All That Which Holds Me

“What are you—an ocean of love?” I ask my first kiss, fully unconvinced.

To call him a teaspoon would be rich.

I am diseased to please; I offer myself as lamb to slaughter, particularly to those who walk all over me. It’s not a kink. If you unpeel my Freudian onion, you’ll find the adversity. But I don’t have the breath or body for that tutorial today.

He smiled and responded with some love-lorn Instagram poetry. Ganja may be a confounding factor. I don’t think he could tell love from an enduring habit.

x

I am not a collector of objects or people. If you had to bucket me, I wouldn’t wait until spring for deep cleaning. It’s a maternal inheritance—I was told some people join you for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. It’s been a three year old’s lifetime, or the last three springs that I’ve spent at the Centre.

I am a card carrying member of the Prof. S fan club. She glides by my room at thirty minutes past ten, adorned in a crisp cotton sari—pastel pink. Deceptively tender.

I turn towards S and mumble a good morning in response to her infectious smile.

Appropriate, given we work out of the Epidemic Diseases Hospital. It was built during the late nineteenth century—early twentieth century as a quarantine and treatment centre in response to the Bubonic plague. Colonial rule has lapsed, the plague has passed, quarantine is no longer the order of the day, yet healing continues in silent, immeasurable ways.

The proof is in AR and P’s knowing, maternal smiles; under G’s watchful eye; and even in the unsettling exchanges between SSS and A. I remain hesitant and continue to be irked by corporate speak of “we are a family”—but I say this with utmost deliberation: they are the ones who hold me.

x

I am 20 years old and my coping mechanisms are experiencing some evolutionary delay. I’m having my first and perhaps most searing heart-break. I chant on loop, “I have a ____ shaped hole in my heart.” I’m howling like in a fever dream in room no. 102, Serenity PG, until I collapse. My thoughts are racing faster than the puke green dukes on Dairy Circle. ____ and I were no contact for ten days; he was climbing mountains. I was quizzing myself and everyone I knew as to why he loved me. Love felt unearned. It was the beginning of learning that something deep inside me lay unaddressed, rotting.

x

G often talks about care—most of us at the Centre nod along in resonance. Care—the word rolls off my tongue, sucking in a little air. It never quite wets my lips. I sometimes chide G—you’re not the Gangsta you think you are. She peers into my eyes and says wryly, don’t tell anyone. I smile goofily to myself, thinking she chooses to humor me even at my cheekiest. I don’t respect G because I’m required to, but because she demonstrates first hand how to honor the messiness among beings. G is the poster face for tough-love, but she’d see to it that I pick myself up even after I fall from grace (after I wrangle a little on the cold hard ground).

x

My Redemption and I started dating when I turned 21, partly to stitch up the _____ shaped hole in my heart and partly because My Redemption looked like Jimmy Shergill. This is going to read like the anti-thesis of my feminist self, but with My Redemption, my interiority became available to myself. My Redemption was basically the boy version of me, but cuter and more attentive in class. Over the course of 2019, I knew this was my end game. Of course, we dated and broke up and dated and broke up, until both of us became very numb to the idea of relationships altogether. Yet My Redemption held on that I wasn’t irredeemable, quite on the contrary, I’m a thirsty ocean of love.

x

I walk into the Centre late on some days; the cocktail of brain medicines leaves me heavy with fatigue and slumber. I live by myself and God alone is witness to how grateful I am for small mercies—though perhaps this is a big one. I can’t tell. Sure, I can begin a rant of the post-capitalistic horror show that we’re all non-consenting participants to, particularly on weekends in Bangalore. But as they say, I don’t have the bandwidth. I dread the weekends. To sustain a guilt-free good time in a metropolis requires you to be within a certain tax bracket, which I currently do not belong to. So I wait until Monday morning, when I can reunite with my people and banter over cups of tea, even when it's summering.

x

What if during one of my swims, I dissolve into the open waters and join it entirely? Glistening as the sun catches on my droplets. We are taught water is merely two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, but I wonder if it holds memory too—if somewhere within it, I continue to exist. What would it remember? The times I was wailing through the streets of Delhi or Coimbatore? Or would it return me to Kunti and Basanti Devi, sitting in their front yard in rural Jharkhand, eating mangoes and sipping warm milk beneath the trees?

x

Over the years, Bengaluru has become notorious for sheltering a growing number of urban heat islands. Summer no longer arrives only in shades of Pink Tabebuia. The dryness comes carrying its own ecology of illness. Sx is my work peer and fruit lover. She works around the heat by surrendering herself to fruits in season. One such mango indulgence left her a little green around the face when she came into work the other day. I, too, was particularly unwell—of the mind. Being able to care for her gave me a perverse sense of control. Perhaps caregiving has one foot in altruism and the other in self-preservation—steadying myself as I tally the balance sheets of care.

x

My Redemption told me that he wanted to travel with me to Varkala. I had been there once before on my graduation trip with my girl gang, whom I don’t speak to anymore. I don’t speak to many people anymore. Or do they not speak to me? We still watch each other’s Instagram updates though, voyeuristically keeping tabs on each other’s lives. I digress.

I am now 24. COVID-19 is on a mid-semester break, and I am in Varkala on a weekend break from my first job. I am sitting at a shack overlooking the Arabian Sea, gathering all the determination I have to offer. I pick up my cellphone and dial a familiar number almost instinctively. My Redemption answers—I cut him off before he can say anything further. I tell him I just spotted a school of dolphins and that I couldn’t think of telling anyone but him.

x

I enjoy working myself to the bone. It reminds me that I am alive and that there is more to the cesspool of absurdity we are reduced to on our cellular screens. I am among the privileged few who love their work. I am a public health researcher and a sucker for clean, usable data.

At a conference a few days ago, a demographer claimed that only two entities can tell the future—God and statisticians. And in God we trust, but all others must have data. I like certainty and the neatness of knowing the odds I am playing.

In class 11 economics, I was taught that human beings are fundamentally irrational, and that error is built into the architecture of decision-making. The orderliness I introduce into my work, I undo in my personal hours. I swing wildly from lawful good to chaotic evil, like an impulsive tide wrecking its way across the shore, swallowing whatever scrambles in its path.

x

Like any other day, the day I breathe my last will probably be uneventful too. Mild to moderate. Like most of my life thus far. I do not fear death, nor do I long for it. I would simply like it to arrive as per its scheduled ETA. But when it does, I hope to leave in style. Once I’m electrified into fine dust, I want to dissolve into the ocean. Maybe then I will bathe naked in the moonlit hours. Kiss a shark.