If I want to live, I must face being alive.

Photo: Pangong Tso, Eastern Ladakh. Taken by me.

When I was about seven or eight years old, I had a really bad haircut. My mother brought me to a Chinese hairdresser at the shopping complex near my HDB block. My mother described what I had asked for to the hairdresser - shorter hair, a little curly bob, up to my chin. In response, there was a lot of hand fluttering and picture-pointing and sounds from the hairdresser that suggested that everything was easily doable. My mother seated herself behind me, I closed my eyes, and the hairdresser began her work. 

Twenty minutes later, all of my beautiful hair lay on the floor, brutally hacked off. Very little was left on my head. I cannot remember my emotions then, only that I looked at myself in the mirror and there was what looked like a little boy-girl staring back at me. I was too young to give words to how I felt, that I could not recognise myself in the mirror, that I felt completely discombobulated from my Self.

I swallowed. 

I cannot remember what happened afterwards. 

I think that is when I first started disassociating from the pain in my heart, body. 

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My hair started falling off in clumps once the chemotherapy drugs properly kicked in. 

Initially, I didn’t think much of it. I didn’t expect it to happen so soon. Maybe a part of me thought that I would be able to get through this relatively unscathed, that I could keep my hair. After all, I had read about other people using cold caps and other contraptions to preserve their hair through treatment.

But with the drugs I was taking, those weren’t options I could exercise. It did happen to me, after all.

There was hair, everywhere.

I’ve always had generally weakened hair, from the years of abuse I had put it through, straightening tongs, and extreme heat, a mirage of colours, chemical washes, more straightening tools. So, seeing my hair being littered around the house wasn’t an entirely new phenomenon. Waking up in the morning and finding my hair on my pillowcase didn’t sucker punch me in the gut. Clearing the clogged drain in my bathroom didn’t give me any more feels than usual. 

Until one day I ran my hand through my hair and felt it come apart in my hands, feather light, so precious, a clump. I did it again. And again. More hair. So much hair. How much hair did I have on my head? I didn’t realise I was crying till I heard a loud guttural sound, like a wounded animal. That was me, I was making that sound, something so feral and primal and inexplicably sad. I kept making that sound. There were tears running down my face. 

I couldn’t really feel anything in my body. Again, disassociation. 

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When you are not small, and have chocolate-coloured skin, and hair that will never behave no matter what you do to it, you realise very quickly that you’re an alien. You look around you, and everywhere, you see skin many shades lighter than yours, the tops of people’s heads. And that’s without the heels.

You wear shorts and it is a dry day and your skin is ashen. You want to hide it, but you cannot. There is no cloak big enough to find absolution in. You learn very quickly that you try your hardest to blend in, that there is no other alternative if you want to survive.

So you do things to your body. You stop eating, first in small increments, then you become bolder and start skipping meals. Your alarm rings at 6am sharp every morning, and you drag your leaden limbs to the gym where you run and run on stationary machine, going nowhere at all but convincing yourself that you are moving towards something.

You may not be able to change the way other people see you, but you surely can change the way you see yourself in the mirror, damn it. 

You wage this war, over and over. Your body changes. You start eating again, but differently, cautiously. You convince yourself you never had a problem in the first place. You preach about acceptance and self love and all the other bullshit you find on Instagram posts. You give the people around you all the love you can barely spare for yourself. 

You get so used to pretending and posing that you think you’ve done it, you’ve conquered yourself now. 

Then cancer hits. 

A huge, yawning chasm opens and it all comes spilling out. 

It sounds like a guttural cry. It looks like a little boy-girl staring out at you, mouth moving without sound. 

You fall to your knees. 

+++

I have completed treatment. My blood results are pretty great. 

I am ready to belong to the world of living again. 

I throw myself into living. 

I jump onto planes, trek hills, visit one country then another. I drink alcohol, eat copious amounts of bread. I start running, fit myself onto a reformer machine and suck my core in. 

I am relentless, heady. 

I am back, bitches. 

At night, I grind my teeth down to the bone. 

I wake up in the middle of the night, my pyjamas drenched in sweat. 

In the middle of my run, I feel a gaping yawn in my heart and I am sobbing, sobbing so hard I cannot breathe. My sentences trail off in the middle of my speech because I cannot remember what I meant to say. I keep writing everything down, less of an artist,  more of an old person fighting hard not to forget.

I am back, bitches, but I don’t quite know who I am. 

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When your identity is stripped off you in so many ways, when the body you’ve waged a war against for the better part of your life decides it has had enough of your bullshit and rebels, when you cannot trust yourself and even less, the world around you, what becomes of you? 

Who are you then? 

If you lose a venerated job, leave an organisation you gave your youth to, have no hair, have wider hips, wider stomach, wider everything, if you feel your brain closing in on you some days, if you are slowly forgotten, if you don’t post on social media, if your words get mixed up and your jaw hurts from your desperate attempts at surviving, at pretending, 

Who are you then? 

When the voice in your head is a constant metronome of self hate and confusion, of garbled thoughts and pain, when you hear the ghosts of your past reminding you that you aren’t enough, that you have failed, repeatedly in everything, you have failed, what then? 

What then? 

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I am in the greater region of Kashmir, staring out of the window as the car makes its way along a snaking mountain pass. 

I am so high up that I have to be careful about getting altitude sickness.

I am surrounded by white peaks, the most unforgiving mountains I have seen in a long time. I am surrounded by white peaks and I feel the closest to joy in a long time. 

Here, very little matters. It doesn’t matter to the mountains how much I earn, or how my hair looks like, or what I’m wearing. It doesn’t matter if I think I’m ugly, or if I hate the way I don’t know how to be in my new body. 

Here, I have no choice. I must succumb to the demands of nature. I must slow down. I must rest. To be alive, I must fight for it. I must honour the needs of my surroundings, and my body. 

Here, I cannot let my mind disappear. Here, I must be in my body, present, take deep breaths. 

If I want to live, I must face being alive. 

That night, I stay up late so that I can see the night sky. 

We are at Pangong Tso, the world’s highest saltwater lake. There is very little here, just the Pangong Range, and the stillest lake, and the widest sky. There are people, shrill anomalies but I ignore them easily, used to blocking out meaningless noise.

The night sky reveals itself to me at midnight, what feels like an omen unto itself.

There is no electricity in Pangong now, all the lights have been switched off. The stars spread out, one by one, twinkling, shining.

I blink, and I realise that they aren’t just stars,  but whorls of stars, swirling beautiful patterns of something that my little human brain is unable to comprehend, stars so old and so far away that I realise how reductive my understanding of time and space is. 

I am crying again. There is a low guttural sound. It’s not unfamiliar, I have heard this before. It is coming from inside me, I feel it rising in my body. This time it isn’t bile, this time it feels like light, it feels like air, it feels like something new and precious coursing through my body. 

My body that has made it thus far, that I continue to hate on some days and honour on others. My body ,that has waged a war against itself twice, once of my own doing, the other to protect its right to remain, to live, to be here. 

My body, with soft curly hair growing everywhere now. Chocolate ashy skin, nails that have regenerated after dropping dead blue, bones that are learning how to move differently, muscles wrapping around bones to protect and nurture, blood coursing proud and fierce, my grandmother’s blood, my brain a pulsing force, my heart, its own lush forest. 

My body, that I know not what to do with often, that often does its own thing anyway, this sentient being. 

I don’t quite know who I am, but I’m here now. 

I’m not disassociating. 

And this, dear reader, is itself is a battle won. A battle won, indeed.