by Shruti Swamy
“I know the rules to bend them. From years upon years, and with the blessing of my guru.”
“Still, I won’t discard it. I’ll perform it.” The joy was leaving my body as my heart slowed, and my tears traveled up into the sockets of my eyes. Now I was fully sorry, for I would have to leave her. My teacher’s face was calm, the hurt of the morning returned to it, and fresh hurt: mine.
“Ah,” she said again, but softly, almost tenderly. “You’ve disappointed me, Vidya.”
“I know,” I said, because I could not say sorry. I did not look behind me as I closed the door.
“In space? It’s so cold, isn’t it?”
“I think so,” Radha said.
“Have you ever been cold? Truly cold?”
“The river’s cold. Not the surface but deeper. That part’s cold.” We were side by side on Radha’s narrow bed in the hottest part of the afternoon. As was often true about the time we spent together, this was a secret part of the day, now that the heat of the year had almost reached its apex, so hot that most people took to their rooms, pulled the shades down, and draped cool wet rags across their foreheads, not so much drifting into sleep as hurled into it by the afternoon’s unbearable temperature. Radha’s skin and blouse were damp, even the edges of her hair where it touched her neck. Mine too. The weight of the heat pushed all but the most dreamy thoughts out of my mind, which was a relief, for since my argument with my teacher I had spent many days unsettled, walking from one end of my room to the other, just thinking of her. The pain felt called up from a deep place, a black place, though I did not regret my words, I did not feel shame for them. The pain gave my dance a strange intensity, almost an urgency, that left me breathless, even the simplest todas. I practiced her chakkars. It was not regret.
“Like ice, though? Ice cold?”
“I’ve held a piece of ice in my hands.”
“Me too. But that just makes your hands cold and the sun is still beating on your neck.”
“I can’t remember. I think in the river I was cold. But not for long. I came back up and it was hot again.”
“What did it feel like?”
“How can I tell you? Have you never not once been cold?”
“No,” I said. Reading all those years about snow and ice in my English textbooks, I would feel a longing for it without knowing quite what I was longing for. To be cold, it seemed to me, was to rid oneself of one’s animal stink and therefore one’s animal tendencies: it was to be clean, pale, and godlike and free of pain.
“Well,” she said, and these words we spoke slowly and thickly through the heat. “It touches your skin the same way heat does. Or when your skin prickles up when you see something beautiful. You gasp, it’s like surprise. And when you come back to the heat you feel grateful.”
“Who taught you how to swim?”
“No one,” she said. “It’s easy if you just watch and pay attention.”
“But girls drown.”
“Yes, girls drown. That has nothing to do with swimming.”
“What do you mean?”
“They do it on purpose,” she said.
We fell asleep. It was a wonderful abundant sleep together as I had never had, I felt with Radha, somehow, as I slept. In my sleep as though in a dream I heard her tell me a secret. It was so dark in the room with the blind shut, stifling hot with the fan going on and on and the quality of the quiet different from early morning or evening: a crushed velvet quality, like bare feet walking against moss. The secret she told me required her to lift her sari to her thighs, she did this without sitting up, tugging the fabric up to bare her thighs, smooth and softly furred, but marred, each leg, by several scars that described a deep pain. They were yellow and pink, slick as though wet, and irregular, the largest the size though not the shape of my palm, the smallest the butt of a pencil. In fact there was more scar than skin across her legs like a burst of wild, horrible art.
What happened?
Hot oil, she said.
How?
It doesn’t hurt anymore, she said. It’s from long ago.
Very, very lightly, I touched the largest of the scars with my index finger. Heat came through the stripped skin in a different way, and the finger I laid upon it was damp with sweat. I thought I could feel her pulse beneath my finger, not quick, but long and steady.
I didn’t make a sound, not at first, Radha murmured. But later I did, I screamed.
Are there more?
No, just these.
I don’t know why, but I felt compelled to kiss her on the scar I was stroking. Had we not been in the dream-dark, we both might have acted differently, but she received the kiss with a calm that was almost indifferent. No, I could hear her breath shift, slightly, to quicken. My lips tasted the salt my fingers had left there. I wanted to look at her entire body, to see what was damaged and what was whole. Each quality enhanced the other, the scars on her skin making her legs more beautiful instead of less. Save for the three small moles in the crease of her elbow, her arms were unmarred; her waist too, so small, it could be encircled easily by my outstretched arm—almost, it seemed, by my hands themselves. There was a moment that passed between us that felt too sweet, too soft, tender the way a bruise is tender on the ripest fruit. Yet I could see no confusion nor pain in Radha’s face. Her expression was innocent and joyful, like the time she pushed the sweet between my lips. I fell down beside her and slept. When I woke up it was dark outside. She was sitting beside me with her knees gathered up in her arms and her cheek against her knees, looking at me. My mouth was filled with sourness so I knew I had slept deeply.
“What time is it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. Her voice sounded far away.
“Have we been sleeping long?”
She shrugged, and rubbed her eye with the heel of her hand, a casual, relaxed movement. I sat up. The bed was much too narrow to accommodate us both. Our shoulders pressed against each other.
“What’s the matter?” But I was asking this of myself. An odd feeling had come over me, a brown, not-right feeling, time out-of-joint. I felt almost panicked for a moment because I was sleepy and confused when I wanted to be alert and awake. I rubbed my face in my hands. My sweat, dried, flaked away with my fingers. The feeling grew louder, like an alarm sounding.
“Vidya,” she said, softly, and then she said again, “Vidya.”
I got up without speaking and went outside. I knew I had to be outside for the feeling to pass, and it did, roaring past with tremendous, ugly force, then ebbing. There were some small stars out there. Now that the panic had passed I felt around at the space curiously, with a different kind of fear. I leaned against the rough trunk of my mango tree.
“Vidya!” Farnaz was returning from the library, her arms loaded with books. All rose-colored her face and arms, the pink stood out in her cheeks. “What are you doing out here? It’s almost curfew.”
“It’s too hot inside,” I said.
“You look strange,” she said, coming closer to me and peering at my face. “Are you alright?”
I nodded.
“You really don’t look alright, joon,” she said and then, looking at me hard and very closely, she whispered, “You’re not in trouble, are you?”
“I think I am,” I said.
“I didn’t even know you had a beau; you and Radha are so secretive. Listen, joon, it’s okay, Sita was in trouble last year but we helped her, we’ll help you too.”
I nodded again. Then I said, “I don’t have a beau.”
“I’m not the Assistant Warden,” said Farnaz, “you don’t have to lie to me.”
“I’m not.”
“Well, what happened then?” her face darkening with worry. “How did you get in trouble?”
“I’m just . . . I think I’m losing focus a little bit. I don’t think it’s my dance, but I think I’m losing focus. I just need to try harder, really.”
“Losing focus!” said Farnaz. “What on earth are you talking abo
ut? Your exams?”
“Yes,” I said. “What were you talking about?”
“I thought you were pregnant,” she whispered. We could have laughed, both of us, but didn’t. We just stood, slightly bewildered and relieved, out there on the lawn.
“What would give you that crazy idea?”
“You just looked,” she said, frowning, “like a girl in trouble.”
Then I was alone. I stood in front of Radha’s door but didn’t knock; when I saw her from a distance, I went the other way. Her figure, slight, upright, and proud, seemed to burn a hole in the middle of my vision—a white pain flared so brightly I had to avert my eyes. Behind her door she was silent; the movements of her pencil against her notebook and the thoughts against her mind were so quiet I could not detect them. Once, I passed her in the corridor—her face opened in a smile and she began to speak, and the sound of her voice caused a feeling of alarm to flood me so utterly that I had no choice but to walk past as if I hadn’t seen her. From then on she did the same. So simple—it didn’t seem to trouble her at all—I just vanished from her face. The version of me who teased, listened, goaded, admired, and advised, all the hours of our lives together—they were simply gone from her: I could not detect any hurt. I came away from each encounter trying to reason with myself. Exams were looming, not so far in the future that they had shifted the hostel schedule into frenzy, but close enough that one could not afford to fall behind, or to lose their place ahead, a place that required an almost superhuman level of vigilance. So I returned, reluctantly, to my own studies.
There were two ways to learn: one was to be curious, to offer the hungry mind a question and patiently let it seek the answers out. For many months my curiosity had found an object outside my studies, and the information I gathered on this subject only made me hungrier for more: what were her home-days like, her family and especially her sisters, which foods did she prefer, and which songs, what did she pray for, and why at all did she pray—but though this curiosity threatened my studies, another, fed by Radha, aided them. Without Radha’s curiosity my own faltered. Therefore I turned to the second mode of learning, which was anger.
You gathered every no you had ever heard in your life that had to do with the capacity of your mind, and you held the freshest insults closest—the credit men took for your work or your ideas in groups, the voices so many used to speak to you, not just with scorn, which was tolerable, which was naked and therefore bearable, but also the impatience and amusement that they never used when they spoke to each other, the voice of a husband explaining politics to his empty-headed wife, or politely tolerating the fizzy ideas of a younger sister—you took that anger and pressed your mind to the hot, sharp point of it when it was tired, and the little jolt of pain drove you awake, drove you forward, yes, you could sit for hours with your anger, not piercing the surface of the subject as you might with curiosity, but smashing the subject open with brute force, destroying it and dulling it with no pleasure, and not even total understanding, but mastering it. You were aiming yourself for the moment that the sheet of your silence would drop, and behind it, the lovely blazing tower you had built and built from your anger for hours or months would finally be revealed—not the meek woman who stopped raising her hand after nobody would ever call on her, though she always had the right answer, but the you who had been all this time coiled inside her.
We all studied this way from time to time, even Radha, I suspect, who might have drawn upon it only in her final hours, when her mind was at its most exhausted. In those weeks, I lifted myself out of my body for hours, studying, and came back to it famished, thirsty, needing to use the toilet, cramped in my back and in the backs of my legs, and triumphant, a feeling somewhat akin to happiness. I took some food in the mess hall alone, the simple rice and dhal of an ascetic, like an ascetic not wanting to speak, my mind humming with the silence of my hours. I could feel myself spreading out into my body again, occupying it again, affectionately. It was small and brown and soft, and young, I realize now, though I cannot remember whether I felt young then in my body—to feel youth in one’s body, I think, means one’s youth has nearly ended. I was impatient too, or, if not impatient, then conscious that my days as a student would come one day to an end, and that there was more ahead, blank but more, and lots of it, its very blankness was a joy, for if I allowed myself to contemplate my future in its particulars, to write upon the blank wall all the outsized dreams I had cooked up, my terror was greater than my joy. To be a dancer, to never marry, to live apart from my father, to live alone, even to cut off my hair—the weight of these possibilities, of their logistical demands and the consternation and even outrage they would inspire, brought up a panicky feeling. Sometimes, instead of looking far down along the road it was better to step and step into darkness, trusting your body to intuit the safety of your steps. So often I turned my face toward that darkness, that dazzling blankness, in which each possible future described itself into a gleaming noise of white.
After the first time I saw Radha in the corridor, I took pains to put as much distance between us as I could without calling attention to that distance, though doubtless it was noticed by the other girls, a hurt so visible that they did not bring it up with me, knowing better than to tease or joke. Early morning, coming back from the bath, I saw her leaving her room—morning so early only we two were awake, still dark, the dreaming time that I loved best for working, when I could walk straight from my dreaming into my dance. I was unguarded in this moment, and the sight of her face caused tears to spring to my eyes. Her face was so soft, her cheek creased where it had been crushed against the pillow, and she was wearing a plain yellow sari that made her look like a bird, a bright little bird—and in her eyes, the recognition of me that had only so recently died—had been suppressed—now flared back up. I was alive to her and she to me—what was all this nonsense?
“Good morning,” she said.
“Good morning,” I said.
She rubbed her eyes with her fist and I thought about the burn on her thigh. I thought about the smell of singed flesh, the fresh damage, and felt ill. Nonsense or not, I could not, after all, look at her.
“How are your preparations going, for exams?” I asked her, and then I said, “I know already, of course: they are perfect.”
“I’m having a little trouble paying attention.”
“You?”
“Yes, me. I’m only a person.”
“No, Radha, you’re the goddess of physics herself.”
I could feel her eyes on my face, trying to read me. The tone of my voice was a little too sharp. I could not read myself.
“Vidya,” she said, “what happened? Why don’t you ever come to my room?”
“I don’t want to distract you.”
“You don’t distract me.”
“I do.”
“Well, a little. But I don’t mind.”
“You should mind. You should forget about all this time-wasting we did.”
“Forget about it?”
I met her eyes. They were brimming with hurt.
“It was nothing,” I said, hurting her. “It was time-pass, it was nothing; better to forget it.”
I started to feel it then, guilt. I had taken her solitude and turned it into loneliness by our friendship—I knew because I was lonely now too, now that I had finally tasted true kinship and had lost it, and, standing apart from her again, I could see just how tightly she held herself in the company of the others when, by necessity, she joined it. It seemed so plain now: what came off as cool aloofness, an absence of need, was actually a shyness that bordered on fear. What did it take to be so excellent? From everyone else she had hidden behind the dazzle of her ability, becoming just an outline: the genius, the number-one student, the proud one, the impervious one, flawless and hollow as a god: pristine. She had let me look behind—even just a little. And I had refused it.
So something was lost, had been lost, my Radha, and the feeling of loss pervaded me wh
en I was not dancing or studying, or dreaming against the blank wall. Something else had been lost, many things had been lost, perhaps everything had been lost, the girl I had been felt far away, though I had come to school to be rid of her—the sad, motherless girl with dry ugly knees and a dark ugly face: that girl, I could not remember her as me, I could only remember her as though I watched her from somewhere outside her body; I could not remember what it felt to occupy her skin and her moods. But why should it be any other way? Why mourn those lost, painful hours, hours lonelier than the ones I spent now? Those that had been lost willingly, almost eagerly, unlike the afternoon hours with my friend? Oh, what a talent I had for sorrow! Or more perversely, it was this very feeling, of loss and melancholy, of wanting, the feeling I always had so acutely and still have so acutely, though the object might waver, that made me feel, if not quite happy, then at least comfortable, at least myself. It is in fact better, I think, when the feeling can be fixed—contained—on a single object. When it was Radha, she became the organizing principal of my sorrow, and I understood myself through my sorrow. That’s why, when I try to put this time into words, I find I am not able to capture what I truly felt, for the words “happy” and even “melancholy” do not seem to hold the meanings I need. I need a shape, a taste, an essence, a pose, I need a stage and movement, I need bells, color, sound, light.
Still: what a pity, I thought, to not be able to see Radha in her final exams. Distraction or not, I knew she would not falter. Unlike my dance, hers was a feat that could not really be witnessed, for the drama unfurled silently on the stage of her mind, the only outward expression of such furious movement were the small gestures of the hands and eyes, all that was needed from the folded body, whose hungers and feelings were otherwise completely irrelevant and unfelt. I could see her sitting in the classroom, her hand moving quickly over the paper. She would finish an hour early, and then wait, not even checking over her answers, just trying to make the distance between herself and her nearest competitor not appear so unseemly, but after fifteen minutes, the tiredness and hunger of the previous days and months flood her and she cannot sit for any longer awake in that chair and so brings her exam to the proctor, who smiles, thinking she has thrown the test, and inviting the horrified looks of the boys, who know she hasn’t. Later, in the violent sunshine, she meets me, I am waiting for her, her body exudes a soft pleasant stink that I breathe in standing close to her but not touching her. She’s not joyous—the pleasure is already over—but she is calm. She would follow me upstairs, out of blinding sunshine into the frank dark of my room and our eyes would speak in the dark of my room, our mouths speak or perhaps only our quietness, the rich, vegetable understanding that surfaces in silence.