Resolution

Keerat pursed her lips and grimaced. She turned her head to the left and then quickly to the right, doing her absolute best to avoid making eye contact with the camera in front of her. She held a bread pakora in her hand, suspended just above a puddle of deep red chutney on a porcelain dinner plate. The cameraman panned around to everyone else sitting around the table; some gave smiles and threw up peace signs while others continued conversations with those sitting beside them, backs a little bit straighter, gesticulating a bit more deliberately. 

As he finally left to another table, she let out the breath she’d been holding and slouched down uncomfortably. Her dupatta fell off one of her shoulders and she impatiently adjusted it, bringing both shoulders closer to her jaw and chewing silently. 

This was undoubtedly one of the worst parts of Punjabi weddings. Why the photographers felt the need to record the contents of everyone’s plates was beyond anyone’s understanding. Most people treated it like a big joke, rolling their eyes and laughing at each other’s appetites. Keerat’s mom turned to her aunt and teased that they were recording to see who ate the most chaat so they could calculate their per-plate cost accordingly. Her size-zero aunt with barely anything on her plate cackled. Keerat looked down at her own plate and immediately regretted how she’d overfilled it. She wished she had the willpower to resist the chilli paneer when she stood in line at the buffet. 

She felt the tightness of her suit against her bust and adjusted herself to a more comfortable position. The rest of the night passed painfully slowly, one awkward interaction after another. She wrestled out of the tight kameez as soon as she got home, ripping off her bra and throwing on a t-shirt and red basketball shorts before crawling under her sheets and pulling the flat sheet over her head. Taking deep breaths, she savored the quiet, the way her mouth felt so comfortable when it was closed and the feeling of having no eyes or lenses on her. 

The next morning, as she was eating a bowl of fiber-rich cereal, her mom drank her chai and spoke to her from the living room. 

“Make sure you pick up your suit and put it away nicely, it looks so nice on you. And don’t forget to pick up the jewelry in the bathroom and put that away, it’s expensive and we can’t afford to keep wasting money on stuff like that. And while you’re at it, pick up the rest of the clothes from your room too.”

Keerat sighed, eyes on her phone and mumbled an “okayyy, I will.”

Her mom continued, “Oh and Grandpa asked for a photo of me holding you as a baby, finish up your breakfast and we can find that downstairs. Unless you have one on your phone. I looked on mine and couldn’t find anything.”

Keerat nodded and they finished their breakfasts and headed to the basement. There, in plastic blue tubs full of dollar store albums and old school drugstore envelopes stuffed with film and pictures they looked for Keerat’s baby album. They couldn’t resist opening the envelopes and albums they found along the way and exclaimed over regretful haircuts, cooed over babies long grown old and laughed at the frozen poses of enthusiastic dancers. Keerat eventually found her baby album and sat quietly, flipping through and considering the fact that  it was the same hands that held the album as had been sticking out from the car seat that first brought her home.

She flipped the page and found a photo she hadn’t seen before. It was her in their old house at what appeared to be the age of three or four smiling as she walked down the hallway to the kitchen. Her hair was cut short like a boy’s and she was wearing blue overalls and a green and beige striped sweater. She was making full eye contact with the camera and she smiled with an open-mouth showing a full set of perfect baby teeth. 

Keerat furrowed her eyebrows quizzically as she looked at the picture, pulling it out of the plastic pocket and setting it to the side when her mother wasn’t looking. There was something so unfamiliar about the subject. This little girl looked so happy to be doing whatever it was she was doing. The camera had been but a slight distraction on her way, and she hadn’t let the surveillance hamper her happiness. She trusted whoever was behind the camera implicitly; the machine couldn’t hurt her if it was in the hands of mom or dad. Not that she’d been afraid of cameras yet. 

Upstairs in her room as she pretended to fold the clothes strewn all over her floor, she sat cross-legged on her unmade bed, staring at the picture. She wondered at the different trajectories her life could have taken. She wondered about the person behind the camera, her mom or dad, looking at her, about the things they did or didn’t see coming about her. How would they have reacted if they knew she would want to study sociology, or that she would get panic attacks so bad she couldn’t breathe or that she’d go on to cut the insides of her thighs, right at the top in the fattiest, fleshiest bits until she felt some sort of sick relief at being jolted out of her head and back into her body. 

Her mom knew about the cutting. It brought a lot of shame when the relief passed, like she was dirty and disgusting and damaged goods. The red-pill articles she normally never took seriously would begin circulating in her head and she’d begin to wonder what her worth was as a fat, hairy, self-mutilating freak. Eventually the panic and stress would grow until she’d break down dry heaving and wheezing, confessing the details of the whole episode to her mom. 

Generally, her mom would react with anger, exasperation and frustration. “Again?!”, she would yell. “How many times are we going to do this, Keerat? Don’t you have anything better to do? You’re literally ruining your own life and you’re ruining mine along with it. I don’t understand what you think you’re missing in your life.” On and on she would tirade until Keerat was soothed by someone else taking responsibility for tearing her down. 

The photograph rested in her hands, and Keerat stared at it for a while. Eventually she put it on her bedside table and began to pick  up the clothes strewn all over her floor. She went to put them in her closet and decided it was time to clean that too. She pulled out all the hangers and piles of sweaters at the top. Methodically, she refolded and re-organized each piece of clothing. Then she went through the junk at the bottom of the closet pulling it out, grabbing the vacuum from the main floor closet and running it along the baseboards. She continued in this way, dusting, wiping and re-organizing until she felt all the satisfaction and relief of a clean space. 

At this point she lit the scented candle on her bookshelf and sat on her clean bedsheets. She felt like her breathing was somehow less hampered and more satiating than it had been in months. Marveling at the sight of her clean floor she smiled a bit and looked over at the picture still on her bedside table. Cleaning her room had been a small task, but it felt like somehow she was already closer to achieving all the potential contained in the little girl’s smile. Her smile. 

Taking out her laptop from under her bed, she opened it in front of her on the bed. Knowing she didn’t have much time before the moment passed, she quickly Googled “Abbotsford therapists”. She knew she wanted a woman and she knew she had to be brown; nobody else would understand why she couldn’t just move away for university or why her grandparents influenced her parents quite so much. Looking through the first few pages she narrowed down a list of potential candidates. 

Their rates were high, but Keerat was pretty sure that her parents’ insurance would cover the cost of at least a few sessions. This time would be different, she thought. She wasn’t going to make big ambitious plans and she wasn’t going to pressure herself. Everyone had told her to take things one day at a time, and this time she would. 

After making a few phone calls and booking three free consultations she closed her laptop. She felt empty now, devoid of things to do. Hugging a pillow to her chest, she clenched her teeth and mentally prepared to tell her mother.