The wolf pierces its claws into living flesh, and bites. White teeth meeting red flesh meeting white bone, its appetite calms. It’s in its nature – this thirst that only quenches at the spilling of blood. An inbuilt inevitability.
This is how we know we’re human – our appetites differ. They separate us from wolves, civilise us. When we prey, it’s not with hunger. It’s with desire – a graceful whore, sweet like a siren. It’s with greed, luxurious and haunting.
And then we have passion’s appetite. A bastard child, left on the tracks of an abandoned station, hardened like a soldier. And tender, inside, like the pith of an orange.
When this appetite seeded in me, I was three. Impressionable, as kids are. My body hadn't even begun, yet, to grow into itself. It was malleable still, like pure gold. Unreasonably precious. For years I would try to keep it malleable, to test the limits of its twists and turns.
I would be foolish.
Passion's appetite grows, you see. Like a neglected weed, moss over brick. It creeps over every surface. Wraps, cloyingly, around everything it touches. Even kids. Even bodies.
That's how it felt, in my chest, when I joined my first dance class. Its green was vibrant then; even calling it ‘green’ feels crude. It was something of poetry – like emerald, or jade, catching
light in all the right places. Catching? It felt more like a grab, like intercepting the ball while it was still cresting, before it had even begun to fall. It felt like being ahead of the game. The feeling magnified my scrawny and awkward little self into something confident, something glowing with eagerness. Glowing, and growing. And growing faster, in me, my darling appetite.
And she – I'll call her she, because she's human, after all – she's strong, you know? Strong enough to push organs aside. To stick her fingers between each rib and mould them to their shape. To stand in place of cartilage.
At five, I play with her. We switch from style to style. I learn Kathak, hip-hop, freestyle. I can’t stop. I’m hungry, hungrier than five year olds are. She makes me special. Makes me stomach more than I am capable of.
I’ve only entered middle school when her eye catches on Bharatnatyam. It’s new. It’s exotic. It’s something we’ve never seen before. She’s hungry. And I comply, I'm happy to, like a rich husband buying jewels for his wily young wife. Clasping them around her neck, trembling fingers barely brushing cool skin.
It's love at first sight, at first step. I'm my teacher's favourite student. Her shiny new daughter, impressionable once more. All over again, my own bastard child preens inside, feeding from my blossoming breasts. She's learning to ask for more. To receive it too, with glee and growing gluttony, every time the night lies witness to embodied rhythm. The moon watches as my foot meets the cold floor with a sharp thwack, a desperate kiss, the power of a star collapsing. Again and again and again.
As my appetite tumours, her eyes tumour too. She turns blind, cupid-like. Cherubic. She learns to see with her feet, with the way her phalanges bend into mudras. With the sound of an audience on its feet, thundering with applause.
Blind, she dissolves into my body like flesh in acid. Takes up every inch, imbues herself in each cell. And I let her, because I love her. And she loves me too, I know, because she spoils me. She lends me the power of a Titan, the power to sway a crowd with a single twitch of my eyebrow. Beguiling.
Together, we're a witch.
And the stage – it’s a stage. It’s like nothing else there is. Under its spotlights, she balloons. Her pith tightens, grows. Titanium meeting titanium, fusion after fusion. Uncontrolled and exhilarating. The mridangam booms right where my heart pumps blood. My guru’s nattuvangam clang sharp against each other, in flawless rhythm with her loud, staccato syllables. The air carries the flute like a wind-born kite. I don’t hear them as much as I feel them.
She rises and holds me up to heaven, satiated, for a moment. Proud, like a mother.
A mother inside her daughter. Pulp and pith and peel.
After the performance, the musicians ask my guru to meet me. They tell me that this is what I was born to be, that they want to work together again. Shining, my guru agrees. Shining, I agree too.
It’s this acknowledgement, perhaps, that pivots my fate. Heroes always warn us about hubris. And I should’ve listened, because I’m not ready when a hand reaches out and grabs me, right as I crest.
And then, well, you know how tragedies go. Apollo licks the head of his arrow before placing it in his bow. Points it at me, or her, with venom coating its deadly metal.
The heavens laugh, and he shoots.
Here, on earth, the days pass. Eventually, the doctor turns to my father. Somehow, she recognises the frailty beyond my torn knee. She says, with a mouth that isn't delivering its first tragedy: "She'll have to give up dancing."
When the body is sick, the soul withers. Its appetites rot, too sensitive for the sun. For the air. For her own good, I lock my appetite up. The cage takes up the hollow of my lungs. Every breath after comes shallow, hesitant. The iron of my blood sticks itself to her cage.
My body goes into labour, giving birth to another self – a Caliban. Something foreign, ugly. Something I can't recognise, can't tell is mine. Pulp, pith, peel – rotten in succession.
Losing its means, my appetite sickens herself with rage. A trapped creature is an angry creature. A trapped creature wants out. She has her burning hands wrapped around her cage, melting the rods from outside in, my skin from inside out.
It’s a damning sensation, utterly ineffable. It’s like battling with myself. A civil war in a five-foot ground.
We visit doctor after doctor, because the ache has travelled. It isn’t just a torn knee, not anymore. It’s everywhere. Arthritis. Autoimmune. A true, physical war between cells.
It’s a cruel joke.
They etch the timeline out, and it’s been here longer than I’ve felt it. It’s been here for years, slowly brewing beneath my skin. Sometimes apples are glossy and rotten inside.
I expect to receive it with shock, but suddenly, everything makes perfect sense. Memories fall into place – all that time when my body felt too heavy for myself, when I had to lock my brain out as the music flooded it. When my skin first started to stretch foreign, much before I had locked my passion up.
Had she tumoured my eyes too? Had she blocked the nerves? I can’t feel pain anymore. I don’t know what it is.
I used to think that made me special.
When I introspect, she greets me with silence, and it triggers an emotion in me so deep, so violent, that I thrust my sharpened claws inside my chest.
I’m angry too. How dare she? How dare everyone else, that fed her? Didn’t they know? Didn’t they see?
Blood stains my blind gaze, and with my enraged hand I hold my mother, my daughter, my love by her pith; I channel the ache of all the places my bones kiss, joint; and sink her deep, deep into the horizon. Like a setting sun. Finally, she’s silenced.
It’s my first grief.
She was here before I was. Slumbering, beside my mother’s placenta, where I grew. In truth, you can’t rid yourself of someone like that. You can’t rid yourself of yourself.
Time starts to pass like honey, slow and thick, clogging the pores of my skin. I peel a mango and the juice flows down my palm, over the bone jutting out of my wrist, along my forearm. I think of rain. I think of the way it dances. I try to coax her out, like this.
I break out a set of old water paints, an even older sketchbook. I draw a pair of plums. I colour them beautiful, as beautiful as I can, magenta and purple. I say to her, see, this is art too.
I’d take a shake of her head over this silence.
I’d take fire over this silence.
I look for her everywhere. In the mango pulp. In the ceiling fan. On the stage, from the audience. She’s so quiet now; so quiet that I can’t tell if she’s even there anymore, if she’s truly left me behind. Did I succeed? Did I push her out? Am I empty, now?
But. But here’s the thing. Sometimes I feel her. Terribly gentle, terribly afraid. She is a part of me, after all. Like the slightest flutter of butterfly wings; like the air, perturbed by a newborn blinking. Small, cilia eyelashes stirring the oxygen before they collide with unblemished skin. When my attention strays from the music and travels to something else – anything else – an instinct rises. It’s older than me. It’s older than time. My toes twitch. My fingers itch. My joints begin to ache with something that’s not physical, not really. They ache with longing. An ache so deep it’s almost alive, like a dancing flame. Like dancing.
And I know she’s not dead. More than myself, my body knows. Even ugly, even foreign, my body remembers. And I’m a voyeur, then, watching my body and my appetite meet. Together, they forget the doctor. They forget medicine and biology and physics. They forget me. It’s just them. It’s just me, looking in, holding onto hope with inflammable hands.
Somewhere buried, a heart begins to throb in time.
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