanned Sara’s blood report from a month ago. “Your blood tests indicated you are slightly vitamin B deficient. If you think the supplements aren’t doing it for you, we can do an injection, that usually does the trick.”

  Sara shrugged her shoulders and said she’d come back if she had another seizure. She stood straight up and walked out without waiting for me. This time my earring fell out for real and clinked on the floor. I hunched down to look for it, feeling Dr. Mudra staring at my back. Glimpsing the shimmer of silver near the corner of the desk, I quickly retrieved my jewelry, nodded awkwardly at Dr. Mudra, and fled.

  Sara was infuriated. She was outside, by a poster hanging on the wall that glorified the health benefits of taking the stairs. “See? They always dismiss me, like what is happening to me is not good enough for them. They just want to toss some drugs at me and not do the work, they don’t want to figure it out.”

  She shook her head in disgust, and my heart sunk; she was so helpless before this visit, but now I felt like I was standing next to a stranger. This Sara was empowered, she was entitled, and she was passionate. Her eyes brightened, her body grew rigid; the fragility that once held her captive now fled. She was rock solid and determined.

  I grasped her hand—mine wet, Sara’s dry—and nodded, trying to be that true Aristotelian friend, letting her anger encompass me. She dug her nails into my palm and I winced, but she didn’t notice. We walked out the hospital’s main gate. The canteen stood in front, an oasis of happy colors, an escape from the marbled grays and bright well-being blues of the hospital. Sara’s hand let go of mine, and she took out her phone and tapped on Uber. She didn’t ask me to come with her; she didn’t ask me how I would get back. She just said, “Rahil is going to be so pissed. My Uber will be here in a minute.”

  We waited in silence. Finally, her white car drove up to the passenger pickup, and after getting in she rolled down the window. Her body looked so tiny in the car. Her familiar fragility came back as she tilted her head to the side and looked at me through the half-open window. “Mira, I am so sorry, it’s just such a long story, I’ll talk to you about it later, promise.” Then she waved.

  The canteen was full of patients’ families and visitors eating samosas and drinking tea. I ordered pineapple juice and a vegetable-cheese sandwich, paid, and received a red token chip to give to the cook. I had my tray in hand when I saw Dr. Mudra briskly walk to my left. He had a glass of sugarcane juice in one hand and his phone in the other. Our eyes met. I was about to avert the situation by turning toward a seat, when he walked up to me.

  “Where is Sara?”

  I told him she had just left.

  “Are you a good friend of hers? She usually comes with her husband.”

  “Yeah, I mean, she needed someone to go with her.”

  “You’ve known her long?”

  “Sort of,” I lied. The guilt of the lie evaporated as his shoulders came closer to mine.

  He nodded thoughtfully. He needed to be goaded more.

  “To be honest, Doctor, I think she was angry you weren’t taking her seriously.”

  I wanted to drop my tray and run the moment the words came out of my mouth. I had no idea why I’d said what I had; perhaps her r
age was truly my rage.

  Dr. Mudra just smiled, nodded his head, and then gently asked me to sit with him. “I want you to know that I take confidentiality very seriously, but I also can’t stand to see her suffer like this.”

  Here was my entrée into Sara’s medical world. I took a deep breath and waved my hand over to the empty seats that were right next to us. Then I sat down and looked at him with new interest.

  What Dr. Mudra Told Me

  Sara had first come to Dr. Mudra three years ago, after her first seizure. She came in with three very organized files and Rahil by her side. He was impressed with her articulate descriptions of her medical history and her warm composure. Her files indicated she had suffered migraines, severe menstrual cramps, constant fatigue, heart palpitations, and joint pain for the last four years. She had been on and off drugs to treat her specific problems along with Ayurvedic alternatives, dietary changes, and even homeopathy. “She’s always been anemic, albeit moderately,” he said. I immediately felt better; there was something wrong with her! Probably much bigger than anemia, but at least this explained her fatigue, her wasting way—maybe it led to a whole bunch of other issues.

  Dr. Mudra took a long pause as he grazed his spoon over his fried vada and chewed his lip. I chanted silently for him to talk, but I didn’t want to look overenthusiastic, some trivial quidnunc of a friend.

  “What do you think of Americans and their fascination for labeling?” he said finally. “They’ve labeled every disease in the book, every behavior, every physical ailment. The drug industry has branded its medicine to facilitate specificity. You know, there is a specific medicine unique for every label.”

  I sipped my pineapple juice, nodded my head. “Usually it is good to know what you have, right?”

  My own depression was triggered by Ketan’s death. Then, ultimately (according to my doctors), it altered the chemistry in my brain semipermanently, allowing me to sit in a room for sixteen hours straight reading. It allowed me to seek solitude from people and the everyday. It let me think. It let me weep in the afternoons, weeping provoked by the most random of things: the attendant giving me a glass of juice, reading a funny line in a book, looking at my empty bed when I finally moved to my new house. I took medication for a year.