Photo by Colton Duke on Unsplash
Nandita. That is my name. Born of sun and sand, I found myself on shingled shores, in a way of life very different from mine. People counted Time differently, there. The bread tasted different. The air was tangy. The gin juxtaposed with the searing, wintry cold to stir me in ways it hadn’t before. There was magic in those differences and that’s why I went.
Where I came from, to be ambitious, and to be a woman, was acceptable as long as it was subtly explored. Executed with humility and grace. There is no grace in visceral passion and unadulterated ambition. There is beauty in it but no grace, and this wasn’t lost on me when the cold air enveloped me for the first time as I exited the arrival terminal of JFK airport. The whirling wind seemed to be challenging me to a duel of faith and exploration, nudging me to get outside my comfort zone. I was eager to grow up and face the heat in that winter wonderland.
There were many firsts for me in my first days: Living away from my parents in an international hostel teeming with youthful vigour. Neighbours noisily making love. To this day, when I hear Bono singing, “It’s a beautiful day,” I concomitantly hear my neighbours’ voices rising above their song of choice to dampen their amorousness, and I have to change the track. It would traumatise me, back then. The thudding rhythms of Down to the Bone’s funky jazz blasting through the hallways as students danced their way to the restrooms and into each other’s arms. People were so free with their bodies, something I was completely unaccustomed to, in the humid rigidity of southern India. There were even joint showers for men and women! People walked around the hallways in their underclothes and drank cheap, red wine, and the professional musicians who stayed in the building would serenade us into the early hours of the morning with their beautiful, arduous practice.
“Don’t register for fancy-sounding courses,” my brother had warned me over the phone, but I was determined to sign up for an advanced graduate-level course in cancer biology. Back in the day, in India, it was unheard of, to be able to take coursework outside of your narrow stream of study. The prospect was too enticing, not to miss out on interesting sounding courses, and I gave in to temptation. How I suffered!
There was a south Asian community in the hostel and they embraced me to a measure, I suspect, because I was young and comely and single. It was open house in Vivek Bhatia’s hostel room, and flatbread and Indian lentils would always be in the offing for those of us, homesick. I was never homesick but I’d actually never had the chance to meet Indians from other parts of my large country before, so I would go to Vivek’s room in the evenings just to soak in some ‘desi’ culture, of a kind slightly different from the sultry, southern nook from where I came. I met Tanvi, there. She was smart as a whip and devoid of pretensions, and earnest in her pursuit of our friendship. She was different from the rest and didn’t indulge in gossip. “Nandita,” she would opine, “something doesn’t add up about that boy. Why don’t you date someone else from your suitors?” She was also, my confidant on all matters Advait. Having spent a quarter of a century on Earth and having no significant romantic escapade to shore up my credentials as a modern woman, I was eager to see what I was missing. But I was a romantic. I wanted deep connection and afters years of social isolation in my hometown, craved for it. Advait was the boy upon whom I enthrust a great deception: I projected my image of a perfect man onto him and said, “You are it.” He didn’t, of course, measure up, in the end, but I wasn’t to know it then, young and completely naïve and madly infatuated, filled with twenty-four years of expectations on this front. He didn’t stand a chance. He tried. His good looks and sharp intelligence unfortunately hid a profoundly insecure core. There were other issues. I was in love with life and he kept telling me, “I don’t get too happy or too unhappy about anything. I’m always in the middle.” Strange talk. I tried to pull off a great deception. He was to have been the glue that cemented Life, as it was, with Life, as it was meant to have been.
I had lucked out with my flatmates: two lovely Mexican gentlemen, both named Carlos, and an African American angel in the avatar of a theologist, Rashida. “Nandita, why do Indian women only get with Indian men?” both the Carlos’ had asked me on my twenty-fifth birthday, a week before the twin towers were made pregnant with the violent embers of destruction and brought down, and the world forever changed. It was true. Tanvi only dated Indian men in the building, despite the Carlos’ many propositions, and I was already taken. We giggled over this seemingly shocking question even as we drank down tequila and marked the day. Back then, I still believed there was a worm at the bottom of each bottle of tequila. I believed this because the Carlos’ told me and I didn’t question their expertise on all things Latin. I took many things at face value, because there was simply too much to assimilate, my young senses new to the visceral assault and also, having to imbibe them in possibly, the most experientially dense city on the planet. It was dizzying.
I regretted that Columbia University remained open the day after September 11th, with the good intention of providing students a safe haven to discuss their traumas, but it meant coursework and due dates and all of our hearts were broken. I’d gone downtown for a career conference when the tragedy occurred. When I’d finally prodded Advait that evening, exhausted from walking all the way back uptown, on the green terrace that faced the dining hall, even as he smoked a cigarette and let go of whatever semblance of attachment he had had for me into the cold, night air, along with the wispy smoke he exhaled, I learnt that hearts can switch off for no apparent reason. This is a lesson I would become repeatedly acquainted with, with age. As I would, with red wine. I remember going up to my room and pouring myself a large glass of cheap, red wine and gulping it down. The silence and calm returned, again, even as the tears streamed down my youthful cheeks. I could cope and found a window to strategize. Rework my grand plans. Pretty boy no longer part of life plan. Check. The human heart is fickle. But New York is not. It survived the wounds of that terrible day and soldiered on.
I would, when I should’ve been studying molecular biology and immunology, walk the streets of Manhattan, fully aware that I was in the middle of miracles, there. I would sit in bars and read of the history of the boroughs while sipping on Valpolicella. Every corner seemed incandescent with the layered tapestry of life. I wondered if Alexander Hamilton had any idea the city he’d champion would juggernaut into the sky-scraper-laden centre of the urban world. In its evolutionary genes lay the entire history of the Western world, mirrored in the reflections off of its glassy skyscrapers. I was nursing a broken heart and found solace in the writings of Edith Wharton. Initially, Wharton’s The Age of innocence, utterly captivated me. I secretly imagined I was Countess Olenska, misunderstood by society and utterly unlucky in love. By the end of my time in New York, I would realise my story was more akin to Lily Bart of The House of Mirth: Her spiral into desperation, her need for release. Her isolation.
One of the Carlos’ took me out to a Mexican restaurant for dinner one day, to cheer me up. “Nandu, I am going to write a number on this napkin,” he’d said, extracting a pen from his pocket, “and it will tell you how many women I’ve slept with. Now, you do the same.” Carlos was beaming from ear to ear and I wrote a big fat zero down. When he looked at me completely perplexed, I simply replied, “I haven’t slept with any women.” We both laughed.
Ever since I was nine and had had a benign tumour removed from the bottom of my spine, I’d wanted to be a surgeon. I’d studied hard and did well in school and when I couldn’t get into med school at seventeen, my plan was to hold on and hold out till I made my way West and try again. My Masters in Biotechnology was to be a sort of a conversion degree toward that purpose. The stakes were high. I had to take my MCATs and would study after tackling my college coursework, late into the night. I had to look for a job post-September 11th when the economy there had come to a standstill. I had to write my thesis. I also, had to negotiate Advait and his new paramour, Shivani, a light eyed girl from Delhi, where he was also from, revelling in their new romance, in the same hostel. They spoke in tongues I didn’t understand. I lived on the 9th floor. Advait was on the 11th floor. Shivani was on the 7th floor. “You’re in purgatory,” Tanvi would tease, but no matter the support she’d offered, a darkness had started taking over me, like a virus slowly creeping into the flesh and subtly altering my chemistry. My way of thinking.
I can’t blame all of this on Advait. I started walking up and down the nine flights of stairs from then. Matter solved. But, I did poorly on my MCATs. And then, I wasn’t sure how to go forward. For the first time in my young life, I couldn’t see my future. I would plot and scheme in my room, alternative scenarios, even as the Wild Strawberries would be playing on my music system as I guzzled gin and wine, the pauses between songs and drinks too difficult to bear.
How I wished I was one of the students from the Manhattan School of Music in the hostel. I could play my way out of that hole. Anything to grasp at strings that would lift me out of the darkness with melody and harmony. Or, that I could sing my world into place again. I discovered lounge music, which was a big sensation back then, and the grooves and lilting rhythms and haunting melodies spoke of aching and loss and lust. But mostly, they spoke of desire for a sense of perfection with which to taste the world, art and relationships. I wanted my life to be perfect. How utterly, beautifully foolish. That meant not making too many mistakes. That meant parsing and cutting through life with scientific precision, and keeping the bits that mattered, so as to build a repertoire, a fleshy body of work and relationships, that was exemplary. To curate Life like a beautiful collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. But, I didn’t think about the pain and toil that probably went into those creations.
When I was a young child, maybe around eight, I’d gone to a family friend’s farm with their daughter, who was my best friend. Amidst the water buffaloes and heaps of straw, there was a huge, open well whose circumference was at ground level. Next to it was a small water tank. It was sweltering. It always is, in my corner of India. My friend’s parents put on our bathing suits and plopped us both into the water tank. How we squealed in delight as water from a massive pump poured in through a large faucet. Later, I got out of the tank, even as my friend continued playing. For some reason, the faucet pivoted and the forceful gush of water was now directed at me, as I stood nary a few feet away from the deep, open well. I had to use all my physical strength to not give into the pressure and fall backwards into the open abyss. I had never felt fear like that in my life. Visceral. Until that time in New York. When the gin and Valpolicella and broken medical school dreams and musical yearnings all mingled in my brain into this new beast with which I was unfamiliar: melancholia. And panic. When the panic rose, I would drink more. Which made me panic more. And so, drink more. I didn’t care because I needed the momentary spurts of relief. It would all settle down soon, I’d tell myself, once I devised a plan. The plan.
Back on Earth, while I fritted away the hours between coursework and studies with music and merlot and plotting, Tanvi had formed a friendship with Advait. Like a stone that splashes into a dead calm pond, shattering the peace violently, their friendship landed in my increasingly isolated universe like an alien spaceship of pain and torture. It seemed so…unnecessary. “You should be over this relationship by now. Something’s wrong when you take this long to recuperate from a broken heart,” she’d said, and walked away from my life. I didn’t understand why someone in my corner, would pointedly befriend the enemy. Everything confused me.
Except New York. The robustness of that city, I realised in retrospect, kept resuscitating me. On many a quiet weekend, and there were many, when Advait and Tanvi disappeared and the Carlos’ were busy with their amorous pursuits, I would walk through the American Museum of Natural History. I didn’t know why, but it helped me maintain some perspective, even though, more often than not, I would have wine coursing through my veins as I took in the wonderment. The vast expanse of Time that the museum showcased, in all its natural beauty, and the diversity on our planet, somehow, made me feel closer to something familiar. Beneath the skin. I would stare at the big dinosaur skeleton in the central hall. The beast never knew it would play such a pivotal role in science millions of years after its demise, its exquisite bones, like a phoenix, resurrected from the ashes of Time to reveal wondrous mysteries from our past. I would wonder, had it been a special dinosaur during its day, or one among many that peppered the landscape and that had been singled out by fortuitous happenstance, millennia later. Would it have lived its life differently, had it known the significant role it would play down the dirt filled road? Would my life bear significance, someday? Or would I only bear meaning thousands of years later when my fossils were exhumed and examined: She was one among the several would-be immigrants who couldn’t find work after September 11th and had to return to her homeland. Would that be my New York epitaph? But even this wouldn’t happen: I would’ve been cremated as a Hindu in India. Nothing would be left. Ashes.
I knew things were decaying in my mind, like a bee that had sipped on too much nectar, when Rashida scratched the beautiful curls on her head and gingerly said, “Nandu, you even sound funny these days. Earlier, it was all about medicine and boys. Now, you talk strangely of art and life and tall buildings and dinosaurs. Perhaps, it’s time to put down that glass and get some fresh air. Go for a jog.” She was a very polite girl so I took this to be a well-intended harbinger of alarm. I did not listen. I was twenty-five and lost, swirling inside my head and in that city. But like a marionette doll, the sturdy bones of New York kept me alive, resurrecting me daily with shards of hope. I firmly believe she looked out for me as I was slipping. In her architecture, in her orderly streets lay a pattern that I clung to, even as Time lost meaning and I disappeared within my distilled delusions and fundamental confusions.
“You need to come home, Nandu,” said my father, with urgency and pain lacing his voice, over the phone. “Mum has been diagnosed with cancer. Ovarian. You cannot stay there, anymore.” I had finished my coursework and was working on writing my thesis, which I could do remotely. I bid goodbye to New York with a six pack of wine coolers and staring out my hostel room window. I could see Advait on the green terrace with Shivani on his lap, kissing. It was time to go. I slept right through the flight back, my first peaceful sleep in months.
Back in my sweltering nook of the world, with the crows cawing and the crickets stridulating, I popped in my favourite lounge CD, badly scratched. It would not play. I turned the player off. I couldn’t daydream my world into order anymore. With music. With dreams of medicine. With boys. I was in my sleepy city by the coast, rife with mosquitoes and coconut trees, ocean brine and unbearable heat, and I finally realised there would be no more pretending at Life. I had to live it. Or wither away.
Years later, I would still remember the cosmic city lights of New York as if it were a throbbing vein of heat and music, jazz and gin, threaded into the architecture that swept through the city like the bones of a perfect beast. Perfection is something you could dare to aspire to, in that city. I dared. And fell. But the fall was long, and in that unfettered descent into the dark stew of purgatory blunders, I learnt about life in the way you learn music. Patterns of logic amid a chaos of beauty and pain.
Madhurika Sankar is an impact investor and writer/journalist whose work appears in The Hindu, India’s leading national newspaper, in the Op Ed. She’s an engineer and holds a Masters in Biotechnology from Columbia University, New York. Madhurika’s short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in literary journals and magazines such as The Bangalore Review, The Bombay Review, The Dillydoun Review, Tether's End Magazine, Litro Magazine, Rock & Sling, The Avenue, Visible Magazine, Firewords Magazine, and the Landing Zone Magazine. Her debut novel Dustria, a fantasy, is forthcoming in Fall 2022 from Canadian publisher of speculative fiction, Vraeyda Literary. She lives in Chennai, India.