A rage erupted in my throat. But the monster told me not to roar: Take it one step at a time, Mira.
After which we, three peas in a pod, slept soundlessly.
XX
Mr. Khan’s face was pulled tight. His eyes were sad and his hands tapped uncontrollably on the table. He asked me to sit. He squirted sanitizer on his hands, looked around awkwardly, and then handed me the bottle.
“It’s my fault,” he stated quietly. “The day you walked in, I knew you’d be trouble. I swear on my beating liberal heart, Mira, I wanted trouble, I wanted risk. But, lady, no one, and I am sure of it, not even you, knew it would end up like this.”
I squirted a bit of the sanitizer in my hands and rubbed them together sympathetically. “I’ll spare you any excuses, Mr. Khan, I know your position, and I sympathize with it. I sympathize with a world that’s not ready for a few shifts. But that’s not to say what happened with Samina was truly appropriate, or that a radical action by itself means anything in terms of being the renegade, I mean…”
“That’s a philosophical discussion we should have when you are not a teacher, and hopefully when I am no longer leading the chain of this monkey house. Look, her parents are flipping mad, but that’s the least of it, because, well, there is only so much anger they can have toward the school when it was Samina, all of seventeen, who did it herself. But I have other parents, shocked, prepared to go to the press, prepared to ask for refunds, prepared to create a revolution of sorts at the gates, and, yes, I see the irony there.”
“What do I need to do, apart from taking my things and leaving the school premises for good?”
Mr. Khan sighed. “You need to take full responsibility, you need to write an email to all the parents discussing how this even came about. Make it clear you are stepping down as a teacher from Seven Seeds with your greatest of apologies. The rest I suspect will die out—after all, parents don’t have the bandwidth to deal with changing schools and following up with all their anger. They have jobs to go back to.”
“It’ll be done.”
“I am sad to let you go. I am angered you let it get this far—you were good for them.” He sighed again. “All your things are with me. Thought I’d spare you the horror of stepping into the staff room again. Mira, consider becoming a writer, or a filmmaker, or something like that, where you can get away with this kind of thing, eh?”
It was the first smile he cracked and I returned it.
“We’ll pay your salary for this month and release your pension fund. Oh, and, Mira.” He reached into his pocket and passed me a piece of paper. “My personal email, keep in touch.”
He looked back to the hand sanitizer and gave it another squirt. I left the room with my things.
At the house, Sara had placed sliced apples and peanut butter on the table. She violently nodded and told me she’d help me write the email to the parents. “Listen, don’t worry about money or salaries, Rahil’s new promotion can support a family of four.”
I started to cry. My life had come to this. I didn’t need money; I had enough saved and had plenty from Ketan’s life insurance. But the fact that Sara had offered to support me like a lover, like a child, like an I’m not sure what, made me feel like less of a kept woman. This kind of bliss must only be temporary, I knew, bliss with nothing else to compare it to. Could bliss last forever after you had enough pain from the past to provide a lifetime of context?
Sara walked me over to the bedroom. We spent the afternoon hours in bed, sucking, loving, kissing, stroking, hurting, and laughing. Sara’s mouth had not been freshly chewed on. It was really all becoming okay again. We had finally figured it out. Her wetness stayed on my fingers, her scent on my chest. When Rahil came back we were a family again. He kissed both of us, separately, authoritatively. Someone needed to be authoritative with it, because with authority came the illusion of normalcy.
But Rahil was inconsistent. He still didn’t know what he wanted. As soon as he walked in the door I felt like the outsider, the woman whom he was indulging in order to save Sara. I knew this because he’d pick up books around the house and start reading the backs of them when he was caught alone with me. He’d go back to talking with me soon enough, but there were always these pauses: looking at his phone, book browsing, endless shiftlessness. Like he was talking himself into this reality.
The silverware clinked, Rahil told us about his day, his new project bringing in clients from Singapore and Dubai. Then he discussed the culture of the Japanese salaryman. A random buffer topic, I thought, to sooth him into thinking this was a temporary dinner party.
“I told Kamala you had a bad marriage and just got divorced, and that you will be here for a long time—that shut her up for now,” Sara said, breaking the lethargic tone Rahil had set.
From now on, I had to wake up at 5:30 every morning to get out of bed and run into the guest room so Kamala would just think a weird cousin was in town. A guest for an extended period of time. I had made my peace with it. It was our secret game. Kamala had treated me with saccharine smiles so far. But every morning, she looked like she was about to pounce on me with a direct question.
“Mira.” Sara’s voice had changed tone. It was formal, it was assured. “I’ve been doing some reading and thinking. There is so much I want to say to you, and we have many days ahead of us.”
“So you think your health will hold up now, for a while at least?” As soon as the words came out I realized I was scared of a happy, healthy Sara. What would Sara sans illness mean to Rahil and me?
“Quite the opposite. I think she’s had quite the revolution in her head, haven’t you, Sara?” Rahil said as he looked up at me for a brief moment.
“Maybe,” she said as she scooped one last spoonful out of her bowl and raised it to her mouth.
I was about to ask her what this new revolution was about, but Rahil’s phone rang. He picked it up and walked toward the guest room.
Sara stood up. “Must be work.”
She took her empty bowl into the kitchen. I sat in silence, staring at the cinnamon stick I had pulled out of the daal and placed on the corner of my plate.
Dear Parent,
I write this with a heavy heart. I am asking for you to read my letter, although I understand some of you might be too angry to have the patience to hear me out.
I don’t have excuses, but I do have intent. I never planned to be a teacher, but when I was twenty-nine a personal crisis led me to books. They opened up my world so much that I had to find a place to share what I had learned. For me that place was teaching. I’ll concede that my teaching had a bent, a leftist sway as some of you might call it. For those more critical, you may even call it radical.
The incident that happened this week is completely my fault. I take 100 percent accountability for letting a minor read a book and then demonstrate her understanding of it without the proper guidance.
I hope you will one day see that what Samina did was not vulgar but, at the worst, misguided and inappropriate for the situation she was in.
I, as an adult, should have known what she was going to do and talked about it with her. I hope this will not dissuade you from encouraging your children to read and learn about things that might not fit in with what we consider to be correct and normal for their academic life.
I hope you will encourage them to channel their knowledge and even offer them comments and time for discussions about their knowledge. The thing is, children interpret this world uniquely, and while we all need to have one uniform way of getting some base points across through traditional schooling, we must allow them to find their own perspective. The world quite depends on it.
All this is not to say that I am not mortified at the way I handled things.
I have resigned from my position as a teacher at Seven Seeds. This school has given your children many happy experiences and opportunities for learning; please let this one incident not taint your understanding of this school.
If you have any q
uestions at all, please feel free to contact me. Otherwise I have left the Seven Seeds premises, effective of this afternoon at noon.
I wish you and your family all the very best.
Sincerely,
Mira Krishna
We sent off the email together, all our fingers on the send button. It was done. I found myself in the middle of their bed again that night. Rahil whispered, “We’ll buy a bigger bed tomorrow.” And we drowned the rustling sheets in laughter.
My days were so much longer with no job, but still, there was never enough time. We draped ourselves in blankets, we channel surfed TV. But mostly Sara told me about the path to God. The illusion of self was our enemy, she said. But it was also our only friend for lifetimes at a time.
“There are four paths to God: one is through meditation, then there is action, there is the path of knowledge, and finally the path of devotion.
“Sometimes we use all four paths, but the end is the same, it is God, it is light. I was confused, Mira, I thought I was on the path of devotion, where I had devoted my soul to light, wasting away the body, but it was the wrong way. I didn’t stop to recognize that the body was also my friend. And without it I had no vehicle to get anywhere. Rahil gave me the freedom to live my paths the way I wanted, but you, Mira, you allowed me to understand what path I need to take.”
“What path is that?” I asked, trying not to show how elated I was upon hearing my role, my value in her life, defined.
“The path of action. I am still figuring it out, but I have some ideas. When it’s time, you will be the one to understand it the most.”
I let Sara shroud her new epiphany in the mystery and confusion it deserved. She was weak and complained of knee pain, but she had more energy than I ever remembered. She traipsed through the house, making tea, cutting fruit, feeding me bits of cut vegetables. We looked up recipes on the internet: Indonesian coconut curry and homemade cacao-almond ice cream. We made food from her childhood: raisin pulao tempered with ghee-fried cardamom and cinnamon sticks. We made hearty daal and bright salads; we painted our bedroom light blue. And in the evenings we huddled watching movies.
One Sunday we walked to breakfast without a particular destination, Sara’s hand firmly in mine as Rahil led us. We walked on residential lanes, moving farther away from our neighborhood, until middle class blurred into very upper middle class, where bungalows with towering gates were laced with purple bougainvillea vines. We found a quaint little café that was run out of a home. We ordered toast, coffee, and fruit bowls. Sara ate everything on her plate. I didn’t say anything, but Rahil looked at her and smiled as if she were a child who had eaten all her vegetables.
Afterward we walked again until we reached the park. The park I used to go to every weekend. The one that had led us to each other. But none of us said anything. My heart became heavy with excitement as we passed by the same bench where I had first seen Sara. I could have sworn she paused for a millisecond. She was about to say something. My body had mimicked her pause, waiting for her to remember with me. Instead she looked to the other side, pointing her finger toward the banyan trees. “Let’s go there,” she said.
We both followed in silence.
Are you wondering about Rahil and I? It’s simple, or at least it became simple. Sara herself pushed the two of us to the guest room one night. “Sometimes you need to find each other with the privacy that being a couple offers. Mira, don’t feel shy, we are all too special to feel awkward.”
There was no awkwardness when she said these words. There was only the unheard sigh of internal relief. She had just articulated something that was supposed to have been understood a long time ago. Something that should have been understood the very first day we met. We were here to form a different kind of family, one not too many people would want to understand, but one, of course, they would like to know about.
Sara sat back on the sofa and opened a book. She raised her head, her chin nudged us. “Go on, it’s okay.”
And Rahil took the lead, holding my hand, taking me to the bedroom, closing the door. Closing the door on Sara.
“Look, we don’t have to have sex just because she has forced us into the room.”
And of course we laughed. We laughed so hard, Sara yelled from the other room to shut up. We kissed, we cuddled, we frolicked in the room in which Sara had given us permission to. When we came out later, Sara was in the kitchen boiling water for tea.
I remember a friend I had in college who studied abroad in San Francisco. She wrote to me about a threesome who lived together and also slept with other people individually. I had laughed at those emails, replied, Oh, that’ll never happen openly in India, what an idea, though.
I was so naive then, I thought it was the silliest thing I’d ever heard. Later, when I was with Ketan, I told him about it. He said that humans weren’t meant to be monogamous, or at the very least should be able to find love and bonds outside their most socially sanctioned intimate ones. I had felt threatened and immediately started crying. He had gathered me in his arms and said something that immediately relieved me. “That’s just in theory, Mir-Mir. The truth is I love you and can’t see any kind of life without you. Ever.”
I hadn’t argued further with Ketan. His words were enough because I knew Ketan wouldn’t go anywhere. Rahil, though—he had forced me to demand what I wanted. Rahil was an open invitation. My very presence demanded that he articulate through his eyes, his body, and his words: I love you Mira, I can’t live without you.
I told Sara this story on the couch one afternoon. “Thing is, I want to feel that one love sometimes, that safety of Ketan, but that’s just me going back to something that is predictable and pleasurably thick in my memory. We always want to go back to a time we know for sure nothing bad happened. Now, every time I look at you, I think you’ll be ill again, die on us.”
Sara gave a full-throated giggle. “I won’t die, I’ll live, and you’ll be surprised. I promise you that.”
Her words made me happy. Her words made me worried.
Sara’s parents called in the mornings, something I had never been privy to before in my past life with them. Rahil had told me that when she talked to her parents her voice was choked and stifled. But what I witnessed was different. Sara was assured, confident, articulate. Lately her parents had been calling and asking her to come visit them—a request Sara always half committed to with vague answers. Instead she redirected with spiritual advice. Fear is a thought and only a thought. She said it to her mother at some point in every conversation. What would my mother have said if I told her her sadness was a thought and only a thought?
I asked Sara this one afternoon. Now I truly sought knowledge from Sara. Hers was no longer a mind that I sympathized with and indulged. These days there was a glow in her voice that seemed to hold the answers to all the questions my books had asked me. We took to bantering. But she almost always won with her tight, confident sentences.
“But, Sara, isn’t it pointless to say sadness, fear, anything for that matter, is just a thought? The reality is that people have to deal with it. After all, if grief was just a thought, then I could have talked myself out of feeling it.”
“And that’s the point, Mira. It’s the awareness you require. The awareness that you can realize it’s just a thought. Everything is harnessed by the way you choose to see the world. Until we are ready to see the power of our mind, thoughts won’t just be thoughts. They will be terrible things to deal with.”
The profoundness of what she said was magnified by her confident articulation. It was startling. For so long, Sara had felt like an unstable element. Before pressing her or challenging her in any way, I’d always stopped to calculate her fragility, but that no longer felt necessary. I held her wrist and fiddled with her wooden bangle. If something had truly changed in her, then she would be ready for my honest questions too. Something we had never acknowledged together.
“Then you’d agree that much of the illness you have experience
d was just a thought. A mental illness, or what some might label as factitious disorder.”
I braced for her reaction. But her wrist relaxed in my palm. “Yes. It was just a thought, a reality I created. I just wasn’t aware of how powerful my mind was. I just wasn’t aware of how much safety I required as an adult. So I channeled it into illness. Perhaps I still do, Mira, but I see now that I can make any reality I want.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. She looked at me knowingly.
“Don’t be surprised, everyone can change in mighty ways. But don’t look at me in such awe, Mira, your answers must come from you.”
A rush of insecurity twisted my insides. She could already see that her role in my life had changed so dramatically. And yet, I could see that this very evolution was the reason I loved her. These answers had always been inside of her waiting to tumble out. It’s why I’d fallen in love with her the very first time I saw her. She had strength buried under her fragile skin. It made sense. When you meet someone you are immediately attracted to, it’s actually the hidden potential that draws you. It’s just that not everyone gets to see that potential.
Sara stroked my cheek with her fingers and guided my head to her lap. Rahil woke me up after some time. Sara was no longer on the couch. I could hear the kettle whining from the kitchen.
I hadn’t visited Appa since I’d left school. I was scared to tell him I was no longer a teacher. I could feel the bitter disappointment that would plague him once he heard of it. But I couldn’t put him off any longer—Appa knew something was wrong. A fatherly sense, as he called it on the phone. I made up the perfect story: I was back with my boyfriend, his name was Rahil, and could I bring him over for dinner? Appa’s voice went a note higher, confused but steady in his assurances.
Sara clapped her hands together when she heard. “I’ll be Rahil’s sister, who lives with him. We can make up a nice backstory, it will be kinder this way, for your father.”
The Body Myth Page 15