*
Harit had heard people use the term “nervous breakdown” before, and because of his tendency to translate word-by-word instead of seeing a phrase whole, he had seen this term as particularly full of meaning. He felt, indeed, that his very nerves were breaking. It wasn’t until now, when he felt himself falling apart, that he realized how much tension had crept into his body over time, how he had long ago given up full control over his movements and thoughts and actions. As with his Swati routine, he felt that someone else had taken over his behavior. It was done to him instead of something he did. This kind of passive behavior could be comforting: if he didn’t have to insert himself into the proceedings, he was free of responsibility. But now, he understood just what he had given up by resigning himself to such a thing. He had let his life be dictated by others and had shut down his own desires in doing so. He had lost not just his sister but his center.
It surprised him that he had not yet had this breakdown in front of his mother. Certainly, she would have been an ideal audience for such a thing, present and therefore witness to his unraveling but unable to process it adequately and resent his insanity. Yet some part of the reverent relationship remained with his mother, and even in the midst of this agitated state, he could not let her see him like this. Plus, she could offer no care for him, as he was her caretaker. He needed the comfort of a woman, but he needed a woman who was comforting, and now with Swati gone and his mother a statue and the women at temple strangers in their giggles and gilded saris, he thought of Ranjana. He knew that she would understand.
But understand what, exactly? What was he planning on telling her? My sister died and it’s my fault and my mother has gone insane and I am wearing saris to keep her stable? How could he begin to explain this to anyone? Every night, he cataloged these problems in his head and thought how much easier it would have been if one or more of them could be erased. Each one was devastating, but taken together, they created a broken man.
Compassion was being able to put yourself in the place of another, to draw from whatever experience you had to relate to someone else’s trauma and therefore strengthen the both of you. But how could anyone understand what he had gone through? To live in this body, shackled in its self-doubt, to wander these meager rooms and understand how tiny a human life could feel, to see the strong will and bearing of your mother reduced to a joke of itself, to see Swati’s body, crumpled, at the foot of the stairs … Each night, he would think of his body as an assemblage of conditions, things gone wrong—his diminishing hairline and spot-mottled hands and hairy gut and unsavory private parts, the corns on his feet and tiny hairs in his ears and in his nose, clustered together as if sharing secrets or telling rumors about the person on whom they grew. How could this be desirable to someone, and if it happened to be desirable to someone, how could that person be expected to move past purely physical concerns into the much more dangerous world of emotion and friendship and, hardest of all, love? He felt detached not just from himself but from anyone who could attach value to him. For, clearly, anyone who found him attractive—emotionally, physically, romantically—had to be a complete disaster.
Nevertheless, regardless of the fears that had struck him the night of the confrontation at TGI Friday’s, he believed a woman’s presence, the softness of her body and the roundness of her hips and emotions, was welcome to him. Ranjana carried with her a combination of the motherly, the sisterly, and the wifely that he wanted so desperately. She had to be the one to take the mess of his feelings and, from them, make him into the functioning man that he wanted to be.
Hovering in the doorway to the kitchen and seeing that his mother had fallen asleep, he was prepared when he heard the tires of Ranjana’s car crackle over the street. For a second, he feared that the headlights would pierce the darkness of the room and give his escape away, but they made nothing more than a soft glow, and soon Harit was slipping out the back door, around the house, and over his lawn. He could see Ranjana’s hunched form and already knew that she was tense, too. This did not deter him but compelled him forward. He did not wish to see her agitated, but he wanted someone who could understand the direness of his situation. If she were already showing signs of worry, then she was all the more suited to what he had to tell her.
As he opened the door and slid into the car, he had the vague memory of seeing something like this in an American movie, a high school comedy in which a girl and a boy slipped away into the night and wound up talking until morning. He felt his posture straighten: to imagine himself in such a casual social situation gave him a sense of belonging and progress, a small confidence.
“Namaste, ji,” she said, pulling away from the curb and already, he could tell, more nervous than he had imagined. He adopted this feeling in turn, wishing for just a moment that he had never called her, that she had never answered the phone. As they drove farther and the silence between them continued, he started to feel comfortable again. The fact that she did not break the silence, did not try to fill it with unimpressive facts of her day or unnecessary questions into his, expressed to him that she knew that their eventual conversation would be serious.
*
For the past few weeks, Ranjana had asked herself what Achyut’s presence in her life had meant. Surely, she had not endured such a bizarre occurrence for nothing; her instincts had been motherly, and she deserved some kind of reward for trying to help out a young person in need. Now, as she drove, a similar air seizing her car, she saw that her nurturing of Achyut had prepared her for this: the nurturing of Harit.
Harit had not sounded suicidal on the phone, but his voice had sounded resolutely irresolute; he needed her. She could not leave someone in a position like that, and Harit was not just someone. She was too involved to let him keep struggling.