Sanjena Sathian
What We Talk About When We Talk About Reality
Arvind Iyer has not yet made up his mind about the mushrooms when he and his wife set out for the Bhattacharjees’ cul-de-sac. Magic mushrooms, he’s learned they are called.
“Fine, Arvu. Don’t try them. Neeta says you can be our ‘sober babysitter,’” Lalitha had told him in the weeks leading up to this Labor Day afternoon. “I am one serious, somber, sober man,” she’d added, in the faux baritone she used to imitate him.
“Magic,” he’d huffed. This nonsense is proof of Neeta and Jayesh Bhattacharjee’s recent rupture with reality. Babysitter—that, too, a sign of their increasing absurdity. They are regressing. A babysitter, at their age.
“Even if you do not do them, you must come,” Lalitha finally declared, settling the matter. “She has been so sick, and you have not seen her at all. You owe this much.”
Arvind knows Lalitha keeps a mental ledger of social debts. Her greatest fear, other than dying of illness or accident before reaching ripe old age, is reaching ripe old age only to find herself socially isolated by Arvind’s ill-temper and therefore too lonely to enjoy her final years. Arvind tries to manage himself in order to manage her. So, he agrees to at least come along to the Bhattacharjees’, for Lalitha’s sake. Privately, Arvind cannot imagine Jayesh, graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, professor of theoretical physics at Stanford, consuming psychedelic drugs. Then again, the whole Bhattacharjee family has been experiencing a surfeit of epiphanies in the months since Neeta’s cervical cancer diagnosis. But epiphanies come and go; they burst into your life and then retreat, and reason prevails. It’s been a few weeks since Neeta’s final chemo session, time enough for the many eurekas to wear off. Arvind is sure sensible Jayesh will have put a stop to this business before he and Lalitha arrive.
The Bhattacharjees have repainted. The house that was once a stolid gray is now cotton candy pink.
“It makes me nauseous,” Arvind says.
Lalitha shushes him. “It is joyful.”
She rings the doorbell.
“Cervical pink!” Neeta cries when she opens the door to find the Iyers taking in the new façade. She is wearing a scarf over her still-hairless head. “The homeowners’ association called and yap-snapped at me about it.” Neeta draws Lalitha into a hug, addressing Arvind over his wife’s shoulder. “I gave them one nice dose of Shakti-woman-power and they backed off. Everything is stronger on the other side of it all, you see. My intuition, confidence, et cetera.”
Lalitha, with her generous chest and wide hips, dwarfs Neeta, who has always been slight, avian, with narrowly mysterious Shabana Azmi eyes. The baldness—which Arvind is seeing for the first time—further emphasizes Neeta’s angularity.
Lalitha pulls away and grips her breasts. “Speaking of intuition,” she whispers. “I am sure I feel something in here. Something growing.”
Arvind places a hand on Lalitha’s elbow, a gesture he sometimes imagines can draw her back to a more sensible gravity. She is a cancer survivor herself—ovarian, fifteen years earlier, back when they lived in Minnesota—and though she’s been in remission since, she has never quite accepted her lot as healthy. Her body has become, instead, a constant threat, an incubator of infinite silent plagues. She’s issued many self-diagnoses through the years: swine flu, Hunting-
ton’s, pica. It is the third time this week she has speculated breast cancer.
“Lallu, your instincts are very valid,” Neeta is saying, as the three of them step into the foyer. Arvind kicks off his shoes and wanders down the hall ahead of the women. He hears Neeta add: “But there is some difference between imagination and intuition, I think.”
In the living room, Arvind finds Jayesh seated cross-legged on a floor cushion by the fireplace. His eyes are shut. He sports a crimson shirt reading HARVARD DIVINITY—the Bhattacharjees’ peculiar son Rohil recently enrolled in a degree called an MDiv after several years of trudging between organic farms around the world. Neeta and Jayesh, having already shelled out for Rohil to major in comparative ethnic studies at Reed College, are now paying for this second, even more impractical round of schooling. Rohil lends some perspective on Arvind’s qualms
about his own daughter, Mallika, who is the same age as Rohil but far less foolish. Jayesh opens one eye. “Some tunes?” he says, in greeting. He stands to fiddle with the entertainment system. Acoustic twangs meet a gloomy female voice in what Arvind calls Starbucks music. “These are Ravi Shankar’s two daughters,” Jayesh says. “Rohil told us about them. One was a love child.”
“All children are love children, Jay,” Neeta says, fetching mango juices from the kitchen. Arvind sees that despite the holdover chemo scarf, Neeta looks vital—light and loose and somehow filled with bubbles. Everything she is wearing could have once been curtains, like the children in The Sound of Music. But as she moves he can also see, through the opening of her V-neck collar, the sharp dip of her clavicles. Her whole body is hollower than it was before the diagnosis. It makes her look shrewder, like she’s been whittled down to only her most essential reflexes.
Jayesh pikes into a yoga pose Arvind thinks is called “the upside-down dog.” Jayesh’s face reddens from the reversed blood flow. “Don’t drink too much juice, Lallu,” he advises. “You may feel a little ill, during the trip.”
“Ro-Ro says journey,” Neeta amends.
“Arv is still feeling cowardly about it,” Lalitha says.
“If you all decided to march into a mental institution for a lobotomy, and I opted not to, would I be a coward then?”
Arvind grabs one of the mango juices and drains it quickly. He plonks on the sofa.
Jayesh walks his hands back to his feet and straightens. “Arvind, it is nothing to be scared of. If you fear this, you are only fearing yourself.”
“He is scared of himself,” Lalitha supplies. She settles on another floor cushion. “Cannot sit alone in the study for more than a few minutes before coming in to ask me penny for my thoughts and all.”
“It is both less of a big deal and more of a big deal than you understand right now,” Neeta says, joining Lalitha on the ground. “We have done them once already. A ceremony with Ro-Ro in Big Sur before he went back for school.”
Arvind calculates in his mind. “You did this while you were in chemo?” he asks Neeta, horrified.
“There is never a bad time to reflect,” Jayesh says.
“How is Rohil’s school?” Lalitha traces her juice glass with a pinky finger instead of sipping. Arvind recognizes the signs of her nerves. He places one hand on her shoulder, that callback to gravity. She is somewhere else, in that illusory place she goes where Arvind cannot join her.
Jayesh stands and begins lighting agarbatti. “Rohil is learning so much about Hinduism and Buddhism. Things he did not pick up in our house, he is lapping up at Harvard!” He does not seem slighted. “These kids, they go off and they discover things we grew up with, from this new perspective.”
“Is that lavender?” Lalitha asks, sniffing the incense fumes.
Jayesh hands her the wrapping. “Vanilla bean. Rohil got it in Pondicherry.”
“You mean they pick up the white-shite version of the Indian thing,” Arvind says. “Then act like they discovered it all themselves.”
Everyone looks at him. Lalitha scowls—her shut up face. “He means, Arvu,” she says, “that sometimes an idea travels all round the world and then comes back to you over here, isn’t it, Jayesh?” But Lalitha doesn’t wait for an answer. “Listen, you know what Mallika and I did last time she was home? We went for this course—”
Arvind wanders to the kitchen. Lalitha has been jabbering about Mallika’s last visit home for months now. It was the first time the two of them had not fought in many years. Propelled by their new companionship, Mallika had taken Lalitha to an acting class in Oakland. She’d been doing a “modern movement” course after work in Brooklyn and wanted her mother to see what she got up to. Years ago, when they first moved to California, Lalitha drove a prepubescent Mallika to Bharatanatyam dance classes every weekend in Fremont and sat in a metal folding chair for two hours, taking notes, learning the steps herself, to oversee Mallika’s home practices. Mallika quit dance as a teenager, the same year she began to make fun of her parents for saying indicator instead of turn signal and calshum instead of calcium.
The Oakland class was on mime. Lalitha was very taken with it. All summer, she’s been unzipping invisible backpacks, shining invisible shoes, cracking invisible windows. Now, before her new audience, she applies invisible lipstick in front of an invisible mirror. Neeta and Jayesh clap when she purses her real lips and makes a smoochy noise at her invisible reflection.
Arvind rinses his juice glass in the sink and gazes out the kitchen window. The sunshine in the South Bay is unrelentingly pleasant. It beams cheekily over the cul-de-sac. In the distance, the Santa Cruz Mountains ridge up, and the dry yellow hills roll on toward San Francisco.
“This mime business is just like abhinaya, in Bharatanatyam,” Lalitha says. “See, Arvu? Mallika now likes all the things she pooh-poohed when she was younger. They just need time, and they come back to their roots.”
She begins to practice Bharatanatyam mudras, spreading her left hand open in lotus mudra and hovering the other hand above, forming a bird pollinating the flower. Then she stands and begins to tremble her lips, her eyes lingering on an old yearbook photograph of Rohil, when he was clean-shaven. She widens her eyes, and then lifts a quivering palm to her breasts and gasps several lungfuls of air.
Neeta and Jayesh golf-clap again.
“What, you’re playing nauseous or something?” Arvind calls, from the
kitchen.
“Pah!” she says, snapping out of it. “That was me looking off at the man I love. See? Waiting for him to come home.”
While the other three cluster in the living room around a carved wooden box containing the drugs, Arvind lets himself into Jayesh’s temperature-controlled wine “cellar” adjoining the kitchen. The Bhattacharjees put it in after Rohil left the nest, at a moment in all of their lives when they finally had the chance to experience pleasure. For so long, everything had been the same: earning money, saving money for the children, remitting money back to India. Buying a home, renovating a home, attempting to settle into a home. Once they’d fulfilled their duties to both generations—installed their parents in senior living communities in India; paid for the kids’ colleges—they had a chance to spend, for the first time, on themselves. Lavishly, if they so chose. For Arvind, the indulgence is flying business class on any leg longer than two hours. For Lalitha, it’s re-entering the workforce, turning her side interest in decorating into a design “consultancy”—as far as Arvind can tell, she advises other South Bay women on what cushions to buy. For Jayesh: wine, multi-course farm-to-table dinners, a $3,000 electric bike. What Arvind so likes about Neeta, he thinks, as he fingers the neck of a Sancerre, is that she has made the most minute changes of them all; so minor that he almost didn’t notice them. She disappeared for weeks a few summers earlier to walk part of the Camino de Santiago. She didn’t mention it until Lalitha commented on her tan. And then, she got sick and kept it to herself for months.
It was Rohil who told Mallika who told Lalitha, who raced to the hospital and sat with Neeta through many rounds of chemo.
Arvind settles on a Beaujolais. He is uncorking it when Neeta slips inside the cellar. Her clever eyes twinkle at him. She holds out a container of assorted sweets from the Indian store. Pastel colors, pale green pistachio, and sickly pink rose.
“Open up,” she says, and he does, and she pops one into his mouth. Why is it Indians so love to feed one another? At every wedding, every party, someone must place a chunk of something sweet right onto your tongue. That’s all this feeding him is, Arvind knows, their Indianness, not the inklings of flirtation. “Oops,” she says.
Arvind blinks. “Wait. You—” Arvind grips his throat like a poison victim. Was that the mushroom? He knows about edible drugs, from television. “You didn’t give me—”
“Joking,” Neeta says. “But please reconsider this stance of yours. Lallu’s nervous, and I have to say, the whole thing will go better for everyone if you’re along for the ride.”
“This is very silly, Neeta,” he says. “Childish.”
“Arvind, you are accepting a story of yourself,” she says. “You are playing the part of some crotchety old uncle type. But we can all change. It’s not too late.”
Arvind has theories about change. He grasps its inevitability, understands how time steamrolls those who try to stand athwart it. But there is a dignity, he has always believed, in remaining staunch in oneself, and an indignity in flailing to catch up to the change. The Bhattacharjees have chased change, trying to stay in touch with Rohil’s strangeness. Arvind worries, sometimes, that his refusal to do the same makes him cold, that he and his daughter have less language to communicate with each year, and that this is fast becoming true, too, with Lalitha.
How can you depart yourself, though? It feels foolish to try. He is safe where he is, right now, rooted to Jayesh’s wine cellar, relishing the artificially cooled air. He takes Neeta’s hand. It is tiny and marvelous, like a freshly hatched baby bird. Briefly, Arvind understands why people break marital vows; this would be one way to depart himself, but he knows that you must simply gulp away these unrealistic whims. It’s not worth breaking the world you have so carefully built for yourself.
In the living room, Lalitha is plucking at an invisible sitar as Ravi Shankar’s daughters speed up. Her gestures have become unconvincing. The invisible sitar neck is too slender and floppy. Lalitha turns and her eyes meet Arvind’s. She does not make the shut up face, which starts with a wrinkled brow, but rather the come here face, which involves sucking her cheeks in.
He waits a moment to see if he will respond, but he knows he will. It’s muscle memory. Lalitha’s looks call on the instincts he developed when she was sickest, back in Minneapolis; her skin developed new fault lines and her finger and toenails cracked. He doesn’t like to think of those years, but Lalitha makes it impossible to forget them. She circles illness as though it is the only thing in her life that renders it meaningful, even now. Arvind would rather forget when Lalitha was feeling weakest, when she called the school and asked Mallika’s teacher to brush her daughter’s hair every morning because he could not manage the child’s tangles. He would rather forget the time he imagined raising a daughter by himself in the endless Minnesota winter and faced the terrifying possibility that as Mallika got older, he alone would have to buy her sanitary napkins. Bras, alone. A wedding sari, alone.
Arvind thinks, then, of Lalitha’s description of the Bhattacharjees sitting in the chemo area, waiting for the nurse. Jayesh would unwind the scarf from Neeta’s head. He would press his lips to the crown of her scalp and stroke her bald skin with his thumb. Like calming a cat on edge, was how Lalitha had put it. All Arvind could hear in this description was an implicit critique of his failure to press his thumb to Lalitha’s head fifteen years ago. But she had not lost her hair. Surgery had excised the ovaries, and Arvind had been afraid to touch her after the operation, like any brush of his fingers on her skin might shake loose another knot of cancerous cells.
“How’s the design business, Lalitha?” Neeta asks. Jayesh is making tea in the kitchen. That’s how they’re going to take the mushrooms—in a tea.
“Business,” she scoffs. “Nothing so fancy-pantsy. Just a chance to playaround in other people’s homes a bit. But it’s very nice. You know what Uma said to me the other day after I finished her sunroom? She is very eloquent. She said I could see the, what was it, the latent potential of a home and bring it to life.”
“You should get yourself a website and put that in a testimonial, Lallu,” Jayesh calls from the kitchen. He peers over the pot. “Still not boiling.”
“Well, you had plenty of practice lurking in other people’s homes!” Arvind says to his wife. “For how many years did you run around to open houses on weekends, trying to picture us living somewhere else?”
Lalitha flinches. Arvind’s chest burns. He meant to compliment her, but he knows it came out condescending.
“You are making a home for someone,” Neeta says, in a too-wispy voice. “This is important work, Lalitha.”
The two women reach for one another’s hands and squeeze. It pains Arvind that someone else can see in his wife a vast goodness, a capacity for something that he cannot. Perhaps he has already become cold to the world.
Jayesh announces that the tea is ready. He carries a bamboo tray into the living room bearing four mugs. The other three take theirs. Everyone turns to Arvind.
“Arv,” Lalitha says, chidingly. Like she’s the sensible one here. “Please.”
Arvind takes the tea. Somberly, they all clink mugs. The drink is bitter and hot as it washes down his throat. Now they wait.
A few summers ago, the Bhattacharjees and Iyers met up for a weekend in Goa while both families were on their respective India visits. This was the first time Arvind realized everyone else had gone and changed without him. Rohil and Mallika rented a scooter and left their parents behind, which set Arvind to worrying about what they would get up to together.
“Don’t worry,” Lalitha had said, as the four adults wandered barefoot out onto Anjuna Beach. “Mallika is being a lesbian right now, they won’t do any hanky-panky.”
“She is?” Arvind said.
“She was very brave when she told me,” Lalitha said to Neeta and Jayesh. “Did not cry at all, asked if she was just the same to me. I was the one crying, saying of course.”
“You didn’t say anything to me,” Arvind said, but no one was listening. They had taken seats at a beach shack and were ordering piña coladas.
The other three got tipsy that night. Arvind had never seen his wife drunk, and he felt lonelier than ever. Then Lalitha began hacking and coughing and begged Arvind to take her home, for she was convinced she had contracted drug-resistant tuberculosis. She hadn’t, but Arvind snapped to action; he changed their flights, and hovered over her when they returned to California.
As they wait to “come up” (as Jayesh puts it), Arvind’s eyes fall on a photo of the four of them, that week, on the Bhattacharjees’ mantelpiece—raising their glasses, chocolate-browned by the Goan sun. Lalitha is pacing, also examining the picture. Arvind watches her pass that frame, and Rohil’s old yearbook pictures, to pause by a shot of Rohil with a flaxen-haired girl on one of those farms where he bummed about.
“Handsome boy,” Lalitha says.
“He has been wonderful,” Neeta says, “with my health issues.” She has unwound the lavender headscarf and let it settle on the ground by her knee. She’s in lotus position, per Jayesh’s suggestion that they meditate through the beginning of the trip.
Lalitha can’t sit still. “Very there for you, isn’t he?” she says, and Arvind can’t help but hear the jealousy.
“Not only that,” Neeta says. “He came home from his travels, first time in two years, and he was suddenly very open. All this time we knew he was trying drugs et cetera, but when we said, ‘Listen, Ro-Ro, our time is limited, don’t go on hiding yourself from us,’ he said, ‘Maa, okay, here is who I am, accept me or not.’”
“Rohil hadn’t been home in two years?” Lalitha asks.
Arvind notes this with a sense of triumph; Mallika flies back from New York several times a year.
“They become private, these kids, don’t they?” Jayesh says. “They think from all the media that their fresh-off-the-boat parents will say, ‘BEGONE!’ if they do anything different. Don’t even give us a chance, isn’t it?”
Lalitha tugs on the furry white rug. An empty-nester carpet, belonging to people far away from the work of raising sticky, messy children. “When I have these scares,” Lalitha says, “Mallika does not come rushing home.”
Arvind tries to stand to join his wife by the mantel, but his legs have grown stiff, so he only wobbles on the couch.
“Ro-Ro’s coming back for the whole winter break, too,” Neeta says quietly, then seems to worry she is worsening things for Lalitha and covers her mouth with her bony knuckles.
“He canceled a big Peru retreat,” Jayesh says, oblivious. “He was going to go take some plant there and vomit out his demons.”
“So, it stayed,” Lalitha says. “The closeness. It stayed. Even now you’re better.”
Jayesh’s and Neeta’s eyes meet. His are wide and light. Hers, those tight ellipses.
“We didn’t tell him,” Neeta says. “Yet.”
“That you’re better?” Arvind says.
“Not yet.” Jayesh is fixated on his wife, still.
“When he’s home,” Neeta says.
“We’ll tell him then,” Jayesh says.
“Everyone shows up, suddenly.” Neeta’s voice has retreated into the back of her throat. It is quaky, a little pleading. “I didn’t expect so much . . . kindness to come our way. That’s how life should be, you realize, and you appreciate it. You want it to go on.”
Lalitha sits on the floor cushion by Arvind and begins to pick invisible berries. Arvind has seen this routine before. She pushes aside brambles and plucks tiny fruits from the brush, then brings each one to her lips and shudders at the sweetness or puckers at the sourness, depending.
Arvind slides from the couch to the floor. His hand closes around Neeta’s lavender scarf. He twists it like he’s wringing out a wet towel.
He loses time because Jayesh makes them shut their eyes, but at some point Arvind opens his and sees that the whole room is like a play orchestrated from above. See, how the other three are so small from his vantage point, little figurines, useless. How he is in the audience. The great performance of life! The Bhattacharjees are like wax people, completely still, recalling but not embodying reality. Lalitha breathes raggedly, her chest swelling and deflating. The sunshine
makes the white rug beam like fresh snow.
He resolves to go to the bathroom, where he can throw up, but he is trapped on the floor. It takes five minutes, or an hour, or an era, for him to defeat gravity and achieve verticality. His insides are turning icy yet he feels a thousand beads of sweat percolating on his skin. He puts his hand to his forehead and recognizes that he is, according to objective measures, dry. He still holds Neeta’s scarf and, with concentration, ties it around his head like a bandanna. He has been dyeing his hair for two decades. Now he imagines it all falling away, being carried off
by the wind, leaving him with a bare head and only Neeta’s lavender protection.
He pads toward the bathroom. He watches the hardwood as he steps and notices how it shivers, visibly furling out fractal patterns as it connects with his toes, and he remembers seeing a group of devout Jains once in Gujarat, all in white, wearing clinical masks and sweeping the ground before them so they would not tread on any insects. A minor terror strikes him that he might be killing something in the hardwood, but then he remembers that he is no longer a vegetarian and in fact enjoys the occasional hamburger, and so he makes it to the bathroom having accepted his lot as a killer.
He looks like himself in the mirror, except now the weighty concepts of murder and moments are on his mind, so he quickly stops looking like himself and becomes an old man, and then a wolfish beast, and then a child, and then just present-day Arvind again. Every instant is death! he thinks. He has forgotten why he came to the bathroom. He takes one of the cervical pink fluffy hand towels from the side of the sink and sticks it under the faucet until it is soaked through, then presses it to his face, then remembers his nausea and kneels over the toilet bowl to dry-heave.
Someone knocks, and, after a pause, opens the door without invitation.
“Arv?” The voice belongs to Neeta. Her skin looks like fresh mud in which you have just left a footprint. She turns on the light and all her features become mottled sunlight on that mud. “You’re okay.”
“I would like to get out.”
“Remember, if it gets scary: you took a drug. You won’t feel like this forever. It will pass.” She sinks to the ground to join him. Then she adds, “Everything passes.”
Arvind topples over, draws his knees into his chest, and lays his head, with enormous ease, in Neeta’s lap. Her legs are folded to one side under her small rear and she absently places one hand on his temple.
“Scarf,” he says.
“Yes,” she says, and he feels her begin to smooth its edges.
“My hair is false,” he says.
She runs her fingers along the nape of his neck and tugs on his hair as though it is a wig. “Feels real.”
“The color. Can you see it? Can you see through the black and see how it is secretly white?”
“I will look.” She lowers her face to the side of his head. She remains there for a few moments. “I felt a snowy forest. It made me cold. We should be quiet.”
She gingerly removes his head from her legs and sits on the shut lid of the toilet.
In Goa, once, a moment: they were walking along the beach behind Jayesh and Lalitha, who were trying to speak as many languages as possible in the span of one conversation, testing their memories to regain the old polyglotism they’d grown up with. Neeta was telling Arvind about her college days, about coming to Goa for the first time, a boy flirting with her, how she refused to get on his motorcycle. She was laughing at the conservatism they were all raised with. Marveling at the distances they had traveled. They stopped. Bare feet. Stepped close to
the water. Ocean foam brushing their toes. They looked at each other and Arvind saw himself as the boy on the motorbike years ago, saw Neeta mounting it, saw the whole life he could have had with someone—anyone—who was not Lalitha. He didn’t lust after that other life, just saw it, and felt a sudden loss at all the other versions of himself that would never come to be. He’d thought of asking Neeta if she had regrets, but she was not that type, and so he opted instead to try to make the moment last as long as it could, to keep looking at her beaky profile even as the night went dark around them, to live in the sudden, vivid picture of this other reality. Neeta, padding quietly into their house, reading by the window, more muted than Lalitha yet still a force. Him, having known nothing and no one but Neeta. That Arvind a mystery to this Arvind.
The moment had dissipated as the wave pulled back, and they walked on, but right now, lying on the Bhattacharjees’ bathroom floor, it swells in Arvind’s memory, and he achieves what he could not in Goa: the moment grows expansive. He can enter it. He wanders inside, stays there for he doesn’t know how long.
Though he’s cramping from lying on the bathroom floor, his eyes remain on the porcelain toilet and the jut of Neeta’s ankles. The memory, after that spell, retreats from him without warning, drawn away by invisible tides, and what he notices now is a shadow of emerging hairs on Neeta’s feet, beneath the skin; life, preparing to pierce her pores again.
“I’m lonely,” he whispers. “In my head, right now.”
She lifts her right forefinger to her lips. She is more lucid than he is, more in control of meaning and its dispensation. She presses her hand against the bathroom hardwood, motions for him to do the same. He does.
“You can’t see what I see when I touch the wood,” she says, gravely. “Spirals. Wonky shapes. All kinds of things. And I can’t see what you see. See?”
He shakes his head. He has absolutely no idea what she means. With no warning, everything speeds up again: impossibly slow to impossibly fast. He hears the world pass through him in a series of epiphanies that he loses as soon as he senses them. A sound in one ear, a flicker in his brain, a desire to set the newly acknowledged truth down to paper, and then it expires before he can capture it. He opens his eyes and sees, in the corner of the bathroom, in front of the mirror, a spider dangling from an invisible web, doubled in the reflection. It is at work on a small bug, and while he presumes it will eventually eat the thing, now it just appears to be tickling it. Death, always tickling us in life! he thinks.
“Arv?” Jayesh’s voice comes to him through a long tunnel. A door opens. He sees Jayesh’s eyes in the mirror like the spider’s two pincers. “Arvind? Is he okay?”
Neeta waves her hands before Arvind. They look like distress flares, shot from far away.
“Lalitha is asking for you,” Jayesh says. “She says she needs you.”
Lalitha is sitting on the floor in the master bedroom. She has taken her shirt off. She proffers her breasts to Arvind. Jayesh, shielding his eyes, shuts the door, giving the Iyers privacy. Lalitha’s breasts are covered in a dramatic crimson brassiere that hues the room a menstrual red.
“They’re throbbing.” Lalitha yanks Arvind to the carpet and he wishes again to vomit. “Feel.”
She places his hands on the bra. He has not touched her chest much lately.
“It is temporary,” Arvind says, passing on Neeta’s wisdom.
“I can feel the tumors. Feel them. So many.” She makes a sobbing sound, but her eyes are dry.
He squeezes. Each breast in turn. Then again, slowly. The breasts wriggle against him. Twitch. First they are rubbery, false. Then he feels their heat. So many pinpricks rising and prodding, rapid. His hands are going to burn up. He keeps them there. His palms are cool and her flesh is hot and one can soothe the other.
It’s here, again. The widening of time. The way he could enter that lost moment with Neeta on the beach. Something brightens, and he sees an illuminated platform above him, the plane Lalitha so often enters alone. That part of her that can experience what is not there. The picture comes unbidden: she reaches down from the platform, hoists him up by his wrists. There he is, in her reality.
“You’re right,” he says. “I feel them, too.”
Somewhere nearby roll her ghostly, lost ovaries, heavy and clunky. How could they not haunt her? They are always here, rattling around on this plane.
“I’m dying,” she says.
Arvind grips her breasts tighter. Like he can suffocate whatever is in there. Then he loosens. As Lalitha heaves larger breaths, her chest rises. The tumors multiplying until she is one enormous tumor herself.
“Yes,” he says. “You are.”
He frees his hands and begins to grasp at the air. All around Lalitha he feels more thudding drops of death. Tumors everywhere, invisible berries in the invisible brush! He knows if he looks in the mirror he will find that he is a tumor, too; he has lost his face and is a lump of obstinately growing cells the color of humanity but somehow inhuman.
He begins to witness Lalitha diminishing as she hyperventilates. Her breasts disappear on an exhale—that’s what will happen, if she’s sick, since she’s sick. They’ll take away her breasts. Then comes a new flatness of her chest. He hears her sobbing, and he says, shh, shh, and lifts his hands in front of her. He loops them away from her chest. They’ll take away her breasts. Then they’ll make her new ones. He begins to make new ones.
“Arvind, what is that, what are you doing?” she chokes.
“I am making you a new bosom. That is what will happen,” he murmurs. “Show me how you do it,” he adds. He attempts to copy the miming gestures she has been making all summer, to form something out of nothing. He fondles the space between the two of their bodies, but his hands just look like the flapping wings of a flightless bird. “Is it like this?”
“Like this,” she whispers, soggily. She links her thumbs through his and leads him in that sculpting motion. He concentrates and soon he begins to feel the peak of two stiffening nipples and the pillow of tissue around them. Together, they stroke and squeeze the air until they forget her flesh and accept the atmosphere as its replacement. Vaguely he is aware that the platform holding him here, in her realm, will fall away any minute, that gravity will drag him back to the place where he normally dwells, so he moves faster, and she matches his pace. Arvind can see through the window behind Lalitha that the sky is dimming, and the day, which is so brief and so vast, is closing.