If I’d lived in the Victorian era, I would have been dismissed as a fragile woman who suffered from hysteria because her husband just died. Or if I had lived a century before in my own country, my depression would have been glorified, needed, and aggressively presented to society as that of an ideal grieving wife. Had the words clinical depression empowered me? I couldn’t remember.
But I didn’t say any of this. I just kept nodding.
Dr. Mudra stared back, trying to provoke a more definite answer from me.
“It’s a catch-22 situation, if you ask me,” I said finally.
To my surprise, he nodded vigorously in response to my cop-out answer. He recrossed his legs, took another sip of his juice. “The thing is, I try not to label my patients, but sometimes, just sometimes, you need to, so that they can actually be put on the path for a cure.”
“Do you think she is just too anxious about her health?”
“Her blood tests and scans have always been normal and, well, she’s always had trouble with her menstrual cycles… Here’s where I’ll end the conversation: if you do care for her as a friend, talk to her husband, Rahil. If you ask me, he’s the piece of the puzzle most won’t acknowledge.”
I pushed my drink away from me in an absurd protest. Sara’s rage swam through my chest. How dare he start something and then end it this abruptly.
“What’s wrong with Rahil? He takes care of her.”
Dr. Mudra shook his head.
“Why won’t you tell me what’s wrong with her? Is she going to die?”
He put his hand on mine to reassure me. “I must go, but do talk to Rahil. I’ll take the consequences if he is upset with me for telling you to talk to him, but let’s just say I know Rahil well. It’s truly in Sara and Rahil’s best interest. You look like a smart girl, and it’s good to see she has friends.”
Dr. Mudra left me sitting with a quarter cup of frothy pineapple juice. For a few minutes my mind was numb, watching a woman in a black burqa try to feed her impatient toddler. She sliced the idli with the edge of her spoon, dunked it in sambhar and pushed it into his mouth. The sambhar spilled orange all over the front of his X-Men T-shirt. The woman dabbed a tissue into a metal tumbler of water and tried to wipe away the mess as the child started to cry. The mother looked at me and smiled. I gave her the most sympathetic smile I could in return and stood up to leave.
Cars, buses, and two-wheelers exploded all over the place. Next to me was a man selling jackfruit from a cart. He had a little sign that announced he took payments through a digital wallet. A black stray dog lay panting under his blue cart. I caught its brown eyes and the dog’s tail lazily wagging in response. The man stared at me. “His name is Raja,” he said in Hindi, pointing at the dog. I felt compelled to buy his fruit. I got eight pieces of ripe jackfruit on a small piece of newspaper and chewed it until an auto-rickshaw slowed down and asked me where I wanted to go.
The jerky movement of the auto-rickshaw as it weaved around buses and cars was calming. I went back to the day in the park in my head. Sara, gold dupatta, sitting on a bench. Her eyes had darted around, searching. No, not right. She was checking—checking to see if anyone was watching, of that I was sure. Then her face had looked out straight ahead and she began to convulse.
Rahil.
Rahil came running after she started convulsing. Out of nowhere? No, from my left in the park, jogging toward her. Now that I thought of it, his pace of jogging had been absurdly slow, not rushed, but not walking. It wasn’t worried, it was—what was it? Sara on the ground, spit frothing; me walking ahead, faster, toward her. She had faked it. There was no denying this.
Rahil. From the left of the park.
I shut my eyes. It came to me. Sara, checking around her, not seeing Rahil, not seeing me, thinking it was okay to start. I re-created the scene again and that’s when I saw it. Rahil was there, he hadn’t come from nowhere, he was standing diagonally behind her. She had missed him. But he was there. I had just been too distracted by Sara to notice him. I closed my eyes again and remembered. Now I was sure. Rahil was there, he saw her too. He saw her fake her seizure. Rahil saw Sara look around before she started to convulse. Then he’d jogged toward her.
VIII
We’ll go three months into the future now. Leave Rahil and Dr. Mudra’s knowledge aside for just a bit. For you to understand that untruths, labels, and freedom all come together eventually, you must walk at my pace. I am not being condescending or intellectual. I too have grown to love the banality of the everyday, the security of a day job, and the landmarks on my commute to school. I’ve come to enjoy the smell of faint detergent on my bedsheets. We all must acclimatize to our world sooner or later, or else we’ll end up wearing pants much larger than our frames.
I was stirring oats into cashew milk for Sara to consume; she had given up dairy for her arthritis. Rahil was out visiting his parents for the weekend. When you watch Sara eat, slowly, sweetly, wonderfully, you forget all you know about her. You also forget how much more you want to know about her. You can pause, splendidly, in the moment. You can watch her bring silver to her mouth, observe how her lips part as her eyes stay gently focused on the bowl.
We’d had our fights, we’d had our silences, in the past few months. And yet we were still here on her bed, only closer. Her Turkish music was on again. I didn’t need her to lead me anymore; I now knew the influence Sara wanted to be on me. I dutifully closed my eyes and swayed my head left to right. I let my upper body move to the beat. Sometimes, if Sara let three or four songs play at a stretch, I could feel the beginnings of the ecstasy she described, the one she said our souls were connected to.
I heard the clink of the bowl on the nightstand, my eyes still closed, my body swaying. I felt her hands on my back, slowly, not suddenly, as if she had incrementally let her hand fall onto me. My eyes opened; we stared at each other. I kissed her, hard. I tasted her lips, her tongue, and even the nape of her neck. I felt a thousand lives kick at my gut, I felt something sacredly sad: the knowledge that this was the pinnacle of my joy, never to be experienced again.
It was not the first kiss or the last. I’d slept with Sara a month ago, and now it seemed to be the most ordinary of things to have done: I’d fallen in love with Sara and now she seemed to be the most ordinary of people to have fallen in love with.
After, when we were making tea in the kitchen, Sara quoted Kabir Das. My knowledge of Kabir Das, the fifteenth-century folk poet, was limited to my old Hindi textbooks. I zoned out of Sara’s recitation, only for a second, to let this realization settle in: how pedantic my teachers had made the mystic seem.
Prem gali ati sankari, tamein dou na samai, Jab mein tha tab hari nahi, ab hari hai mein naahi. (Before I existed there was no God, and now only he exists, not I, there is no place for the both of us on this road.)
Sara knew how to twist my dormant insecurity; she knew how to cut fresh wounds. These wounds were very different from the ones I was familiar with: the death of a husband, the death of expectations. No, Sara’s wounds weren’t the ones that allowed you to regenerate or grow scar tissue. Her wounds were the ones you take, like a public lashing. The ones you let stay open, becoming a part of you.
Not that she meant it personally. She’d say something about universal love, about our collective consciousness, about our bodies being rotten meat, and instantly my purpose with her would be rendered insignificant. I had spent so long trying to be of significance to her. Worked so hard to be noticed in my individual capacity, my “true friend” capacity. Always waiting to be acknowledged as the person who grew with her. And it was in those intimate times—making her food and feeding it to her, stroking her hair and talking about her protected childhood or about college and Ketan—when she would say something that obliterated me.
No, I was just a manifestation of our larger consciousness. A better, surer, muscular limb of consciousness, but just a limb nonetheless. Sara’s mission was for her body to accept the fact that her soul wanted ou
t. She demanded her body to let it go with dignity and peace. I was just her body’s soother, not a soul who could convince her to stay.
“We’re on the same road,” I told her, almost pleadingly.
She ducked her hand into the chamomile and pulled up a handful of the dried flowers.
“Yes, to the body’s eye, we are two, three, even four, but to the soul it’s just one. Mira, you depend so much on sentences of famous men and women, even my idea of Sufism required the validation of your Doris Lessing.”
I stood there, taking in her confusing wisdom, which at first put me on the defensive. I had readied an argument to this. That the white man and the white woman were able to speak first because they’d had the platform, and now we too had privilege to speak of this Sufi wild love, when millions in our country didn’t have the luxury of looking past their depleting incomes. Wasn’t it then okay for privilege to use its privilege? And hadn’t these arguments circled around my head for such a long time, when I’d read my grieving heart to bed? But here, to sick, sick Sara, I bowed my head. She was a true friend, seeing for me when I couldn’t, for she understood something beyond words. Beyond good sentence construction, beyond Derrida and Camus and Aristotle. Beyond Rumi too.
She brought out a coaster and put it on the kitchen counter. Her spirituality could not erase the obsession with perfection. Her cups were lined neatly in the cabinet, the stove handsome and completely steel. Despite how much dust was floating around in this damn city, her house was as clinically clean as an American home in suburban California.
It was only then, in that moment, that I realized how methodically Sara’s things were organized, dusted and pristine in their display. It was not the house that surprised me, but the fact that it had taken months for me to notice it was oddly immaculate. Had the need to be with Sara, to see her, to smell her, been that overwhelming?
She talked some more, standing over the counter. “Isn’t it funny that the Koran, the Bible, and even the Gita tell us to pray? Because the more holy in prayer we are, the more the gods are pleased?”
She stroked the edges of the coaster and looked back at me. My face tilted, urging her to go on.
“Our translation of everything is wrong because we have not evolved yet. Yes, if we submit to God then we will be granted freedom, but submitting to God is not standing and praying, it is finding that God is everything, all of us. God is every bit of this moment, and when you realize this, you dance with relentless joy—that’s the boon.”
My intellectual barriers faltered when she said all this. She didn’t sound like a new age self-help book. She sounded like an old soul who’d been sent back far too many times. A soul with a throat that had gone raw repeating the same simple thing.
You must be wondering about Rahil by now. But to understand—if not for you, then for me—I must go around and back, like a memory. At first Rahil didn’t know that Sara and I had started sleeping together. Sleeping together so normally, so ordinarily. And when he did, he never confronted Sara. He got upset only with me. Rabidly upset, of course, because to share Sara’s love is an impossible thing. To take the one individual who had explored her mind and make him secondary was one thing. But to take her body too—a wasting, rejected body, no less—the one physical manifestation of Sara’s vast mind? It was too much.
Increasingly disorienting timelines help keep me from exposing the truth.
The truth was that I wanted to be in the right. I wanted to be simple. A good person acting primarily from a curiosity to live and to explore the boundaries of her existence. But no matter how many books we’ve read and how liberating philosophy can be, we are united in one wish. We’re all scared of being the villain. We don’t want to be that person—the one who exists selfishly for her own needs. We’re scared to take individual responsibility for things unless our actions can be immediately glorified for their rebellious nature. I guess what I am saying is that I have written an unreasonably long preamble for something that is very simple.
Before I slept with Sara, I slept with Rahil.
IX
I wasn’t even attracted to him, but I met him at a café called West of the City. It was the Tuesday following my canteen conversation with Dr. Mudra. I’d called in sick that day, didn’t even go in for the first half as I’d originally planned.
The most powerful tool I had in my arsenal was the element of surprise. I had the knowledge—if only I could trust the authority of what my memory was telling me—that her seizure on the day we met was faked. And I was quite sure Rahil knew too.
By noon, my stomach started to cramp. I went to my bedroom, opened my laptop, and looked at old pictures of Ketan and me. Right after we got married, traipsing on Sri Lankan beaches. Drinking a Vietnamese iced coffee in Bandra on a brief trip to Mumbai. At home with Appa, who was wearing a lungi and a checkered shirt, smiling in the middle. What a different person I was. Cool, smart, but undeniably naive. The girl there was not me. In that moment I felt the thick possibility of an afterlife and shut the laptop quickly.
While I waited for the Uber, I thought about Ketan, living his afterlife, doing all the things he needed to do. Was the life he had spent with me worthy of any new perspective? Or was his purpose in life to direct me to a new one?
In the car, I was overwhelmed with a simple kind of grief, one more becoming of a fresh widow. My body cried for Ketan, my heart ached for the simplicity of our time and the predictability of our love. Our dinners at home, our hand holding in bed. I was overcome with a desire to run out to the streets, drop to the ground, and beg the universe for it to return him to me. My eyes welled up, my heart spilled into the seat of the car, my mouth wanted to howl. Still, I knew from previous experience how it would play out. First I’d feel it coming like the tight twang of an impending migraine. And then it would hit. Whole moments of anguish would drown any sense of calm and pleasure I’d had minutes ago. But I knew my mind would protect itself from such grief, that if I just gave it a moment, I would regain composure. This was the first time in months, though. It used to come far more often, a couple of times a week. I dug my forefingers and middle fingers into my palms and waited for the mind to do its thing.
And it did. In moments, I was okay again. I looked at my phone.
I am here. See you in a few.
Be there in 10.
I put my phone back in my bag. Authoritative, strong, a true friend—I would be all of these things because I could. When my Uber pulled over, I walked out with confidence, strode right into the café, and found him: near the back, in a blue office shirt and khaki pants,
cross-legged, and scrolling on his phone. He looked up at me with a big smile. His body was relaxed, open, and ready. My anxiety diminished before my butt hit the chair. He asked me if I wanted to order first, “to get it out of the way.” We were on the same page. This café was nothing but an acceptable space for us to pour our hearts out about the woman who danced continuously in our heads. To the café we were far more banal, a married couple, two friends from work, anything but what we were. I ordered penne with mushroom and chicken, he asked for a basil pizza, and we both wanted iced lattes. We didn’t mumble, we didn’t make small talk. This was because I set the agenda with clarity.
“I need to tell you, before you start, I met Dr. Mudra, he talked to me after Sara left the hospital on Friday.”
Rahil didn’t bat an eyelid. In fact, he smiled again, pressed his back into the chair, and licked his bottom lip.
“Well, isn’t that just serendipitous,” he said. I looked him in the eyes, but only for a second, because he went right into it.
What Rahil Told Me About Sara
If there was one thing to pick up from the first half of what Rahil told me, it was an intense irritation toward Sara’s parents. Overprotective was pure euphemism, and a term that Sara was forced to rely on. Rahil deconstructed the psychology of others clinically, with roaring emotional insights, making it impossible for me to believe he had anything to do with t
he corporate world.
When Sara was seven, her parents took her out of school and sent her to live with an aunt in Coorg. The children at Sara’s school had been repeatedly stricken with bronchitis, and Sara’s father was convinced it was the air quality. Her aunt mostly made fun of her parents over those months. “Crackpots,” she’d call them. And Sara would lower her eyes and pretend she hadn’t heard. Her aunt was a tall, overbearing lady who overfed Sara. At least that’s what Sara claimed. Within a month her tummy bloated into a tight puff, and she tossed and turned at night, nauseated from all the food. When she complained about it, her aunt put a teaspoon of caraway seeds in her mouth. Her tongue blazed and her chest choked with its pungency. She stopped complaining.
Her parents retrieved her, of course, after the aunt made one too many passive-aggressive remarks on the phone. Once it became clear she didn’t have time to look after her niece. This was just one of the stories Sara had told Rahil innocently, as if her parents had merely been idiosyncratically overconcerned. Like it was a passing fond memory from childhood, something that should only be laughed about together.
Then there were the stranger things that Rahil himself had to endure.
Sara’s father meeting him in private, asking him too many questions about his plans, his health, his ability to provide. Sara’s mother and father almost bending over backward to have Rahil at the house at all times. It wasn’t because they especially liked him; they just knew the new truth. That Sara was in love with Rahil. They knew that Rahil had all the power; he could take their daughter away at any time. He could make her do dangerous things that could possibly kill her, hurt her, maim her. So they approached their village lion with caution and humility. They made the lion their guest.
The Body Myth Page 6