The Body Myth

by Rheea Mukherjee

  I was born in a small birthing center. A friendly nurse told Appa to come and see me forty-five minutes after my mother had a very smooth and normal delivery. She was exhausted but ecstatic. Everyone was there, both my sets of grandparents. The nurse took a picture of all of us right there in the room.

  My mother sang to me, cooed to me, dressed me up, and massaged my limbs with coconut and sesame oil. She’d sit and watch Hindi films from the ’80s, pointing at heroines and heroes and telling me about them as I wiggled in her arms.

  “She talked to you like you were an adult even at six months. She explained movie plots, she was obsessed with Anil Kapoor.”

  And then my father told me something I had never heard before: he came home from work one day when I was seven months old, and the home was unusually quiet. He found my mother sitting in the living room staring into space. “Where is Mira?” he asked. She didn’t reply. He went to her and yelled. That’s when she looked up and said with leveled calmness, “I am not sure.”

  I was in the bedroom, of course, but I had been unattended to since four o’clock, when our maid, Radha, had left to attend a wedding. My mother had not fed me, nor had she touched me the entire day. Or at least that’s what Radha claimed when she returned the next day. It took a month or so of my mother’s erratic behavior for my father to realize she needed a doctor. She was diagnosed with postpartum and told to eat healthy and exercise. But she never recovered and slowly whittled into a world of her own—one where new recipes, bookshelves, and shopping for baby clothes did not exist. My mother quite literally changed who she was seven months after I was born.

  She switched on and off when it came to simple tasks, and my father was in denial, he now admitted.

  “I trusted your amma would return to her regular self. I would have to just wait it out for a year, that’s what the doctors had predicted.”

  My father relied on his mother and Radha to bring me up for the first couple of years. Soon enough, though, he accepted the new mother. The bright, happy housewife was a distant memory, like a character he once knew from a book he had read as a child.

  “And, Appa, her death?”

  This time Appa did not pause. He looked at me, his face relaxed, calm. He had finally accepted I wasn’t here to hear old stories. I was here for the truth.

  “She did have an infection, Mira, and it was serious.”

  I sat very still. I could hear my breath.

  “But she also had a bottle of sleeping pills with her, in her hospital room. She took more than twenty of them, and by the time we realized something was wrong, her medical complications just did her in. She was willing her body to go anyway; she just gave it a kick start.”

  My body began to shake involuntarily and deep, hiccupping sobs rose from my throat. I felt release, I felt okay. I was crying because it felt good, it felt good that Appa could tell me something I had always sensed. I hugged Appa and held him for longer than I ever had. He patted my back; his feet on the ground were tapping to some unknown rhythm in his head.

  XII

  A few weeks after my conversation with Appa, I’d been restored to my place in Rahil and Sara’s lives. The process had been slow. One night Rahil called me. I was thrilled because I hadn’t texted him first, he had sought me out.

  His voice was tender. I imagined him looking over his shoulder to see if Sara was near. But that couldn’t be true because he said he was at work. He told me to watch this one documentary on Netflix. I was intrigued. Not with the documentary, but the fact that Rahil was interested in true crime. When I asked him about it he told me he went through a serial killer phase. “Ever hear of Jeffrey Dahmer?”

  He went into detail about him and I couldn’t help but giggle. Rahil was such a straitlaced guy, tame, almost shy. I wondered if he was just googling in real time and pretending to have some sort of fascination to make himself more interesting. To court me. I felt that thrill rise again. I asked if I could come see them soon.

  “Soon,” he said.

  Rahil told me he had read my letter too. It didn’t bother me. By this time I had already made peace with the fact that both Sara and Rahil knew the extent of our relationship. Why did we keep our most obvious secrets away from each other? Because this is how we thrived, how we bloomed. Once you start talking about things, jealousy emerges and everything becomes a mess.

  Sara found my letter hilarious. It was “begging for intellectual validation.” That’s what Rahil said. “But she thought it’s funny that you think she is insane and she told me she’s just going to ignore that part about you.”

  An hour later, my phone had buzzed with a text. All of a sudden, there it was again, this persistent odd question.

  Has Sara showed you any medical tests in the last weeks? Just wondering, cuz she tends to hide them from me.

  He was lying. Sara didn’t hide anything from him. She couldn’t. I remembered her stack of files neatly organized and tucked in between the old magazines near the dining table. Besides, why would Sara show me something on her medical records that she wouldn’t want Rahil to see?

  No. And why? This is the fourth or fifth time you’ve asked. Do you feel like she is hiding something from us?

  No. Never mind.

  I felt a whirl of nausea in the middle of my stomach. It passed. I set my phone down and looked at the fan. It tended to clickety-clack instead of whirr.

  A week later, I was pulled back into their company, their dinners, their blue teacups. Rahil and I still met for coffee sometimes, but we hadn’t slept together since the fight with Sara. When we talked now, it was as close friends who tided each other over the confusion of what we were, what we meant to each other. He listened to me. He talked back, asked questions. Sometimes I talked about Appa, other times I talked about the books I read and the onus I carried of finding meaning in the mundane. He didn’t dismiss like Sara; with him, there was nothing to prove. He was present. He was gently assertive. But his words and body failed to explicitly hint at the possibility of sex. Not that I had asked. I knew it was an unsaid game with unsaid rules. Something about that fight had allowed Sara to be in power. Almost as if Rahil was a caretaker, a watchman, a guide to the relationship between Sara and I. But one thing was clear: Rahil’s primary responsibility and priority was Sara. It was in the way he looked at me when I sat by him. Always making sure to keep a comfortable distance. It was in the way he called Sara for dinner as I followed her to the table. It was in the way he took over the kitchen, spending long periods crafting her meals.

  On a Tuesday I was sitting with Sara on the couch. She had started eating normally a couple of weeks ago, but in the last three days she’d begun complaining of mouth ulcers.

  “Let me see.”

  “No, they are ugly.”

  I put my fingers to her lips, she flinched and swatted at my hand.

  “You don’t understand, it’s not like I am not hungry, but I have to keep myself from eating, it’s destroying my body.”

  I could have taken the commonsense route and given her the basic rationale behind nutrition, but you can’t play such a primitive card with Sara.

  “Is there something we can make that you think your body will, I don’t know, like, thrive on?”

  She tilted her head in exasperation. “I can’t stand Rahil pestering me on and on about food, it’s like I am ten again, it’s so annoying. I am not starving myself, I am eating. I just don’t like him serving me all the time. I can’t tell him that either—it’s like I’ve told him I want a divorce or something. I mean, that’s how sad he looks.”

  If there was one thing I could swear my truth upon, it was how much Sara depended on Rahil’s coddling: how her body sighed in relief with every look of concern, every hug, and every cheek stroke he offered her. Maybe I helped. Sara needed the same amount of concern from me. I could only hope.

  “Well, if you are stressed about that, I mean, that’s probably causing your ulcers in the first place.” I could hear Rahil in the kitch
en. “Want me to tell him not to bring you any food now?”

  “No, it’s okay, just go help him. You’re right, I’m making this a bigger deal than it should be.”

  I walked into the kitchen. Rahil was fiddling with her bowl of oats. He jumped like a cat when he saw me, and the spoon clattered to the floor.

  “What?” he demanded coldly, startled. Ketan would have never talked to me that way.

  I looked at the bowl. “What are you doing?”

  “Don’t come in here when I am cooking, it makes me very uncomfortable.”

  I wanted to tell him that preparing oats hardly counted as cooking. I wanted to tell him that Sara would not eat anything he made. I wanted to ask him what he was doing standing over her bowl, fiddling with what? Sometimes I overthought things, it’s true. But most of the time I felt like this house had too many secrets. Maybe I didn’t want to know those secrets. But I found strange pleasure in telling myself that they existed.

  My doctor at the farm had told me I overthink to the point of creating delusions, and that overthinking is a process of self-destruction. I agree with this in theory, but with Sara and Rahil it was different. Sometimes overthinking is as utilitarian as a seasoned chess player studying her board for thick minutes before she makes her next move. What if my doctor was right? My toes curled involuntarily. Chipped blue polish. What parts of this relationship were just in my head?

  “It’s oatmeal, for God’s sake.” I waved at the bowl to make my point. He slapped the bowl with his palm; it rocked and moved two inches farther away. What the ever-loving fuck was he trying to do? Was I suspicious now? Yes. Was I possibly more upset by the fact that he hadn’t bothered asking me if I wanted a bowl too? Maybe. Why was it only Sara who needed the spoon-feeding? Why was I the one who gave off that I-don’t-need-to-be-coddled vibe?

  “Actually, I don’t think Sara is hungry. We were just chatting and she said her mouth is really hurting.” I

  pushed myself toward the kitchen table and nudged the bowl toward me. “But I wouldn’t mind some.”

  “What’s with you, Mira? It doesn’t matter if she isn’t hungry, she has to eat small meals every few hours, you know that.”

  “No, you know that.” I felt thoroughly stupid as soon as I said the words. In a panic, I grabbed the bowl. There wasn’t a spoon in sight; I dipped my finger into it. My lumpy-oatmeal-covered forefinger rose as a sign of victory. I put it in my mouth and sucked. “It’s masala flavored, that’s disgusting. I thought Sara prefers fruit in hers,” I said with a stoic confidence.

  Rahil had frozen all this while, staring at me like I was a new person. A drama queen of sorts he had never calculated for. He slapped the bowl out of my hand. The plastic bowl bounced twice and splattered the turmeric-stained oatmeal all over the floor.

  His voice dropped to a firm whisper: “Why don’t you trust me? Do you know that Sara is doing this to torture me? She did have an ulcer on her bottom lip, but she won’t let it heal, she fucking chews on it till it bleeds. She bites her lips at night until they’re freaking raw. So yes, now she can’t eat because it hurts too much to put anything into her mouth. And you know why? Because of all this. All of this stress. She can’t figure out how she feels about you…about us… the three of us.”

  My eyes immediately started to water. I was the problem. And now I was responsible for Sara’s raw bleeding lower lip. I choked out a whisper: “Maybe she’s protecting herself from you, maybe your coddling reminds her of the way her parents were. She’s not a possession.”

  I started to clean up, wiping the oatmeal away and discarding the plastic bowl in the sink. My heart was thumping with sorrow. Did I have to protect Sara? I couldn’t trust myself anymore. Rahil had resigned himself to the corner of the kitchen, his face defeated and pulled. Irrationally I felt sorry for him. Maybe it was hard, finding his unique way to love Sara when there was another person willing to compete for her. Maybe my time with Sara on the bed swaying to Sufi music seemed competitive to Rahil. Maybe the way I made her tea annoyed him. Maybe he just needed his own way to love Sara.

  I put my hand on Rahil’s shoulder. “Don’t treat me like a stranger, you know how I feel about you.”

  My body winced in preparation for rejection, but he surprised me and pulled me toward him. I inhaled. Wood, sweat, Rahil. My body flooded with reassurance, safety. For a moment, I could smell Ketan. My heart slowed.

  “I am figuring this out too, you know, Mira, but you have to respect that Sara is special. We both need to help her.”

  I squinted. “Yeah.”

  “Let’s not talk about it now.” He offered another hug. I pushed out of it in seconds. He looked at me, confused.

  “Why don’t you make her another batch of oatmeal.” The authority and confidence in my voice faltered. “I’ll go check on her.”

  “Let me check on her first,” Rahil said right back.

  The balance of power in the house was almost in harmony. Sometimes it was like Rahil and I were Sara’s parents, but I didn’t like to think about it that way, it was too weird. Everything was weird enough as it was.

  As soon as Rahil left the kitchen, I went back to the abandoned bowl in the sink. My heart started to pound again. Maybe he really had gotten that upset because I’d interrupted one of the few things he was left to do for Sara since my arrival. But the jumpy startle I’d given him by simply walking into the kitchen? It didn’t add up. I picked up the bowl and looked at the remnants of goopy oatmeal left clinging to the sides of the blue plastic. I sniffed at it. It smelled like mustard-tempered oatmeal, with a hint of something sweet that I couldn’t quite identify. A dark idea started to form. The idea became more pronounced in seconds.

  I stopped my head from filtering in any more questions; it was ungrateful of me to think like this about a man who had given me so much solace. A man who had offered me comfort and love. Sara was no fool; she would have noticed if her very own Rahil was the cause of her problems. Surely. I glided my finger along the side of the bowl and raised the oatmeal to my lips. I let it sit on my tongue. It didn’t taste weird. It was really very good. I bit my lip in guilt. The quick sting on my lower lip made me feel better. A physical punishment for over-thinking.

  I set the bowl down and started to make some more oats. I added enough to the water for two servings. That’s when I heard Sara humming as she entered the kitchen.

  “All good now, Rahil gave me some numbing gel for my mouth. He told me he spilled a bowl of masala oatmeal, so I am thinking, would it be too much to ask you for a banana and brown sugar version instead?” She winked and I laughed. I knew Sara preferred her oatmeal sweet. And here she was, magically ready to eat. “Rahil just thinks his masala oats are the best, plus it gives him another chance to add a bunch of turmeric to it, you know, anti-inflammatory…”

  “Where’s Rahil?” I asked, mostly to know if it was okay to make fun of his masala oats recipe.

  She waved her hand. “Taking a shower now.”

  Together we made bowls of sweet oatmeal. Sara chopped two bananas into perfect circles and arranged them on top of each bowl. I sprinkled the brown sugar on top. Sara curled her lips in thought. “Hmm, maybe a dollop of coconut oil?”

  “That’s the most hipster meal I’ve seen in a while,” I said, and with that sentence the relief of normalcy buzzed through my head.

  Later, Rahil sat across from us as he read a book. He watched us on the couch for the next hour, sitting like two old friends who had been reunited after years. Giggles and brown-sugared bananas. There was no talk of illness, there was no tension. Could it be this easy?

  I decided to go home for the night. I didn’t have any worthy clothes to wear for school the next day and, oddly, even though I’d had so much fun with Sara, I wanted to sleep in my own bed. A private space to soak in the day. A place that I knew bowed to my power. Pillows and bedsheets meant only for me. Plus, I didn’t want to be a burden to Sara. I wanted Rahil to be the reason for her ulcers and night chewing,
not me. I couldn’t afford that.

  I took off my jeans and rubbed the red welts right below my belly button. I tried to remember if this pair had always been tight or if I had gained weight. I couldn’t remember. For whole minutes I was just Mira again. I didn’t think about Sara and Rahil, my nighttime ablutions insulating me from them. I picked up my red toothbrush, measured out a dollop of Ayurvedic toothpaste on the bristles, and started to brush. I had taken to nighttime brushing only because I was having sex. The last time I had been so particular about my oral hygiene was when Ketan was around. He would make sure I brushed before we went to sleep.

  I sat in bed with a wad of cotton and nail polish remover. Studiously, I wiped out all traces of dark nude from each finger. It hadn’t even chipped or anything, but it didn’t matter. I admired my naked nails for a minute and took a sniff of the bottle; the acidic twang reminded me of being thirteen. My mother wiped off my nails every Sunday because they checked at school. She did so robotically, but I enjoyed the vigorous rubbing: it was contact; my mother had to hold my hand to do it. Now that I thought about it, I was sure I’d put on nail polish every Friday afternoon just so my mother could rub it off on Sunday evenings.

  I ran the fan on the highest speed and settled in. Only then did I allow Sara to pop back in my head. Rahil filtered through every few seconds but I pushed him away. Sara gave me the quiet thrill that I needed.

  That night I dreamed of Rahil. I was in the kitchen again, but it wasn’t in their house or mine. It was that magic trick the mind plays after dreaming, when you just know where you were but you can’t remember what it looked like. Rahil was offering me a bowl of oatmeal. It had ripe, bursting red strawberries on top. I held out my hands for the bowl. “Wait,” he said with an almost mischievous grin. From his left hand he sprinkled something on top. I thought it was sugar.