Rebirth

by Babitha Marina Justin

Joemi Brazier

They say I have woken up in a new body. I didn’t know this for long.

It looked like a dream, and all I remember was the loud crash and the blinding lights that did me in. There were also moments of searing pain through which I wriggled, writhed and perhaps, passed out. I had no idea that the end would come so unexpectedly while crossing the road; there were no dreams, no prognostications, and no signs.

Ma stares down to me. I cannot see her clearly in the blinding light that seeps in from the window. She attempts to say hello and smiles at me. She smiles this time. Fa wipes off his tears; he is the more dramatic one of the two. I can see his snot glistening at the tip of his nose. A ray of sun lights it up like a dewdrop for a moment. Am I having visions? I wish Ma had taken some Kleenex with her. I try to move, but my body stitches with pain. It is unbearable, and I go stiff. Even my eyes blink fast against the light like a pair of doves taking a panic flight from the sidewalk to the sky. My lid grows heavy, and I feel I cannot breathe. I hear the panic buttons ring; people, perhaps the doctors and the nurses, shuffle in. They feel my pulse, steady my oxygen mask and the cold machete blade of a stethoscope measures my heartbeats. They say I am alright. I start wondering if I am naked beneath my hospital dress. My breasts would flop on both sides and gravitate towards the ground. I am not pleased with the thought that the doctor would see them. Perhaps he is a young guy, or slightly older than me. I feel ashamed. I wish I could talk to Ma and ask her to stay with me. Ma is always fastidious about such things; she always pulled out my kurta caught between my buttock cheeks on time, pushed in my bra straps that peeped out and warned whenever my dress was tight.

“Hi, try to open your eyes.” It is the young doctor, just as I thought. I try to do what he says.

“Hello, can you hear me?” I try to make a noise; nothing comes out, not even a groan.

“We may have to wait a bit longer, he will take some more time to heal.” I catch the “he” part, and think it is a deliberate attempt of the doctor to desexualize me. He has certainly seen my gravity-defying boobs!

***

I wake up at last. They say it took two weeks. I know I will be in bad shape. Ma and Fa are always beside me. I see them from my blurred half-closed eyes. I haven’t started groaning even. I do not know if I can ever move my muscles. The doctors and nurses come every day, a few of them Chinese looking, and ask me to try to start living. I try and try; now I can half open my eyes. Ma says I can do better. I can see more wrinkles on her face. Fa also looks greasier now. I wish he had washed his face at least once. He looks as if he hadn’t bathed for ages. I manage to call Ma. I feel thirsty. I find my voice at last, and it is so strange and unfamiliar. I sound scruffy, but I am glad I can talk.

“Water, ” is the first grumpy sound that comes out of my second birth.

Ma springs to her feet, wakes up Fa from the adjacent hospital bed.

“She is talking, Madhu,” and her feet hurry to the table and I hear her pour water.

I part my lips, and she dispenses water into my mouth with a spoon; half of it spills. I am parched, and I feel thorns grow all over my throat. But I feel good.

Father sniffles in the corner. Ma orders him, “Help yourself to the tissues on the table.”

Usually, Fa shouts back when Ma instructs him, but today I think he has obeyed her like a child. He can be very passive at times, and the opposite when things are normal.

“Ma,” my voice is worse than I ever imagined. I wonder where I am and how long I had been laid up in the hospital. Instead, I ask, “Ma, what happened to my voice?” It sounds atrocious; Ma could not catch it. But I hear Fa ringing up the doctor from the room.

Immediately, the doctors and the nurses swoop in. I cannot move my body to straighten my hospital dress.

I try, but a sharp pain splinters my spine.

“I can’t,” my warbled voice spouts out nonsense.

***

In two days, I find my voice which is husky. I have cactus growing all over my throat. The deep treble is gone. Perhaps it is the accident that changed my voice. I can move now, but my face itches all over. Ma scratches my body for me. I can move my fingers a bit now. The physiotherapist has started his treatment on me. He is a young man, and I start worrying about my braless existence. He pulls up my left leg, and it falls with a thud; he repeats the same with my right leg. I can feel his touch. He urges me to move my muscles, and I try hard. But the same splintering pain splits me up. I give up easily and I am relieved to sleep.

I wake up feeling someone wipe my face with a wet towel. I can feel something hairy on my face. Am I growing hair? I feel like scratching again, and, sensing this, Ma helps me scratch. I feel the gentle bristle of hair growing on my face.

Today I can move my hands and my toes. “There’s an improvement,” they say.

***

I hobble to the bathroom. Ma looks worried rather than relieved.

“Anita, go slow.”

She helps me slide onto the commode.

I am relieved that I don’t have to use bedpans any longer. Ma waits outside the toilets and warns me against bolting the door.

I see myself in the mirror. I let out a scream involuntarily. It is not me who stares at me from the mirror. Instead it is a man, with a beard and grown hair. I touch my face, and I see the man touch my face. I feel a beard with my hands. “What is happening?”

Ma pushes open the toilet door, and she takes me by my arm. “Relax.”

She walks me to the bed and sits me down.

I see my body as if for the first time. It is not the one I am familiar with. I didn’t grow up with this. I even have a penis dangling between my legs.

Some more unfamiliar doctors file in, including the Chinese looking ones. I feel psyched out. What happened to my body and my voice?

The splintering pain reappears. I feel sutured pain stitched into my body. Perhaps I have been operated upon extensively.

I close my eyes and lie down and let the doctors discuss my condition. Ma looks worried; Fa is reading a newspaper. He looks greasier than ever, and he is frowning into the newspaper. The doctors file out neatly, and Ma keeps looking at me with a wrinkled face. I suddenly feel an urge to iron out the wrinkles on her face, but I feel pinned down to the bed like Gulliver.

***

I hear them out, patiently. They say they operated on my body with failed organs and encased my brains in a new body. I feel incredulous, and I pinch myself to see if it’s a dream. It isn’t. I feel the pain and the soft hair all over the body. After my accident, I was brought to the hospital with all my organs punctured and brain intact. Now, I am a man, and they cremated my woman’s body with all the ruptured organs inside it. As my brains were alive, the doctors freshly planted my brains into the man’s body, which was brain dead. I understand nothing, but I realize that my brains were swapped with a man’s body. I listen to the doctors as if it is a fairy tale. I am in a hospital in Mumbai, and they say the operation was a big success. They are not letting out my details to the press because they say this is a significant thing that can change the world. There are also ethical issues they haven’t sorted out. I am a guinea pig who got a second lease of life in another body. They say I should be ecstatic. I am not. I stare back at my hairy body, and lanky limbs crisscrossed with veins. I should have been an athletic male once upon a time, but the body doesn’t fit me. I keep staring at my hairy arms. Ma read from the Psalms: “I laid me down and slept: I awaked: for the Lord sustained me.”

***

Ma and Fa do not talk to me much. I stay in the hospital for many weeks, which feel like ages. I have to get back. I left a lot of work undone; someone else must be managing the shop. Or is it shut down? Does Neeraj know what has happened to me? A familiar pain stings me, and I let off a scream involuntarily. The nurses come rushing in. They crowd around me, administering an analgesic. I want something for my mind, some deep sedation from which I don’t have to wake up.

“Be thankful you got your life back,” Ma keeps saying.

I dream of flying away from my body and perching on a treetop. My body is laid to rest under a tree. Neeraj lays a white wreath and looks broken. Fa blows into his napkin. Ma wears an off-white saree with kanta work I gifted her from Hyderabad. She looks dignified in there. Everything seems picture-perfect as in Hollywood movies. Somebody is digging my grave and he is late. Ma looks at her watch and Neeraj wants to go too. His boss is coming and he has a presentation to make, he thinks. Or perhaps, I think about his thoughts.

They move me to a room. I have recovered a lot, they say, and my brains have synced with the new body. I wonder if I have to live with a male body all my life. But as Ma says, I am thankful that I am alive.

***

Ma says I must live an anonymous life. She says I can take care of the shop in another name and pretend the owner is dead. I think it is impractical too, and I look down my veins and belly button. I am worried about the man I am.

“What was he called?” I ask.

“Amar Tyagi, a North Indian guy.”

“What about his family, Ma?”

“We do not know about it, beta (I notice that she stopped calling me Anita), those are all classified details.” I Google Amar Tyagi, unable to ignore the deluge of condolence messages cluttering my phone.

Crazy, even Neeraj has sent me a message.

“What will I do without you?”

I can’t help laughing; he has very little drama in him. My Facebook timeline is flooded with condolences. I tear up just skimming through them. I cannot read all those.

I feel torn between the irony of living and the reality of being dead. How am I supposed to live in this entire new body?

“Do I live as Amar or Anita?”

I Google Amar Tyagi. There are hundreds of Amar Tyagis. Many of them are tall and lanky. I look at my face in the phone camera. I look nowhere near Anita. Anita was soft and dark with a curly mane. I am a good-looking north Indian man with prominent features. I look close to thirty. The jawline is well defined. I could have very well fallen for this guy, had I been alive in my woman’s body. Suddenly, I feel a twinge of guilt. I have vowed to be Neeraj’s as long as I am alive. But now that my body is dead, does the same rule apply now as well?

I heave a sigh, and Ma comes rushing in. She always lingers near my door. Like before, she doesn’t come and snuggle close to me. I have a strange male body after all.

“Are you hungry?” she asks, and that is her way of asking how are you.

I feel bile well up, and I retch. Ma brings a pan and calls out for the home nurse. I double up and puke liberally into the pan. She pats my back; I feel her soft palm on my skin. It feels so different. My skin tingles with goosebumps.

There are these monitors and computers in my bedroom. She reports to the doctors and in half an hour, a retinue of nurses attends to me. I try to tell them I am fine.

***

I open my shop as a new employee who has taken over. I have no idea how long I will maintain my imposter identity. As of now, all my papers are Anita’s, and they are useless, as I even got her death certificate with me. As for Amar Tyagi, all information about him is classified. It is even possible that he was a hardcore criminal poisoned and eliminated by the state. I feel so uncomfortable in his body, and I want to wiggle away from it, but as Ma reminded me, “Body is nothing but the skin and flesh you wear. Be thankful you got your life back, beta.”

I am aware of the fact now that body remembers. Amar Tyagi was indeed athletic. I always feel an urge to wake up early and go for a jog. I walk around first, and I realize that men don’t look at me nowadays. I feel invisible, though I am around six feet tall. I was only five-one as Anita; now I feel as if I am walking on bamboo stilts. Am I becoming comfortable gradually? My mind says I should take everything in a positive stride.

***

I walk into Neeraj’s office.

I see him immersed in a heap of office files. I greet him and he looks up briefly. His eyes have further dug into their ascetic caves.

“Hello, Neeraj,” I squawk out in my male voice.

He looks up rather irate, and indicates I should sit.

After five minutes of poring over the files and scribbling down notes, he looks up.

“Hi, I am Amar Tyagi.”

“Yes, Amar, what can I do for you?”

“I am Anita’s friend.” Neeraj looks at me surprised.

“She never told me about you.” His eyes further disappear into their mean slits.

“Well, I studied with her in Himachal. That was a long time back.”

“She kept you well-hidden, then.” Neeraj smiles with his left lips tipping down into a curve.

“She must have forgotten about me; I wasn’t in touch for a long time. I visited her parents recently and came to know that she.…”

“You knew her parents?”

“ Yes, quite well.”

“They told you about me?”

“No, Anita told me about you.”

Neeraj crumbles and shrinks half his size.

“It’s three months now. I was even willing to leave my family for her.”

I feel a surge of joy course within myself.

I want to hug him and soothe him saying, I am still alive.

He is interrupted by a phone call. He asks me to excuse him, and he instructs somebody over the phone. I am curious to know who it is.

“My wife wants to go to Munnar with our daughter. I too thought I should take a break.”

I could not keep my choking sarcasm out.

“Without Anita, things should be smoother now.”

I see his eyes glint a touch of steel for a microsecond.

“It was difficult for a month. Then it was like hobbling back to normal life. My family helped me to pick up what I have lost.”

“But nothing can replace Anita,” he says as an afterthought.

I keep telling myself that I am Amar and not Anita. But my eyes well up and I sniffle. Neeraj doesn’t notice that. He tidies his desk and shoves all important papers inside his drawer.

“I will be away for a week. We have booked the Government Guest House in Munnar.”

“Have a safe journey.” I get up to go. I feel like smashing the paperweight on his skull and crunching it. I swallow my disgust.

I have a paperweight held tightly in my fist. I walk down the stairs, and five years with Neeraj plays in my mind.

I met him as my customer in my Art Shoppe, where he used to stare down at paintings for hours and hours together without buying them. I coaxed him to buy the paintings and we became friends, and he used to visit whenever a new painting was on display. That was every day.

I wooed the artists and displayed new artists every day, till I came to know Neeraj came to see me in the shop and not the paintings. I was both flattered and annoyed. We went out for a coffee to talk and that sealed our fates. Neeraj told me about his arranged marriage and his miserable, trapped life in the family. I felt a lump growing deep within me, but somewhere, I wanted to be desired deep, the way Neeraj desired me. Was I desperately in need of Neeraj?

I don’t remember what our passion was about; my male body refuses to remember the details. But my mind is torn: I feel the same searing pain deep within my mind, and my heart beats fast. I don’t want to remember Neeraj’s love and his words, or our moments together. Those visuals keep popping up, but I erase them with violence.

Those were perhaps the first and best days of our love life. We could not help meeting each other and we made out in every puritanical corner of the city. We hugged and kissed at traffic blocks, and we checked into cheap motels whenever we thought we could not contain out passion, and we loved with a passion that neither of us believed would come to an end.

Neeraj’s wife came to know. Neeraj said with a callous smirk that in Bollywood movies the threesome triangles could be sorted out better. Either finish off one of the women, or let one of them discover her cancer all of a sudden.

I didn’t laugh. I thought it was lame. Instead I yelled and grew hysterical each day. I kissed him with an unrinsed mouth after eating red hot chilies and gave him mouth ulcers right away. He hurt me more, mentally and physically. He squeezed my breasts till they hurt and I elbowed him back. At the end of it all, we made passionate love. This became a routine, even the day when I died.

I am angry and hurt, and I walk into an angry red crowd. I walk like a furious bull. I feel the bounce and I tighten the grip on the paperweight. People walk around me in the same uncaring pace they are all homing towards their anger. I stop for a moment and look back. I see Neeraj get into his car. It is not the old one where we unleashed our demons. But the new one.

I walked away from Neeraj furiously. He wanted to break up. He said he couldn’t manage; he blamed me for breaking up his family. I wanted to break him. I got out of his car and banged the door. I heard him honk furiously. I walked away angry as ever. I stumbled on the sidewalks and I crossed the road. I walked on the zebra crossing, the lights green. Suddenly, a speeding car knocked me out. I remembered only the loud crash and the blinding lights. And the pain….

I swivel and throw the paperweight on Neeraj’s car with all my might. I hear the loud crash, the speeding new car and the blinding lights. The hospital sirens sound close to me now. I walk away and swagger into my new identity.

I walk the way Amar’s body would, comfortable in his flesh and skin for the first time after my death.

---

Babitha Marina Justin is from a small town in Kerala, South India, and her poems have appeared in Eclectica, Esthetic Apostle, The Scriblerus, Paragon Press, Fulcrum: an annual of art and aesthetics (forthcoming), Adolphus Press, The Punch Magazine, Rise Up Review, Constellations, catheXis NW Press, Silver Needle Press, About Place Journal, The Write Launch, Ogazine, The Four Quarters Magazine, Taj Mahal Review, Indian Ruminations, Kritya and Journal of Post-Colonial Literature. Her first collection of poetry, Of Fireflies, Guns and the Hills, was published by the Writers Workshop in 2015. She is also waiting to debut as a novelist with Maria’s Swamp: The Bigness of Small Lies.