Shrimps and Gunpowder
by Amita Basu
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
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 as 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. When I read this I snorted and vowed I’d never succumb to this modern ancient illness.
“So, yeah, you should come to the golf course 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 stick-thin 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. Air-brushed skin and cookie-cutter features glow from backlit hoardings. Women stand oblivious mid-pavement, their shopping bags bristling like cats’ whiskers, chatting with friends as strangers jostle past. Intrepid motor scooterists seek shortcuts around rubbish heaps and over pavements. An apple-red sheath dress in the Mango store window 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 sheath dress. Even a writer. Look! That’s me, lounging on a talk-show host’s royal blue sofa in my apple-red sheath dress, chatting about my latest award-winning best-selling experimental-metaphysical Bildungsroman.
“That’d look fantastic on you,” says Komal.
I lean back from the store window, 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 shop attendant 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 men: sports bras, 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 back-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 dressing room 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 bra clip behind. My bra straps loosen, my breasts sag in the bra cups, 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. I look terrible. 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, plague-ridden, half-bald, 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 self-hatred, 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 correct reliably, 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 judge distances accurately, 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 is 5’11” and Ma is 5’6”; every generation grows taller, reaches farther. 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. “Go away,” 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 go away so I can change.”
We walk through the milling crowds, under the flickering street lights, chattering. Finally, at 9:40 p.m., 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 water flask, 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 back alleys. The street dogs’ eyes are glinting gold green. 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.”
Copyright © 2025 by Amita Basu
