Eli had always had body issues because of her shitty upbringing.
Half sea turtle, half hermit crab, she suffered from the intersecting stigmas of fish, reptiles and hybrids alike. She needed to breathe but also to stay moist to be able to stay alive, and her sleep cycles amounted to a lifelong sleep disorder. She’d been brought up to hate her body, and while she developed her own additional reasons for hating it over time, the original lesson had certainly stuck all of its own.
Her parents were from England, their line traceable all the way back to those who had first colonized Mano’s homeland. While they did so under a more benign guise than before, they still benefited from perpetrating some of the same injustices as they had been from the start. As staunch Calvinists, they believed that their wealth meant that God was on their side. When they’d taken her on trips to India as a child, it had made her sick to her stomach to have seen just how much the luxury of their living conditions clashed with the poverty of those who lived around them. She decided that if God was on their side, God’s side wasn’t worth being on.
Limited forms of genetic engineering were available in the world they lived in. Mano’s third eye had been a ceremonial gesture, using science for ritual body modification. However, it had been her decision to have it put in, when she had come of age to be considered able to decide. Eli’s parents had her genetically engineered while she was still in the womb. They’d made her more resistant to all forms of disease and injury. The only sacrifice they’d had to make for it was to also change her genes in a way that made her more vulnerable to depression. They found it a fair trade. Pleasure was a waste of time, work was success, and success was God’s grace.
They had moved to India altogether when she’d been a teenager.
They talked about how important it was for her to grow up to give them an heir often. They believed that the perpetuation of their bloodline was everything, and that all the money that they’d inherited from their ancestors’ ancestors had to go to their descendants’ descendants, to keep the line of their power unbroken in God’s eyes. Her father was the model of an angry God, and she could never have imagined having had to deal with his reaction had she ever admitted to him that she did not want to him that she had no intention of ever being in a relationship with any man at all. Her father believed in ‘spare the rod, spoil the child.’ She’d grown up to resent him.
There was no one for her to turn to about any of it. When she heard her parents talking to other couples they had over, the other parents talked about the value of disciplining their child all the time. As far as she could tell, people around her existed as part of a culture that had conditioned them to ignore her suffering because it had been made to their disadvantage to acknowledge it for what it was. When one of her visiting relatives had taken advantage of the trust that she had put in him when she’d been just a teenager, she was told that it was important that she think about his reputation and about the reputation of their family business in general.
This event had cracked her shell more than any other before or since. Considering that she was already predisposed to depression, internalizing the silencing of the pain that she’d experienced shattered the dividing line between her mind and heart. Every emotion she felt in response to an unjust situation became stronger, more difficult for her to control. Under it, there was always the reminder that not only had she already had to endure her worst experience of all, but she also had to be submitted to the indignity of having had to deal with this on top of it too, adding insult to injury in the already cruelest world of all. It was just too much to put up with.
She wanted to think of sensitivity to others’ suffering as a power, not as a curse, but it wasn’t easy.
When they’d moved to India, they’d moved into a mansion where they’d hired Mano’s mother as their mechanic and Mano’s father as their gardener. When she was old enough to be allowed to work, they also hired Mano as help around the house whenever she’d be available for it. Mano’s parents weren’t rich as such, but they weren’t poor and, compared to many around them, they were thankful for what they saw as their luck. Eli’s parents were a little weirded out by the gender weirdness of her mother instead of her father being a mechanic. It was unheard of, but they came highly recommended, and they worked for comparatively little, so they were in.
Mano loved her parents.
Her mother first tried to encourage her to become a mechanic, like herself. Mano had enjoyed taking things apart and putting them back together when she had been a child. Her mother thought that she really had an aptitude for it, and informally taught her some of what she knew over time. Her father first tried to encourage her to become a gardener, like himself. She clearly liked plants, stopping by to view, smell or even touch them whenever she would see them in the wild. She wasn’t afraid of getting her hands dirty, and her father showed her the rudiments of his trade, in the hopes that she would follow in his footsteps as well.
Not wanting to disappoint either of them at the expense of the other at the risk of driving a wedge between them, when she had come of age, Mano went to college to become a journalist. While they had hoped to pass on their trades to her, they also made it clear to her that they were happy for her that she would have found something to pursue in life that was truly her own. She hoped they would prove as understanding when she would reject arranged marriage as a lesbian. As long as she did not end up having to work in a call center like her friends who were forced to give up their long-term well-being for their immediate survival needs, she would be grateful.
She was made to spill ink, after all.
Her mother would take her to the beach to teach her Kalaripayattu. Like silat, it was renowned for how far its female exponents could rise and gain respect in them, even in the midst of societies that could otherwise prove unfavorable to them. She taught Mano never to use violence irresponsibly, but to always be ready to defend herself if she needed to, and they would bond as they trained before the rise and fall of the ocean’s waves.
Her father would invite her into his garden, and teach her yoga among the plants. He taught her that there was more to yoga than a simple physical exercise that was supposed to keep you healthy. Yoga was supposed to be a natural extension of the connection between people and their gods, a ritual expression of spiritual practice. Beyond that, he taught her to try to ‘get into’ the spirits of the animals that they imitated, to treat it as role-play, as an exercise in empathy.
What would you be like if you had been born in different circumstances? She was taught to ask herself this question relentlessly. Reincarnation meant that you could come back as anyone, so you should try to understand people because you could have been them, if things had only been just a little different for you. By becoming used to any difficult posture through yoga, he hoped she would also learn to adapt to difficult environments, even uncomfortable ones, by extension. By teaching her both engineering and Kalaripayattu, her mother taught her to adapt situations to her own needs. She strove to develop both sets of skills, and to use them right.
She was startled when she first saw Western kids kill insects. When her parents had found insects in their home, it had always been their custom to be careful to capture them without hurting them, and to release them outside. When she had asked about it, her parents had explained to her that they believed in something called ahimsa, that the first duty of every living thing was to do no harm to any other living thing. When she would find insects drowning near her, she developed the habit of taking them out of the water to put them back on land, and it would cheer her up whenever she would do it. What must have it been like to have been a bug?
Once, the building they shared with other tenants became infested by termites. They were eating through the wood everywhere so much that the structural integrity of the whole building was compromised. They needed to evacuate the building of all of its tenants so that they could safely perform the extermination that would put a stop to their ravages before repairs could be performed. One of their neighbors, a very pious man, was refusing to evacuate on the grounds that it was against his religious beliefs to cooperate with the extermination. At first, Mano was surprised that her parents criticized his decision, while agreeing to evacuate themselves.
“We understand how you feel, but this is not just a matter of what we believe ourselves. We live in a society with other people who may or may not share our beliefs. If it were feasible for us to move to a different building and to simply abandon this one, we would do it, but we are not rich, and many other tenants are poorer than we are. None of us can afford to. If science had progressed to a point to which we could communicate with the termites to ask them to leave, we would agree to it. Unfortunately, science has not, and we do not have this option. We’ll always be proud of our beliefs, Mano, but it’s still not right for us to impose them on others.”
It was this level of nuance based on context that laid the groundwork for the kind of religious tolerance that Eli liked about Mano right away. She’d had crushes on other girls her age back in England, idle longings that she knew even while having them that they would always be the stuff of fantasy, and that it may be just as well that way than to bluntly find out a girl was straight. This was the first time she felt as though she fell in love with someone. It frightened her.
Love could be a scary thing sometimes.
Eli had always hated the maid fantasy. While she was made of flesh and blood, and liked eroticizing her fellow women just as much as the next lesbian did, she just couldn’t help but look at it through a Marxist lens and see it as a projection of the straight male gaze. While it was usually thought about from the perspective of how interesting it could prove for the person being served, she couldn’t help thinking about how reductive it could be to think of it from the perspective of the maid, having to treat what should’ve been a vacation as just an extra chore to slog through at the end of the day. What an entitled way of thinking that was.
When she fell in love with her housekeeper, she felt rather conflicted about it. Did this mean that she’d been wrong to judge others for finding something compelling about this concept that she hadn’t considered? Did it mean that she really did have just the entitled way of thinking that she rightly criticized others for having? Did it mean that her disregard for the maid fantasy and her attraction to her housekeeper could be separated in a way she hadn’t thought about? Or was that just a self-serving excuse to justify herself? She wasn’t sure, but she was a little afraid to find out. How badly could she have internalized some patterns that had been inflicted on her?
There was more to Mano than being her housekeeper, that much was for certain. Eli paid attention to what she did in her off time. She saw Mano’s workshop and garden as windows into her soul, as places where the ideas that came into the octopus’ mind were made manifest, and marveled at the mind that she imagined having been able to come up with such things. She saw Mano training at both yoga and martial arts, and wondered at the time, skill and effort that it would have taken anyone to move as gracefully as she did, without even seeming to try. She saw Mano seem to get along with her parents and envied her that more than anything she ever had.
Mano was kind to her.
She went about their dwelling like well-oiled machinery, creating order from chaos, with a song on her lips and a smile on her face. Eli had always found it hard to smile. Her parents’ smiles had always been fake, and the more they had tried to force her to smile to convince other people to like her, the more she had come to think of it as an unfair encroachment for others to expect it from her. But Mano’s smiles at her felt like they were being freely given to her.
Mano had seen Eli cry one time. At first Eli had become angry and hurt at the thought of having been caught. She’d been taught to repress her emotions at all costs or else, and the idea of having someone else see her in an emotional state such as this one had been humiliating to her. At first Mano felt guilty to have accidentally infringed on Eli’s privacy the way she had just then. But she felt a surge of empathy for her that rendered her unable to walk away. She had to ask if Eli would be all right, if there was anything she could do. How could she live with herself if she didn’t?
How could Mano see Eli’s suffering, and not imagine what it would be like if it had happened to her instead, and not feel that same suffering in all three of her hearts?
There was nothing that Mano could really do. Eli was sad because her parents were abusive to her, controlled her life, taught her that everything short of perfection from her was unacceptable, and that the purpose of her life should have been to meet their expectations at all costs, no matter what. Mano could not risk confronting her parents’ employers, throwing the lives that they had worked for into disarray. She had no leverage against Eli’s abusers. She knew that the power dynamic she was in had come to be without her input, but she still felt so guilty for not being able to help that she felt that she had to apologize to Eli about it.
Even though Mano had no way to solve her problems, Eli was moved by the fact that Mano took the time to listen to her and to care about her. No one else had ever gone to the trouble of trying to understand what she’d been going through, and she’d never realized how badly she’d needed it all along before it had finally happened to her then. She’d never imagined herself as even worth caring about by anyone before. It was a first for her that she’d never forget.
Beyond that, in a world she’d come to see as cruel beyond any chance for redemption for her entire life, it was the first time that Eli had seen a sign of empathy in someone that had convinced her that maybe sometimes people could be kind to others after all. Eli thanked her for her kindness, and they started to talk. Mano came to admire Eli’s capacity and willingness to speak her mind a great deal, finding Eli an inspiration to her in her own journalistic endeavors. The first time that, sitting together idly during what little free time they had, they’d tentatively moved their arms toward each other’s to hold hands, Eli’s heart had leapt in her chest.
Mano wasn’t fazed by Eli’s atheism. She’d lived in a religiously diverse environment for most of her life, mostly around Muslims and Sikhs, none of which her parents had taught her to think less of because of their beliefs. She didn’t particularly need someone she loved to conform to her beliefs for her to feel that they were being validated, as long as they didn’t expect Mano to give up her own beliefs for them. Eli made it clear to her that she didn’t.
Mano had not met many Buddhists. In practice, most of them seemed relatively peaceful to her, at least from a distance. In some ways, their beliefs were still more similar to her own than the beliefs of any monotheists. According to her beliefs, Buddha was even supposed to have been one of the avatars of Vishnu among many others, so clearly he was supposed to have had an important role to play.
Despite that, on an underlying level, she sometimes wondered what it meant that Buddhism, having started out from Hinduism to go in its own direction instead, presented itself as an ‘awakening’ from something. Did it mean that they considered her beliefs to mean she was ‘asleep?’ Of course, she knew that, on some level, the point was supposed to be to become awake to the suffering of others.
She would sometimes think about the story of Buddha, having grown up in a life of privilege, suddenly being ‘awakened’ from his sheltered existence to witness suffering, poverty, disease and death. She had certainly seen her share of poverty when she had been growing up. Even so, on some level, talking to Eli and trying to be there for her, to listen to her about her pain, always made her find the Buddha relatable. In her way, she’d been ‘awakened to suffering.’
She understood not wanting to go back to not knowing. She could never think that the bliss of continued ignorance could be worth not being able to be there for someone who needed her, who she wouldn’t have been able to help if she hadn’t known about it. While it was true that she often found the news depressing herself, she became proud that she would be living her life as a journalist, in a way so as to bring knowledge about the state of the world to people.
Knowing was always better than not knowing.
When Mano had graduated from her studies, she came in contact with a leftist newspaper that offered her a job as a war journalist in the Middle East. She could have either accepted it to leave everything and everyone she’d ever known behind, or have tried to find another job in India, to have been able to stay in her homeland with her parents. Beyond that, she’d become attached to Eli enough that she didn’t want to leave her behind by that point.
When Mano first mentioned the job offer to Eli, she talked about how she didn’t want to take it. She knew she could find other opportunities where they were, and she made it clear to Eli that being able to be with her was the most important thing in her life. But Eli’s depression because of her parents’ abusive treatment of her was getting worse. She told Mano that, if she did take the job, Eli would very much like to go with her, if Mano would have her.
She said that she couldn’t imagine having to spend another year in a place where her parents had as much access to her as they wanted to at all times, where they could always hurt her, where she could never do anything about it. She’d become used to being able to lean on Mano whenever they’d hurt her. Without her as support, or any chance of escape from such an untenable situation, Eli feared she couldn’t make it through the year and would take her own life.
If she stayed, she believed she would die.
Even though Mano hadn’t come out to her parents yet, she asked them whether they thought she should take the job or not, for what it was worth. She was afraid of getting them in trouble with their employers, or that she would be betraying them by leaving them behind in some way. “We just want you to do whatever will make you happy,” they’d told her. She was grateful for their kindness, and knew they were saying what she believed parents should say, on some level. As part of her own reflections on the awareness of suffering, she wondered whether or not happiness was truly the most important thing. But she smiled, and thanked them warmly.
She took the job, and brought Eli with her, to save her love from the grace of God...
