The Body Myth Read online

  Then at 1:20 A.M. my cell phone rang. It was Rahil.

  “Listen, Mira, she doesn’t know I am calling you right now, but I need to talk to you.”

  II

  Did I promise to tell you this story chronologically? Yes, I did. But I must make room for the distractions of my past. It’s not an unfair move on my part; ask yourself, don’t you carry pieces of your past with you every day? It manifests as fear when standing in a small elevator, and sometimes it holds your tongue and warns it into submission. But the other parts, they come in the form of memory, mostly for no rhyme or reason.

  Soon after I met Sara and Rahil, I started to think of my mother several times a day. A melancholic mother, she was, but there was no classical romanticism about her, at least when it came to her depression: she wasn’t beautiful enough.

  The world loves a beautiful depressed woman. Long hair tumbling over slumped shoulders. Wasting beauties locked in bedrooms, their combs trembling through knots in their hair as they stare listlessly into the mirror. These women possess hips that never threaten the seams of their cotton pants. These women smell of old musk, or the faint scent of a closet in a summer home. Not my mother. She wasn’t ugly; she was only plain, and it is far more difficult to be plain than ugly. At least that’s what she used to say. Being plain meant you were assured some of the things good-looking people had, but not everything. Being plain allowed you to know that certain things were off-limits. But if you were ugly, you knew exactly how to build your world. And if you were fierce enough, you would end up building a vibrant one, because you knew better. That’s what she said, my mother.

  A couple of years ago I read about tuberculosis in the Victorian era. Tuberculosis and feminine beauty became interchangeable. For decades the beauty industry made its money off the tuberculosis look. Any lotion or blush was manufactured to flush the cheeks that certain shade of pink that imitated the reddening of skin caused by frequent fever. Then the corsets came and sucked their bellies in. If you could waste away with grace, there was no misery in your existence.

  My mother would not have inspired the Victorians.

  Her face was full, arms freckled, hair thick, lips in a perpetual pout, and body resigned. She loved me fiercely, but there were days I didn’t exchange a word with her, because she preferred to walk about the house, her face almost exquisitely blank. You couldn’t bear to interrupt it with the everyday. I found ways to occupy myself, reading factoids in encyclopedias and quizzing myself on scraps of old stationery. Awarding myself stars and smiley faces. I was okay being a loner. I was enamored of her mystery and her waves of isolation. My mother reminded me of my future.

  I must have been twelve or thirteen, when she came to my room. Her face had spread into a welcoming smile. It made me feel dizzy, even though I was just sitting on the bed. She came and sat right next to me. I’ll never forget the green cotton sari she wore, the curls in her frizzy hair, the thin gold bangles on her thick wrists. “How are you doing, Mir-Mir?”

  I remember shrugging my shoulders, caught off guard. And I remember feeling cheated, resentful that I hadn’t been given enough time to prepare for this one spectacular moment: my mother sitting by me, cooing in my ear, asking me how I was. I had stuck my hand out to her awkwardly, but my voice came out steady.

  “Ma, how come you look so sad most of the time?”

  And my mother had looked at me, squeezed my bony shoulders, and whispered into my ear:

  “There is a need for every emotion.”

  “What is it, Rahil? Everything okay?” I couldn’t shake the feeling that Sara was listening on another line.

  “No, it’s just that I need to talk to you about Sara. She hasn’t ever had a friend. Ever since she got… you know.” He inhaled. He exhaled. “Sick.”

  I wanted to ask him then: What is really wrong with her? My mouth clenched in restraint instead. “I haven’t been able to talk to anyone like a friend in so long either. I mean, no social life. I am not complaining but…you know.”

  “I know what you mean,” Rahil said, his words barely audible.

  I promised to return to their house the following weekend. I put the phone down with conviction. I dropped my face into my pillow and slept dreamlessly. Tomorrow, I’d be back to the ordinariness of my life.

  A Preamble to My Everyday Teaching Job

  Perhaps I glorified the French intellectual movement a tad too much. The school certainly thought so, warning me to tone down my syllabus dodging. Parents had called me too, weeping, enraged, in awe, that their children were talking—much too much!—about communism and philosophers. Name-dropping terms like utilitarianism! But I always mediated such complaints with a certain brand of nonchalance that, more often than not, left my accusers morally unsure of their own understanding of the world. I created enough uncertainty that they ultimately gave me the benefit of that doubt.

  At the end of the day I was, in fact, a teacher. I taught the English syllabus well enough to the ninth-, tenth-, and eleventh-grade students at Seven Seeds International. Some people mistook me for being an instigator of sorts. Some kind of Emmeline Pankhurst. But I wasn’t. I was meeker than that. I was just obsessed with certain time periods, and I made my students obsessed with them too.

  Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity, for example, was mandatory reading for my tenth and eleventh graders. I was obsessed with de Beauvoir because she, like most women, had a knack for simplifying the complexities that men create for the sake of their egos. She boiled the words spun by men down to an accessible existentialism. Most of my students did not bother to read her, but the few who did would come to me crying afterward. The things they’d felt before now seemed only truer, they would tell me. The world was too absurd, too heavy to have any relevance. And we would talk about it until everyone was satisfied with something more wholesome and candid. Gandhi’s “Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it” usually satisfied them in the end.

  You might think it was teaching that saved me from the blunt darkness that comes with the loss of a spouse. It was not. I almost committed suicide, true, but it was Camus, Sartre, Foucault, and de Beauvoir who led me back to life. These philosophers who embraced the absurd made my pain feel silly. It made the world seem indulgent and, most of all, purposeless. I followed the wisdom of these postwar intellectuals with an addict’s desperation. My everyday in smoggy, stifling Suryam was a very different reality from the European past I conjured in my head: the winter crisp and the woolen coats clenching the chests of these writers. Then I’d look at the bare cotton kurta I wore. I felt the whimsy and entitlement of the cows stoically chewing their cud as they sat in the middle of major intersections. I wanted to laugh at it all, all our perceptions of existence, all our grand ideas of hope and reality. And this, somehow, saved me.

  All I know now is that I am still alive, and I find grief bothersome.

  When I went to Rahil and Sara’s house the next weekend, Rahil wasn’t there. Sara said he’d be back in an hour or so and ushered me into her bedroom.

  It was a messy room, but still clean. Everything smelled freshly laundered, her sheets radiating with essential oil. Sara’s face seemed thinner since the last week, but more beautiful. Her eyes were shining and her hair was tied back. Her lips bloomed from her bare face, plump, puckered, present. She patted the side of the bed and gestured for me to sit down beside her.

  “I’ve been exhausted this week, I have no idea why. It’s like I could stay in bed forever. But then I feel sharp needles in my head, an ache really, I have no idea, I just stare at the wall.”

  “The Yellow Wall.”

  “Huh?”

  I couldn’t help the involuntary pride that warmed my cheeks as I savored her confusion. I know I’ve read far more than most of my peers, but with Sara it was a win. My knowledge was a knife that could cut the thickness of her mystery, if only for a second.

  “Oh, nothing, you know men used to like to keep their women
in bed—they called it hysteria.”

  “You’re so smart, Mira, really you are, but you see, I know about mental illness. It’s a physical sickness, what I have, and it’s causing me to shut down.”

  I moved my hand to her shoulder in solidarity, but she brushed it off dismissively.

  “No. No more pity about me, forget about me, tell me all about your love with Ketan, you only talked of his death last time.”

  No mental safety valve was employed in my response to Sara. It was something I had never done with the discipline it required. This was the moment.

  Ketan and I (A Succinct Version)

  Let me confirm one thing now, because it’s simply true. Love is only romantic when you’ve lost it. Or if you can’t have it. In the end, I lost my love. Eventually, the pain and vulnerability and howling grief were drowned in the bitterness and the boredom that only insomnia can birth. But was Ketan a “love” before he died?

  Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, said romantic love and marriage could never be experienced in the same lifetime. This is why we humans perpetually suffer from angst, or rather a running between two conflicts, an oxymoron, two things that can never be at once. Heartbreak arises only when you’ve been stupid enough to expect anything as a given: a happy marriage that lasts fifty years, children who grow up and don’t die before you, or a promotion that comes every few years. Heartbreak only comes from expectation.

  I had a naive, awkward, gentle expectation of Ketan. That he would be with me until I was old. That I would probably be the first to die. That he, if anyone, could bear the brunt of losing me.

  Mundane office love stories are the most predictable of all. They only exist because people like us forget how to express our desire to live and love beyond the walls of conference rooms and meetings where glances can be exchanged. Ketan and I were the sort of people who thought social bonding was employing a chai break to talk about a coworker with smug judgments. Our moments of joy were heaped upon the everyday baseline of light traffic, three-day weekends, and the candied HR emails that urged us to keep leading and achieving our “goals.”

  He was a project manager. I was leading internal communications. I’ve forgotten the main purpose of the company we used to work for. There were far too many experts, far too many divisions, for anyone to form a cohesive image of the entire company and its place in the world. I barely had an idea then, much less now. Still, I controlled its intranet, sent out firm-wide updates, and helped the interns resize images. Maybe it’s precisely being such a cog in the machine that allows you to fall in love in the first place. If you are trapped in mundanity, it’s impossible not to latch your poor soul to something, or someone, that makes you realize your vulnerable pumping heart will only beat a certain number of times. No matter how clean the air is inside those air-conditioned walls.

  Ketan carried himself with a gentleness I’d seen in no other man. He had a beard, five years ahead of the trend, and a make-you-believe-in-God smile. Yes, the fucking charming smile cliché. Expectations, after all, are made of clichés.

  I developed a crush on him his first day in the office, at which time I’d already been at the company for a year. I came up to him with an unnecessary and largely irrelevant question. He never called me out on it and was quick to find some kind of legitimate office connection to justify us loitering by each other’s cubicle most of the day.

  We both came from conservative enough families, but we were no prudes. We took off to Pondicherry the first three-day weekend we got. We went to French cafés, grabbed beers, and ate spicy seafood by the beach. We got right down to sex in the hotel, no qualms, though he was my first. I never asked if I was his. I assumed I was. He made love by searching. Searching for something through the act. You could feel his confusion, his need to express something, something locked in by his body. In exchange I made love by letting him find his own answers. I stroked his hair, whispered into his ears, easing his anxiety. One morning, he lay on the bed after sex. He rubbed his beard and grinned. The grin disappeared and his mouth puckered in thought.

  “It’s like I have so much more to do.”

  Then he got up, went to the bathroom, came out and asked me if I wanted to explore Auroville. We got married eight months later in a simple ceremony. His parents, my father, our friends, and a majority of our office coworkers were present. We bought a three-bedroom flat twenty minutes from our office. Ketan said that it wouldn’t be long until it took forty minutes to get there. We’re crawling all over this city, multiplying like insects, aren’t we? he said.

  So far, all our expectations were alive and well. Our workdays, our lunches, and our dinners together. Our friends on the weekends, our lovemaking at night. Such basic expectations.

  Seven months later he died in a really stupidly common accident. At a spot equidistant from the house and our office. It was a two-wheeler accident. A two-wheeler, not because we couldn’t afford a stupid car, but because it was the faster way to move through the city. And his helmet was shit and it cracked. Still, nothing had happened to his head. His middle section was run over, resulting in massive internal bleeding. What a bunch of shit the body is made of. It’s put here on earth to take emotional bullets all day and night, but one thud, a bit of force, and the body immediately gives up. Bleeding, bursting, rendering itself so fucking useless. When I was brought to the morgue to see him, I had only anger and disgust for the human body. What a horrific joke, what a silly, stretchy, fragile, untrustworthy thing it was. I started screaming. I pounded his chest, his fucking stupid bleeding-ass stomach that couldn’t seem to have gotten its act together in time. I smacked his face, I screeched, You fucking idiot, get up, why are you so fucking weak?

  I never got to see his cremation. My father had me drugged and kept in a hospital room, lurching in and out of consciousness for a week. Each time I woke up, my father would come up to me and coo soothing words that jumbled together. He kept telling me to rest. Friends came in; they talked to me like I was a geriatric patient with Alzheimer’s. Like I had no idea what had happened, when in fact I could remember every little insult I had screamed, every little word I’d said to Ketan’s dead body. My anger was only artificially tamed. I could feel my body being medicated, like a hot water bag on top of a raging, crampy, menstrual tummy. I wanted to laugh at the doctors and their medication—what fucking idiots, like I didn’t know what was there. Like I couldn’t feel what was inside of me. I just couldn’t act on it, because my lids fell, then they stretched across my face and covered my entire body, like cling wrap. I was a butterfly in a cocoon, a cocoon made out of my eyelids, and it felt damn good.

  Later, I was put in a recovery home for six months. Where we had collective goals, where we talked to warm, self-aware therapists. Appa called it the farm. I ate upma every morning and drank mosambi juice every evening. It’s also where I read Sartre’s Nausea, and Kafka, and about feminism, the Enlightenment, and everything in between. I soaked it up, thriving in privileged absurdity and philosophy. I still have no idea why a humble recovery home offered such a wide array of European enlightenment and existentialism, stacked shelf upon shelf. It seemed like an inside joke by the founder of the place (who was dead and whose children had promptly sold it off to a private company).

  Like most important European men, I too found myself in exile. And like them, I would survive. I would obey Albert Camus and honor the freedom I had every day. It worked. One day, about six months after my arrival, I felt so free that I saw the innate absurdity of authority crumbling at my feet. I went to the office and told them that I was free. They said I was 110 kilometers from the city and that I’d need to contact my father. I told them I was twenty-nine years old and I couldn’t possibly need my father’s permission.

  They said they could offer no transportation. I had no phone. Only theirs. I’ll walk home, I told them. They only nodded their heads; they didn’t believe me. So I walked righteously toward the gate, where a scrawny watchman saw me coming. He very metho
dically checked the latch on the gate. I told him to let me out. He only said, Madam, no, madam, no. So I walked up to the gate and unlatched it. I was kind of surprised that the guard made no other attempt to stop me from leaving the farm; he just stood there frozen to the side, looking past me as I walked toward the highway. I guess when someone sees a person who’s truly embraced her freedom, one can only be stunned into a fleeting, temporary realization of one’s own invisible chains. Don’t you think?

  III

  Sara had barely spoken. She took in every word and savored every lengthy monologue. Every muscle of her face worked to engage with me. The semi-clench of her cheeks, her tilted head, and her puckered lips. Every micro-reaction was for me. It was only at the end that I told her it was my first time. I had never summarized that year for anybody, there had just been fragments of my past that lurked and danced between my ribs.

  “You aren’t alone anymore, Mira.”

  “That too would be a foolish expectation.”

  “Why, because I am so sickly I could die at any moment?” She laughed hysterically, her entire body jostling on the soft bed.

  She stopped smiling abruptly, took my hand, and leaned forward. I smelled musky, rosy talcum. My eyes moved, helplessly, to her spilling cleavage. There were tiny, squiggly, fading stretch marks traveling around her breasts, ending before they reached the collarbone. She palmed my cheeks, then looked me in the eyes. I wanted to kiss her right then, but I knew it would toss my entire world up in a second. So instead I asked a question that was more intimate than a kiss.

  “What makes you so sick?”

  Her eyes winced and she snapped her body away. There was a moment of static silence and I panicked. Then she exhaled slowly. Within seconds she had recomposed herself.

  “I’ve always been sickly, Mira.”

  Her life, she said, was surrounded by tests and medical visits, homebound restrictions and dietary experiments. The thing was, though, that one problem fueled a solution and that solution created a new problem.