Out of Print Workshop Online - October 2023: ARSHALY JOSE

Marma: The Places that Hurt

Arshaly Jose

Arya woke up, engulfed darkness in the room. She blinked furiously to adjust her eyes. She picked up her copy of God of Small Things, dogeared and embroidered with underlines of different colours over multiple re-reads. She scoured the pages and securely placed her Fabindia kurta tag – that doubled as an aesthetic bookmark – where Velutha was brutally killed for the crime of being born a Dalit. But he had encroached her dream, fought valiantly with a ‘mass’ background score, against everyone he could not in the book, and just before he was united with his love, Arya had woken up. 

Dreams of dawn see light they say. What about the dreams of dusk? 

‘Someone ordered me. Delivery in 15 mins, mam😘’ The notification on the phone shook off the last remnants of her nap. She used to hate that emoji. And Aadhi used it obsessively since she confessed her distaste for it. Who winks when they kiss? She had asked him, trying to clinically dissect her idiosyncrasy, sitting at a respectable distance from him, away from the faculty and students on the empty stairs near the lab. He scrunched his face into a wink, pouted animatedly like only a twenty-one-year-old could, and quickly planted the first kiss on her cheeks. She froze. More than anything, she was scandalised by the speed at which he could convert a thought into action. Did his thoughts not have to jump through multiple sets of rules, then travel along the length of nerves, and then move the muscles to turn into actions like hers? She instinctively looked around. She had to. She was the teacher. She was the woman. She was the one responsible. She always was. After she ensured there were no prying eyes, a hint of a smile escaped the walls she painstakingly built. Like a kid sceptically reaching out for a chocolate offered by a stranger. Arya did not trust her ‘stranger’ but the love he offered was too rare for her to not at least try. That same smirky smile showed up whenever she saw the bright yellow emoji. It is an odd thing, this heart. It can drastically reduce the gap between the things you hate and the things you love. Like folding a world map one day and discovering Russia was so close to Alaska all along.

Arya looked at herself in the mirror. She tried touching the playfulness that still lingered in her dark circle-lined eyes. When she smiled, really smiled – not the fake symmetric one she had practised to almost perfection – her right side stretched more than the left and ended up seeming more like a smirk. She ran her fingers gently over her cheeks on the scars gifted by the parting bout of acne that seemed to have trapped her youth in them like a snow globe. 

She had thought a lot about youth since dating Aadhi. She would be thirty-six this year. It wasn’t too old. But the infuriating barrage of alliances her Amma brought up throughout her twenties seemed dwindle post thirty-two. And had almost dried up now. Oh, just what she would give to trade Amma’s quiet resignation of her singledom for her old fury when she turned down yet another ‘nice’ Brahmin boy. 

And men’s advances – they are just the most accurate system for tracking a single woman’s age. The earnest I-love-you-forever’s and I-would-die-without-you’s of the 20s slowly replaced by do-you-wanna-fuck’s in the 30’s and then to silence. Radio silence, leaving her wondering did ... did I change?

Arya had changed. She used to be the cliché perfect girl. A spectacled, pimpled, wavy-haired topper. Her Amma strategically introduced her to books at a very young age so she would fall in love with the Mr Darcys’ and Atticus Finchs’ of fiction and keep away from the lanky crude boys of her reality so she could eventually fall in love with a suitable boy Amma picked. Amma’s plan worked well until Arya fell too much for the fictional men so she decided to pursue them. ‘Tch, what a waste of talent. She should take Engineering or Medicine, with that board score,’ everyone advised her parents. They initially tried cajoling her, but seeing she was adamant, they let her be. They consoled themselves that English literature is respectable. And most importantly it only would increase her standing in the marriage market where they could find her the perfect IIT Iyer boy while the fictional men kept her busy. Amma’s renewed plan worked well until she met her firebrand SFI activist Alex in second year of college. No one would have believed then that she would be thirty-six, single, and contemplating sending a sexy selfie to a twenty-one-year-old student. Even she would have scoffed at the possibility that out of all the fictional women, she imagined herself as, Mrs Robinson would be the one she would play.

Arya had an epiphany. She quickly grabbed a comb and ran it through her wavy hair, then searched around to find a companion to her trusty old grey rubber band that she almost only used to tie up her hair in a ponytail or an occasional safe braid on the days she oiled her hair.  Then, she parted her hair neatly and tied it up on either side in two pig tails. She pulled out few stay hairs and ruffled the rest. She changed her comfy tees to a white button-down shirt with one, no two buttons undone. She pulled out the sole red lipstick from among the nude lipsticks. Today was a red lipstick worthy day. She carefully applied it while practising this elusive perfect pout she saw on Instagram. After a few failed attempts and the help of Google she settled with tightly pursed lips and widened eyes. Hands on her hips and her weight on her left leg. Click. 

She sent off the picture before her relentless right brain could make another pros and cons list about the consequences. She felt excited. She looked hot. Cute even. And most importantly, young. She wasn’t a Mrs Robinson whose midlife came calling few decades early due to the clamouring of Indian aunties. She was Arundhati Roy’s Ammu today. And like Ammu, she loved her Velutha.

But did she love Aadhi? She knew had known love. Love that hurt enough to kill. 

‘Urvi,’ Alex had proclaimed, touching a point on her thigh about seven inches north of her knee.

 ‘If I massage here properly, your cold will be gone, like this.’ He snapped his fingers. 

‘Okay, ashane,’ she said without looking up at him from her assignment on Standing Female Nude. 

‘Even three decades after writing it, Duffy’s nude model is still trying to find herself in the art.’ She read aloud her last sentence almost expecting applause.

‘Wah! Let me revise my marma knowledge on this female nude. Stand. Stand.’

‘Adipathi, Phana, Vidhura, Amsa,’ he recited, touching different points from the crown of her head.

When he reached the middle of her chest, the model decided to take charge. ‘So, what does this marma do?’ 

‘This is Hridaya. It is the most important of the 108 marmas. If pressed they say it can hurt enough even to kill.’  

She placed her fist on his chest and applied pressure. ‘Like this?’ she asked in a flu-gifted extra sensuous voice.

‘No.’ Using the tip of his index finger, he gingerly drew patterns on her breast. She moved closer and closed her eyes. Suddenly, he sharply pushed in his finger at the centre of her chest.

‘AHH’ She gasped.

That night and many others in the sultry Madras air on the college campus, they searched each other for marmas that hurt deeper. His absent father, her body image issues, his anger, her limits, his surname, her surname. The list kept piling up as the years piled on. She found a little more love in each marma she uncovered in him. In return, she allowed him to create new ones in her. Until he walked away saying ‘Go fuck your paripu-eating Iyer boys your Amma chooses for you.’ hitting her right at a marma.  After that, she worked obsessively on insulating each of her marmas with varying levels of success. 

Arya was getting impatient. Did Aadhi not see it? Was he traveling on an Uber moto that he couldn’t’ reply? She had already contemplated and failed to come up with an explanation when WhatsApp would dutifully snitch if she deleted the impulsive selfie. How could she? It was one thing having a secret rendezvous with a student occasionally, but this would be incarcerating proof. And they had not even done anything yet.

‘Swipe left if you are looking for my surname.’ It was Aadhi’s bio on Bumble that had first caught her attention. She always struggled with Bios. How does any amalgamation of twenty-odd words describe someone? But Aadhi’s bio did it as best as it ever could. He was everything his bio said about him. And it was all of it that pulled her closer to him in their three months of ‘dating’ where they met occasionally in the sheath that the college could offer. She knew him more through his Instagram account @beingDaLit, where he posted satirical content on modern India. He was funny and unapologetic about being funny. In times where being angry is currency and typing speed the metric of passion, he chose to be happy, and it was revolutionary. 

He was her true rebellion. To date a Dalit, albeit an English-speaking, fair-skinned one was something unimaginable for her. Rebellion for Arya always stopped at the bed. And today that would change. She would let him touch her. With that, she decided she would erase years and years of oppression. 

Ding! The bell rang and Arya quickly changed out of her youth, draped a lavender cotton saree languidly around her and ran towards the door into his arms. Words had no more relevance. She stained his cheeks with the red from her lipstick. The lavender sari uncoiled with his touch and left their trail to the bedroom of her cosy 1 BHK. He had the impatience of a hungry child. A kiss there, a bite here, he ripped through the clothes and layers between them. She smiled and reassuringly ran her fingers through his hair. He awkwardly struggled to find the nooks and corners to fit himself in. With the patience of a teacher, she guided him into her. But her touch possessed him, and he felt unable to hold himself. As though clearing it off would clear him of his shame he picked up his t-shirt lying on the floor and meticulously wiped her body clean and laid down turning away from her.

She looked at his back, hunched into a cocoon, and felt it was like many other indistinguishable bad dates she had. Arya did not mind the early end of their endeavour as much as she was disappointed by how normal everything felt. As she patted him kindly, she looked for the earthy raw smell of Velutha but there was nothing exotic about the smell of cheap Axe deo. She gently opened his curled fingers searching irrationally for calluses in his soft hands. She searched for abs sculpted by forests in the belly filled with parcel food and cheap beer. He was supposed to be different. He was supposed to make her feel different, make her feel real, make her feel something. Otherwise, what was the point of it all?

She gently turned him towards her and looked at his young handsome face that refused to look into her eyes. She wanted to salvage the moment. She wanted to smother him in her kindness by not just letting him touch her, but in forgiving him. Who else would do that? She would make him feel like a man in exchange for giving her the chance to feel like a rebel. He slightly nodded his head and as respectfully as possible picked up his phone and started scrolling and noticed an unseen message notification on WhatsApp.

Before he could hide it, she saw the smile escape his lips. She saw her through his eyes fleetingly. It reflected the same pity she had for him, just of a different shade. ‘It is cute. Really, really cute.’ He said with all the earnestness he could muster. It hurt more than if he would have just kept quiet. She smiled her fake symmetric smile. Marmas hurt the most when caressed. 

She could suddenly taste the dryness of the late October air rubbing against the goosebumps on her body. She could distinctly trace the lights from the window bouncing off her unruly folds. She could feel every hint of the wrinkles on her forehead, every silver of the stretch marks on her thighs, every fold on her body that stored her stories. She felt intensely naked. In that long moment that stretched endlessly, her rebellion died. She felt a new marma take shape. They lay turned away from each other, two bubbles under a bedsheet, looking at the dusk sluggishly turning to starry night.

*