The Body Myth

by Rheea Mukherjee

  “Well, if you guys were really in love, wouldn’t you have found a way?” I dipped my hand into my empty cup, scooping up a wet lump of undissolved sugar. He cringed. I couldn’t tell at first if it was because of the sugar on my finger or because of my remark.

  He giggled in nervousness. “Yeah, maybe, but we’d known each other since college, what can I say? We both were unhappy, but don’t you think running away back to your family is childish? Life brings change, she should have looked forward to a new city.”

  “We’ve got the Rasagura, not much else. Kolkata has far more personality.”

  Shomon knew about Ketan’s death, though he had never met him. He used the fact that both of us were single to unabashedly suggest us meeting more. “I like women like you—strong and independent.”

  I liked that men felt compelled to say things like this these days. I wondered how he would have truly felt if I had told him the truth. I’m in love with a married woman, and I kind of have a relationship with her husband too. They’ve gotten really mad at me, and I haven’t seen them in weeks. My heart is literally being stomped on. And guess what else? The woman I love has a rare mental illness, one that I can guarantee you’ve never heard of. It’s worse than losing a husband seven months into a marriage. A husband whom I very much loved.

  I imagined him either jumping to his feet and leaving the café in confusion, or just plain laughing at me. But I said none of this. Instead, I told him about teaching, I told him about genocide and how schools don’t cover it enough in history class.

  “Serious topics—don’t be so serious. You’ve been so strong already.”

  Of course I wanted to slap him the moment he said that. But I have a tendency to smile when a person outshines my preconceived notions of his stupidity. Shomon tried another line of engagement. Nostalgia. School days, stained uniforms, the scary math teacher, and how we cheated in physics, because the teacher pretty much allowed it. I let him go on. As he talked he mentioned we should go out for a stroll and I shrugged indifferently—it didn’t matter if we were sitting or walking, my experience of Shomon was going to be the same. He paid the bill for two coffees, 511 rupees, with exact change, stunning the barista, who raised her thick eyebrows in appreciation. As we stepped out into the muggy sun, his hand tried to graze mine. He pointed to the other side of the road where the sidewalk extended without any breaks for at least a kilometer. All the trendy pubs were lined up there, and as we crossed the road Shomon very confidently took my hand. Nothing like a chaotic street filled with scooters, mopeds, cars, and auto-rickshaws to enhance his confidence. I let my hand stay in his hand. I don’t know why—maybe it was to remember what it felt like.

  He was still talking about the past by the time we were on the nicer sidewalk. I even interjected with a few random (and mostly made up) memories I had that dovetailed with his recollections.

  We sidestepped a large crow pecking at a bloated rat carcass on the sidewalk and weaved in and out of weekend crowds, mostly hip kids in their early twenties waiting for the last of their friends before they entered pubs that would serve them brunch, strawberry-flavored liqueurs, and gin on ice. Their expensive perfume inflated in my nostrils: juicy apple, magnolia, lily rose, earthy cotton, and sandalwood. We walked aimlessly through all of it.

  On the ledge outside a coffee shop I finally sat down. A black-spotted stray looked at me, his ears perked up on eye contact. Ketan had had a thing for dogs, especially the ones on the roads. His mother used to feed strays in the evenings when he was growing up. I was always weary of them, but Ketan always called to them like they were his own, making kissing sounds and petting them. Today I felt Ketan in me. I put my hand out to the unusually inquisitive stray. It came right over to me, tail wagging; Shomon moved inches away in fright. The dog got up on its hind legs in excitement and placed his front paws on my knees. I stroked the dog and felt an odd sense of love for it.

  “They carry diseases, you shouldn’t touch them.”

  I bit my lip in irritation and shrugged, continuing to pet the dog.

  None of this derailed Shomon, though. He didn’t want the date to end and asked if we should go to a movie. I told him I had to take my father to the doctor, which was a complete lie, but one that quickly gets you out of any social commitment. “We’ll meet next week,” I said, although I had no intention of ever talking to him again.

  For the next few days Shomon WhatsApp-ed me: sup, howz ur day? saturday night movie? He also forwarded a slew of sexist wife-husband jokes with crying-laughing emojis. I finally blocked his number after I received a message from him at midnight: so nice 2 connect with u after all dis time, weird, but i already miss you.

  I also blocked him on social media and felt like a cruel bitch. I worried about karma and how my unkindness would retaliate in the form of more heartbreak. But really, I didn’t care.

  I ordered a bunch of books, the same books that had surrounded me on the farm: de Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus, Foucault, even Chomsky for good measure. Looking at the books on Amazon had made my heart swell with old familiarity and a sense of impending safety. Just the thought of the books made me feel like I could get through it all, just forget Sara and Rahil. I’d exist solely for the questions Sartre asked.

  I met Asha a few days after blocking Shomon. (Good thing they weren’t connected at all, but then, I wouldn’t have cared anyway.) She invited me to her house to meet her two-year-old, Simran, whom she’d named after the protagonist in the ’90s blockbuster Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge.

  “Retro,” I had managed when she first told me.

  She had the quintessential I’ve-married-into-prime-upper-middle-class apartment. Three large bedrooms and two gigantic verandas, one overlooking the apartment pool and the other over the apartment dog park.

  “Simran loves doggies, we go every evening to watch Bongo and Sha-Sha, don’t we, Simmy?”

  Her husband was in the United States for a two-week project management gig.

  “So cold in Boston, it’s all he can talk about. In fact I told him, ‘Why don’t you go to an American strip club to get warmed up?’ We like to joke like that. We’re, like, best friends.”

  I managed not to cringe. I picked up Simran, who immediately burst into tears. Asha shook a stuffed frog at her and her hands flung toward the toy. She took her frog and walked to the other side of the room. “Let her be with that frog, now we can talk.”

  We sat in the living room for hours. She had laid out samosas, sliced apples, and Rasagura. We drank an Indian red wine from her friend’s estate. She didn’t really ask me about my life; instead she concerned herself with my next marriage.

  “You need to stop this, you are so young, there are so many men out there, and really, once you settle down, everything is great. I mean, I actively chose to be a mother to Simran, but if you want to work too, there is no harm.”

  She fished out her phone.

  “Look,” she said, her eyes lit up with sudden mischief. “You need to get on this app, all the men in the world—well, in this city at least—and you can find out from the very start if they are smart and successful or not.”

  I burst out laughing. “Why are you on it? You’re married.”

  “Oh! It’s just for fun, Akash knows all about it—you know, it’s good to flirt once in a while. I show him all my chats.”

  I stopped laughing. I looked at her profile description. Here to let new friendships bloom. Movie addict, Ex-HR back ground. Music fanatic. She had three pictures on it: one with her in sunglasses with a very fresh-looking mojito, the second with one leg propped on a giant red wall, like a movie heroine, and the third an “au naturel” selfie. I scrolled past them with frantic interest, with disgust, with thrill. A little fly of judgment started to buzz around my head, then turned into a wasp, stinging, pleading with me: tell this woman she is an idiot and walk out. But my mind fought back; it told me that judgment itself was ironic, irrelevant, and would only make me the stupid one. Instead I let compassion r
ise. Maybe she was lonely. Akash traveled two weeks every month. Plus, I was in no position to judge, since until very recently I’d been fucking a mentally ill married woman and her husband to boot.

  She tried to set up a profile for me, but I promised I’d do it myself when I felt ready. Her face fell, but she nodded understandingly. “Yes, you must be ready, but remember, schoolchildren can give you happiness, but it will be your own that will give you the most joy.”

  I looked at Simran in the corner, who was still fiddling with the frog. I couldn’t help but think about the children I could have had with Ketan. Simran looked up and met my eye. Maybe Asha was right.

  I found myself nodding to an invitation to Asha’s fourth wedding anniversary party at the Hyatt. It was another thing to distract me and I was willing to take anything.

  By the end of the third week of my separation from Sara and Rahil, I was back on top of my teaching game and the other teachers had stopped swarming me with concerned glances. The classroom had lost a chunk of spark, though. Samina had dengue. She was devastated that she couldn’t give her presentation on The Second Sex. I read her email twice, savoring the weird nature of this girl in all her tortured glory:

  Hi, Miss Mira,

  I had everything ready, even a PowerPoint. But Mom insists I recover at home and even do homeschooling for a month. I guess I’ll give it another read and maybe do something way more powerful. I have a few ideas. I’ll be back in January for sure.

  Please don’t do anything fun before I am back.

  Hugs!

  Samina

  P.S. You still haven’t read my Hitler essay, have you, miss?

  Meanwhile, the books I’d ordered had started trickling in. I began flipping through them, but something was missing and I quickly set them down. All that kept me secure in the evenings were memories of my first and last times in bed with Rahil, talking about Sara. Our shared love for this woman. Now my nights were filled with olfactory hallucinations—her rosy musk, her sweat. I heard her music in my head too, so vivid it would wake me up in the middle of the night. I would charge to the kitchen to make a cup of chamomile. I’d pick up a book, read a page, and then picture Sara laughing at it. All your men and their lofty thoughts, I could hear her saying. I wanted to show her Asha’s dating profile, I wanted to tell her about Simran’s frog. I longed for the sound of Rahil walking through the front door at six o’clock. I inhaled deeply and swore I smelled Sara.

  XVIII

  Another month went by, both slowly and fast. I even managed to go to Asha’s anniversary party. Her husband looked like a Punjabi pop star playboy. He was nice enough, but I couldn’t imagine him being faithful to Asha. He even tried to flirt with me. I had given them a set of books, the ones I had ordered from Amazon. It was my own inside joke. I never saw them again, but I often wondered what they’d done when they opened the box of books, all existentialism and radical politics. Maybe Akash wasn’t as one-dimensional as he looked; maybe he’d read them. Maybe Asha read them sitting next to Simran and her frog. But mostly I imagined them scrunching their faces, pitying me and my life, and throwing the books out. All these scenarios gave me some unknown pleasure.

  I cooked elaborate meals but didn’t eat them. I watched cheesy romantic comedies after school and sometimes I researched facts on Appa’s obsession: Indonesia, Bangladesh, and the communists in general. And I still spent a lot of time on factitious disorder forums in the evenings.

  At the end of December, Appa and I toasted the New Year with a bottle of sparkling wine at a hill station six hours away from Suryam. We stayed in the middle of a tea estate, very much like the place my parents had come to when my mother was pregnant with me.

  We were sitting by a bonfire that the staff had excitedly put together. The heat pushed my body to the ground; it embraced me in meditative calm. The roughness of the dry mud and the poke of small rocks at my scalp felt good. By then, Appa had stopped talking about history. It was almost midnight when he coughed in preparation for a sentence that I knew he had revised in his head a few times.

  “Happiness is such a subjective thing, yet it’s the only thing parents want for their children. How do you calm this need without knowing what it even means to your child?”

  It was the most personal thing he had said to me in a long time. He was trying. He needed intellectual reasoning to start a fatherly conversation. It made me ache with guilt for the times I’d made up a meeting or failed to call him over the past few months.

  “You could say the same thing for children—we want our parents happy.”

  “And I am, Mir-Mir, I’ve found a beautiful reliability and purpose in my life. It’s you I worry about. I don’t need you to tell me everything. I just need to make sure you talk to yourself, that you tell yourself everything honestly and examine it. You know your mother would have been proud of you—”

  And that’s where the authenticity of what he was saying failed. My mother was unknowable. My mother hadn’t bothered to wait around to see if I’d make her proud. What she would have been proud of was a mystery. I didn’t say as much. This was his way of apologizing for keeping such profound secrets from me. I sat back up and moved closer to him. I held Appa’s hand and swallowed my lower lip.

  “I can tell you that I am being more and more honest with myself every day. I can tell you that sometimes I get visions of Ketan. They used to make me sad. But now it’s like he is just telling me to live. Not just live, but thrive.”

  Appa nodded his head in response. We heard drunken hooting rising and falling in the hills. It was midnight and Appa already had the bottle opened. “It’s a screw-cap version, that cork is just nonsense, I tell you.”

  We each drank two small cups of sparkling wine as Appa told me stories from his days in college. None of them was particularly funny, but I responded with laughter. For two hours I managed to forget about my past. It was just Appa, me, a bonfire, and the tart sharpness of the wine.

  I guess it’s easy for time to go by when heartbreak gives you a predictable schedule of new habits to follow. But by now I realized I was in purgatory. Sara was too weak to make a choice, Rahil probably even more so. I had to make it for them. For myself. For my sanity. Sara had once told me if you surrender to the divine with your intent, the world around you will give you the tools.

  Samina was back when school started after the New Year. On Monday she came to my desk asking when she could make her presentation. Her eyes were shining bright with such a potent excitement that I felt a rising need to crush it. But this time I was aware of my envy. It was the girl’s ability to be happy with purpose alone, her ability to feel content and driven by something purely academic. Samina didn’t need anyone else, certainly not the crutch of two lovers. It may have been self-centered, but standing in front of me, she also made me feel old, sloppy, and immature

  “Let me see it first at break, and you can present in the afternoon grammar class.”

  She swung her long braid to her other shoulder and nodded her head. I found myself distracted by the shine of her hair. Envy crept up my gut again, twisting and curling around her youth.

  Samina and I went into the media room since it was always empty during break. She opened her laptop. Her introductory words snapped me to attention, echoes of the writers and thoughts that lived in my own past.

  “‘The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project.’”

  I was excited to hear de Beauvoir’s ideas uttered out loud by Samina. And it wasn’t because of the familiarity. I could feel something reckless forming in my head as we went through her presentation. But then I asked her the hard questions, ones that challenged her purpose. Questions that were coming from a place of an emerging agenda, but ones maybe I’d have asked years ago from a place of philosophy.

  “You’re right, Miss Mira, it has to be much more.”

  Samina. Shiny bright eyes. Shiny hair. The tools were always there. Now I knew how to use
them.

  I felt steady and calm going back home that evening. It changed the second I flung my door open. I looked at the empty living room and my heart disintegrated and fell to my stomach like sand. I thought about the last two months—all I had done and all I had reworked about my existence. It didn’t matter, I realized. I stared at the sofa Rahil and I had had sex on. I didn’t want to be alone anymore. I had played a game with myself and lost. I didn’t change out of my clothes. I went to bed and pulled the blanket over my head. It was stifling, but it’s what I needed.

  The next day I ate a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast. It was dry and my mouth grew achy just chewing. It was as if I had already started grieving the loss of my old limitations and abilities. Yes, it was scary. But on an instinctive level I knew this had to be the next step. The afternoon brought Samina’s presentation. I nodded and she came to the front of the class. Her hair was tied in a high bun. She smacked her hands together in a muted clap and glanced at me quickly: “It’s more performative this time.”

  Her eyes lit up. She reminded me of Sara for a second. The class settled down as soon as Samina authoritatively stood at the front of the room, her hands clasped together at the middle of her chest. Her face was calm but serious. The boys in particular shut up, then shifted in their seats, unable to get comfortable.

  “I am not here to do a boring book review, but rather to show you how a book needs to be represented in to day’s world. But, guys, I think we need to all thank Miss Mira here, for giving us insights and freedom no other teacher would.”

  I rolled my eyes, but I’d be lying if I said my heart didn’t swell the littlest bit. The class hooted. Some boys from the back shouted, “Miss Mira rocks!”

  “All right, enough guys, let’s get to what Samina has to say.”