A young widow returns to everyday life with the help of her body (and some philosophy) in this novel

Let me confirm one thing now, because it’s simply true. Love is only romantic when you’ve lost it. Or if you can’t have it. In the end, I lost my love. Eventually, the pain and vulnerability and howling grief were drowned in the bitterness and the boredom that only insomnia can birth. But was Ketan a “love” before he died?

Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, said romantic love and marriage could never be experienced in the same lifetime. This is why we humans perpetually suffer from angst, or rather a running between two conflicts, an oxymoron, two things that can never be at once. Heartbreak arises only when you’ve been stupid enough to expect anything as a given: a happy marriage that lasts fifty years, children who grow up and don’t die before you, or a promotion that comes every few years. Heartbreak only comes from expectation.

I had a naive, awkward, gentle expectation of Ketan. That he would be with me until I was old. That I would probably be the first to die. That he, if anyone, could bear the brunt of losing me.

Mundane office love stories are the most predictable of all. They only exist because people like us forget how to express our desire to live and love beyond the walls of conference rooms and meetings where glances can be exchanged. Ketan and I were the sort of people who thought social bonding was employing a chai break to talk about a coworker with smug judgments. Our moments of joy were heaped upon the everyday baseline of light traffic, three-day weekends, and the candied HR emails that urged us to keep leading and achieving our “goals.”

He was a project manager. I was leading internal communications. I’ve forgotten the main purpose of the company we used to work for. There were far too many experts, far too many divisions, for anyone to form a cohesive image of the entire company and its place in the world. I barely had an idea then, much less now. Still, I controlled its intranet, sent out firm-wide updates, and helped the interns resize images.

Maybe it’s precisely being such a cog in the machine that allows you to fall in love in the first place. If you are trapped in mundanity, it’s impossible not to latch your poor soul to something, or someone, that makes you realise your vulnerable pumping heart will only beat a certain number of times. No matter how clean the air is inside those air-conditioned walls.

Ketan carried himself with a gentleness I’d seen in no other man. He had a beard, five years ahead of the trend, and a make-you-believe-in-god smile. Yes, the fucking charming smile cliché. Expectations, after all, are made of clichés.

I developed a crush on him his first day in the office, at which time I’d already been at the company for a year. I came up to him with an unnecessary and largely irrelevant question. He never called me out on it and was quick to find some kind of legitimate office connection to justify us loitering by each other’s cubicle most of the day.

We both came from conservative enough families, but we were no prudes. We took off to Pondicherry the first three-day weekend we got. We went to French cafés, grabbed beers, and ate spicy seafood by the beach. We got right down to sex in the hotel, no qualms, though he was my first. I never asked if I was his. I assumed I was.

He made love by searching. Searching for something through the act. You could feel his confusion, his need to express something, something locked in by his body. In exchange I made love by letting him find his own anwers. I stroked his hair, whispered into his ears, easing his anxiety. One morning, he lay on the bed after sex. He rubbed his beard and grinned. The grin disappeared and his mouth puckered in thought.

“It’s like I have so much more to do.”

Then he got up, went to the bathroom, came out and asked me if I wanted to explore Auroville. We got married eight months later in a simple ceremony. His parents, my father, our friends, and a majority of our office coworkers were present. We bought a three-bedroom flat twenty minutes from our office. Ketan said that it wouldn’t be long until it took forty minutes to get there. We’re crawling all over this city, multiplying like insects, aren’t we? he said.

So far, all our expectations were alive and well. Our workdays, our lunches, and our dinners together. Our friends on the weekends, our lovemaking at night. Such basic expectations.

Seven months later he died in a really stupidly common accident. At a spot equidistant from the house and our office. It was a two-wheeler accident.

A two-wheeler, not because we couldn’t afford a stupid car, but because it was the faster way to move through the city. And his helmet was shit and it cracked. Still, nothing had happened to his head. His middle section was run over, resulting in massive internal bleeding. What a bunch of shit the body is made of. It’s put here on earth to take emotional bullets all day and night, but one thud, a bit of force, and the body immediately gives up. Bleeding, bursting, rendering itself so fucking useless.

When I was brought to the morgue to see him, I had only anger and disgust for the human body. What a horrific joke, what a silly, stretchy, fragile, untrustworthy thing it was. I started screaming. I pounded his chest, his fucking stupid bleeding-ass stomach that couldn’t seem to have gotten its act together in time. I smacked his face, I screeched, You fucking idiot, get up, why are you so fucking weak?

I never got to see his cremation. My father had me drugged and kept in a hospital room, lurching in and out of consciousness for a week. Each time I woke up, my father would come up to me and coo soothing words that jumbled together. He kept telling me to rest. Friends came in; they talked to me like I was a geriatric patient with Alzheimer’s. Like I had no idea what had happened, when in fact I could remember every little insult I had screamed, every little word I’d said to Ketan’s dead body.

My anger was only artificially tamed. I could feel my body being medicated, like a hot water bag on top of a raging, crampy, menstrual tummy. I wanted to laugh at the doctors and their medication – what fucking idiots, like I didn’t know what was there. Like I couldn’t feel what was inside of me. I just couldn’t act on it, because my lids fell, then they stretched across my face and covered my entire body, like cling wrap. I was a butterfly in a cocoon, a cocoon made out of my eyelids, and it felt damn good.

Later, I was put in a recovery home for six months. Where we had collective goals, where we talked to warm, self-aware therapists. Appa called it the farm.

I ate upma every morning and drank mosambi juice every evening. It’s also where I read Sartre’s Nausea, and Kafka, and about feminism, the Enlightenment, and everything in between. I soaked it up, thriving in privileged absurdity and philosophy. I still have no idea why a humble recovery home offered such a wide array of European enlightenment and existentialism, stacked shelf upon shelf. It seemed like an inside joke by the founder of the place (who was dead and whose children had promptly sold it off to a private company).

Like most important European men, I too found myself in exile. And like them, I would survive. I would obey Albert Camus and honour the freedom I had every day. It worked. One day, about six months after my arrival, I felt so free that I saw the innate absurdity of authority crumbling at my feet. I went to the office and told them that I was free. They said I was 110 kilometers from the city and that I’d need to contact my father. I told them I was twenty-nine years old and I couldn’t possibly need my father’s permission.

They said they could offer no transportation. I had no phone. Only theirs. I’ll walk home, I told them. They only nodded their heads; they didn’t believe me. So I walked righteously toward the gate, where a scrawny watchman saw me coming. He very methodically checked the latch on the gate. I told him to let me out. He only said, Madam, no, madam, no. So I walked up to the gate and unlatched it.

I was kind of surprised that the guard made no other attempt to stop me from leaving the farm; he just stood there frozen to the side, looking past me as I walked toward the highway. I guess when someone sees a person who’s truly embraced her freedom, one can only be stunned into a fleeting, temporary realisation of one’s own invisible chains. Don’t you think?

Excerpted with permission from The Body Myth: A Novel, Rheea Mukherjee, Penguin Books.