It has been raining the whole night. And in the morning it is still raining. The sky is gray, wet. The trees sway and shiver. The grass is strewn with leaves. A dog barks from a balcony. It is the damnation samar.
I stand before the window and look out. Everything is still. I am absent from here.
The phone rings. I pick up. There is a sound of breathing. Then the phone disconnects.
There are days when I do not talk to anyone. I watch films. The risqué ones. Women swaggering their hips, flaunting their boobs, showing their thighs, putting out their tongues and teasing men.
I had seen a film once. A young man goes for confession. The priest asks him,
“Do you lie?
Do you covet what others have?
Do you commit impure acts, do you touch yourself?”
He gives him three Our Fathers and Hail Marys for kissing a woman tongue in and out.
I haven’t yet kissed. Maybe on the cheek of a friend once, on the forehead of a child once, my mother on her head many times. But on the lips? No sir, never.
We have a test. Sometimes we do this to allow people to pass into the loop.
They have to read aloud selected passages of Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Delta of Venus. Sometimes Tropic of Cancer and maybe The Sexual Life of Catherine M or The House of Holes, depending on our mood.
If they do it unflinchingly, and seem to enjoy, take pleasure, their voices roughing up in arousal, their glancing up flushed, their nipples straining against their shirts, they pass.
If they fumble and look shocked, they are booted out.
Outside, it is so cold. I see a dead sparrow on the grass near the row of purple flowers. Its body is stiff, the claws skywards, as if holding the sky in its death.
I am thirty. My body is thin. My breasts are small. I read books and search for passages where I can know the magic of a man and woman fucking each other. I remember the first time I knew of the missionary posture was when I saw a Gauguin painting. A woman on her back on a dark flower and a man entering her, her legs wrapped around his waist. It was a tiny illustration and I had to fetch a magnifying glass to pore over it. It was the eureka moment. It was the imagined paradise.
I snuggle inside the blanket, close my eyes, and imagine someone holding me tight. Skin to skin. From head to toe. I promptly fall asleep. It’s a wave. I sway with the unnamed, unfaced, unbodied.
Someone joggles me. It’s my mother. She interrupts my orgy. I look up, dazed, befuddled.
My palms smell musk. My thighs are wet. I look into her eyes. She shrinks back. I mumble, “Give me two minutes.” Silently I say, to come. The blanket is warm. It is a warm, comforting taste-in-the-mouth feeling, of being home. I stagger into the bathroom. I switch on the geyser. I look at my face in the mirror above the basin. A face looks back at me. You are fine. I pull off my shirt. My breasts are small and my nipples two brown patches. My face is solemn. My eyes are big, wide, with a smudged under-skin. I look like a waif. Emaciated and malnourished. Why does the tiger roar so furiously inside me then? From where does it get its sustenance? From where does it feed its hunger?
These are half-framed emotions. Nebulous and dark and guilt-laden. This is still the time of no internet. This is still the time of no selfie. Yet I sit down on the wet floor, spread my legs wide, place a mirror between them, and peer down in the dark. Does it look like the Munch sketches of the vulva? Does it fit the description from the much-read Second Sex passages?
I take a selfie.
I feel horror. I feel revulsion. I feel guilt. My body is not mine. My breasts are not mine, my pubis, my palms, my toes, the instep, the arch of the sole, the lobe of the ear. They are not mine. My pleasure is not mine.
I examine them one by one. I cannot see me. I need someone else to see me and then describe me. I need another. It has to be a game of two. I find this unfair. Unjust, uncouth. There has to be the rhythm of one. The symmetry of one. The exploration of one in total leisure. A nook at a time, a crevice at a time, an orifice at a time, a crack at a time. I am the Columbus. As I see innocently my face, my wrists, my fingers, my feet, so I see them. From within and from without.
I am the difficult child. A child-woman who has no friends. No ambitions, no aspirations. Who is scraggly, untended, ungroomed. Who wears unbecoming clothes. Who is neither a child nor a woman yet. There are so many negatives in my life. I am drifting.
There are days when I do not come out of the house. Days when I do not come out of my room.
My mother thinks these are difficult teen times. Too many hormones running rampant. Thank God for a mother like that.
This is still the time of no internet. I do not know hormones to be the villain. I do not google since there is no Google. So instead I ask real people. The quiet girl in the school who knows even less than me. The elder cousin who whispers conspiratorially, “You put your tongue in and suck his, like you would an ice lolly.” She won’t tell me about the heat raging inside me, about the body-less feeling enveloping me.
I lie back crumpled on the bed as my body sheds blood. I know the biology and feel shackled. This is not power. It is a trap. A monthly trap of pain and blood. It has been five years now and still I am not used to this. I look at 30 years of this ahead and I am horror-struck.
Ma, did you go through all this? Sometimes I watch her speculatively. She is so beautiful. So full. There is a strange attractive engagement in her.
Sometimes I start to ask her, then stop. She starts talking baby talk. “Oh my darling baby shaby.” She pinches my cheek and ruffles my hair.
“Oh Ma, let me go.” I escape to my room. Draw the curtains and flop head down on the bed.
The boy in my kindergarten, Kooki. He would not let me off the school bus. He would pull out his tiny cock and show off. “Show me yours then I will let you go.” I would squirm and struggle. I didn’t have a cock to show. We were five or six at that time. I would troop into the toilet, not pull down my knickers, instead in a mad hurry to get back, pull the lower end one side and pee. The knickers always got wet. It took me a long time to get rid of this habit. Like a long time to get rid of the habit of sucking my own tongue.
Now I surmise these were nascent sexual yearnings. I read so much and think I am Freud and Jung. That I have discovered myself. The inner well of my being. My raging, bubbling hot lava of heat. My listlessness, my ennui, my life.
I realise I am waiting for something. Sometimes a tub of ice cream. Sometimes a good sleep. I walk bare feet on the grass. An ant climbs up my calf. Its tiny spidery legs tickle my skin. A whisper of a sensation. I let it be and enjoy the sensation. My eyes close and I fall down. Flat on my back on the grass I lie. The tiny yellow flower touches my neck. The sky is blue and clear.
Ma calls out from the balcony, “Come inside, my darling baby.”
I don’t hear her. I put my palms on my ears and hum, “Dear Prudence, won’t you come out to play.”
I make a camera frame out of my fingers and say, “Cheese,” as I click a selfie.
Excerpted with permission from ‘Taking Selfie’ in The Mistress of Phoolpur: Stories, Pratyaksha, Speaking Tiger Books.
