Arcadia

78

I have begun to see myself in fragments, to fall in love with the fragments and not the whole. They used to say in the love advice columns that you can’t love anyone else unless you love yourself, but that is not true. What is true (because I say so) is that you can’t love anyone else unless you know yourself. But you can never know yourself (my 15-year-old admittedly precocious common sense could have told you that long before the existentialist professors came in). There are so many little bits and pieces that clamour for space that I sometimes wonder my tired and prematurely aged body does not crack from inside, the who am I questions seem quite pointless if there is going to be no answer. There can be no answer, for the name of my Chemistry teacher in class 8 is as much a part of me as Beauvoir and the colour of my favourite shirt and Kamala’s poetry and train-station tea even though it tastes awful and what my friend said to me the other day. I thrive in multiplicity like my worn out nation and long to join the other part of the splinter beyond the border from which I have been severed since this country was born in August 1947. Children of Bangladesh, we have been adopted and raised by India. Children of midnight, we have been raised by the day and drowned in the heavy rains of Bombay (but they tell me it was a dry year, maybe you will find more cracks in my narrative and in my body and know that the end is near) And even with my prematurely aged severed fragmented body (thin arms, heavy breasts, stretch-marked hips, short legs, short hair which refuses to stay in shape, uneven teeth, thick eyebrows, thick glasses) I sometimes (but very rarely) reek of youth and fall in love. I break off a piece of my heart and give it to him and hope he will keep it, but I (wisely? selfishly?) keep the rest of it to myself. He does the same. That is adulthood, that is knowing yourself enough to love someone else. Knowing enough not to give your whole heart away all at once.