The Body Myth

by Rheea Mukherjee

  What Sara Said to Me When I Told Her She Imagined It

  She was silent. I started babbling from memory. About Foucault and mental illness. Trying to create a new bridge with Sara. Trying to find my way back to her. I talked some more, but her silence stayed. It hung eerily in the air. Abruptly, I stopped talking. She stood up and I saw that her eyes were bright with rage. I remember she was wearing sweatpants with a white kurta that ended at her small hips. She threw the first thing she laid her hands on, which, anticlimactically, happened to be a sofa pillow. It landed on my feet. I wanted to laugh, but I knew this was only the start.

  She walked to the dining table and picked up an empty ceramic fruit bowl. She threw it at the wall and then rolled her head toward me and snapped, “I wanted to throw that fucking bowl at your head.”

  I had, perhaps, expected the throwing of breakable things, but not this verbalized intention. I was frightened for a shadow of a second that she might try to hurt me.

  “After it all, Mira, after it all, all I try to tell you about life, about my fucking beliefs, my understanding of this stupid world, you go ahead and pigeonhole me as some rubbish mental case? Is that how fucking intelligent you are? With all your books and all your philosophers?”

  Her dark skin was glowing. Her anger had allowed for beads of sweat to collect on the sides of her temples. I wanted to hold her, to take back everything I had said. I had said it to challenge her, because from the very day I met Sara there was a thumping need to call her out on something. Now that I had, it seemed futile, purposeless, and reckless. I held my hand out toward her.

  “Sara, please, let’s just talk this out.”

  She leaped toward her front door, swung it open and told me to get out. My fright came back, swiftly.

  “And the stupidest thing, Mira, is you have no idea how ridiculous Dr. Mudra is, because you don’t really know what he thinks. Hah, if you only knew that. But I don’t care for snoops, I thought you were a friend, now get the fuck out of the house.”

  My fear protected me, and it told me to get out of her sight at once. I walked out of the house and took an auto-rickshaw back home.

  As soon as I was home I texted her, I love you. She didn’t respond. I texted Rahil, who told me to give her a few days, that she was really upset but it was nothing to worry about. I sat on my sofa with a fresh piece of paper and laid it on an old Femina magazine. I wrote her a letter. It felt weirdly good, but after twenty minutes my fingers and wrist were cramping—I couldn’t remember the last time I’d written something this long with a pen. I listened to the hum of my building’s power reserve; the city power had been out for the last two hours. It was at times like this I wished I had a cat around. Something warm and furry that allowed me to love it.

  When I was done, I walked to my neighborhood post office for the first time. I stood in line for stamps. There were four booths open, three women in polyester saris and one potbellied man wearing a crisp white shirt. He was scratching his tummy even as he caught my eye. I asked lady number two how many stamps I needed for an in-city post. She didn’t say anything back; she just took the letter, stamped it, and put it on top of a stack of envelopes. “It will reach tomorrow, ma,” she said. Her accent was South Indian.

  I can’t remember anything more about that day, except for the fact that I cooked and ate rice, daal, chili fried mushroom, and mango pickle for dinner.

  My Letter to Sara (For Michel Foucault)

  Dear Sara,

  No one writes letters anymore, and this might be the first and last one I write to you. Indulge me.

  You know how much I read when I was at the farm that year. I know you don’t have the patience or the inclination for the words of European men and intellectualism. But indulge me once more. Michel Foucault died in the ’80s, and he is regarded, by those who like labels, as one of the most renegade existentialists and philosophers of our time. I’ll spare you the intricacies of his life save for a couple of things. Less than a year before he passed away, he wrote a letter to his friend (and writer) Hervé Guibert. They were very close friends and the details of their intimacy are shrouded with a certain kind of mystery. Anyway, in this letter he wrote to Guibert, he details his obsession with watching a man who lived opposite to him. He watched him every morning at nine A.M. Here’s an excerpt of the translated letter:

  I have been wanting to tell you about the pleasure I take in watching, without moving from my table, a guy who leans out of a window on the rue d’Alleray at the same time every morning. At nine o’clock he opens his window; he wears a small blue towel or underpants, also blue; he leans his head on his arm, buries his face in his elbow; he does not move, apart from making occasional, rare, slow movements when he takes a puff of the cigarette he is holding in his other hand; but he is so tired that he is (almost) neither able to move the hand that holds the cigarette, nor to prop himself up; he gets tired moving along the railing of the balcony, his head rolling from one hand to the other; he then takes up his initial position, tucking his face back again in his elbow to look there for strong, intense, and powerful dreams, which leave him in a great (darn, [I need] more blue paper) depression; sometimes he makes a grand gesture with his arm that hangs freely or even his whole body; it is not that he is resting or trying to wake up; one can see that he is draping himself again in the night; and if he comes to the edge of his balcony it is not to cast light on the last shadows where he is caught, it is to show everyone, to no one (since it is only me who is watching him) that there is no day that can overthrow the gentle obstinacy that remains with him and sovereignly masters him.

  The excerpt here ends with this line: “This morning the window is closed; instead I am writing to you.”

  If you were to take an academic approach to this letter, one might say this is post-intimacy, post-sexual, even post-friendship. This letter bears the soul of a simple, everyday obsession, with no call to action, no sentimentality, and no other fragments to build a story of friendship between Foucault and Guibert.

  Sara, it is you whom I want to write like this for. I want to tell you about the lean wooden chair I sat on in the library at the farm. Its armrests folded out, so that I could prop my legs up; I always imagined it an effective chair to give birth to a child in. When I read those men and women, they gave me a strange comfort, an inkling that nothing was too dark, too out of place, too absurd. And when you feel that you can have a place in this world no matter how isolated you feel, then there is indeed a sense of liberation.

  Anyway, I digress. It’s time for me to come to the second part of Foucault, and that was his commentary on mental illness itself. Stay with me, Sara, because of this I am sure you will agree with him. He believed that the twentieth century brought science to mental illness. Right before that, the crazies, the sinners, the miscreants, and the dubious were put away and for all other practical purposes isolated.

  But before isolation, there was a period of celebration, a society that appreciated the insane, thought of them as wise souls on a higher level of consciousness. Minds that expressed and responded to the world asymmetrically. And he believed all evil, or those men we chose to label evil, were simply an inevitable re-creation of our collective faltering. Evil people were simply mirrors of our everyday hypocrisies.

  But then came the policing and the psychiatrists and the psychologists. All of them had not bothered with the “archaeology of knowledge” (as Michel Foucault put it)—going back into history and tracing our collective responses to mental illness itself. Our entire knowledge infrastructure of psychiatry has come from suppression and isolation. Where we pin down these people, suppress their tendencies, and coo them back into the “reality” we’ve semi-agreed to all agree upon. We can move on to the capitalistic society here and see how this baseline “reality” has been constructed, but it would be beside the point, and, really, I am already sensing your agitation and impatience as I write this.

  Anyway, I am not sure what I want to communicate to you, but I
’ll try, and because there is no backspace in a letter, I’ll let this be written out with no editing, no long pauses.

  The thing is, Sara, I agree with you, that our “odd” responses to this world are coping mechanisms. And the oddest ones manifest in what we like to define and label. But your mind is special; it understands the absurdity of the world. It accepts it, and you allow yourself to reject the stupid everyday by willing yourself away from the world, by meditating on illness so that it can let your soul run away. I know this. But I also know that there is still this tired old reality we live in. It’s one that you cannot deny. After all, you still need your chamomile tea and the love of Rahil and, hopefully, me. We are helpless and want you. Can’t you at least consider reuniting your mind with your body and living with us in this moment? I am not special like you, Sara; my melancholy stemmed from having my ordinary expectations crushed, it was by chance that I could find relief in philosophy and the words of men and women who have died.

  I want to be with you. Every day, trace your mind, your spirit. I want to write post-sexual notes to you. I want to live post-life with you. I am beginning to write words that make no sense. So I’ll stop here. Because if anything, I want you to make sense out of me.

  Yours,

  Mira

  XI

  I visited Appa with an agenda. It was the type of agenda that comes quickly, makes you think, Why hadn’t I ever had the courage to do this before? The more valuable question was this: Why hadn’t I been compelled to demand the answer to this question?

  Of course I had the answer to that one nestled in my head. I now had time. And while I had to play it cool with Sara and Rahil, I still felt the excitement of being a part of them. I felt a sinister void threatening to infiltrate my body and numb my mind. It terrified me and made me think of my mother. At school, at lunch, and right before my eyes felt heavy at night. My mother haunted me. My mother who had chosen to be sad instead of loving me. I could see her point of view now. Love was not an easy thing to dole out in exchange for the ordinariness offered to her by life. An ordinary daughter or an extraordinary melancholy? At least a piercing sadness could make her feel. Just like how Sara made me feel. Sara, anything but ordinary.

  Before this, I hadn’t thought about my mother very much. When she’d died, there was no real grief. People expected me to cry and feel lost, and I played the part as best as I could. I suspected my father had done the same too. But I was just sixteen. She’d had a gallbladder infection that spread to her blood. Or at least that’s what I was told. When aunts and uncles from other parts of the country huddled around us just after she passed, there was the shock of her immature death, but there was also a wall of eerie silence. Some people in that house knew things I didn’t.

  Appa sat on his couch. He was irritated with me—my weekly visits had become biweekly, and he was convinced there was a man in my life. “When I’ve supported you through everything, been as liberal as I have, why would you hide this from me?” “There is no new man, Appa!”

  He shrugged his shoulders in defeat. I reached for a milk biscuit that he’d laid out on the table, just as he put his hands together and pushed them out into a stretch. He looked into my eyes briefly. I felt an earnest guilt creep from my gut. He was always there for me, always on my side. But he wasn’t built to support or even counsel on the things I was doing. My situation was too far past my own worldview; I couldn’t imagine how Appa would begin to react. That kind of truth might destroy something fundamental in our relationship.

  There were other truths that I was beginning to believe we could handle sharing. I chewed on my lip and considered letting the anxiety of the question get the better of me. It didn’t. This time would not come again soon. I looked straight at Appa.

  “Appa, I want to talk about Ma.”

  Appa grinned. “Well, she would be proud of you: teaching children, giving back to this country…”

  “No, Appa, you and I both know that Ma barely managed to keep up with life itself.”

  “Mira, she loved us very much, what is this about?”

  “You know what it’s about.”

  He cleared his throat. I closed the World War II book that lay open on the coffee table. I could not have anything else distracting him, nothing that could derail him from answering my questions. I felt stupid as soon as I did it, though, so I flipped it back open and looked at him expectedly.

  “Did she really have a gallbladder infection?”

  “Of course she did, you were there at the hospital—what kind of question is that?”

  It’s true, I did remember my mother in pain one night, going to the hospital, being admitted into a private room with a small TV that I fiddled with. I remembered the movie Maine Pyar Kiya was playing, with Salman Khan wearing a hat labeled “friend”. I remembered the heroine, Bhagyashree, in her bright yellow sari romancing Salman Khan by the lake. The tune of the lake song started to whirl in my head. I remembered the doctor, bearded, murmuring to my father. But after that it was all a blur, and forty-eight hours later she was dead. I had to leave school early; my father’s sister picked me up. She was dead on the bed, her face relaxed, peaceful, almost happy looking. I remembered not knowing what to feel, too guilty to ever admit the word that came to me hours later: relief.

  “Appa, what was wrong with Ma? I mean, do you know why she was depressed? You realize we’ve never actually talked about this. After everything that happened with Ketan and me.”

  I was well aware it was a question that sounded like it had been asked by a fourteen-year-old. Some questions come too late.

  Appa let out a sigh, then he stood up. I panicked—for a second I thought he would burst into tears. Instead he came to my side of the sofa and sat by me. He put his arm over my shoulders, then his forehead to mine.

  “No one is like everybody else; everybody has their own purpose, Mir-Mir.”

  I shook Appa off. I demanded more with my eyes.

  What Appa Told Me About Amma

  Appa met my mother through a family friend. Their marriage was arranged and both parties were neither desperate to get married nor opposed to the idea. My father had a good job, my mother had finished college but had never worked. He thought she was pretty, sweet, and mysterious. They had six dates before they got married. She talked a lot at that time. She was an excited girl, wanting to set up house, host dinner parties, have babies.

  If she were the same woman today, she would have been a feminist advocating and supporting women who wanted to housekeep full-time. She loved the idea of it, even though her own mother had taught college-level economics her entire life and her parents had offered her opportunities and money to study further. Appa would create history quizzes for her, and she would indulge him. They’d talk on the phone for hours, about movies, history, and Appa’s job. She wanted to experiment with new recipes, decorate the new house. All she could talk about was becoming the perfect wife. In fact, Appa, who would have supported and encouraged a working wife, felt like it would be too cruel to even suggest it to my mother. If this was her happiness, then it would be his too, and his conservative parents would be just as happy.

  I didn’t interrupt Appa when he told me these parts. I wanted to—I wanted to stop him and say, Are you sure? Is this really true? Because despite having heard about this version of my mother, I couldn’t for a second picture my mother as a happy woman, a woman enthralled by keeping house and wanting to have a child. The mother I remembered lived in her head, listless, meandering, wandering the house like a ghost.

  They got married and a few hundred relatives came—a moderate-sized wedding. Appa had never wanted to live in the same house as his parents, and it created a stir. But they found a house close by and the dramatics ended.

  Ma had the house painted bright colors: yellows, oranges, and greens. She spent weekends making lists of carpentry work to be done, drew up blueprints for quaint little cupboards in the kitchen and bookshelves in all the rooms. The house was filled with l
aborers for a month as they hammered, chiseled, made the home my mother had in her head.

  Every morning she dutifully walked to Appa’s parents’ house. She offered them prasad from the morning puja, complained about rising vegetable prices with her mother-in-law, and read the small print in the newspaper for his father. She never really bothered to see her own parents much, apart from Diwali and special occasions; they had an older son and they were well taken care of. “I was a reluctant patriarch, Mira, she did it all on her own accord. Sometimes I thought it was silly, this bright convent-educated woman, so intelligent, acting like some TV-serial bahu.”

  I sensed this response was more for me than my mother. Appa always wanted me to regard him as more liberal than he was. He was too well read to position himself any other way. But I knew my father well enough to know that he’d probably enjoyed these qualities of this unknown mother of mine.

  Every evening, my mother would have dinner ready at eight. My father would come home in the early evening, and they would chat about the day, she would excitedly tell him about a new recipe she wanted to try, or her fight with the grocery store guy, or a new friendship she had made with someone in the neighborhood.

  A year later she was pregnant with me. The first months were glorious; she had no nausea and an unusual energy. Her face was lit up, pink, and she wore bright, festive saris. She made a lot of sweets the first six months of her pregnancy—ghee-laden laddoos, milk sweets, toasted rava with nuts, and gulab jamun—all from scratch. She and Appa went on a week’s vacation to Coonoor, where they stayed at a guesthouse overlooking dense tea estates. They took long early-morning walks, drank chai from kerosene stoves, sipped tomato soup at night, and giggled under the blankets. It was the best vacation they ever had, and they were excited for their first child.

  The pregnancy became harder at seven months; she had cramps and her energy shot down. But it didn’t stop her from smiling or cooking. Her mother-in-law made sure she ate meals prepared in accord with family tradition, insisting on ghee and milk to ensure the child was fair. My mother laughed about it, but my father was angered and he had a huge fight with his mother about her fairness obsession. Appa spent too much time telling me about this fight, leading me to wonder if it was just a white lie. The more details he went into, the more it seemed like a desperate cry for validation. I wanted to tell Appa that his younger self didn’t have to match the progressive mind of the present, but instead I just nodded my head, wanting him to go on.