I drag my suitcase up the alley. The potholed asphalt and narrow inclined driveways constitute an up-and-down obstacle course where a pavement should be. After Goa’s endless beaches, half-empty in offseason, this treeless narrowness is disorienting. I glance up at our room. Against twilight’s midnight blue, our second-storey window flickers white: the ceilingfan whirring against the fluorescent light tube. Komal sits hunched over her laptop. Her left arm is raised, fingers worrying her scalp, tablelamp shining on the bald spot that’s colonising the crown of her 22-year-old head.
I haul my suitcase up the dust-slippery stairs as quietly as possible, but at the landing I see Komal standing in our doorway, shifting her weight from one flat foot to another, grinning. “Hey, Pragya! How was Goa?”
I fling my arms around her. Ow, she says, her voice comically flat. So I squeeze her some more. Discreetly I exhale from my nostrils the bhringraj pungency of the restorative hairoil that saturates her scalp. “Goa was splendid!” I squat to push my suitcase under my bed. Turning to rise, pivoting, I spot, under Komal’s bed, at right angles to mine against the other wall, the hillock of Cheetos and Doritos, Little Hearts sugared biscuits, and 5-Star and Dairy Milk chocolates: all ten-or-twenty-rupee single-serving packets, a rainbow of neon plastic. My gut spasms and it’s all I can do not to recoil. I face Komal brightly. “I’m starving. Travel tales over dinner?”
“Okay!” Komal reaches for her jacket. She always wears a jacket outdoors, even in this roasting April, perhaps to conceal her breasts, which are big but not saggy.
I glance at her laptop. “Wait, you’re reading a manuscript. Due tomorrow?”
“Ye-ah,” Komal drawls. Her welcome-home smile vanishes, leaving her smooth fair-skinned face, with its double chin, expressionless. “But I can finish later, ya.”
“You’re on page 254 of 270. Why not finish now? You must be in the climax.”
A wave of irritation scurries halfway across her face before she suppresses it. My ten days’ change has made me forget what date I was coming home to. It’s 2008: I no longer call Komal out for failing to speak up for herself. When we became friends, I laughed at her doormattiness, and tried to train, roleplay, and bully her into assertiveness. That was three years ago. Last September, when we got this room together, I had a mirage of an even closer intimacy. All that is gone. And now I’ve only irritated Komal by confronting her with another minor conflict where she has failed to assert herself.
“Well, this MS is not exactly a page-turner.” That’s Komal-speak for ‘It’s shitty.’ She’d sooner bite her tongue out than disparage someone else’s work. “But, ye-ea-ah, I guess I could finish first? D’you want a snack?” She heads for her junk-food hillock.
“No, thanks!” I clear my throat and settle my voice. “No, thanks, I’m not hungry. You take your time.”
I phone my parents, as I promised to do when I got home, as I did when I caught the train at Goa, and when I disembarked, and when I caught the bus at Bangalore Central. On speakerphone at their end, they ask me whether I’ve eaten and tell me I must be exhausted. They give me weather updates from Calcutta, 1,900 km away. Hmmm, I tell Pa and Ma, my mobilephone two inches from my ear, wondering why they’d think I’d give a damn. I lean back. These big executive swivel chairs are the only nice thing in the rooms at this paying-guest accommodation.
Komal rocks as she reads. Hunched, she seems to have grown into her chair. Has she gained weight while I’ve been gone? We’re both 5’3”, but she’s 80 kilos: at least, she was in October, when I discovered that old-fashioned weighingmachine with the running lights in the Sagar restaurant, that Sunday when I managed to drag her to Lalbagh for a walk. Her bald spot has grown too, unless her tablelamp is playing tricks. I try not to stare. But Komal’s oblivious. Whenever Komal pulls her hair out by the roots, she enters a trance, like a baby junkie suckling heroin milk. My skin creeps and I wonder whether I should look away and I wonder whether I should hang up on my parents and confront Komal.
This compulsive hairpulling is called trichotillomania. It’s she who told me. She knows that she does it, but she doesn’t know when she’s doing it. She told me this, that evening last October, weeks after we became roomies. She never mentioned it again. I think I’m not supposed to notice it. I look away and say “Hmm” on the phone.
It’s in another world that I’ve been downing Kingfishers all week and dancing halfnaked in bamboo shacks: with strangers, and with friends whose psychological damage is either absent or buried deep, under intact scalps, too deep for beer tears. Back in this room, with its musty smell and dusty corners, I’ve forgotten not to stare. Maybe it’s like watching someone masturbate and I shouldn’t. Or maybe it really is like watching a baby junkie and I should intervene. I picture creeping up on Komal, leaning over her, and kissing her hand away.
“Ah,” I say on the phone. I’ll graduate in June, move to Delhi, and start getting my scholarship at JNU. My content-writing job will cover my remaining expenses. Then I can block and delete my parents’ phone-numbers. I’ve avoided accidentally memorising their phone-numbers, accidentally listening to anything they tell me. Just two months to go before I’m born into a parentless new life. And when I’ve finished two years at this job I’ll request a reco and get a better job, and at JNU I’ll have shiny new friends, who’re going places, who’ll spur me to go places too. “That’s nice.”
Komal glances across the room periodically, eyes bright and sympathetic, as if she knows. I smile and roll my eyes. About my parents she knows nothing, and now I’m glad I’ve told her nothing. It’s she who decided we’re no longer really friends. She shouldn’t still be interested in my phonecalls home.
Komal graduated last July and got a job reading manuscripts at Phoenix, a startup publisher cofounded by one of our literature professors. Phoenix gets mostly fiction manuscripts, from first-timers, low-quality. Komal is self-sufficient now: she no longer needs to answer her parents’ phonecalls.
“And you’re having your period regularly?” says Ma.
“Goddammit, Ma!”
Now I’m in for it. I sit up and rub my forehead. My parents react to a bad word as to a cat-o’-nine-tails suddenly across the face. One of the worst beatings I ever got was back home in the violet twilight after a birthday party, back in Calcutta, where I’d called another seven-year-old a ‘bastard’ – a funny word I’d heard somewhere. I’d glanced at Pa between the balloons and streamers, and amended it to ‘bustard’ – another funny word, funny bird. That didn’t save me.
But Ma doesn’t rebuke my ‘goddammit.’ She rephrases her question and vindicates her concern. After all, my periods did, you know, I was… but she can’t say the word. After everything that’s happened she still can’t say the word. My vision blackens, my ears burn, and I picture flinging my mobilephone across the room. But that would startle Komal and let her know something’s up. She doesn’t deserve to know.
“Yes, Ma. I’m having my period.” I open my fisted fingers. They’re bleached from the pressure. Now the blood runs into them splotchy red.
“Good.” Ma asks about my dinnerplans and whether I’m drinking enough water – me, famous water-guzzler. Weather reports and all the wrong questions – that’s my parents’ conversation… In Bengali there’s no word for sorry, no word that anyone in real life ever uses.
I go back to monosyllabic responses. Come to think of it, I’ve never actually heard Komal’s parents calling, not even before she graduated. Can’t be the time difference: Dubai’s only ninety minutes behind. Suddenly I realise Komal’s interest in my parents’ phonecalls has nothing to do with me.
Is it by the roots that Komal pulls out her hair, I wonder. If I went and hugged her, would her fingernails smell like hair-follicle blood, ovary-follicle blood, menstrual blood? She crunches into a Cheeto that she’s sneaked out of a pack under her pillow.
When Komal and I became close, I told her that she shouldn’t eat junkfood, that maybe she should see a psychotherapist about that other thing. Hmmm, said Komal. A thoughtful Hmmm. Komal does have periods of self-awareness: clearly the idea of getting help had occurred to her. Why not, then, I wanted to ask her. I missed my chance to ask her. Komal hasn’t really spoken to me since that drunken evening in the bathroom. She’s snapped herself shut and I’m done trying to help. I’ve got my own life to solve.
Ma winds up. “Bhalo thakis,” she says. Stay well, take care.
“Okay.” I hang up.
Komal plucks out another hair and holds it before her eyeglasses. Yes, there is blood on its root, yes, it is by the roots that she plucks them out, or why would there be a bald spot? She stares at the hair. So she does know what she’s been doing. So why doesn’t she just stop? She’s a year my senior, and whatever happened happened years ago, and how hard is it to get your act together? I did it. Nobody helped me.
Komal lids her laptop emphatically. “Done!”
“Ready when you are, Komal.”
Komal puts on her denim jacket before the rust-blotched mirror nailed to our plywood cupboard. The button over her bust will no longer fasten. She fastens the buttons above and below, studies the effect, unfastens the button below, then unfastens the button above, then tries the whole placket unbuttoned. Then, feet planted wide, body penduluming, she lowers her head and confronts her bald patch, left of centre near her crown. How does it feel, I wonder, to wake up and confront the corpses of the night.
I tear my eyes away. I text my tripmates banalities bouqueted with smileyfaces. They’re my batchmates: in two months we’ll be scattered, will probably never meet again. But we promise each other, with all-caps and exclamation points, to do this every year. I’ve watched the grownups, the successful ones, I mean. This is what they do.
When I first saw Komal, up on stage at the Literary Association, she was speaking about Malamud. I looked up thinking, Wow! Someone who’s read an author I haven’t, and not one of those junk pop authors. But these last eight months Komal’s read only shitty manuscripts, hunched, tugging at her throatskin, and some rubbishy Mills & Boons romances. And she’s written only Harry Potter fanfiction, which she knows better than to show me.
Never live with your idols. Better still, never have idols. Anyway, when push comes to shove, you’ll be all alone. All my life we’ve moved from place to place. I tried to keep people in my life. But when I was struggling, nobody helped me; the people close to me only hurt me. Why did I think Komal cared about me? Life’s easier when you have no idols, when you’re the only person you expect anything from.
Komal turns around, hair swept stylishly sideways and backwards. I smile back brightly.
“Come.” I rise and change my shoes.
“Do I look okay?” says Komal softly.
I whirl back around. Since when does Komal care how she looks? Some days I hardly recognise this person she’s become. I care, too, I guess, but only in private, in decent. I’ll never be one of those women who do a whole hair-and-makeup session in a public bathroom.
“’Course you do!”
I stride towards the door. My foot dislodges, from under my table, a giant white plasticbag.
“Oh,” says Komal, “you can just” –
I’m kneeling over the bag. It’s plain and unmarked. The loops are knotted tight, but the plastic is white and thin and I can see it’s stuffed with wrappers: Cheetos and Doritos, Little Hearts, 5-Star and Dairy Milk. The wrappers have been folded small and stuffed densely and this plasticbag full of plastic is almost heavy.
– “can just put it” – says Komal. I shove the bag back under my table. “Sorry, you weren’t here, so I shoved it there, ya.”
“No problem! Hey, by the way, my treat tonight!” I haven’t meant to say this. But why not. Let’s get some real food into Komal, a goodbye meal or two.
She shuffles into the corridor. Yes, I can afford to treat Komal. I’m the only one in my batch who’s got a job. I’m racing forward; soon the past will be banished from the rearview mirror. I leap behind Komal and seize her shoulders, like last autumn when I thought we were going to be soulsisters. As she’s descending the stairs I notice her right knee is locking, her right thigh is wobbling. Is she getting arthritis at 22? I dig my fingertips into her soft shoulders whistling choo-choo-choo.
* * *
Our alley is all three-or-four-storey houses, painted hotpink or skyblue, overcrowded drawingrooms elbowing neighbours’ bedrooms. Crimson and navyblue SUVs share the sloping driveways with lounging streetdogs and cows. Hybrid cows, these, black-and-white: mountains of flesh sitting statue-still, except for the shit-encrusted tails fly-flicking, and the square jaws masticating, drooling whitey-green. Under the unquiet gray that stands, in the metropolis, for the black of night, the streetlamps cast deceptive shadows. A single blade of grass, cowering between pavingstones, casts a mile-long shadow slithering snakelike over my foot. And a shallow circular shadow, which I felt sure was cast by a stray pebble, turns out to be a fresh pothole suddenly underfoot.
Ow, says Komal, as her stiff right knee buckles, and it’s I who wince. I clutch her elbow and nudge my glasses up my nose, the better to see where I’m guiding her.
“Aryan Chariot okay for dinner?”
My question is perfunctory. Before she graduated, Komal stayed in the hostel, but she made no other friends. Her hostelmates ignored her all year, then sucked up to her the week before exams, so that she’d coach them. Komal’s default response is yes: to me, to anyone who shows the slightest interest.
“Sure, or we could also try Anand Vihar?” says Komal. “They’ve finished their renovations.”
“Which do you prefer?” I ask, suddenly annoyed, determined to make her choose.
“My butter-chicken-and-naan is equally good at both places,” says Komal. “But only Anand Vihar has that skin-on grilled chicken that you like, and the big salad.”
I squeeze her elbow. “Anand Vihar it is.” My annoyance vanishes, leaving me feeling foolish.
Of course Komal cares about me. When I come back from the golfcourse, which is open to nonmember walkers and joggers before working hours, Komal asks how many laps I ran this morning, and whether the uncles gathering flowers for their wives’ pujas had left one or two shiuli on the tree to scent the air for seculars. And now Komal, as I lead her through the backalleys, stumbles against shadows and stubs her toe against nothings. Maybe she’s been working from home again, like after her breakup, forgetting how to use her feet, her voice.
At Anand Vihar Komal shuffles up the steps – black granite, shiny and sharpedged, powdered with cement dust from the upper storey that’s still under construction. She stands hugging her tummy, penduluming, staring at the table as the waiter clears up. She collapses into her seat. She looks up across the little square table at me, as if we were alone in the restaurant this Sunday evening, alone in the world. But maybe it’s only because she’s too shy to people-watch, to make eyecontact even with the stickthin pimplefaced waiters, that she gives me this attention. But her bald spot is growing her knees are going her jacket’s no longer buttoning and it doesn’t matter why she likes me I’m all she’s got. “No,” I cry, “lemme see what else there is!” And I didn’t ask for this revelation, I refuse it, I sit fidgeting in my chair, frowning at the menu.
“What did you eat at Goa?”
“Prawns. Lots of prawns.”
“Yum! Any good?”
“Huge and fresh and sweet.” I survey the diners. There’re some women skinnier than me, and some women curvier than me, but there’s no woman who’s both skinnier and curvier than me. “Well, some restaurants skip degutting their prawns, so sometimes they’re bitter. They sell them right at the beach, too, you can eat prawns lounging thirty feet from the water. You sit on a chair to keep the sand out of your bumcrack, under an umbrella. This umbrella you’ve got to hire by the hour. And you do, for even at 9 am the sun broils you. Before dawn, you watch the fishermen prepare to set off. They unravel their nets… which takes ages, somehow. You’d think they’d fold their nets up neatly in the first place… When they come back, they throw their catch into piles on the sand. You watch as you eat your prawns which they brought. For this scenery, you pay twice what you’d pay in a restaurant 200 meters away on the street. And it’s worth it. Yes: good prawns, good scenery, good trip.”
“Show photos!” Komal has so little practice asking for anything that she can only do it by regressing into childhood, lips pouting, eyes sparkling behind big mudbrown-framed eyeglasses. Is this how she looked, I wonder, that afternoon when she asked her parents for the most important thing. How badly did they fail her, I wonder – did they try to throw her out too, did they ask her why can’t you just be normal? “Fuck it,” I say, “I’ll just have my usual.” We place our order.
I pass Komal my phone. I bring my own chair around – keeping her to my left, which takes a bit of calculation, for I’m bad at left and right, even worse at simulating them in my head. I’ve got photos from the spice plantation, the cruiseboat, and the scenic old churches in Panjim. But Komal’s rushing through. I thumb back and offer commentary. “That tree with the cottony sprays of white flowers? It’s allspice. I bought allspice powder at the plantation’s shop. Have you ever tasted allspice? We grow it in India. We’ve been exporting it to Europe for centuries. I’ve never seen it before! I’d heard of allspice; I’d thought it was a spice mix. Like ‘all the spices.’”
“Allspice.” Komal mouths the word. “What’s it taste like?”
“Like a combo of three other spices. Cinnamon, nutmeg, and the third note is uh, clove,” I venture. My memory’s not what it used to be.
“Ooh, that might work as gunpowder.” ‘Gunpowders’ are coarsely powdered blends of roasted spices and lentils, which resemble gunpowder not at all, unless you’re as myopic as me and as colourblind as a collie. Back in Kerala, ‘gunpowders’ are served alongside red rice, several vegetable dishes – and meat, if you’re Hindu but non-vegetarian, as most Malayalis are, as Komal is. (And as I am, and as, I discovered only lately, most Indians are. I’d been fooled into thinking otherwise by the glut of restaurants marked ‘pure vegetarian.’ But that, it turns out, is only courtesy the hoi polloi chasing the Brahmins’ ostentatiously abstemious habits.) “It’d be nice having another flavour of gunpowder.” Here in Bangalore, when she’s not bingeing junk, Komal makes a meal out of a mound of white rice and a teaspoon of gunpowder, sometimes made into a paste with a five-rupee sachet of Mother Dairy ghee.
“Yeah, that might work… And this was on the cruiseboat, which goes down Mandovi river and back. I photographed the sunset from deck. Then the boat began blasting music, and there wasn’t much to see above, so we went down to the ballroom – yes, this is it. We spent the hour dancing to Bollywood hits. Rubbishy music, fit only for dancing to… And these are the casinoboats. Big as oceanliners!” Komal listens politely. I open my mouth to explain about the casinoboats. But Komal’s thumbing her way forward, rushing forward. She’s from Kerala but she’s never been to Goa and now shows no interest in my photos so why did she ask to see them?
“Ooh.” Komal has found the beach photos. She pauses on a photo of me and two of my tripmates. The waves lap at our heels. The sun crimsons behind us as it sinks through a cloudless colourless sky. “Bikini?” says Komal.
“My friends are wearing bikinis, yes. They bought them there. They’re expensive! I didn’t know when I’d use one again, so,” I chuckle, “I’m wearing my regular underwear.”
“This is your regular underwear?” Komal peers at my phone.
“It’s just a cotton underwired bra, unpadded,” I add, trying not to emphasise ‘unpadded,’ “and cotton hipster briefs.” I omit telling Komal that, in this photo and in all the others, my brastraps are clipped behind, racerback-style, with a braclip, to shorten the brastraps and lift my breasts, which sag even minus a drenched cotton bra. “There’s a reason they don’t make bikinis from cotton,” I add irrelevantly.
“Wow. I could never wear my underwear as a bikini!”
Pokerfaced, I bite into a drumstick. Komal often leaves her underwear around our bathroom. She still wears white woven-cotton wireless bras of the kind our mothers bought us at twelve, which show their lacy seams through teeshirts, and which, working by compression rather than lift, squeeze your lungs uncomfortably. As for Komal’s underpants, I mistook them at first for high-waisted knee-length city-shorts.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen your underwear,” says Komal.
“I don’t like leaving mine around… Ha, it’s my first year away from home. Two years in hostel during M.A., and I’ll be leaving everything out, too.” No, I won’t. I’ll never let myself go.
Komal’s still staring at the first beach photo. Finally she thumbs forward. This one’s just me: same setting, the photographer, a stranger we’d just met, kneeling for a better angle, five feet away. Looking at the photo now, through Komal’s eyes, I see he knelt slightly to my left. He must’ve figured out my squint despite all my efforts to hide it, and found himself a good angle to counteract it – and all without letting on. He saw me, I realise, and I feel furious and grateful and terrified. I press my palms to my cheeks, but the tandoori masala from the chicken on my fingers only makes my cheeks redder.
“You’re hot,” says Komal. I giggle, then bite into the drumstick so hard, I strike bone. “You’ve got an hourglass figure and perfect skin.”
I masticate with exaggerated relish. “I do like my skin.” Vanity’s a sin. Vanity almost killed me. I change the subject. I tell Komal how my friend pulled her calfmuscle on our jungle hike, and I carried her 7-kilo backpack on my chest, walked sandwiched between two backpacks three hours forth, three hours back,; and about the Nigerian giant my friend picked up on Tinder, who grabbed my backside instead, and I slapped him. Should I have made the Nigerian a Dane, I wonder, so as not to sound racist.
“You’re so cool,” says Komal.
“Aww, shut up.” I don’t tell Komal that midway through the hike my shoulders, strained by two backpacks plus my clipped brastraps, felt like they’d break into two; I don’t tell Komal that the bottom-pinching pleased me, just a little, and that I considered not telling my friend. My actual behaviour remained admirable so my mindworkings become irrelevant. I cannot sacrifice Komal’s admiration.
“I’ve gained weight,” Komal blurts, still staring at my phone. “Four kilos.”
She looks up quickly but I’m even quicker; I’ve masked my horror. Four kilos in a week! “It happens,” I say. I implore her to come to the golf course with me. She says people stare at her no matter what she wears. Fuck people, I say. I implore her to let me make her salads. Hmmm, she says. Halfway through her meal, she’s smashed up her neon-orange gravied chicken and crumbled her naan into it. She pushes her plate away and keeps thumbing through my photos. “See,” I say, “if you eat real food, you’re easily sated.”
“Maybe,” she says.
Maybe she’s lost her appetite for real food. Maybe she’s trying to uglify herself.
That Saturday last October, it was Komal who suggested that we drink. I gaped, then ran down to the liquorshop before she could change her mind. Midway through my Kingfisher, I realised Komal didn’t want to drink: she wanted to get drunk. Soon she was kneeling over the toilet. But she didn’t throw up. She talked. Maybe she felt better able to talk in that novel situation, sprawled on the shabby tiles with me. It was her brother, she said. He’d been ten, and she’d been four, and he’d tried his fingers first. That felt strange, but kind of good. Then he’d tried his – his thing, she said. After everything that had happened she still couldn’t say the word. When he put in his thing, that no longer felt good. She cried out. He skulked away. She spent a week creeping around on tiptoes, wondering if people could tell, thinking up excuses why she’d let it happen. Finally, she told her parents. They shouted at her, shook her, almost slapped her. He’s just a curious little boy, they said. No damage done, they said. And anyway she’d probably imagined the whole thing, with all those books you read, they said.
’What’s your brother’s name?’ I’d cried, springing to my feet, looking around for my steel waterflask. Gimme his address. Somewhere in Nepal, wasn’t it, in medical school? I’ll catch a train and go bash his head in, I’d said.
She wouldn’t tell me. She’d drained a quart of McDowell’s but she wouldn’t tell me her brother’s name. And Kumar is far too common a last name. I’d never find him myself. And Komal wasn’t on social media. There was nothing I could look through. She wouldn’t say another word and she refused to touch the second quart.
Not that evening, and not afterwards. So that was the end of our dawdling in Sagar restaurants, over idli-sambhar at one-legged stand-up steel tables, watching clerks rushing through lunch, making up stories about them; of our expeditions to discover which hole-in-the-wall or overpriced Café Coffee Day outlet serves Bangalore’s most rancid coffee; of our lounging in bed in the streaming Saturday sun, dreaming up outlines for our awardwinning bestselling novels.
Komal has forsaken me. I thought that evening we were stepping into my mirage of soul-sisterhood. But, ever since, if I mention her brother, or her hair, or a therapist, she freezes up, and then if I don’t take the hint she replies with as close an approach to rudeness, to shortness as she’s capable of. Komal has forsaken me – but it’s okay, I’II tell myself, scolding myself for the quick hot sneaky tears gushing up my throat. It’s okay, for when I graduate it’s I who will go away from her and make new friends.
I always make new friends. Pa works for the bank; he keeps getting transferred. We’ve always moved around, a new city every couple of years. I’ll make friends in Delhi. How hard can it be to find someone who will discover, without my telling them, that I love oleanders and hate roses; that I secretly wonder what the big deal is about Shakespeare, with his odd pacing and inconsistent characterisation; that I need to have whoever I’m with always to my left, so I can see them properly, so they can’t see my squint? I’m staring at Komal, silently bidding her goodbye, and all this time she’s been thumbing through photos, and I’ve been lecturing about salads and morning walks. With savage relish I picture Komal stuck in this dead-end job, hunched, redhanded with dusty Dorito guilt. I picture the Komal-shaped hole in my life and yes this is what I deserve I don’t deserve any friends any success I’m still just a fat fuck.
I take big swallows of water, draining my glass tumbler. “You okay?” asks Komal. I nod and attack my salad. She returns my phone and plays with her food.
Nobody knows me as Komal does. And the things that she doesn’t know, there’s nobody else I want to tell them to. I picture my life, a turnstile: pairs of ears cycling into my life, out of my life, always a new pair of ears, every pair of ears the same, sorry, have I already told you this, oh, sorry, I thought I’d told you. We blow our noses on each other, like tissue paper, and throw each other away, said Bernard Shaw in 1912, and when I read this I snorted and vowed I’d never succumb to this modern ancient illness.
“So, yeah, you should come to the golfcourse with me. I can run, you can walk. Or I’ll walk with you. Who cares what people say? People are always saying something, blah, blah.”
“That’s easy for you to say, Pragya,” Komal murmurs. She grins placatingly, lest I take her words as an insult, or as an invitation to a real conversation.
“I guess.” I open my mouth and close it again and focus on my salad.
Let her think it’s been easy for me. Let her admire me under false pretences. For who would admire me if they knew the truth? Not even Komal.
Not even Komal. Revulsion breaks over me and throws me back, like that wave at Goa, that looked low, and came too fast, too high, and threw us back, sprawling on our backsides giggling, spitting out saltwater, sand wadding in our underpants. Afterwards, I got to my feet, didn’t shake out the wad of sand, I thrust my butt out and squeezed the wad of sand instead, with my fingertips through my underpants, pretending it was poop, disgusting my dainty tripmates. But it was okay. I can afford to be disgusting. We all laughed together. They all think I’m hot. Komal thinks I’m hot. I’m squeezing every last drop of admiration out of Komal, squeezing her dry. She’s all I’ve got.
And I face myself, and I long to hit out at myself, like I did at the mirror, that evening in April 2005 when I was locked in my room, shivering even though it was hot, stripped down to my cotton hipster briefs, weighing myself for the seventh time that day. I looked up into my face. Don’t know why. I’d been sick a while and all I’d wanted was for my body to look thinner, all I’d wanted was never to look into my own face. I looked now but I couldn’t see myself. I’d spent two years in a trance of starvation, of plotting how to starve myself without my parents noticing. Like a baby junkie suckling heroin milk. Then my vision cleared. I saw my stickthin arms and dead eyes, my jutting ribs and sunken temples. Revulsion broke over me. I hit out at the mirror, missed, hit air, sprained my shoulder hitting air. So much weightlessness, so much admiration from friends and strangers, so dearly bought.
I spring to my feet pushing my chair back. It falls backwards. I catch it just in time. “Shall we go?”
* * *
The evening is cool. We’ve got two hours till curfew. So we take the long way home. Airbrushed skin and cookiecutter features glow from backlit hoardings. Women stand oblivious midpavement, their shoppingbags bristling like cats’ whiskers, chatting with friends as strangers jostle past. Intrepid motorscooterists seek shortcuts around rubbish heaps and over pavements. An apple-red sheath dress in the Mango storewindow brings me to a halt.
This mannequin has no figure at all. This dress is cut for me. I’ve never spent so much on a dress, but, well, every woman needs a red sheathdress. Even a writer. Look! That’s me, lounging on a talk-show-host’s royalblue sofa in my apple-red sheath dress, chatting about my latest awardwinning bestselling experimental-metaphysical bildungsroman.
“That’d’ look fantastic on you,” says Komal.
I lean back from the storewindow, notice the oily intricate fingerprints I’ve left, wipe at them with my palm, and leave an oily smudge. I catch the staring eye of a shopattendant and decide I might as well try it on. Komal shuffles in after me, arms crossed over breasts, elbows pressed over tummy, bulky jacket covering everything.
Why don’t they employ women assistants in a women’s clothing store? I’m tired of buying everything from me: sportsbras, underpants, contraceptives. All the shop attendants are men, mostly young, and they’re staring at us, and Komal’s staring at her feet, and I cross my arms across my body too. After a few backs-and-forths we figure out which size I am. I almost snatch the dress from the attendant. “Won’t be long,” I promise Komal.
The dressingroom is just big enough for the door to open into it. Ignoring the mirrors and bright lights, ignoring the chicken-and-salad food baby disfiguring me, I change. I unclip my braclip behind. My brastraps loosen, my breasts sag in the bracups, and instantly the tightness that’s been cramping my upper back all day, sneaking up my shoulders into my neck, growing into a throbbing, raging headache, falls away. The dress turns out to be cut after all for a boyish figure – it was clipped behind the mannequin into an hourglass illusion. False advertising everywhere. It’s loose in the waist, but not loose enough to hide my food baby. And it’s tight over the bust, flattening my now inadequately supported breasts further downwards. And I look terrible and I want to burrow underground and suddenly I’ve got an idea.
I open the door a smidge. Feet planted wide, swaying left to right, fingernails digging through jacket into elbows, Komal is staring through the rows of dresses. “Komal!” I whisper. “Mind coming in here?”
She comes in and bolts the door.
“What d’you think?”
I stand sideways to her, showing off my grotesque food baby and hell-headed breasts. I stand as I do when nobody’s looking: slouching, midsection not sucked in, butt not thrust out, shoulders not pinned back. My heart thumps in my ears deafening me. I stare at my feet. Komal says nothing and grows bigger and bigger in my peripheral vision.
“Woah,” she says softly.
There’s no admiration in her voice now. But there’s nothing else, either. Quickly, afraid I’ll lose my nerve, I unzip the dress, yanking on it, I free my arms, ease the dress down over my midsection, and let it hang over my hips, making my hips, I know, I know without looking, look even bigger. I stand exposed. My vision goes black. I am a rat, plagueridden, halfbald, that was scurrying at midnight down the gutter when the sun rose, and froze me, and immortalised my hideousness. Come, merciful axe, terminate my shame and me.
“You look… different.” Komal turns to the mirrors.
“No,” I mutter, “don’t look in the mirrors. The mirrors are slimming.”
So she looks directly at my breasts, sagging and stretch-marked in my bra. I resist the urge to explain that when I starved myself, my breasts shrank. I resist the urge to explain that when I found, in running – in running for fun, in running for the love of misty mornings, shrill mynahs, and blue-gold sunrises – the beginnings of a cure for my selfhatred, ill-fitting sportsbras made my shrunken breasts sag.
“You get bloated after meals, too?” She pokes my tummy, startling me, making me look up at her at last. A smile creases her eyes.
Why was I dreading this? All the anger and shame, of which I’ve made stilts, on which to walk through the world, as over a bed of coals, melt, and my stilts incinerate instantaneously, poof, and I’m falling. It’s only onto the beach that I fall. I’m lying on white sand, waves tickling the skin between my toes, and the sun is shining on me, legs spread wide, the sun is shining into me. The warmth enters the innermost part of me, and fills me, and surrounds me, and lifts me up into a place without weight.
“Jiggle-jiggle,” says Komal, jiggling with two fingers the layer of fat, over my abs, or maybe in place of my abs, which survived two years of starvation. She giggles.
Now I want to tell her everything. I want to tell her how she’s not the only one who hates her body. How the squint in my right eye is too slight for surgery to reliably correct, but bad enough to make crossing the road problematic, and how every time I ‘look to the right’ before I cross, I have to turn and face the traffic head-on, to accurately judge distances, judge when I can safely step into the never-ceasing traffic. How what bothers me, more than this danger to my life, is that someone might see I have a squint, might look at me differently, find me out in my shame, which is why I manouevre endlessly to keep whoever I’m with to my left. How my sagging breasts –
My phone rings. “Goddammit!” How many times a day do my parents need to hear I’m alive?
Pa’s voice rings high. He’s received another promotion, he says, another transfer. They’re going to Chandigarh, he says, they’ll be much closer to me when I’m in Delhi. Ah, I mutter. Pa puts Ma on speakerphone, and they interrupt each other, planning trips for us three during weekends and holidays. I can finally go hiking, says Ma. Hmmm, I say, not bothering to tell them that I’ll be out of their lives soon. How little power, after all, they have!
They had all the power when I was in secondary school, when the other girls pointed and giggled, and nobody would sit beside me in class, or pick me for their team during Friday sports hour, or stand near me on the cafeteria queue. And so I began losing flesh, losing my period, my skin growing sallow, my mind going cold and dead. Sometimes, even now, when I wake up in the night, I find I’ve not been dreaming, I’ve been thinking in my sleep, wondering what else I lost in those two years. Pa’s 5’11”, Ma’s 5’6,” every generation grows taller, reaches further. I’m 5’3. When I was sick I felt my brain going quiet. I’m no longer sick but I’m still not bright enough to do all the things I want to do. I hid how little I was eating, how much I was exercising locked in my room, I hid this shameful disease with which I was trying to cure my shameful body. But my parents noticed. They kept trying to drag me bodily to the psychiatrist, kept trying to throw me bodily out of the flat, kept pounding at my door, shouting at me. If you’re going to starve yourself, you shan’t do it under our eyes, they said, what are we to say when your aunts and uncles ask after you, they said, and how hard is it to eat a normal diet, be a normal person, they said.
And listen to them now, gushing all over the place. You’d think I’d imagined those two years. Fuck off, I long to shout at them. I see you.
Komal puts her arm around my shoulder. I look up at the mirror. I’m scowling and Komal’s timid smile is bursting into a grin. She waves at me, waves the hand that’s draped around my shoulder, accidentally flicking my earlobe. And it’s she who says Ow.
“…Okay then,” says Pa. “We’ll talk more later.” He pauses. He always pauses. “Bhalo thakis.”
I look at Komal waving at me like an idiot. Little idiot. Big idiots. You can’t get hurt like this unless you love someone and you know they love you too. “You too, Pa,” I mutter. “Take care.” This time I wait for him to hang up, suffer through his trail of Okay then, yes, bye, okays.
“You should buy this dress,” says Komal. “Just don’t wear it after a big meal.” She tries to wink, and ends up blinking.
“It doesn’t fit. Now fuck off so I can change.”
We walk through the milling crowds, under the flickering streetlights, chattering. Finally, at 9:40pm when we turn homewards, Komal says she’s been thinking about seeing a psychiatrist. I hold my breath. “He’ll make me talk about stuff,” she says, slowly, like pulling teeth. “It’ll be painful… But that’s not what I’m afraid of.”
“What then?” I say carefully.
She doesn’t reply, and I wonder what I’ve done wrong this time, whether she’s going to snap shut again. I picture the psychiatrist inching his chair forward, caressing her thighs, and I look around for my steel waterflask, which I’ve left back in our room. It’s just the right size to grasp, club, smash a rascal’s skull, this asshole won’t get away with it, this asshole can’t hide from me.
“What if,” she says finally, “he blames my parents, and my brother, and tells me I should cut them off, like they’re toxic? Which, even if it’s true, that isn’t how I want to move forward.” Shoppers push past. The smell of leftover chicken alfaham, warmed over, the bones burnt to a crisp, singes our nostril hair. Shop attendants, tense with closing-hour anxiety, shout their wares down the street. “Some people might be able to choose between family and sanity. I don’t want to.” Her eyes are moist, her apple cheeks are bunched in a sorrowful smile, and she’s looking at me as if I have all the answers.
I squeeze her hand. She asks me if I’ll come along with her to the psychiatrist. I disengage my arm to roll up the sleeves of my shirtdress, it’s a warm night, then roll them down again, no it’s not. Why a psychiatrist, I want to ask, why not a psychotherapist? Is medication what Komal needs? Is it what I needed? Would medication have saved me two years of my life? Two blank years, through which I zombie-lurched, a blur of weighings and calorie-countings and boxes of sugarfree laxative gum. Would medication have saved me two inches of height, 12 IQ points, two years of my life which I’ll never get back, by which I’ll always be behind, already my memory at 21 no longer what it used to be?
We’re back in the backalleys. The streetdogs’ eyes are glinting goldgreen. Komal is waddling along beside me, stumbling on shadows.
“Yes,” I say. “I’ll come. But you’ve got to speak up for yourself.”
We trudge up the narrow darkened stairs of our paying-guest accommodation.
“Hey,” says Komal behind me, “d’you think we could put allspice on salad? Make it taste, you know, less salady?”
I pause at the landing to turn on the light. “You can put anything on anything.”
Amita Basu’s fiction appears in 85+ venues including The Penn Review, Bamboo Ridge, Faultline, Jelly Bucket, Phoebe, and Funicular. She’s contributing editor at Fairfield Scribes Micro, and sustainability columnist and interviews editor at Mean Pepper Vine. Her debut, At Play and Other Stories, is due out with Bridge House Press in 2025. She’s won the Letter Review Prize and Kelp‘s Shelter in Place contest, and been shortlisted by the Coppice Prize and contests at Phoebe and Five Minute Lit. She lives in Bangalore, works at a climate action thinktank, and blogs at http://amitabasu.com/