News from Maya Khosla

Maya Khosla (Mendocino Coast Writers Conference presenter 2007, participant 2008) sends this news from India. A message of renewal at the turning of the year.

Of Flight And Healing

This morning a peacock flew over my studio; yesterday, three alighted on the roof. I heard their rush of chestnut wings. I heard the slam-and-echo, their claws against baked clay tiles, their catcalls. Displaced yellow leaves twirled past my window. I felt flightless, immobilized, consumed by shadow. Forget about flight: I wanted the basics, one good foot in front of the other.

It’s my sixth week in a cast extending from the base of my right knee to my toes. I’ve been hobbling from room to room with army-style crutches of steel, underarm handles encased in cotton wool, wrapped with cloth and fastened tight with duct tape. I’ve been sitting feet-up.

An invalid’s windows become world. Out there, tailor birds, tree pies, yellow-footed green pigeons, flame-backed woodpeckers, jackals and occasional blue deer come in search of cover, insect and berry. They move on. The living world is all muscular roil and roll. Nothing can compare with the luxury of fluid movement.

My last fluid movement was a sprint for a low black ball flying toward the wall of a squash court. ‘Pop,’ and I went down. Someone, my squash partner Rita or perhaps I myself, had slammed my right heel with a racquet. Except that I was wrong. No one had hit me.

Driving, she raced me past street cows, diesel-pumping buses, women weaving through traffic in small scooters, their long scarves tied to avoid entanglement with spinning wheels. We pulled up at the front gate of the Indian Spinal Injuries Center, which also deals with hurt knees, feet and arms. A uniformed security guard handed us a pink parking slip. Two hours after X-rays and MRI scans, Dr. Chawla, a young surgeon with a lab coat and a neat side parting, pronounced it a complete tear. One of my body’s two strongest rubber bands, the right Achilles tendon, had snapped.

A week later, I donned a blue hospital tunic front-to-back and Dr. Chawla stitched up my rubber band. “No weight on this foot for six weeks,” he announced when I awoke from the two-hour operation with a throat of sandpaper.

Blood tests, anesthesia, stitches, my single room and three day’s bland hospital food came to a little under $1500—without health insurance. That, my sister Anjali and Rita agreed, was the reason it was best I ‘broke my foot’ in New Delhi, India, and not in the United States, where I live. Plus I had them. It was true: they poured mugs full of water over my head and softened the tops of my new crutches with cotton wool. And wheeled me out.

Healing is the longest phase of illness. Windows become blown-up photographs, documentary films, world. One window looks out on a corridor of trees. Three others overlook a jungle where understory and top canopy blend together.

Scene replaces scene and none is for keeps. Parakeets turn the sky into a wheel of green. Babblers turn a patch of earth into a trembling, feather-preening ball of fluff. Sunbirds flicker, warblers twitch, Oriental white-eyes flit in flocks like organized sparks. Feathered forelimbs swirl and flash. With all this swinging, swirling movement, I have to practically hang on to the arms of my chair to stop myself from falling forward. Locomotion is the simplest output produced by a wildly complex set of muscles in collaboration. I will walk again. Even dance.

It’s my seventh week and the cast is off. The cold season has arrived. I’m walking without crutches for the first time. My movement is all jerk and sway, arms held out as if I’m inside a rickety cabin on a speeding train instead of outside on solid ground.

“Focus inward,” I re-hear the voice of Thu, a Vietnamese yoga teacher who taught in the morning. “If your mind wanders, gently bring it back to breathing and movement.”

I take a deep draught of air and lurch forward. Ahead, a flycatcher swoops and arcs back up to its perch behind a shifting screen of bamboo leaves. I step forward and raise my binoculars. Circle and back, circle and back: it repeats the loop, scooping up insects.

By night, my windows are still as stone. Earth hurls through space. By dawn, stone has burst into a thousand wings. The sun breaks through and its leafy echoes, its million imitations, reach up with faces of gold, lime-green and jade. Witnessing a miracle in the making, surely any beholder can shake free of shackles. Already my amble flows smoother everyday. Surely anyone worn and injured can be made new.

Comments

[Graham Moody]

It was good that Maya chose to break her Achilles tendon in India. Her universe of birds is vibrant with amazing colors and motions. They entertain and taunt her at the same time. "You cannot fly . . . you can't even walk." She thinks she will write a story about being bed-ridden from a squash injury. Her fall is a metaphor for the collapse of empire. When she is restored the peacocks will walk her down the pathway of broken tiles, down to the river where she will swim.

[sonya]

Maya, how beautifully written. you are such a poet.I love how you get the personalities of all the birds .Reminds me of summer mornings in Maharani Bagh, when Gauri maami, visiting from Kabul, would wake early. To watch the birds.

[harriet gleeson]

Oh Maya. A lovely piece of writing.Sorry you had to break a tendon, but we have had joy from the account of your window views. Continue healing/

[Karen Lewis]

Maya,
May the new year bring healing and more deep writing. Thank you for this dispatch from the distant curve of our shared planet. I look forward to hearing more of your misadventures and meditations on natural beauty.