The Body Myth

by Rheea Mukherjee

  “You must do more, Mira, don’t you think?”

  XXII

  In the beginning, there was purpose to us, to Sara; now, it had become the entire point of my life. I was unemployed, I wasn’t doing anything to change that, and I didn’t even know what I wanted. I wanted to be here, every day, to wake up to tea, wake up to Sara and Rahil. And yet something was changing.

  A week before her departure to Delhi, Sara ordered that we each have three hours of “research time” every day while Rahil was at work. Rahil obliged her because he considered it a part of her new personal revolution, her path to health. I obliged her because I’d do anything that would make Sara happy and rely on me. She spent her three hours in her bedroom. I stuck to the guest room. We were allowed to use books, the internet, and notebooks.

  “I must find something to do with my life, Mira. You and Rahil, you’ve kicked something in me, you refused to leave me to waste away. Now you’ve started a fire in my head.”

  My first response was a need to control her. A need to stop her. I was acutely self-aware of the irony. I felt like a jealous husband who had just been told that his wife was getting another promotion and would now make more money than him.

  She spun around in the living room. Sara was easy to take seriously—her movements demanded it—but her twirl just looked silly. “I feel something, I feel like I know why I used to be the way I used to be.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, standing up next to her.

  “The best way I can explain it is that my thoughts are my life, and my thoughts have changed into something joyous.”

  I stood there, a helpless child, looking at Sara, an adult woman who had found the secrets she was born with. The ones hidden behind her self-doubt and cloistered past. It meant something, only I didn’t feel intelligent enough to decode it. Life here was trying so fucking hard to illustrate its truth, I could feel its force swirling around the room. So close I could breathe it. Sara looked at me, all-knowing and compassionate. “It’s okay to be wherever you are right now—say it, say it with me.”

  “It’s okay to be wherever you are right now.”

  We chanted it together like we were in some hokey spiritual workshop. But just when I thought we were done, she sat on the floor and kept repeating it.

  “It’s okay to be wherever you are right now.”

  It was like the beginning again. When she would sway on her bed, so ill she couldn’t stand. And I would join her without question, until I felt it to be the most normal thing to do. I held her hands and joined her on the floor. I chanted in whispers. I chanted until the words became alien humming. Until I felt Sara’s hands slip from mine. When I opened my eyes, she was there. Present. Lips curved into a soft smile. Eyes bouncing with thoughts I couldn’t begin to understand.

  Sara became increasingly cagey in the afternoons, fiercely protective of her time alone in her room, doing God knows what. I was forced to scroll the internet. Books were no longer an idea even worth toying with; history no longer fascinated me. I watched YouTube clips, I browsed new schools’ job openings—international schools that were banking on upper-middle-class anxieties, ones that would take teachers who were willing to do what the job demanded. But of course my qualifications were dependent solely on my experience at Seven Seeds and a good recommendation from Mr. Khan. I hadn’t even dared to email Samina to learn what had happened to her. I could no longer value myself as a good candidate to teach.

  By the time I looped this entire sequence of thought in my head, I felt thoroughly bored with the idea of a job. I considered going back to a mainstream corporate job and started to use my afternoon hours to look at traditional job platforms. But I knew I was just buying time. I was waiting to smell the chamomile wafting in the air, my signal to come outside for tea.

  “So what have you been up to?” I asked Rahil. “What’s new at work? I’ve become a dim-witted bore.”

  Sara was in the kitchen and I was done making issues of things, but I needed to know if Rahil was being obtuse to Sara’s changes. His control in the house had worn effortlessly.

  “I am excited for Sara,” he said, ignoring my attempt at small talk, understanding what I was really asking. An answer like this would have riled me up even a month before. But today it calmed me. It pushed me an inch closer to thoughts Sara had been seeding in me.

  I left Rahil outside and went into the kitchen, hugging Sara from behind. She turned from the pot of daal she was stirring, held my cheeks with her palms. Her smell still moved my body. “I want to tell you, Mira, you are going to be fine, Rahil is going to be fine. You’re on your path and I am on mine. There is nothing to be worried about. Promise me you won’t worry?”

  And the insecurity slipped violently out again. Her confidence eroded my nest. I wanted to tear her hair out. I wanted her to assure me everything was going to just be the same. But I couldn’t play such theatrics in the face of the calm she presented. I went back outside, where Rahil still sat.

  “She’s up to something.”

  Rahil turned to me, his voice dropped to a low whisper. “She’s happy, Mira, and healthy. And it’s because of you. We are lucky, to find this kind of harmony. Listen, whatever it is with her, it’s because of her trip to see her parents. She always gets crazy when she has to visit.”

  “You’re telling me her being so physically able, so bright in composure, this is normal for her?”

  He snapped back faster than I thought he could. “Are you telling me you preferred her sick and wasting away?”

  “Are you telling me that you haven’t noticed your wife of almost a freaking decade is different?”

  “Answer my question first,” he said with an irritating calmness.

  “It’s complex. Something that seems healthy might actually be the most devastating to her right now. You aren’t thinking. And yes, you might know her best, but sometimes you need a new perspective too, Rahil.”

  Nobody said anything; we both had our answers in the curves of our lips.

  Sara increased the volume of her Sufi music, drowning out her coughing from the tempered curry leaves that must have just hit the oil.

  XXIII

  The moon came to me last night

  With a sweet question.

  She said,

  “The sun has been my faithful lover

  For millions of years.

  Whenever I offer my body to him

  Brilliant light pours from his heart.

  Thousands then notice my happiness

  And delight in pointing

  Toward my beauty.

  Hafiz,

  Is it true that our destiny

  Is to turn into Light

  Itself?”

  And I replied,

  Dear moon,

  Now that your love is maturing,

  We need to sit together

  Close like this more often

  So I might instruct you

  How to become

  Who you

  Are!

  —Hafiz

  The night before Sara left for Delhi we were all happy. She didn’t impose her three-hour rule and Rahil came home early from work. We ate dinner together. Rice dotted with peas and cinnamon. Yellow daal with fresh coriander sprinkled on top. Cucumber slices peppered and salted. And carrots and potatoes in a mild coconut milk gravy. Sara truly had stopped eating meat after dinner with Appa. It was only Rahil and I who made chicken curry in a small pot to accompany our daal and vegetable sabji on some nights. We watched an Iranian film with subtitles. Then Rahil found a pack of old cards in our bedroom. We played rummy. We sipped Old Monk mixed with freshly brewed black tea and lemon. Rahil switched to whisky after one round of the rum. We were eating Oreos and chocolate chip cookies, a combination that was heavy in theory but felt light today.

  The thoughts that went through my head in between sips and chews are what I imagine newlywed housewives think about. Ten days without her would go fast enough, I thought, and then it would be do
ne and we’d be back to this moment. I had already planned fun things to do with Rahil while she was away. My confidant, my reliable Rahil, who absorbed my insecurities and unpredictable responses. Rahil who readily accepted my simple desires. Rahil who didn’t demand the burden of my rusting intellectual barriers. We’d get on just fine, and she’d be back soon enough.

  “Promise to write us emails chronicling your parents’ antics?” Rahil teased, a goofy grin spreading on his face.

  “Don’t be rude, Rahil,” she said, playfully enough. Sara had her brown hair down over her shoulders. Her hair had grown so much since I had first met her. It touched her breasts. There were split ends, but it was thick, vibrant, almost shining. She had recently decked out her wrists with multiple wooden bangles, and it seemed as if they’d always been a part of her—she even slept with them on. I had woken up to them pressing into my back the last few mornings. Every sunrise, a reminder that there was something stronger about Sara.

  She sipped her rum-laced iced tea and shuffled the pack of cards. “If only you could see what I see in front of me, at this very moment. You’ll see it, but later on, I promise, just remember I said this.”

  Rahil rolled his eyes. “Ahhhh, wise guru Sara.”

  Sara shook her head playfully but looked at me with intensity, like a teacher who inadvertently looks at her favorite student to shout out the answer. She expected me to understand whatever it is that she understood, not Rahil. The self-importance radiated through my body and I forgot to notice that I didn’t, in fact, understand.

  That night we listened to a guitarist whom Rahil had been enthralled with on YouTube. We held on to pillows, shifted our weight on the bed, and crisscrossed our legs. Our eternal slumber party. It came with the kind of sleep where you have a thousand dreams. When you wake up you can’t remember them, but you’re left with the feeling that you’ve lived multiple lifetimes through the course of the night.

  The next morning was a Saturday. We helped Sara with her final packing. Phone charger, contact lens solution, earphones, and a book of poems by Hafiz in her hand baggage. Her larger suitcase was filled with freshly ironed clothes: white linens, pastel blues, ankle-length pajamas, and cotton pants. When no one was looking I pressed my face against the clothes folded in the bag. Rich rosy musk, Sara all over.

  We packed a plastic box with carrot sticks, hummus, and grapes and threw it in her handbag. As we made our way to the car, I purposefully trailed behind, the slowest to board. A petulant child grousing because a parent was leaving her for a work trip.

  Rahil hummed an old Hindi song. Sara sat in the front. I took my place in the middle of the back seat, watching the side of her face, making small talk. We were quiet in the car, the traffic relentless. The horns blared into the sun.

  As we passed the first signboard for Suryam International Airport, decorated with pretty Rasagura fruit along its edges, I saw Rahil’s left hand gently squeeze Sara’s shoulder. Seconds passed, but she didn’t reciprocate with so much as a glance his way. He looked to her in confusion but quickly turned his head back to the road. As we approached the airport the roads got better and the surrounding greenery more manicured.

  “Don’t you love how the government gives us first-world development around the airport? At least for ten kilometers we can pretend we live in Europe.”

  Her voice sliced the stress in the car. I laughed back in response, utterly relieved that Sara had said something inconsequential.

  At the departure gate, she turned to hug us individually. She held Rahil for a long time, too long. Jealousy snaked around my body and tightened around my chest. She whispered in his ear. But then she came to me, held me, for how long I am not sure. “Everything is going to be okay. I love you.”

  She walked off, handing her identification card to a bored mustached security guard. We waved at her once more and she disappeared into a crowd of shuffling travelers. Rahil and I walked to the car in silence. Once I sat in the front seat, he turned toward me. “What did she tell you?”

  “Huh? Nothing, just that she was happy.”

  “No, about the letters.”

  “What letters?”

  “She told me there are two letters under the mattress in our bedroom, one for me and one for you, and that we should read them privately.”

  “What the fuck?”

  I immediately called her. I was surprised when she picked up. “Yes, Mira, I’m just getting to security.”

  “No, what letter? Why did you write us letters? What are you up to?”

  I could hear her grinning. “Uff, just read them, they are under the mattress. Gotta go now, and like I said, stop worrying.”

  Rahil shrugged his shoulders. “She used to write me letters when she visited her parents, but she used to send them to me. First time she has written one before she left. She is just getting wilder with age.”

  And that’s when I realized I couldn’t quite remember the last time Sara had complained of a symptom. She had been healthy for weeks, even months. And now, she was gone.

  Sara’s Letter to Me

  Dear Mira,

  At first I wanted to be poetic. But I thought I owed you something more straightforward. A marriage is another kind of relationship altogether. You know this too, because any summary you gave me of Ketan cannot hold all your stories. It can’t account for the thousand things that made your relationship a living thing. It simply can’t be articulated. Marriage will always remain a shared private history.

  It is for this reason I ask that you never read the letter I wrote to Rahil. Not because there is any secret or fact that I have withheld here, but because there must be sanctity in what we meant to each other. Every relationship has its own story, so I ask that you never give this letter to Rahil either.

  I have gone to Delhi, but I am not going to my parents’ home. I’m leaving from Delhi on a bus, a carefully laid out route, with ample research and internet friends to aid with rest stops until I reach a place high above the plains. It is there where I will start to truly understand what Rumi and Hafiz meant: to find ecstasy as a wanderer, to find God in the self, to unite with ordinary in an extraordinary way.

  Mira, the first thing you’ll think (and Rahil will too) is that this is a little trip I’ve planned to find some independence. I won’t lie, it started out like that at first. A little trip by myself, something so simple to do, but something I had never done.

  I had fears, Mira, of anything upsetting my life. Someone leaving, dying—someone who would not be there to care for me. I was wild with fear, just wild. Yes, it made me sick, so sick that sickness became my solace. Sickness was my reassurance that something, someone, some hospital, some man, some person, would take care of me.

  So yes, I thought taking a little trip would help me.

  But that was the idea I had when I first met you. You gave me this unexpected courage. You let me think that there would be more. More people, more intimacy, more things for me to count on. It sounds selfish—it is—but let me go on.

  But then I fell in love with you. I never stopped loving Rahil. The thing is, I loved him more thoroughly after you. More purely. Rahil was my rock, but you never appreciate a rock, it stays there waiting. The only thing that made me appreciate anything about Rahil was the feeling of fear I felt when I thought about the chance of losing him. Imagine loving someone only because you fear them dying or leaving you? Love then is only fear.

  Then you came in. You were my living, breathing fear. A young woman who had lost her husband. A woman who lived by herself, who did things her way and found it perfectly ordinary.

  When you see your fear living, loving, eating, breathing, fucking, you can’t help but feel free.

  I loved you so much. I loved your head, the weird facts you’d go on about, your ordinary ability to talk of days on that farm, the books you read, the perspective you had. You made me see the simple but potent love Rahil and I shared. It almost comforted me to see that he loved you too.

  I wan
ted to leap, do things, be okay with living life without the fear of loss. But not before I went back to my old habits.

  Once I knew I loved you, fear came back at me again. I was obsessed with the fear of losing you or, worse now, losing both you and Rahil. My body turned on me again (or as you would say, my mind did) and I needed the rush of security.

  It was only after losing you for two months, the ache of having lost you at my own will, that I realized my love for you might be forever. The contradiction was this: our two-month separation was not killing me either. There was another restlessness, one to be free of fear. I had felt the edges of it, and that’s only because of you.

  It was only at the hospital, medicated and in bed, that I knew what I had to do, what I felt was the most important thing to do. In fact I could feel myself doing it in my sleep, I could feel myself living, alone, walking on the road, some small town, a village, anywhere, walking, doing, living without a lover, without a mother or a father, without a history of fear.

  Perhaps all your Foucault, Camus, and de Beauvoir said this in many complex words. But for me it is simple. You need certain people to come in and hold a mirror to your fears. You need real (the moving, breathing, unconditional, unboxed) love to be able to see yourself and then make a choice. To walk toward freedom. And true freedom is not worrying about love and how others will perceive it as betrayal.

  If anything, my going away is a testament to love, to your love. You saved me from years of being a lonely, sick woman. You saved me from dragging a man, a good-natured man, under the bus with me. For years I thought I was being the most faithful spiritualist, but now I see I was only preparing for my time, this time, as I leave, as I live.

  I won’t be coming back. Will I make contact? Not now, not for a few years at least, and you’ll have to trust me when I say it’s truly for the best. It’s not for the sake of mystery or panic that I am making this decision.

  It will be much better to hear from me like an old friend, a pleasant memory from the very deep past. It will be much better to hear from me when you’ve found your own path in life, when the rhythm of the everyday has been set, and you find yourself humming in the bathroom getting ready for your day. Then it will not be intrusive, it will not cause ache. It will just make you smile and hopefully let you remember an afternoon with me so long ago.