The Body Myth

by Rheea Mukherjee

  He came closer to me—I could feel his breath. “Do you want some?” he asked seductively.

  “Yes,” I said. I wanted it. I could taste the sweet tang of the strawberries.

  He put the bowl in my hands. I looked down at it. A hundred dying moths wallowed inside, their wings caught in lumps of oatmeal.

  XIII

  Days washed in like the ocean thinning onto sand, then retracting into the thick mystery of its depth. Ebb and flow. I remember moments from that time, mostly not in order. I remember standing outside Chai Wallah, the fancy tea shop that served sweet chai in cups made from clay. One hand held chai, the other scrolled texts from Appa and Samina. Appa’s were forwarded news article, ones I wouldn’t ever read. Samina sent an update about a freak lynching in a small northern town.

  Rasaguras are getting people killed.

  The culture police of the country wanted people to respect that Rasaguras came from only one place because it was divine. Now people were buying the fruit in bulk and eating it like it was a common banana. It’s a fruit that should be eaten like one would eat prasad from a temple, raged one minister. Seven men from a town I had never heard of before decided another man was disrespecting the fruit and lynched him. I remember not caring, even though I received the same story Samina was referring to in one of Appa’s forwards. Even though I knew I could analyze the politics endlessly with either of them. And last year I probably would have.

  The street in front of me blared horns, but the rain had settled the dust. A beige stray licked its paw, its tail curled for warmth in the unexpected coolness. I stood on a broken rock lying in the middle of the sidewalk and looked through Samina’s text again.

  Mrs. Mira, perhaps it’s a larger class conflict here, and the fruit is just the scapegoat?

  There was something about Samina. Something tragic, something that made my heart twist. She was looking to dump her mind into the world without understanding how very complex it was. I found myself swell with an unfamiliar irritation. I could not admit it to myself back then, but I was envious of young Samina possessing an intellectual curiosity I once had—one that had sustained me. I remember not replying to her text.

  I remember shopping on Gandhi Street. In retrospect it was odd I was taking time to do something as mundane as shopping. Perhaps it was the idea of bangles and how Sara might like them on my wrists. Or maybe it was the one fantasy I had of Rahil stroking my face and the red glass bangles clinking gentle jingles as I moved my arms to his face. There were small vendors laced back-to-back in between wooden carts of boiled corn rubbed with chili powder and men offering stale samosas and fresh chaats from rickety wooden trolleys. I had picked the peanut guy. His face was alive; his eyes blinked to the rhythm of the metal spoon hitting the giant tava. Inside the giant black utensil were peanuts—roasted, smoky, earthy. Tang-tang-tang, he’d hit the side of the tava every few seconds in a bid to get public attention. His hair was cut short, his fingernails dirty, and his teeth bright white. “For you, madam, special, I even have onions and chili powder to mix with them, come have some now and you won’t even realize your boyfriend is late to meet you.”

  I had to laugh. “Only a small bit of chili powder and extra onions.”

  “And a bit of lime juice,” he said, and grinned. I watched his fingernails press against an already-squeezed lime and imagined Sara cringing at the thought, especially raw produce grown God knows where and laid out to the sun and smog. I wondered if it was just envy that compelled such judgments. The fact that her body couldn’t eat the delights of the streets. Or maybe this was why I was here, to do the things I didn’t do with Sara.

  I don’t remember much else about my time alone in this period.

  All that is certain is that I still needed the restless love of Sara. Perhaps it was the same thing Rahil had with her too. I had held Sara naked in my arms many times. Each time I held her, I felt silly about the pedestrian safety that was my love for Rahil. Each time I made love to her, I imagined the greatness of life, the things I could be, the things I could do. I felt important, wise, and significant to the universe. It was baffling that most of the time I was kissing her body, I was thinking of all the incredible things I had read and wanted to share with her. When I grazed my hands over her nipples, I felt the future. I fantasized: I am a professor of philosophy in a European country, maybe Germany, maybe Brussels. I am an important writer, touring the country, Sara with me. She’s sitting in the audience, her face covered in pride. I am living with Sara in a small hill town, we run a café where famous writers come to write, away from the city. They sit around over espresso, and Sara and I impress them with our ability to converse on any subject.

  It was only after we made love that I thought of Rahil. Of his role in Sara’s life. Of his role in our life. And the fantasies started to lose their importance. I’d feel my tongue ready for the wet warmth of chamomile tea. Rarely would I want to cuddle and lounge around in bed after making love with Sara. The ecstasy faded into something reliable: casual banter, Rahil’s dinner menu, the need for the TV to be on.

  Sara’s health had been stable over the last month. While nothing had dramatically spiked, her fatigue, headaches, and cramps remained. Rahil and I never discussed the oatmeal incident and that nightmare faded into obscurity. He now allowed me to make tea for Sara, and I allowed him to fiddle in the kitchen alone when he wanted to. The ordinariness of our everyday interactions had made me feel only guilt for housing dark thoughts about Rahil.

  Our new routine was addictive. It was the drug I woke up to and sustained with undivided commitment. I gave up chatting with the schoolteachers after school so that nothing could swing the clockwork of happiness we’d built. I had semi-abandoned my house by this time, coming straight to Sara’s house at four, when we made love. Then we had tea ready for Rahil by six. I can’t imagine he didn’t smell our sex in the room, filtering through peppermint. It cut through the perfume of chamomile, it radiated from Sara’s cheeks, and, most of all, it sweated itself out from the pits of my arms.

  I told Sara about my mother, weeks after my conversation with Appa. When I spent time with Sara, it was like my past had no consequence. I felt intrusive when I talked about myself. So I waited it out, knowing that my stories would find a way for Sara to hear them. And when she did, Sara nodded her head vehemently, stroking my face with a beige-painted nail. “Her soul was dying to get out, so sometimes a baby lets your mind wind down. It allows your soul to be set free. You can’t possibly blame yourself—you were what she needed.”

  I could have turned it into a fight very easily; I could have slapped her then and there. I had never seen a happy mother, and I was the reason for it. All this pro-death nonsense Sara spouted, it enraged me, but it also drew me to her. At that moment, I chose to be drawn to her instead of angered. I wept. She whispered into my ears—I can’t remember what, but it helped.

  We were sitting on her sofa; she turned back to her computer. She showed me a new article on seizure treatment, a new medication, a trial testing in the United States. My throat tightened; she had not spoken of her seizures in a long while. She still had crippling joint pain and headaches, but she had not found the need to have another seizure. I believed now, after watching her these many months, that she tricked her body into creating them on demand. She willed them, and with as much ease she willed them away. It was the fatal flaw of psychiatry, I surmised, to not evaluate the true potency of the mind over the body.

  She could die at any moment, I suddenly thought. It made my entire body flinch in panic. I pushed the idea away, temporarily soothed by the calmness of her voice. Nothing could take away such calmness before its time, no universal force could reckon with it. And the thought would diminish for a while, only to rise again, usually in the middle of the day, when I was correcting papers.

  One weekend she casually told Rahil and me that she’d had a seizure the past Thursday afternoon. We were heaped with guilt. Automatically our shoulders sagged, we muttere
d apologies. We were not with her full-time, but the mere suggestion of Rahil working from home made her hysterical. Sara needed her hours alone—of this I was sure. She was in no mood for apologies.

  “I am alive, don’t worry.” Then she shocked us by saying she wanted to go out for a walk. Alone. Rahil signaled with his hand from behind her to let her go. I nodded my head, but asked if she wanted company to the gate.

  “You stay with Rahil, our dinner plan is still the same.”

  I awkwardly sat back down. Sara waltzed out of the house with the confidence only a body that had never felt an ache could. Rahil rubbed his left eye as if he were buying time to make sure Sara was really out of the house. Finally he looked at me, his face soft and endearing.

  “She’s upset. I mean, upset about us. I mean, she wants more control in it. She likes the idea of it all. You know, the three of us, but she’s been insecure lately, that’s why…”

  My gut was tangled. This was as open as we’d ever been about the three of us since the oatmeal fight. “Rahil, I don’t know how to talk about this, but I just want everything to be like this, forever, without upsetting anyone.”

  He exhaled and sighed. My foolish want had obvious answers.

  “And I want world peace too while we’re at it,” I said, trying to make light. He didn’t respond. Anger flooded. “I am taken for granted here. You know, sometimes I think you like her being this way, so you can feel important.”

  He rose, went to the side bar, flipped a glass, and poured a large measure of whisky. He pushed the glass toward me. I swallowed in utter exhaustion. Rahil didn’t fight back with words.

  He took his left thumb and stroked my cheek. “I’ll always love you, Mira, but you have to understand, there are things you can’t… you know… can’t understand.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with her. Look at her, she had a seizure, but she’s out there taking a walk now. Maybe you need to stop coddling her so much, enabling her so much.”

  “Tell me you’ve not kissed her and felt the rawness of her lips? You see what she is doing to herself.” Rahil sighed. “The stress will take a toll. This setup, it’s not normal—we might like it, but it’s not normal.”

  I blushed. We’d never discussed our intimate interactions with Sara before. The fact that he asked me about kissing her made me more uncomfortable than the truth. I had not only felt her rawness with my tongue. I had seen the purple-red welts on her lower lip while she was on her back, so soaked in the moments of our touching. I had grazed at her lower lip more than a couple of times in the past week, pulling it down for seconds as she moaned. My body would flinch in fright at the rippled raw punctures dotting the inside of her lower lip.

  “Mira, I think it’s in our best interest if we take a break for a bit.”

  And I started to cry. Sob. Like a teenager who had just been dumped. The pain was searing. If Ketan hadn’t fucking died I wouldn’t be in this ungodly situation. I would have been a mother. I would have had friends. I would have been fucking normal. I looked at Rahil. I felt like he was dying on me too. Leaving me to the world just like Ketan.

  He took my glass from my hand and swallowed the remaining golden liquid. “In good time maybe we’ll get a handle on things. Nobody can plan for this kind of thing, Mira. I can’t risk Sara losing her health over jealousy.”

  “I think you’re the one who can’t handle it, you’re the one who is jealous, and I am the one being honest. And Sara should have the courage to talk to me about this too. She gets to go on a walk while you get to be the dirty messenger? Where’s your spine?”

  He shrugged his shoulders at me assertively. It was his dance of power. I was in their house, he ruled it; he was the one married to Sara.

  “What, are you scared that I might tell her?” The threat in my voice was unmistakable. A lioness roar. He hadn’t expected it.

  “Tell her what, Mira?”

  “I don’t know, maybe that you might be keeping her sick? That you like her like this? It must be nice to have someone sick and needing you, Rahil. You’re the hero, right? You even admitted that you like having someone who needs you. You guys don’t even have friends.”

  Rahil’s body shrunk from the attack. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I felt empty.

  “I can’t believe you said that.”

  His voice wasn’t friendly. It wasn’t angry either. I couldn’t read him and it made me deeply uncomfortable. I had no cards left.

  Perhaps they had done this before. Perhaps somewhere in this house were the remains of a broken heart, another widow who fell for their charms only to have her spirit shattered. Maybe Sara and Rahil were a team that worked together to extract all they could from vulnerable women.

  He took in a noisy breath and raked his fingers through his hair. But then he came to me and let me fold half of my body onto him. “It’s going to be okay,” he whispered. But I had no idea what he meant. What he wanted me to do. What he was doing. Rahil was the master, but Sara was master by proxy. The easy one to blame. In the next twenty minutes Rahil repeated that he loved me and that we’d figure it out. That he was sorry for being so inconsistent and mysterious with his ways.

  I was drinking a glass of water when Sara returned. She looked possessed. Happy, chatty, as if the walk had given her a new lease on life.

  “I’ve always wanted to get out of the city, move somewhere, into the hills.”

  Rahil just smiled at her. “I haven’t taken her on a good vacation in so long, Mira. Soon we’ll go, maybe the three of us?” He looked at me, his eyes friendly, a consolation prize.

  Sara nodded and said she’d love that.

  “Maybe when we’re old that’s what we’ll do, take some morphine and die quietly in Dharamshala.” I winked at her.

  She grabbed my hand. “Everything isn’t a joke, Mira.”

  But her voice was cotton candy friendly, and I knew. She’d planned this. She didn’t want to be the bad cop. Rahil was her messenger. She couldn’t do this anymore, and I could feel it. Sara couldn’t risk losing Rahil over some stupid woman she had decided to love. She could only communicate with her body.

  I let my teeth graze my tongue. The water was making a weak attempt at rehydrating my whisky-dried tongue.

  “So tell me, what you are teaching these days? You never talk about work.”

  I looked at Rahil. Sara certainly wasn’t acting insecure about me being in the house. Her pretense of friendliness was grating. Rahil’s eyes met mine for a second, but then he dropped his gaze to the ground, got up, and disappeared into the kitchen. So I answered, trying to remind her of the things she found so intriguing about me in the first place. I told her the latest from my world: Samina had started reading The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir and was going to talk to the class about it. It was completely off syllabus, but the students were smart and indulging them was the only hope I had for their generation.

  “What’s it about?”

  “You’ve never heard of de Beauvoir?”

  She shook her head, and I knew I had her. Her ignorance was always willing to award me with purpose.

  What I Told Sara About The Second Sex

  De Beauvoir disagreed with the premise that the differences between men and woman were superficial. Men and women are in fact biologically different and have experienced the world very differently. We, as women, have a very different narrative to give the world. Men and women, according to de Beauvoir, should encourage acknowledgment of these differences. But here’s the important part: the reality is that men have always been “the one,” the historically significant gender. They were the people who mattered, the ones who had power, choices, and agency. Women have always been “the other,” the ones whose characteristics have been derived from what men are not. Women have been objects, unlike their counterparts, men, who are the subjects. Everything we’ve done is through the dependence on men and their agency. We’ve been the ones who have sculpted our existence through the needs of men. De Beauv
oir didn’t want a world where women were dependent on men. She just wanted both to have equal agency in the world. In essence, both are subjects and there is no room for objects.

  Sara nodded along. “Yes, we are all individual souls, all of us have the ability at any time to express our individual brightness, and in this expression you’ll see we are all the same one energy, Mira.”

  Sara could literally take any theory or opinion and bring it back to her one-soul theory. I swallowed another gulp of water. Rahil came back from the kitchen and Sara quickly filled him in on what I had said about The Second Sex. My heart started to beat faster. I’d had coffee the day before with Rahil, and we’d discussed the privilege of philosophy. I started to feel excited again. The three of us talking about something that I loved to talk about. The two of them anchored to my thoughts, my memories, my knowledge.

  “Yeah, hah, just like you were telling me the other day, Mira. That Maslow’s hierarchy of needs determines those privileged enough to debate our existence. Here we are sipping our whisky calmly, while the rest of the world goes to shit. But, oh, like Mira says, there is a place for philosophy too, even if it’s privileged.”

  His words sliced my heart. The other day, he had nodded, even grazed my cheek with his finger, like he had understood what I had said. Now, there was something unmistakably snide in his tone. Rahil wasn’t even that politically inclined or pessimistic about the world. At least not the Rahil who sipped caramel lattes with me in the evenings.

  Sara shifted on the sofa, her face pulled in. “You guys met outside?”

  “Yeah, Sara, for coffee. I was done with work early, I forgot to tell you,” Rahil said calmly. As if it were a one-off coffee. As if it were not something we did almost weekly.