I’d always hated my toes: they were short and stubby, pink and round, with bits of hair sprouting near their middles. In fact, I hated my feet altogether, although when I really considered them, I realized this hadn’t always been the case. I noticed, during my examination, a prominent mole on the outer side of my right foot. I hadn’t looked directly at it in ages, had practically forgotten that it existed. But someone had told me, when I was a child, that this mole was a sign that I would travel, and I remember staring at it then, on a cuter, smaller foot, and feeling excited for this gift foretold by my body. I wondered when this appendage had started seeming so grotesque to me.
I sat like this for a while, holding my toe, slowly removing the layers of other people’s gazes that had settled upon it. I found myself thinking of the way I looked at Billee, at his sweet whiskers and the little freckles from which they emerged, at his dab of a nose and the little M on his forehead that looked like someone had drawn a pair of ears there, and at his actual ears, soft and sharp and rotating independently from the rest of his face. When I looked at Billee, I saw perfection. His nose, to me, was a miracle. And now I tried to bring that same gaze to my feet. Sometimes I was successful in this endeavor, and in those moments, I marveled at the beauty and grace of this vehicle I had been given the privilege of inhabiting for my brief span of time on earth. And I thought of my father, and his obsession with the stars and planets, and how he would remind us sometimes of the strangeness of our blue dot, and I felt filled with love and gratitude. An hour passed this way. An hour of intimacy between my feet and me.
Shiba told me to continue this process over the coming days until I reached the top of my scalp and then beyond.
“What we are doing here,” she said to me, “I don’t think there is anything more important. You’ll see.”
I shared with her that during my process of self-ingestion, I had also felt, I thought, Peter’s feet, walking purposefully down a German sidewalk, and Anna’s, soft and achy, and, well, maybe even Anna’s daughters’ feet too, and beyond.
“Yes,” she said, her eyes shiny. “This is the magic of it. Their feet are your feet. This is what I was hoping you would see.”
“I’m still having his nightmares, you know. Peter’s.”
“It’s not just nightmares though, is it? Also nicer dreams. This is what happens when you have an intimate relationship with anyone. You partake of their lives. They change you. Sometimes the experience is pleasant, sometimes not. But who knows, maybe you learn and grow more from the unpleasant bits.”
It isn’t always easy to distinguish between the rush of excitement and the chill of fear, and my adoration of Shiba was not so oblivious that I didn’t consider the possibility that she had, well, practically hypnotized me, calmed me to the point where I didn’t feel the need to demand answers straightaway and had decided, instead, to go at her pace. But I allowed for that possibility and chose to walk toward her nonetheless. I had turned around enough times in my life, abandoning relationship after relationship at the first hurdle, to know that this time, I would find the strength to stay. And when I’d felt Peter’s and Anna’s toes within my own, well, I had sensed that they, too, wanted me to continue.
The next morning, back in my own flat, I lay on the living room carpet and devoured my ankles, spinning them around, flexing and stretching them. These ankles that had run across the sand of Defence Club playground, and that had twisted and swollen once when I’d tripped while walking down Willesden Green. These ankles that had been cradled in the hands of an old boyfriend on a sofa on a cold winter’s night. Every morning, in this way, I moved upward through my body. Sometimes, tears started to flow, and other times laughter would erupt. And occasionally, I drifted off, something in me resisting further exploration, but when that happened, I would call myself back. At times, I heard Anna’s voice beckoning me to continue my investigations within.
Some parts of my body were particularly difficult to digest: the bum that had been caressed by an anonymous hand at Funland when I was eight years old, the waist that had been encircled by a presumptuous arm. Then there were the breasts: the nipples that had been teasingly pinched by a cousin in the swimming pool, the chest that had to be concealed and covered up from prying eyes, the breasts—which, I have to say, are not even particularly large or unique—that had been leeringly gazed at enough times and from a young enough age that I’d started carrying them around guiltily and apologetically. Then there were the ears that had heard things they wished they hadn’t, a brain that made up stories that weren’t true. Some of these revelations would come up in waves and leave me reeling, and I would understand why the mind chooses to cut itself off from the body. But so often, joy and beauty were stuck in the same places as grief and shame, and one could not be accessed without the other. All the memories, the feelings and sensations that I had walked away from over the course of my life, were still there, intertwined in my physical body, and now I was untangling them. Sometimes, it felt like I was cutting up my own tongue with a knife and fork before consuming it with that same tongue.
I stayed in touch with Shiba throughout this process, telling her of my journey. We contemplated together what it truly meant to be in touch with the body—with the flesh and blood and muscle and tendon and fascia of it all—and with that other, more ephemeral substance that flowed through all things. The body, I started to see, was a memory keeper. It knew everything. It made me sad that I had lived at such a remove from this fountain of knowledge, that this communication with my own self had been so badly severed.
And there was something else, too, something I could only touch the edges of. When I felt my stomach, my womb, my breasts and sternum, I saw that they didn’t just hold my memories, they held the rage and pain and isolation, the joy and passion and lust, of the women before me. My body remembered my mother’s life experiences and my grandmother’s and her mother’s before her. I felt the violations and indiscretions, the reverence and longings, from unfathomable years back. When I caught these glimpses, I was filled with awe. And it started to feel like there was a way to return to the very first woman in my lineage who had experienced a certain kind of shame and to find comfort, strength, and reparation for her from the women who had come before. It’s hard to explain, really, but when people say the body remembers, the breadth of this memory, I suspect, is almost inconceivable.
“I’m starting to understand,” I told Shiba, “to see the infinite possibility that we hold.”
“I’m so glad.”
And in this way, a slow reconciliation took place between Shiba and me. We met again a few times, reaching a new depth in our relationship from the secrets slowly revealing themselves. Shiba had never let a friend into this part of her life before, and she wanted to show me more. Every year, she shared, her father and his partners would meet in person to further their research, and this time, the four of them were getting together at her house in Delhi.
“You should come with me,” she said. “You’d get more insight into the process and its potential.”
“To Delhi?”