Exit Bags
Photo: Karan Madhok
Fiction: ‘I try not to behave like my mother and accept a session of pedicure without making it about civilization and its discontents. I am in no hurry to die, but I shall go quietly when He comes.’
I am eyeing a busy Hatibagaan Salon, called “Deepanjali Beauty Parlour” waiting for my first ever pedicure. A Lepcha girl of around nineteen, with a flowing shiny mane of hair, approaches me. “Which one would you like to do, Ma’am,” she asks, indicating an index of differently-priced indulgences. I can scarcely concentrate, because I notice that behind her clean, ironed shift dress—with an apron and a sheer stocking—she is heavily pregnant. I finally beckon at the manager.
“Is this girl going to sit down and take my feet on her lap?”
The manager, a sole male figure in a female-only environment, emerges from a deeply meditative state attained by reading the entertainment section of a local newspaper.
“Yes Ma’am, is there a problem?”
“But she’s pregnant!”
“That is not an issue Ma’am. She is putting in an eight-hour shift!”
“Not only is it inhuman, I think it is illegal. You cannot use a pregnant woman for heavy-lifting work. She should be on maternity leave.”
The manager looks at me and starts to laugh.
“Ma’am, maternity leaves are for government employees. Women continue to labour in fields and deliver babies. Pooja here can barely afford two square meals a day. I know that she is a daughter of tea-garden workers; she has come down to the city after an early marriage to earn her living with her equally unemployed husband. If clients refuse to accept her services, she’d be thrown out. Do her a favour. Let her do your pedicure. Leave her a 5-star review.”
The pedicure is a gift from a dear friend, who—during the days of my struggling with my PhD—promised that the treatment was a woman’s best shot at happiness, outside of a good lover.
The same friend had said that I was on my way to becoming another Vikram Seth, who took eleven years not to do his PhD. But I proved her wrong; I delivered.
Their passage was tumultuous, they were hanging onto the edge of the cliff till death wrenched their fingers off it, or they gave Death acidity for good measure while He came to collect their souls.
Women deliver, with or without struggle–a Bengali’s favourite word. There are several stories of women who have given birth while working in fields and then, after cutting the umbilical cord and laying the baby in a sack, have continued to work their scythe till sundown. While working on a project on reproductive care in 18th-century Britain, I came across a story which appeared in the 18th-century Mist’s Weekly Journal, which reported the incident of a woman giving birth to rabbits in a field in November 1726. The incident, a strange and well-attested piece of news, came from Guildford. It was reported that a poor woman who lives at Goaldmin, delivered a baby with the help of Mr John Howard, an eminent surgeon and man-midwife. The creature she delivered resembled a rabbit, but whose heart and lungs grew outside of its belly. It was further reported that fourteen days later, Howard helped the woman deliver again—and this time, a perfect rabbit. And on the next day and the next and the next after that, Saturday, Sunday, the fourth, fifth, and sixth instant, of one in each day, they all died as they were brought into the world.
The woman confided under oath that two months ago, while working in a field with other women, she saw a rabbit, which despite their best efforts, she and the other farmhands could not catch. This incident created in her such a longing for rabbits that she was taken ill, and miscarried soon after.
Many were approached later to attest to the truth of this tale. Many heads from the medical community rolled on the matter.
*
Pooja—the young, pregnant Lepcha girl—is washing my feet, removing my calluses, as if she is washing a three-pound baby in a sack. Her hands are soft and tender, and she is doing it slowly, as if it were the feet of Jesus himself that she was putting under ablution.
She reminds me of the times when my mother used to bathe me as a child. Forty years later, the tables turned, and it was I who was washing my aged mother in turn every morning. Mother was diagnosed with stage-five dementia but her symptoms had started way way back in her youth, when she was given to compulsive washing and hoarding of objects without recourse to retrieving them back.
When I left for college, she locked my room for two years except on the occasions that I visited home from Delhi, as if her raw grief were a thing of sin. Even under my severe protests she would insist on washing my luggage; she had, like many people, great difficulty in accepting change.
Then there were my grandmothers, about whom family legend remembered that both had such lust for life that they did not know when to give up; not after carcinoma, or a bad marriage, partition, poverty, or dementia. Their passage was tumultuous, they were hanging onto the edge of the cliff till death wrenched their fingers off it, or they gave Death acidity for good measure while He came to collect their souls.
My mother was a beacon of that voracious appetite. Acceptance was not a word in her dictionary. “How is your mother?” is part of a compulsory psych evaluation for the post-doc positions I am applying for. I answer honestly to that and write ‘anxious’, but I work hard to change my neural circuits. I try to trick them into behaving differently, because not only do I have a lurking fear about my genetic destiny, I can already see signs in myself that forebode dementia, or a cluster of signs that I shall have dementia in the near or far future.
Any conflict of interest makes me want to howl like a wolf. Everything I ever let go has bite marks on it.
I try not to behave like my mother and accept a session of pedicure without making it about civilization and its discontents. I am in no hurry to die, but I shall go quietly when He comes.
*
I shifted and changed tracks in my career many times, and I forget names of offices I have worked in. But men remain as stories without titles. Every time I walked out on someone or someone walked out on me, a part of me went with them.
On 20th April, 2024, Sabreen—seven months pregnant—was asleep with her husband and daughter at the al-Sakani family home in Rafah, when a midnight Israeli airstrike killed all three. Only a baby in her womb was left alive.
When rescuers came and surgeons operated on Sabreen, they found that the baby had survived albeit with severe respiratory distress because of her premature birth. Born an orphan, premature and in an incubator, the baby entered the world in a hearse, with fireworks all around.
*
Afterwards, I amble about Hatibagan street near professor Hariharan’s house, where I used to go for chemistry tuitions in my teens, as a newbie in Kolkata out to crack JEE. I am now 50, and I cannot remember a single chemistry class that I missed, thanks to my then boyfriend Tathagata, who was punctually at my hostel gate to attend the tuitions together.
Professor Hariharan was the childless cat gentleman of my dreams (he had 13 of them). I loved him, and I adored Yahoo da, too his Man Friday, who earned that nickname because that was precisely what he would exclaim when he saw us arriving for morning classes. “Yahoo! Didimonis and Dadas have come,” he would call out to Prof. Hariharan, whose sitar recitals would be underway, and who would climb downstairs in pristine white pyjama kurtas afterwards to begin his two-hour chemistry lecture. Waiting for our teacher downstairs by the stairwell, where Tathagata made aeroplanes out of ABTA sample test papers, I would feel like a river overflowing in monsoon. Our teacher’s sitar filtered through the shuttered windows of his North Kolkata house along with early June light, a melancholic raag that remained with us long afterwards as we drew organic chemistry diagrams. And when we would be silent, Sir’s booming voice would be the burning bush to shatter that hush.
With time, Tathagata and my paths would diverge: while I ventured into academia, he had a keen interest in policing. He would soon focus on criminal psychology and join the Indian Police Service.
I remember him, and Sir, and all the men I have loved as vividly, as if I had said goodbye to them only yesterday. I shifted and changed tracks in my career many times, and I forget names of offices I have worked in. But men remain as stories without titles. Every time I walked out on someone or someone walked out on me, a part of me went with them. Those parts of me that went with all my lovers are now living fulfilled lives, perhaps as wives and mothers to their children, being loved, falling out of love, suffering from infidelity, both mine and theirs. Parts of them have travelled with me and aided my growth, given me ambition, independence, solitude. While they were making love to my vulnerability, I was absorbing their haughtiness.
And to think that I never got a pedicure, till date, in my life.
Part of the reason I ignored self-care is a solid middle class Bengali upbringing, where the mind is without fear, the head is held high, and knowledge is free. I am a granddaughter of migrants, who struggled (that old Bengali favourite) to lay down roots in a floating life after migrating from East Pakistan. I was brought up on the lavish luxury of a ‘Boroline’, ‘Keo Karpin’, and ‘Anti-bactrine’ childhood: the first a skincare product, the second for hair and the third a tincture for scrapes and injuries. It was intended that I should be self-sufficient, and marriage was not to be my only destiny—although it was not exactly ruled out, either.
To that effect, my mother disciplined me with an iron hand, and she would often use metal instruments from the kitchen to drive her determination home. I learned to metamorphose into the daughter of my parents’ desire; but somehow, I could not escape life taking its own trajectory.
*
There is an Assamese tale of Tejimola, who is a lonely young girl subjected to her stepmother’s torture. Her stepmother cruelly beats her to death, and buries her while her father is away on business.
Tejimola re-emerges as a bottle-gourd plant from the bit of ground where she was buried. The stepmother smashes the bottle-gourd plant after realizing that it is Tejimola. Tejimola resurrects again as a citrus tree that grows from the gourd’s remains. She objects every time someone tries to pick the fruit, pleading with them not to hurt her.
The citrus tree is eventually discarded into the river as well. There, she transforms into a lotus. Her father sees the lotus from his boat on the way back. He hears the lotus achingly sing to him as he gets closer, confirming that she is, in fact, his daughter. Startled, the father urges her to change from a flower to a sparrow in order to prove who she is. He brings the bird home and confronts the stepmother. Ultimately, justice is done, and Tejimola returns to her human form.
*
I am now crossing Prof. Hariharan’s house, No.36D, Harish Chatterjee Street. The last time I came to visit Sir, he was experimenting with exit bags. Any other well-wisher would have been alarmed, but not me. Prof. Hariharan was the most pro-life intellectual of the 21st century. I had approached him on the subject of my own mother’s dementia many years back.
My mother, Sir knew, had been suffering from early onset dementia since the time my father passed away, and she had recently attempted to kill herself by crushing her own skull with a brick from the garden.
The suicide bid was botched, but it completely destroyed her prefrontal cortex, and she was reduced to a mental state of a baby. Doctors increased my fears about the condition by making dire prophecies, but Sir had calmly stated that Dementia was a defence mechanism of the brain confronted with untold suffering.
“The first principle of the brain is to survive; it does not care for the body.”
“But Sir, how can the brain survive without the body’s help?”
“It will retain the bare minimum functions and discard the unnecessary ones to keep itself alive.”
“Except Lemmings, I haven’t heard of any other species which kills itself to escape the pain of living. Why do humans?”
“The human brain is unique,” he said. “Not only is it ready to press the escape option at short notice, it is continually devising new ways of protecting itself from feeling the pain of being human. In the Netherlands, they have devised a method of painless exit by using a plastic bag over the head. This method is also called ‘suicide bag’ or ‘exit bag’.”
“Murder mysteries often show victims suffocated by a plastic bag over their heads,” I quipped.
Was my professor suggesting that I put an exit bag over my mother’s head? Not to say that I sometimes did want to poison her, suffocate her with a pillow or push her from the rooftop of Tata Centre, but surely, these were things you confessed to your shrink and not to be taken literally?
“This one’s different,” said Prof Hariharan. “The exit bag uses Helium which is odourless, colourless, non-flammable, not explosive, and leads almost immediately to unconsciousness because helium replaces oxygen in the blood and brain and leads within minutes to death. In addition, helium is not dangerous for people in the environment. Besides, helium is easily available in a shop selling balloons. Or just off the internet.”
“So, can we finally order death online?” The conversation had gone beyond its intended reach. I tried to lighten things up.
“Unfortunately, you cannot. The law would not allow it. If you could, your mother may have been spared the vegetable life she is leading now.”
I stood stupefied. Was my professor suggesting that I put an exit bag over my mother’s head? Not to say that I sometimes did want to poison her, suffocate her with a pillow or push her from the rooftop of Tata Centre, but surely, these were things you confessed to your shrink and not to be taken literally?
*
In one of Brother Grimm’s especially grim stories, an affluent and virtuous couple pray for God to grant them a child. One winter, under the juniper tree in the courtyard, the wife cuts her hand while peeling an apple causing a drop of blood to fall on the snow, which makes her wish for a white-as-snow and red-as-blood child.
A serious illness befalls her six months later due to eating juniper berries, and a month later she gives birth to a child exactly as she had wished. In accordance to her wishes, her husband buries her beneath the juniper tree. He moves on, and has a daughter named Marlinchen (in some versions Marlene, Marjory, or Ann Marie) with his new wife, who despises her stepson.
The next part of the gruesome tale is about this evil stepmother—as often folktales are—who decapitates the boy and frames Marlinchen. Marlinchen believes that she caused her step-brother’s death. The stepmother cooks the boy into a blood soup to feed the father, who unwittingly proclaims the soup to be delicious. Marlinchen gathers the boy’s bones under the juniper tree, from which suddenly a mist emerges followed by a beautiful bird. The bird visits the local townspeople and sings about its brutal murder at the hands of its stepmother.
Captivated by its lullaby, a goldsmith, a shoemaker, and a miller offer the bird a gold chain, a pair of red shoes, and a millstone in return for the bird singing its song again. The bird returns home to give the gold chain to the husband, and to Marlinchen the red shoes.
Meanwhile, the stepmother complains about the “raging fires within her arteries”, revealed to be the real cause of her anger and hatred towards her stepson. She goes outside for relief, but the bird drops the millstone onto her head, killing her instantly. Surrounded by smoke and flames, the son—revealed to be the bird—emerges and reunites with his family. They celebrate, head inside for lunch, and live happily ever after.
*
I can say that the day was ending like a cigarette butt in the fingers of a bored pharmacist who unwittingly let in some carbon-dioxide in his can of unadulterated helium. Or I can say that the day was ending like a paper plane flown out of a juniper tree to sing into the night about arriving into the world in a hearse, each breath a laboured one in a ventilating machine.
I am crossing 36D, Harish Chatterjee Street again. There is a crowd and a police van outside, and I have to go in and check on the now 70-year-old professor. He is lying on a stretcher; volunteers are wheeling him out and I am sure that his liver cancer has caused him so much derangement that he can’t recognize me. He can’t recognize Tathagata, either, who is there, too, now as the attending DC Crime Branch. Prof. Hariharan is telling Tathagata something about cows on VR producing more milk; to my astonishment, Tathagata is reciprocating with the story of an Orissa underworld don who plays flutes for his cows on full moon days.
Prof. Hariharan looks frail, emaciated, as if suffering the Promethean curse for stealing fire, a new liver every night.
After Tathagata sees him off in the ambulance, he returns to tell me the rest of the story. Last week, Yahoo da and Prof. Hariharan had had a long day at the local police station, after a manhole cleaner had died of asphyxiation in front of his house. Prof. Hariharan had registered an FIR with the police making the local MLA, MP, and the current Health Minister a party to the FIR. This had caused an uproar, as Prof. Hariharan was also substantially well-connected to the international community, and strict action was recommended against offending authorities. Since then, unknown citizens had been calling up on his mobile, threatening and hurtling obscenities at him.
The old gentleman tried, for the first time in his life, to become a subject of his own experiment, and tied an exit bag around his head. However, the local pharmacy had supplied him only with adulterated helium, so that when Yahoo da found him unconscious and gagged, he was only asleep—and a little deranged.
*
I step out into the late evening and look at my feet, now rendered beautiful with the pedicure, standing thirty meters or so from the manhole, where the cleaner had suffocated to death. He must have entered feet-first in that sewer; like I enter feet first in my story. My story is now suffocating me; I should have entered it like a birthing child, head first into the world.
When we are born, do we exit or enter?
I wish the Pooja would deliver a beautiful baby boy and name him Grimm.
Tathagata stands beside me, and in the absence of the ABTA test papers, plays some inane game on his mobile called ‘Sandcastle’. I wonder how I should end the story, because the sun is about to set and throw a melancholic light, the kind of melancholy that reminds me of Prof. Hariharan’s music at our chemistry tuitions. Sunt lachrimae rerum. I can say that the day was ending like a Neolithic salamander which changes colours rapidly in its last throes of death, as its neural pathways for deception goes awry. I can say that the day was ending like a cigarette butt in the fingers of a bored pharmacist who unwittingly let in some carbon-dioxide in his can of unadulterated helium. Or I can say that the day was ending like a paper plane flown out of a juniper tree to sing into the night about arriving into the world in a hearse, each breath a laboured one in a ventilating machine.
Or shall I say that the day is ending like a scythe which a field-borne lass has finally laid to rest in the orange glow of sunset after delivering a baby in a field, standing in knee-deep water, cutting rice plants?
In Ethiopia, primates—especially females—lived on all fours in a canopy of forests copulating, breeding, suckling babies, foraging for food while species evolved all around them till in the Miocene the planet’s climate started to cool. Wide grassy plains opened up and they had to descend from the trees, venture into the ocean of grass with the big cats, raptors, and serpents. Part of this process involved beating a hasty retreat home after being chased by a creature ten times their size. They started to run.
Feet evolved. We began walking on hind legs. Five neat fingers, shorter than those in your palm to grip the grass and slither up the barks of trees. A slight curve under to provide suction, to survive, a long walk for food away from home and return to it. Or to find a foothold in a sewer, or as a tool to enter or exit the world.
***
Mandira Mitra Chakraborty is a writer from Kolkata who grew up in the jungles of Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand amidst Sal Mahua trees. The awareness of a bustling humming world of insects, birds, trees and animals, of rivers and hills with coal burning in their belly subsumes all her experience. Apart from being a poet and a writer, she is a professor of English Literature at Taki Government College, West Bengal. She has a Doctorate Degree in Medical Humanities and has published some scholarly work as well, apart from a debut collection of poetry called, “Six Ways of Raising Daughters” and a short story collection called "Firefly Games". You can find her on Instagram: @kissewali and Twitter: @MandiraChaktab1.
