Red Right Ankle

Every day I begin to feel more like a collection of organs and less like a person. The parts of me and the sum of me are in conflict. Today it’s my ankle. The right one. It’s swollen.

No it isn’t. Yes, it is. No. Go to work.

I will, I know I must. It’s my first week at the new restaurant and I can’t be late. But where did I leave the measuring tape? It’s supposed to be on the bedside table. Ready, accessible. Constant surveillance. That’s how I live. Me and the State. I learnt from the best after all.

They take my Aadhar Card for every scan. They note down the number at the bottom of the card every time I ask for an MRI, an ultrasound. I used to say no. I’d argue, before. Back when the ankle wasn’t so swollen, the pain more erratic. I had the energy for debate then. I’d say you don’t need my Aadhar card number. The woman at the reception would look blankly at me, as if I’d suddenly switched to a language she didn’t speak. She’d talk slowly, enunciating as if we are not both speaking in our native tongue. She could have held an ice cube in her mouth and I’d still recognise the words.

“The form won’t go through without the Aadhar card number.”

“No, the form won’t go through without a twelve-digit number. Just type 000000000000. It’ll work.”

“I’m sorry, it’s against company policy.”

Now I just give in. Take it. Fill the form. Make the bill. Let me pay so you can see through me and save the data in your porous cloud. I’m too tired. This is paranoia anyway, isn’t it?

“Your data is safe with us ma’am.”

She can read my mind. Maybe I’m not the first one to try and say no? Consent lingo hasn’t quite made it big here yet. Odd, one would think the medical industry would be the first to jump on the consent bandwagon. Or maybe not. Doctors know best. It’s customer is always right, not patient. Mine is a reluctant, reticent no; a tired one, half-hearted because it’s been rejected so many times before. She doesn’t take it seriously. Even she knows it’s a yes.

Get with the program please miss. She smiles in Lakme’s 9 to 5 range. I nod in yesterday’s eyeliner.

“Just sell it,” I say at last, as I tap my phone and pay. Sell my medical history to the big men who run the country. No, not those men. The ones in government? They can’t run shit. Sell it to the pharma company. The ones who now know that I am crippled by pain, by anxiety, by delusions. They’ll come for me, they’re already on their way. With their algorithms and medicines.

Will they scold me for wasting resources? Will they ask why I felt the need to have three MRIs in three months? Or will they laugh, in satisfied corporate, because each MRI costs twelve thousand rupees and isn’t covered by insurance? That’s half the starting salary at the restaurant. If I was still a new cook—scurrying, peeling potatoes and chopping onions—I’d be going to work only to spend half my salary every month trying to prove I can’t actually work.

I can tell them why I have three in three. If they want that data. They won’t file it, it’s unreliable. Not empirical. Based on emotion, on fluctuating pain. Can’t be measured, can’t be recorded, must be ignored. If I could, I’d grab their faces with a pair of kitchen tongs, force them to stare at me, look at my mouth as it forms the words and say, “Your doctor is too stupid. He missed reading the chapter on women’s biology. He can’t read the MRI. He’s blind.”

You see the first time I took the MRI to him, he said the pain was in my head. He looked me up and down to see if I was too fat or too thin. Unfortunately, I am right in between. So, he ran some more tests, not the ones I asked for, no—doctor knows best—but ones that give him the answer he wants. He finds it at last, low Vitamin D levels.

“Take this once a week for three months and eat more chicken. It’s low vitamin D and low protein, that’s all, that’s your problem.”

I tell him that’s all of India. That we are full of untapped sunshine, that we’re so focused on figuring out who is pure and which meat to eat that we’re all a bit underfed.

But he has waved his hand. Next.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I can read my own MRI. It took three tries, but I’ve got my own surveillance ops running now. I keep tabs on me. All filed neatly, just in case they ask for proof one day. They do that now. Ask for proof of citizenship.

Where was your great great great grandmother born?

Here. Here is proof of her irregular cycle. Here are her fifteen children, four of whom were stillbirths. Here is her blood. Pouring out, for three months at a stretch. Note that down too. Back then, even she didn’t know she was unwell. Record her, note her down. An unwell woman. Before microplastics. Married at fifteen. Had the babies. Lost the babies. Good wife. Cooked and cleaned. Perfect mother. Literate. Taught her children how to write. Read books while making mutton on the coal fire outside the house. She was ill too. They forgot to note it down. They didn’t survey her. Only me.

And with me it’s easy to blame. It’s the lifestyle. The junk food.

But I don’t eat that shit. I’m a chef. My body is a temple. My palette my money- maker.

Don’t lie, they said. It’s my fault, me and my precocious puberty.

Precocious; developing abilities too early. A word thrown at child actors and little girls who sit with grown-ups and enunciate. I hate the word. Makes this feel like something I did. Like I tried to grow up faster than my pre-teen body.

I didn’t. The world did. Don’t put the onus on me.

One day they’ll ask for proof of fitness before sending us off to war. They’ll ask where the children are. I must have more.

On the news the leaders of the majority party warn that the majority religion is no longer the majority. They are the ones running surveillance on our lives, and when they say, you the women of the majority are not doing your job, I know they are talking to me. Three children each, that’s the minimum they will accept to save ourselves from an invasive minority.

The boyfriend-on-track-to-become-husband is a liberal man. He doesn’t believe their propaganda, but he wants kids. If they make this a law, he won’t fight for my rights. That’s why he hasn’t become husband yet. I can’t give him a stakeholder share in me. Before that, I must have proof. Proof for the men in charge and the man in love.

They’ll want proof that I’m barren and not unwilling. I’ll show them how barren I am. Unwilling is in my mind. An emotion—hard to place on an excel sheet—ignored, irrelevant. That’s why I scan, and scan again. Surveillance. Proof of illness. Look look, this is adenomyosis. It’s swallowing my uterus. It’s bigger, no that doesn’t mean I can have more kids. It means there is no space for a child. Uterus is already full. Of overgrown tissue and blood and things that shouldn’t be there. Measure it, see, it’s larger than the average uterus. It’s retroverted too. Yes, facing the wrong way. I’m all wrong inside, sorry. Yes, I can’t fulfil my duty. Boyfriend is not sure he wants to make it to husband anymore.

The measuring tape says I am correct. My right ankle is 6mm fatter than the left. It is round and soft. Inside, it is enflamed. When they removed the cast on my foot, they said, all good, healed now. Go run a marathon. I returned with the measuring tape and a right shoe that had inexplicably stretched, moulding itself to the fatter contours of my new ankle. Then they acknowledged the discomfort.

“Yes, sorry, the ligament never grew back. But it’s fine, no need to create a fuss. You’re fine. There will be some swelling when there is moisture in the air, that’s all.”

I’m fine. No pain. Even when it can be seen it cannot be seen. Good thing the monsoon in Delhi is short.

One day I’ll use the measuring spoons at work to measure the moisture in my underwear. Two cups of blood, one cup off-white mittelschmerz fluid, a tablespoon of viscous—slimy like okra—goop, one egg. I’ll bake the gynaecologist a loaf of bread. Can he taste what he cannot see? I’ll wash the spoons afterwards of course.

My foot is swimming dangerously in these black no-slip Kitchen Crocs. There’s no grip on them. The corners of the adult diaper chafe against my white Chef’s trousers. Sanitary pads don’t cut it in the kitchen. It’s a twelve-hour shift. One tiny bathroom, shared with eight men. I don’t have time to care. Diaper it is. At my old job, we could wear black trousers. I traded that for better pay here.

Here too, I follow orders. I have a supervisor. There is no experimentation in the commercial kitchen. We have a book, its laminated pages full of recipes. Anyone can cook here. No, really. It is easier here than in my kitchen at home where I have to guess the spoons of turmeric and imagine when the meat is done. Here, I don’t even taste. I put salt and yell for Chef. I give him a spoon full of sauce and wait, praying that this time I am correct. I don’t taste to see if I am correct. That’s wastage.

How will I learn? By sneaking around.

There’s a CCTV camera in the kitchen, they’re watching me. If I eat a bite extra, they’ll cut it from my salary and then where will I get the money for the next MRI?

What they don’t know is that if I open the cold storage freezer and kneel, they can’t see me. So here I sit and shove slices of imported meat into my mouth. Not out of hunger. Just malice. They owe me. They’d give me the extra food if my belly was getting round the way they want it to. No, they wouldn’t, then they’d just fire me.

I want to consume. The chorizo rounds from the pasta, the imported sliced meat, the salmon I smoked with lavender sprigs and coal. The goat’s cheese and the liver mousse. I am hungry and can’t be satiated.

Like the pain that is consuming me.

All pain has begun to muddle together like mint and sugar and ice at the bottom of the mojito glass. I like the man behind the bar at the restaurant. He comes in early—like me—to wash down the sticky bar counter, to fill and refill ice. He makes me an iced americano every morning, without my asking. If boyfriend-on-track-to-be-husband understood me like that, I may even try and get pregnant.

He’s not from here, the bartender. He’s an outsider in the mainland. Respected for his skills but mocked. He understands me, more than I understand him. He sees the same shiftiness in me. His pain is worse. It’s visible. His eyes, hair, face. I’m different, he screams. They notice. They make sure he remembers.

They don’t see me, they’re not sure if I’m different or just sullen. So, I have to be grateful. I can hide in plain sight. He fights every day.

Now they’ve all come together, the parts of me, to attack the sum; the throbbing of my back, of my foot, the knots in my stomach, the bloating, the ebb and fall of my abdomen. This last symptom I can measure. My wardrobe accommodates three different women. We stretch, from size 8 to 14. How will they handle this, the data companies? What will they sell me? I don’t fit.

Maternity pants. Wow. Way to rub salt in the wound.

I’ve made a map. In case you want to come someday and join me on this treasure hunt. If I wake up one morning and the world is upside down and suddenly everyone is rushing up to me to say I believe you, show me please. I will say come see this. I am showing you. I will teach you with this diagram. Here, hold my index finger, and let me move us around the board. The body. Through the reds of my inner thigh to the jolts of electricity that spark in between my matted pubic hair, down to the clicking heartbeat of the two bones in my ankle rubbing at each other and upwards to the pulsating headache under the arch of my neatly threaded brow. Come, it’s real, this finger moving across the board. The body.

It is 8:30 a.m. and I am at the restaurant. I’m the newest hire. I left the old job because the women there all moved to the bakery. It was an unsaid thing. Men get the meat; women get the bread and cookies. I don’t do bread and cookies.

“No thank you,” I said. I quit.

“Good,” they said. “You take too many sick days anyway.”

I don’t need to be the first one in. This job is a promotion. But in the kitchen, loyalty matters as much as competency. For the first month at least, I need to be the first one here. I need to do the grunt work and smile. I’m a team player. Keep me on your team please.

I’ve come in early to wipe down the countertops. It is a choreographed routine that my broken body remembers. I can do it in this distracted half-sleep, where my mind is fading into self-indulgence. That’s what the last doctor called the pain.

“You’re overindulgent. You think about it too much. Practice restraint. Out of sight, out of mind.”

I promised him I would. No more naval gazing. My muscles scream, the nerve twitches. No, I say. I can’t hear you. Luckily, these muscles have the memory of the kitchen in them too.

So I refill the bottles of oil and light the pilot under the stock pot. The grill is seasoned with half an onion pierced on a fork. Then I empty the containers, all thirty-two of them. Wipe them down and fill them up again.

The head chef at this new place lent me his copy of Anthony Bourdain’s memoir three nights ago, at the end of service.

“What an inspiration, man. Changed my life. Read it, read it.”

I’ve been reading a few chapters before bed every night. Anthony writes well; candidly and with wonderful, wicked descriptions of food. I can taste this book; I get the chokehold it has us all in.

Over lunch, Chef asks me what I think of the book so far. I talk to him about the descriptions of food and how they have inspired me to travel. I acknowledge and admire the honesty in Bourdain’s writing, the starkness of his mental health on the page. I can feel a sense of deep empathy. I tell him boyfriend-to-be-husband is reading it too. He loves it, even though he works in tech and can eat dal-chawal for every meal and still be happy.

“And his work ethic,” Chef says with relish, eyeing us younger cooks up and down. He’s gearing up for a teaching moment. “He tells it like it is, you gotta put that blood and sweat into the kitchen. You have to work hard man, this place is brutal.”

I nod and wait for him to move onto something else. This part of the book I have skimmed through. The descriptions of women who make bad workers in the kitchen (to be fair he talks of bad men too). There are some women who make excellent workers. Tough women. They have a knife held between their breasts, no time for nonsense and a fuck you-can do attitude. He leaves the conflict on the page. In language borrowed from the military that glorifies the questionable labour practices of most successful commercial kitchens. I understand, I do. Labour costs must be cut to keep food costs competitive. I want to hate him for singling my gender out. But as I continue to become more organ and less person, as I become more the example that proves his point and less the exception, I lose the words to articulate my case against misogyny.

I return to the task at hand, peeling three hundred cloves of garlic for a chorizo and sausage pasta dish. And then it comes like projectile. The sticky peel of a clove still half stuck to my forefinger, I lurch upwards and inside me lurches out. A quick pause in the cloakroom to grab my bag and I walk to the bathroom. I pry open my underwear and pick up the gelatinous maroon mass, the blood clot heralding an early period. It is larger than my finger, though I admit I have unusually small hands. I cradle it in my palm, carefully so the blood does not loosen from its congealed state and spill. It looks like the slugs that come out to climb up the wall after a night of rain. Moves on my hand with that same squiggle too. I marvel at its size for a second longer, then flush it down.

I wash my hands, very thoroughly, then let the tap run for a minute longer to wash away any traces of blood left on the sink. I take this break. A second longer than my peers. Their cigarette breaks don’t count. The boss takes those too. My bathroom breaks are logged. I don’t smoke cigarettes though. I work while they puff. But that’s part of the process. The bathroom—a waste of time. An excuse.

“You’re tired, aren’t you? Can’t handle standing. Want to sit on the pot? Weak.”

The timer goes off. I return to the garlic, ignore the throbbing, the pulsating as if my body is the site of tonight’s EDM concert.

I have video footage that I have condensed into a forty-five second time lapse that shows just how much I bleed on the first day of my menstrual cycle. The original footage is a little over eight minutes and in those eight minutes I have bled more than most women do in two days. I have a violent urge to shove my footage into everyone’s face. Into the Head Chef’s face, and Anthony’s, because if every day in the kitchen is a battle against the clock and against customers in a hurry, then what about the soldier bleeding to death in my underwear? But really, it won’t make a difference. Boyfriend-to-be-husband has seen how much I bleed, still he is clutching onto hope for the promised baby. He’s like the doctor, can’t read the MRI. They surveil but they don’t even know how to use the data they’re holding.

A week after I first tore the ligament in my ankle, we read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in school. I learnt that Brutus was stoic. I will be stoic too. No complaints from me. So instead of calling in sick to work the following morning, I take my pill, pick up my hairnet and chef’s cap and walk to the metro station.
I have to make six litres of stock before I clock out today. The bones and vegetable scraps have been sautéing for a while and I have added water. It is the straining of the stock that makes me nervous. The stockpot is taller than me, and we weigh about the same. I cannot lift it without spilling, and I most certainly cannot lift it on a day when my stomach is churning.

Chef Maria can. Chef Maria is a boss lady if there ever was one. She is four foot nothing, has close cropped hair and wears red lipstick to work every day. And she is stronger than everyone else in the kitchen. She sees me struggling and comes to lift the stockpot herself while I hold the strainer. The minute she is done, she leaves, returning to her station before I have a chance to say thank you.
I must force myself to distinguish between the organ and the person. I must learn to be more like Chef Maria, like Brutus. I am afraid that if I am too indulgent, if I give these wounds too many words and acknowledge them as often as I already do, then I may manifest them into a more magnified existence. I worry that if I do not hold it in, my pain will develop an agency of its own, and in the process maybe I will lose mine?

Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary. Say it three times and she appears. Smiling at you from the mirror. Ready to pull your hair out. To kill you, limb by slow limb.

Pain. Pain. Pain. I’ve called on you so many times. When are you going to walk out of the mirror, share a cup of tea, split this last cookie perhaps, and laugh at me?

The last MRI, the one I filed for judgement day, the one I didn’t show the doctor, said my uterus was fused to my left ovary. Pain is at a scale of unable to stand straight. Doc says it’s a 3. Take an ibuprofen. He gave the same dose to a twelve-year-old with a stubbed toe. I take two. I’ll kill my liver first.
Boyfriend-to-be-husband has packed his bags. He does not approve of pain killers. They hurt the future baby. There is no future baby. Then there is no future. I hold the door open for him and fix the hairnet around my bun.

Because I must stand. Like Chef Maria taught me to. Legs spread. Weight shifted to the heels. I ignore the ankle. At least it is straight for now. Ignore the wetness still matted to the left inner thigh.

I’m giving it my all, Anthony. Because I like you, I do. Blood sweat and tears. I’ll be damned if my body makes me leave the kitchen. We have the same love for it, Anthony and I. I’ve got a roast to carve before dinner service tonight. I fought for this. The fucking meat station. No cookies. No bread.
Boyfriend-who-will-never-be-husband rings the bell. He’s a good guy. He feels bad.

“One last scan? Just in case?”

No babe. I’m sorry.

He wants to come back in. He thinks I’m feeling bad, that I am still processing that I am barren. He won’t leave today. He’ll stay till the weekend. Why? Two more days won’t fix a broken heart.
I tell him I’m Brutus now. He doesn’t understand. He didn’t pay attention in school. Didn’t file away words to use as measures.

“I feel no pain love,” I try again. No emotion. Not vulnerable. All good. Can’t be measured, can’t be seen remember?

“You’re not sad?”

I’m so fucking happy.

He’s scared now. Of this evil woman who doesn’t even want his kid. I should show remorse, look chastised, broken, incomplete. I’m breaking the rules.

He leaves. I adjust the diaper and leave for the kitchen. Twelve kilos of prawns need to be deveined and butterflied.

“Can I still get a meal at the restaurant?”

Friends and family discount always babe.