My heart shifted. Sara’s tone had flattened when she had asked the question. No friendly curiosity weaved through her words. They had tricked me. They still wanted me out. I had fallen for it twice in a span of forty-five minutes. I felt a hot shame burn my forehead. And with it came a choked tongue. I no longer knew what was happening. I no longer knew what to say.
We had never said that our phone calls and our once-in-a-while meetings alone were supposed to be secrets. They were premised on an unsaid understanding: we needed each other to fuel us for Sara—for us to love Sara. Or so I’d thought. Was this now his final revenge, his way of punishing me for forcing him to share the woman (thing?) he loved the most? Or was it his way of making sure I couldn’t tell Sara of my own suspicions about him?
Sara stared at Rahil for whole seconds. Then she turned to me. “I guess I am not needed as much as I thought I was.”
She stood up and went into the bedroom and slammed the door shut. Her music started playing moments later. Rahil reached for his glass of whisky. He looked at me, his face twisted in smug arrogance. I was a pebble in an ocean, an insignificant dot. Tears danced in my eyes again, but I blinked them away. I wouldn’t repeat the same grief I had experienced not even an hour ago with Rahil. I considered telling Sara about the oatmeal. But I already knew she wouldn’t care, wouldn’t even believe me. I was the enemy now.
“This is what I was trying to tell you. Her mood is just not stable, she hasn’t figured out how to be in sync with this. But she wants it too at the same time.”
“Yeah, and I am the one who is easiest to get rid of, aren’t I?”
“There are boundaries. This is my and Sara’s house first. You’re just a friend, and friends have their own homes.”
His voice was drained of any sentiment. So cold, for a minute I thought he was joking. He went into the bedroom, leaving me alone on the couch. I could hear his voice rise. “It’s time… You show her… done to yourself… have to.”
I had never heard Rahil raise his voice at Sara. I could hear Sara murmur. The door swung open, Rahil was clutching Sara’s forearm. He dragged her to the living room. I wanted to pounce on him, rip him away from Sara, but I froze. Sara’s eyes were lit with terror. “Show her!” Rahil demanded.
The confusion on my face was no match for the utter sorrow that washed over Sara’s. I focused on Rahil’s hand; it gripped her wrist so tightly it could have sliced it off. He swung Sara toward the couch; there she was, right beside me.
“She’s already so sick, and what I am trying to tell you is that our situation here is inflaming it. She is so stressed, her mouth is in shreds. Show her, Sara!”
Sara’s eyes were glazed with tears; her pale cheeks glowed in shame. She shook her head. “It’s just that I can’t handle it anymore. The nights… I keep thinking I am losing everything.” She hiccupped three rapid sobs.
Rahil took in a breath. He stood in front of her and pushed her shoulders to the couch. In a split second he used his thumb and index finger to pull open her mouth. She didn’t resist. She slumped as a mannequin would. “Look!” he commanded.
I looked—into the depth of her mouth. My stomach fell. The damage was much worse than I could have imagined. How had she ever kissed me back and not cried in pain? How had I never looked at her this closely? The insides of her cheeks were pocked with thick bubbles. Her lower lip was clotted and uneven, shrieking red. I put my hands to my mouth in shock. Sara finally pushed away Rahil’s hand and disappeared into the bedroom. Rahil followed without another word to me.
I sat on the couch in silence for minutes, wishing, hoping, willing them to come back, to hug me, to tell me they loved me. They’d been wrong—we all were stronger than this. We didn’t care what society demanded, ours was an irreplaceable bond. But no one came out. No one said those things.
I shut my eyes. I saw Ketan. Yellow shirt, beige pants. I had conquered grief, he reminded me. I had conquered uncertainty. I had jumped from the rug that had almost pulled the life I knew out from under me. Ketan’s hand reached out, urging me onward. I could walk back to normal. I could walk right out and be the me I had been all this while. I didn’t need Sara and Rahil. I didn’t need their games. I opened my eyes. Ketan was gone.
I left their house and went straight to Appa’s. I told him that the boyfriend I’d never told him about had broken up with me and he held me like a little girl. Sara’s torn mouth would flash in my mind and I’d feel my stomach turn. What had I done to her? What had Rahil done to make her think I was the threat?
I spent the night there, Appa singing an old Tamil song to me. Hours later, too tired to think, I lay with my face in the pillow, inhaling the scent of my pillowcase. It reminded me of my hazy childhood—nothing delightful, nothing tragic. Just familiar.
In the morning, Appa gave me a plate of toast and fruit.
“It’s a new day, it’s time for you to go teach some children. Now go do what you have to do.”
XIV
I went to work with a new determination. I had a mother who’d committed suicide. I had lost my husband after less than a year of marriage. I had survived, and I could push past this too. I was not weak or needy. I was not Sara, who couldn’t communicate what she felt with words. Sara who needed to skip this part of her “eternal life.” And I certainly wasn’t a two-faced asshole like Rahil.
Mrs. Meena, the head of the physics department, asked me to help her choreograph a medley with the seventh-grade kids for Annual Day. “Hindi songs, it will be fun, and you need to do some more fun things. You are always into all that serious stuff,” she squealed. She wore a bright yellow salwar kameez and a large red bindi, and had overly black-lined eyes. I couldn’t help but think she looked like a bee.
I burst out laughing, shaking my head in mock protest. Truth was, it did sound fun, and helping kids dance to some stupid Hindi song was, probably, exactly what I needed.
At lunch break we gathered at the central student plaza. Samina was there, tucked into a corner of the plaza, observing the rest of us. I couldn’t place her emotion, but her stare was intense. Samina was not the dancing type. She had set up a far too serious reputation among her peers to participate in something as frothy as this. I smiled at her and she raised her hand in calm acknowledgment. For a whole minute I reconsidered my decision, wondering if students like Samina would think less of me.
The music burst from the speakers. Immediately, Mrs. Meena started to demonstrate the steps for the first thirty seconds of the dance. The Hindi song was about love and breakups, but also included an original English rap:
Love it, baby, when you breakup,
My heart still says, baby,
What’s it, it’s okay, darling,
We’ll still be together on WhatsApp.
“This song is ridiculous,” I scolded over the music. Mrs. Meena looked at me sidelong, reached her hands out imploringly for me to join her. Apparently, bad rhymes could win over almost anyone, even overqualified physics teachers and morose English teachers. Two boys whom I had never taught came up to me and very sincerely asked me to start dancing so they could copy my moves.
“Those boys just have a crush on you, a pretty young teacher—what else will they do at this age?” Mrs. Meena shrugged her shoulders playfully and then continued to show the impatient boys the next set of moves, since I had stopped to watch Samina walking toward me.
“Miss Mira, you didn’t reply to my email.”
“Samina, I am so sorry, it’s just that I have this other project I am working on at home. Did you send me the essay?”
“What else? You said it was okay if I write it just for you.”
“Yes, and I need to give it the time it deserves…”
“I understand, Miss Mira.” She made it easy—she didn’t need excuses, she just needed me to read it. She looked over at the kids swaying to the music and then looked at me.
“You want to dance?”
“Maybe next year, miss.” She finally smiled at me an
d walked back to her corner.
Mrs. Meena was showing the girls how to do the first eight-count steps. She pointed her hand energetically to the boys standing lackadaisically to the side. “You teach them, Mira.”
In the middle of my hip thrusting I felt my phone buzz in my pocket. It was from Sara.
Mira, let us be for now.
My heart dropped, my head filled with rage. I began typing: He’s making you sick, he’s the one who keeps you so unhappy. He’s the one who needs you to be sick. He’s the one who makes you self-harm. But the futility of it all filled my head. Instead, I heaved my phone with demon strength across the plaza. It bounced twice and lay shattered thirty meters away.
The students gaped in awe. Mrs. Meena audibly gasped. I pulled my hands through my hair in response to the thick embarrassment that pulsed through my body. I walked with purpose toward the phone, picked it up, traced my fingers on the shattered glass, and mumbled, “Shit, shit, shit.” I didn’t have to look up to know everybody was staring.
Mrs. Meena came up to me. “Are you all right?”
I didn’t answer as she stroked my head gently.
“Go home, take the rest of the day off,” she cooed. “Whatever’s going on will smooth out.”
In that moment I wished she were my mother—the happy mother Appa had talked about. The mother who could hold me and make everything dissolve into a gentle breeze. The next second I didn’t want my mother or any weird replacement of her. I wanted to be on the farm again, surrounded by shelves. I wanted my eyes and my mind locked in the safety of words written by men and women long ago. I looked up at her and nodded. As I walked toward the staff room to collect my things, I caught Samina staring at me from her corner, her eyes lingering on my body and her intense gaze piercing my back as I exited.
In the staff room another teacher told me that the principal had called me to his office. I sighed loudly. I loved my conversations with Mr. Khan, but this time I knew it wasn’t casual Marxism he wanted to discuss.
“Did you eat? I have some roti and daal left.” Mr. Khan was wrapping up lunch at his desk.
I waved my hands at him. “No, no, I am full, thank you.”
He opened a bottle of hand sanitizer and squirted a blob out on his palm. As he rubbed, the air flooded with that clinical hospital smell. He took a deep breath in, twitched his mouth.
“The thing is, Mrs. Meena thought your help with the dance might, uh, help you. The teachers said, uh, you’ve been slightly off the last couple months. Not to say the students or parents have complained. But just, we care about your well-being, Mira.”
“I’ve just been a bit distracted, that’s all, Mr. Khan, really. Actually I am just pulling things together right now, and uh…”
“I heard you just threw your phone across a plaza full of kids. Scared them. I can only imagine what kind of text you must have gotten to do such a thing, but whatever it is, your personal matter, we can’t…” His voice trailed. I knew he felt stupid giving me moralistic lectures like this. He was an interloper to traditional academia, and his rant was unbecoming.
“I reacted on impulse. I am sorry. This won’t happen again.”
“Good, and I don’t think it will. Eleventh grade is enjoying your teaching, and they really have taken to history. I had Ranvir in here the other day saying how he wanted to study anthropology after school. It’s because of the way you were teaching them to read. You know, feel free to teach out of syllabus. But careful, like I said, the parents do come to us from time to time with their bourgeois worries. A fine balance, Mira, a fine balance.” He looked to his desk and started tapping it with his fingers.
I nodded my head, assuring Mr. Khan some more. I even used some of his hand sanitizer as I talked. He told me to go home for the day. I didn’t argue. Primarily because I already had an idea of what to do next. Something that would get me back on track. I would not let five words destroy me. I was stronger than that. I got home and flipped my laptop open. My bed was pristine, my house neat. I had barely been around in the last few months, and I had missed my sheets, the smell of the walls. That mellow, woody, earthy smell that I walked into every day. Before Sara, before the loony farm, before everything, I had friends. Ketan and I had a community of people. Not that we were overly social, but I had people to gossip with, friends from the office, friends who texted me to go to movies. Friends who would share beer and Scrabble in our living room that always smelled of sandalwood because it was the only incense Ketan would ever buy.
After he died, I still kept in touch on social media; sometimes there were even emails. But it’s only now that I realized I hadn’t really hung out with anyone in the last year. I hadn’t really looked with curiosity at the pictures that flooded my newsfeed: babies, dogs, trips to Phi Phi Island, promotions, and anniversaries. Old colleagues smiling into their phone cameras, fancy plated dinners, and new babies on their laps. Mountains behind them, wearing dapper checkered coats on benches in Europe. Normal life and what it looked like. I chuckled mindlessly looking through, catching up, understanding what had happened to whom. The information had always been there. This gold mine of adventures and evolutions. For whole moments I couldn’t get over the fact that I hadn’t been compelled to sit down and read into the lives of others in so long.
I had wanted nothing of other people and their boring, predictable lives after I came back from the farm. Even less after my body was soothed in the arms of Sara. But now it was the only thing I wanted. Talk of husband promotions and movie reviews; I wanted pregnancy stories, makeup tips, and goofy laughter. I wanted all the things from before.
There she was: Shriya, a good friend at one point. She now had a baby boy who was more than a year old. She’d become a stay-at-home mom and, by the looks of it, a well-kept one. Her dress seemed to be sharper than I remembered, back when we used to go watch movies right after work. Shriya was a good-hearted woman, innocuous enough, not above gossip, with an addiction to bad Bollywood. I scrolled through more photos. She had gotten married right after Ketan died, but I had never really met the husband, save for the time they had come over to our house to give their condolences. She was a brand-new bride then, the orange-red mehendi still fresh on her hands.
It was the last time I saw her. Her husband was handsome. I clicked on his profile. He was already a VP in a midsized organization in fintech. Her baby boy wasn’t all that cute. I immediately felt bad for thinking that. Her album was filled with birthday parties and lipsticked mommies posing for selfies. Then there was an older album, from right before they had their baby, of a couples’ trip to Cambodia. I hit the messenger button.
Shriya!
It’s been so long. We can both blame each other, but let’s just blame life. I see you have a beautiful baby boy! He is tremendously cute. I am a teacher now—weird, right? I was thinking about our movie dates today, and I thought I would say hi. How about we catch up this week? Let me know.
I hit send and closed my laptop. In between those sentences lay days of me at the farm, days of me understanding myself again. It held secrets and sex. It held the story of my mother. A message like this reduced me to a shimmer of light, a passing wink.
I switched on the TV and found myself enjoying an old rom-com from the ’90s. I was enjoying it so much that I got up midway to make popcorn. I propped my head up with pillows, shoved popcorn down my throat, and washed it down with an old bottle of Limca that was lying in my fridge. I felt fucking content. Ketan, are you seeing me now? I am happy; who knew it would take a rom-com and popcorn?
My phone buzzed—it was messenger. Shriya had replied.
Mira! OMG so long. What the hell, babe? How is your father? Teacher! That’s crazy. Listen, I am going to my parents’ home in Delhi for a month, we’re celebrating their fiftieth anniversary. Full family and all. I’ll message you when I am back. Promise.
A whole month before Shriya could distract me. I was still buzzing from the movie. Undaunted, I scrolled my newsfeed, looking out for
those faces from the past. There were 456 to choose from.
XV
I am only human.
I admit there were days I plotted. I toyed with the idea of playing detective. I could and would find out the truth about Sara and Rahil. I could and would understand my role in their lives. I could make Sara love me again.
But I didn’t. I could barely sleep at night; my hands would scroll down my phone into the early hours of the morning. Al Jazeera, BBC—the rest of the world was there for company and offered unadulterated friendship. I drank too much coffee in the mornings, but it worked. I was open, my mouth swollen with conversation, teaching, discussing, telling kids to shut up in the back seats.
I had Appa too, and he didn’t make a scene of me visiting him more often now that I was “single” again. He didn’t ask questions about my mysterious boyfriend; he didn’t care for those details. He was all about Indonesian history these days. He was mad and upset with pop history, specifically because it didn’t seem concerned with recording enough about some of the world’s most gruesome genocides. Appa’s words and opinions kept me in a sort of coma, a calm waking sleep I was happy to accept.
What Appa Told Me About the Indonesian Genocide
On October 1, 1965, six generals from the Indonesian army were killed; the blame was put squarely on the communists. And overnight there was a violent outrage against them. “The Chinese people of Indonesia, the perceived ‘leftists,’ they were about to endure their own holocaust,” Appa said as he dunked a crisp piece of dosa into coriander chutney. The bloodbath lasted a year. “I say more than a million died. You’ll see half that number in some places, but do your research, there were bodies piled everywhere.
“The world was already at the height of communist paranoia. It was in the middle of the Cold War and Lyndon B. Johnson was president. America played a great role in encouraging the Indonesian army to seek out communists, even funding them,” he said with the confidence only book memory could give you. “Bah, the average American wouldn’t know where Indonesia is on a map, much less their own country’s involvement in about a hundred wars, forget genocide.”
The Body Myth Page 11