Someone I once knew had told me about Vipassana. We only shared the kind of intimacy neighbours do but when she revealed this golden, noble ticket to finding a fuck to give, I listened. She was zooted most of high school and later in college, I heard about how she’d dig up the trash for seeds to roll with once she had run through her own stash and everyone else’s. And suddenly, before me, a bright-eyed phoenix in handloom.

I really needed a win. I had been rejected from Oxford not long before, anxiety riding through my blood- fast and furious. There was a hole the size of my dorm room in my stomach- red lamp, ashtray and a ragged copy of Barthes’ Mythologies. The months seemed to have fallen like mustard seeds from my palm. At first, with a slow roll and then in damp clumps. All at once. The interlude felt rough. It was bright May and suddenly bits of monsoon stuck to my shoes.

At university, my roommate and I would call our room the ‘Red Room’ like that Hiatus Kaiyote song. “It feels like I’m inside a flower/ It feels like I’m inside my eyelids/ And I don’t wanna be/ Anywhere but here.” The gang would pull up, cool girls in the thick Delhi winter. Figures outside were only shadows in the smog. The heater’s glow reached all four corners. The room was so small you could lunge across it. I’d be neck deep switching tabs between masters applications and Ali’s Tarot, while someone read from ‘I Love Dick’ out loud for the group, who was almost never paying attention. Perhaps we should have been.

“I think the sheer fact of women talking, being, paradoxical, inexplicable, flip, self-destructive but above all else public is the most revolutionary thing in the world.”

And we would do a lot of that. Talking. Being. Paradoxical. Inexplicable. Flip. Self-destructive. It’s the revolution we were hinging on.

On the last Thursday of term, my roommate said she had something to show me. The projector whirred. We were watching Khanh Nguyen and Lam Dao Dao’s short film on NOWNESS’ Youtube- ‘Up close and personal with the Hanoians shaking up Vietnam’s film industry’. The first frame had six artists watching themselves on a projector screen, “You should never hate those that share the same dreams as you”.

Hanoi was full of corners. Coloured accents. Butts. Ceramics. In the scene, was one of the artists in a black tracksuit with streaks of green in his blonde hair. He was at what looked like a Hanoian cemetery, smoking a cigarette by someone’s tombstone. Her picture seemed recent. She looked around his age- black bangs across her forehead and a ring in her bottom lip. He left her a smoke, fixed the roach into a candle stand and left it to burn.

We sparked another joint under the projector. The smoke lifted, curled and bent to form Tagore’s ‘Dancing Woman’ while a steady beat from the film got louder. I was so high. “Our rhythm is the rhythm of Hanoi.” Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. “Be it soothing.” Boom. Boom. “Or intense. We learn from Hanoi,” Boom. Boom. “the art of blending various textures,” Crackle. Scratch. “though unrelated, to create something original.” The graphics were heavy- green and yellow. Boom. Crackle. Blue and purple. “From there we shape our own world.”

We looked at each other. The red room seemed to expand into the city and the city into the country into the whole wide world at our ashy fingertips.

It's the idea of place-making, chasing after the promise of a home over and over again. You never really know when it’ll stop or when the world will settle down for you. Deep down, you know that it won’t. But you chase because it’s really all you can do. Till the land. Plant a tree, and when the tide rises or the seasons change, you hold on as tightly as your fingers grip, until the good bones are no longer enough. Like Maggie Smith, you believe this place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.

I was Waiting for Godot, like a turkey with its mouth open to the eye of a storm.

In a similar vein, I was reading Nietzsche.

Shacket Guy and I had been sleeping together since I graduated. In other words, I would suck his thumb to break the tedium. Boredom will have me do absolutely anything. Confronting temporality irks me. The way mornings echo in my ears from their emptiness when the alarm goes and there’s nothing to do but check my inbox and eat. And eat. And eat. In between waiting for something good to happen.

So while Shacket Guy would drawl on in his ‘team-building seminars’, I would lay on his couch in my underwear, sheets of rain offering privacy from the neighbour's grilled window, and read from the whatever-edition-book he stole from his ancestral home library in Calcutta. My cigarette would burn till it couldn’t anymore and I’d bury the butt in a white pyramid of Marlboro Lights by the coffee stain.

In my final semester, I was reading ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ for a class called ‘The Reconstruction of Thought: Muhammad Iqbal and Friedrich Nietzsche’. Essentially, the question was- how can a finite ego participate in eternity? It was inconvenient, the timing. I was at the precipice of what seemed to be the rest of my life and here were two madmen with an unfortunately valid problem. How do you affirm the self?

It is possible I will spend the rest of my life joining the dots, but for those empty hours, bleeding out without company, empty pack and a forty minute rendering of Marvin fucking Gaye on a loop, I would call it happy reading.

‘Hey everyone, am I audible? Keziah, hi, thanks for joining’

‘Hey, yes we can hear you, how’s the leg?’

‘Still in a brace, Kez, but healing fast’

‘Good to hear’

‘Righty, so let’s get straight to it. Give me a sec…. Just… Sharing my screen here….

Uhh…Should…Be…Up now! Am I still visible?’

1. Do you have any physical health problems, medical conditions or diseases? If yes, please give details (dates, symptoms, duration, treatment, and present condition).

Clinical anxiety, imposter syndrome, menstrual agony, non-monogamy, crisis of faith.

2. For women applicants: Please indicate whether you are pregnant.

I might be.

3. Do you have, or have you ever had, any mental health problems such as significant depression or anxiety, panic attacks, manic depression, schizophrenia, etc.? If yes, please give details (dates, symptoms, duration, hospitalization, treatment, and present condition).

Yes.

4. Are you now taking, or have you taken within the past two years, any alcohol or drugs (such as marijuana, amphetamines, barbiturates, cocaine, heroin, or other intoxicants)? If yes, please give details (dates, types, amounts, additions, treatment, and present use).

Marijuana, MDMA, Cocaine.

5. Are you now taking, or have you taken within the past two years, any prescribed medication? If yes, please give details (dates, types, dosage, and present use).

N/A

6. Any other information you wish to add.

I really need this.

The first hour is crazy. There is hunger or withdrawal scratching at your throat. A bulb or the moon dances against your lids when you press them shut, counting phosphenes like seconds on a clock. You are told to watch your breath, how it feels inside, around and under your nose, the fragility of it all, how a whole life hangs in the balance- in the steady rise and fall. But the cigarettes you left behind in good faith shimmy and smirk. And there is nothing you can do about it. Nothing else to think about. Except your period and how it’s late and how this thing is about to be ten days of anticipating a fucking abortion.

It’s even worse when you’re not meditating. Alone in a room without instruction. You sort of forget how to breathe because you’re suddenly aware of it deserving your attention. You take hours to undress, touch yourself especially since it’s against the rules, hoping it’ll make you feel something. It does. Slut. There’s a rat snake outside your window, a thunder clap, a slow falling of rain or maybe it's all in your head.

It’s hard to tell the difference between dreamscape and morning meditation. You are wary of sleep. Mosquitoes at your feet. A pain in the left side of your abdomen- rising and rising like a hot tempest through your back. You must be still. Observe it. Like the fag end of a rollie. Like a forest fire unfurling on the evening news. Until it has passed or the death of your grandmother undoes itself as a sailor would a knot.

On a small TV in the corner, they screened a documentary on filling prisons across India with the idea of Vipassana. A large tapestry draped across the courtyard where thousands of prisoners would gather. Sink to their haunches. Cross their legs in reverence and surrender themselves to the illusion of great repentance. Once the weight of sin lifted and the mind became a domestic conquer, hours would pass as if a single moment in a jail cell,

‘Sometimes the spark doesn't ignite. Maybe you need another spark, another spark. But after a couple, the light starts to flicker, it grows and then the candle is lit. Change does not come easy way. Change takes a time’.

By the third day, I called it suffering- the silence, the sitting. Broken-boned and exhausted from having to confront the nature of every breath I had ever taken, what I needed was to write. Surrender, they said. Endure. But I missed her, my grandmother and the way she’d run her fingers across my stomach, my head in her lap. I hated it now, that stomach with the thing maybe growing inside it. And not knowing what’s next. Not knowing. Not knowing. Not knowing.

I walked up to the tutor, a large woman who smelt like talcum powder and disinfectant. She was the only person I could talk to. I told her about my rash. It had begun with just my fingers but soon the itch had cast a red shadow on my body. She told me it wasn't unnatural for the past’s impurities to surface and take such a form. This was a sign of cleansing. But the rash snatched the only slivers of night I was allowed. Bright begonias dotted against the pale expanse of my thighs. Forearms. Shoulders. Neck. My nails could have broken skin like hot daggers on cold turkey, but I couldn’t falter or everything would fall apart.

I wanted to hang myself from the peepul tree. I even thought of how I’d do it- wrap a string of lantana around my throat, stand atop the wooden stool from the cafeteria, kick off and hope that I land somewhere beautiful. Where I’m not carrying:

• Shacket Jr.
• Or the addiction genes.
• Or the dread.
• Or the jitters.
• Or the scarf I stole from my cousin’s laundry when we lived together in the summer.

Fourth day. No sign of blood on my underwear. My breasts were tender and sore to the touch. Waves of nausea crashed into me through the long morning and well into lunch where I ate so many chapatis, I couldn’t keep my eyes off the double chin reflecting back at me in the bright steel of my lunch plate.

For such a curious person, I didn’t wonder about the others a whole lot. I suppose the meditation had consumed me, but in the early hours of the fifth morning, I could feel the woman beside me squirming. She seemed so uncomfortable- legs crossed, then uncrossed and crossed again. I wondered what she was doing there and whether she might quit. We shared a wall in the living quarters and I could hear her through it at night, wailing into a pillow till I fell asleep.

Days later, we would share a cab back to Mumbai and she would get off at Lokhandwala. It would all make sense- the wailing in particular, once the Orchard had long passed and I knew the name for her sadness. We would smile about how hard it was and make promises about keeping in touch and watching Tarkovsky and meditating. She knew we’d never see each other again.

Eyes dry and body heavy, on the sixth afternoon, I was consumed. The back of my train ticket was an empty sheet and my lip balm was tinted. I had been writing a poem in my head, placing one word after the next with overserved precision for the past couple of days, reciting over and over the lines in a sequence so I could preserve its memory. I took the Nivea Cherry Shine and spilled my shrivelled guts onto the page.

July 29, 2023

the quiet hours teethe on my hot flesh

writhing bare against the vacuum.

I would die to be moved

by something other than my breath,

To have a finger in my mouth to suck on-

A death, a foe,

A better song than this bleating monsoon.

I keep waiting for it to come- this song.

But it is only my third day in the desert

And such a long way from home.

On the seventh day, against a shining dawn, the spark caught and I was meditating. The pain in my side had persisted but I observed until it became something else. Something euphoric. A slight tingle down my spine and through my fingers. A hot rush. Flush. Eyes rolling into the back of my head as if nothing could ever exist again. It was sexy. Novel. Genre-bending. No rash. No fire. A quiet expanse where my words grew in the cornfield. Resistant to the drought.

But beauty, like all things, exists only by attachment.

Equanimity.

Equanimity.

Equanimity.

Your mother’s head is almost grey, you buried your dog in the yard last Tuesday, there isn't a word for your pain because it isn't what it was yesterday. You are drawn to what you hold dear, yet all things— cigarettes, washing machines, candles, sex—are fleeting, fleeing, flying away. You grasp at the ephemeral, not knowing that clinging harder will only deepen the wound. If you’re willing, you can see freedom in this truth. This art of living. If you listen close enough, it will teach you how to die.

You move through mortal stages- from consciousness to perception, from sensation to reaction, you give in too many times to know the difference. You were born with the chord- ego clinging to your belly like a leech in the mountains- and the scissors were too cold or the OT light was too blinding, so you kept it, the chord. And you are tied to yourself and to the other and to the unfortunate pith of desire. And yet nothing can be owned. Not the words or the spires because nothing exists to last. Not the song or the kiss or the waiting in time.

So I let the wave ride through me before I spat the thing out and returned to my breath.

Over and

over and

over again.