During our breaks, we took the boys’ cricket bats and used the wickets as bases in the fashion of American baseball. We had watched it on television, first on a Tuesday at nine in the evening. Instead of a straight line, the court was diamond-shaped, and some of the players had rotund bellies. Nine players on each team. They spat and beat the ground with a thick, round wooden stick. It was like cricket but not, and we loved it.

  Gloveless, we caught the ball with our bare hands, letting it crack open our skin. Calluses bloomed from our fingertips. Our flesh formed a thick, protective layer.

  We felt devious using the instruments of a British sport to play an American one. Winning was never a matter of points but an exercise of our spirits. What did we know of the rules except three strikes and you’re out, or the theatrical slide from one base to the other, fingertips outstretched to graze against the four corners of in and out, life and death?

  To the boys, we appeared idiotic, players of a perverse cricket.

  “This is why they shouldn’t have a women’s league,” they said, but they kept watching us, alarmed and perhaps intrigued by our relentless bodies.

  Unlike the stiff shape of us in class, on the field, our limbs flailed and contorted in unexpected and unflatteringly geometric ways. We’d fall with our asses pointed in the air, the crude formation of a triangle. Or in catching a ball, we’d arch our backs into parabolas, curls of pubic hair sprouting in the sunlight. Knees bent into diamonds and slim rectangles of girls sliding into home base, calves mossed with dark hair glistening.

  On television, the women were clean and spotless with a fluorescent glow. No mustache fuzz, no pimples under the chin, and even their voices sounded like prepackaged biscuits. These women had chubby faces, but not too chubby. They looked happy, probably because they had the right kind of chubbiness.

  On menstruation week, Saint Mary’s Hostel usually smelled of a copper womb. Our fertility was especially potent to Madame Sarojini, who at the age of fifty-eight was keenly aware of the impossibility of her own body producing children, and she sprayed the halls with the strong scent of hibiscus and lemongrass. “Bloody girls,” she’d say under her breath as we passed, waving at her with our unclean hands. A layer of blood in the toilet reminded us we were baby-less beings. Relinquishing a godly power we did not fully understand, the creation of life. But after the drought, when we had little fat or blood to spare, it took the stray spotting in our underwear to recall our female bodies.

  * * *

  Leela kept a palm-sized notebook of quotes, which she called the Book of the Dead. Radical compassion had no hymnbook, no written text, but at the end of every lesson, Leela would open up to a page and recite a quote. Never-ending, it seemed, as she turned each page and another appeared. She did not register value distinctions between the thoughts, but Avvaiyar always left before she spoke. At first, we had assumed she had some prior obligation but night after night, her disapproval became quite clear through her absence. She did not want to be tainted by the words of Max Planck or Heidegger.

  The evening when Baseema struggled to untangle a piece of red yarn to show how the chaos of thoughts in our minds made us useless, Leela opened the book early and read the words of Joseph Brodsky: “If there is any substitute for love, it’s memory. To memorize, then, is to restore intimacy.”

  She closed the book quickly and turned to Avvaiyar, who was not prepared to meet her gaze, and in that moment, we sensed an invisible piece of yarn between them, knotted and fragile, as if by trying to unravel each other they would find themselves. Later we would return to this moment of recognition as a silent declaration of both war and love. Doesn’t every rivalry possess the seed of an unconsummated love?

  Avvaiyar straightened her face and proceeded to leave, and Leela stood there watching her. After we all left, Radikha rushed back to get her tiffin box and said she saw Leela leaning against the wall, two tear streaks along her cheek.

  * * *

  On the banister of the staircase near the second floor, there were two names carved into the interior of the wood. When you slid your hands against the rough curves, your fingertips blushed. Nagaswary and Arun. Her name coiling around his. She had left the school three years earlier after deciding she did not want to study medicine. We heard about her because she was the only student not to complete her training. As she left, she had marked her name and a boy’s, a lover, perhaps. With her writing, she had stealthily let him inside the hostel where he had not been allowed. In passing we unconsciously rubbed against the pair, these unassuming relics of love. It was foolish to search for eternity in external things, Leela had told us. But after one girl cut her finger near the etching, the stain left the peculiar feeling of life. Most of the time we kept our hands to our sides and our eyes closed purposefully as we crossed the threshold to the next floor.

  Tragic love stories like Romeo and Juliet, Bajirao and Mastani interested us simply for the intensity of longing. A kiss like a burst of flames. The thousand knives of heartbreak. We did not crave the beauty of the actresses on television, with their smooth, round faces and curvy hips, but we wanted what the body allowed, the sensation of being.

  Watching television, we felt the ache in our mouths when the hero kissed the heroine, never on the lips, but somewhere far off like the pale palm of her hand. She held him there, sealing his lips, holding him still. At night when we slipped out of our clothes we examined our bodies, some still prepubescent with chests as flat as ironed linen. Anatomy had taught us the dual functionality of the body. A bird’s cloaca provided both sexual pleasure and execratory relief. Tracing the rim of the inner ear with a wet tip of cotton left us delirious, with a momentary glimpse of the orgasmic. We feasted on our desires secretly, crumbs we held on to in the middle of the night when hunger kept us awake. Some of our older sisters had married early and wrote us letters filled with recipes for meals they could no longer cook because of the missing ingredients. Chicken Chettinad: chicken (1.3 kg), 1 onion, sesame oil (2 tbsp), 2 tomatoes, ginger (10 g), garlic (5 g), 3 dried red chilis, cumin seeds (1 tsp), coriander seeds (1 tsp), fennel seeds (2 tsp), turmeric (1 tsp). We chewed on the words until nothing remained.

  Craving meant suffering. Made from equal parts of pain and pleasure, and like trained dogs we leaned in toward pain, held our own cheeks when our friend was slapped. It was pleasure that the older girls warned us against, said it would leave us with soft bellies.

  We were becoming doctors. Soldiers of Salvation.

  Remember.

  At the clinic, Dhivya treated a young refugee who had wounded his leg during the war. He limped slightly to his right side, and out of some askew need for balance, he smiled too widely to the left, like he was stumbling on a private joke. He was missing his index finger on one hand, Dhivya told us, and now and then we’d catch her bending her own finger, making it disappear. He had lived in the camps for five months, arrived with his younger brother, the two of them making a living selling betel leaves.

  The senior girl assigned for that hour fell ill, and she had not bothered to find a replacement. Of all the hour sessions, Dhivya had chosen the evening hour between seven and eight, for she must have known without knowing that they would meet. Unsupervised, she stretched out his limbs and he talked about the pain coiling up his leg and settling in his knee. Sitting down on the table, he reached her full height. She faced him, placed her hands on the sides of his face, and traced his pressure points, her eyes holding his. She would remember his bone structure, could re-create him with precision in her dreams. Everything too fine to shatter pieced together. Cheekbones constructed with the broken curves of porcelain teacups.

  He was three years older than her. Vignesh Prakash with his nine fingers. She knew so little about him, no more than the betel leaf he offered her before he left. As she mourned a loss she couldn’t name, we would tell her that he was no different from any other young man and she was not special either. But she searched for him tirelessly, with her palms out for stray facts, collecting what would neither nourish nor relieve. Just enough to keep living. She learned the police picked him up from the camp to question him, believed he was an ex–rebel fighter. He had enough injuries to convince them, and tucked inside the stitching of his cot they had found a dagger the length of his missing finger. A stack of Archie comics was also confiscated.

  We told her she was not Dhivya. He was not Vignesh Prakash. There was no beginning and no ending.

  Standing in the courtyard of Saint Mary’s, we watched the boys pass by the gates in their almond-colored uniforms, their hands slapping the metal lightly as they whistled between laughs. The boys lingered, eyeing us through the rectangular spaces, their faces pressed so deeply against the bars that they seemed willing enough to break through their skulls to find a way inside. Often, they simply called out compliments on the shine of a braid, the flowers adorning our hair, the pattern of our uniforms. Looking at them, we felt interchangeable, our sorrow discreetly hidden as we turned away.

  * * *

  Radical compassion was beyond the realm of love, a state of consciousness where language lost meaning.

  Though we longed to exist in that space beyond linear time, each morning we washed our faces and brushed our teeth, all these habits of the living. Enclosed in a classroom with the professor groaning, her hand scraping the board, we sat at the edge of our seats, losing oxygen, ready to faint. Starvation had reoriented us. In one afternoon, eight students were gummed to the floor, but before they were carried off, Param sneezed, and the professor, watching the boy rub his nose, began to doubt the students’ embrace of gravity. She instituted a two-finger ear-twisting truth test. The number of collapsars declined.

  After class, before meeting the older girls for our lessons, we sometimes would lie in the courtyard, the dirt chalking up our skin, and we would pretend to be things connected to nature. We would finger the earth, plant seeds, sucking our mouths dry as spit trickled out.

  We had read that a healthy human body was roughly sixty percent water, and we knew that after all these months under an unforgiving sun, we had forgotten our aqueous existence.

  We felt more like the paper origami we folded in our breaks throughout the day. Thin brown squares susceptible to becoming anything. Waiting for the washroom, we would count our breaths with each crease, crafting animals we had never seen, pandas and tigers.

  Over a few weeks we constructed in the common area a thousand-and-two sheet kingdom, an Eden, with water buffalo and three-toed sloths and winding rivers.

  We tried to remember a time before our own, before the infestation of plastic bags, when we used to have forests, when nothing was wasted, when the only utensil needed was your own hand.

  Avvaiyar called our activities childish and wasteful. One morning we found a stack of flattened paper on the television in the common area, our universe undone.

  At night, during quiet hours, when we watched television with the volume low, we closed our eyes and opened them to catch images in sustained blinks. A man stood by the doorway in one blink, and by the second blink he was clutching his chest, bent forward. The stories on television were often too ordered to lift us from the ordinary. We wanted time to move backward. A grown man turning into a baby. Or the unfathomable, a miniature woman swimming in a bowl of curd rice. Still, we couldn’t look away, the black boxes emitting a force we had no name for. We knew that starlings, with their fragile bones, could feel the magnetic field of the earth, the force as thin as a needle guiding them north. Maybe we, too, sensed the invisible pull of far-off things.

  Avvaiyar wanted to rid us of all these external distractions and staged a Tirumular Yogam, where we competed to reach beyond our minds, ascend levels of consciousness. We crossed our legs and fasted from dawn to sunset, focusing on our breathing. The goal was to exist without breathing at all, merge with death in the living form. Walking to class we often saw on the roadside shrubs growing from rotten trees. Green sprigs bloomed from dead roots. We struggled to be that leaf pushing through the decay to the other side. Deepti was the only one of us who was able to slow down her heartbeat and her breathing. Once every minute she inhaled. After the older girls disqualified each of us, only Deepti remained with her eyes closed and her head turned upward, the stem of her neck bright against the fluorescent light of the common area. We felt her energy pulsing within us. Passing by her, we would hold a hand by her face, unsure if she reached immortality, beyond the laws of time and death. But on the second day, with her forehead spotted with sweat, she simply fainted, falling forward on the grass-colored sheet. We woke her with a rag drenched with precious ice water, the liquid collecting in the cup of her collarbone. She could not remember her higher state and did not believe us when we told her how she stretched her breathing.

  Deepti had lost both of her parents at a young age and we wondered if this gave her a natural affinity with the dead. Loss cut through reality like a knife. And that was why Siddhars who gave up everything, even the clothes on their backs, were rumored to have the ability to levitate a half meter above the ground and to control the movement of water. We wondered if we were capable of such miracles.

  We heard that Leela moved into a higher consciousness through coupling. In her first year, it was said that Leela fell into a trance so deep her skin turned into a pale blue hue. It was said she could outdrink men and one evening earned almost a month’s worth of tuition fees after she drank a whole bottle of whiskey without wincing, as if she had trained her body to process the liquor like water. Last week, after the celebrations for the chief minister’s birthday, Leela brought a guest over to Saint Mary’s. The girl was dressed in a plain green salwar with dark red leggings, a shawl covering the rim of her face. Bowing to Madame Sarojini in the front entranceway, she took small, deliberate steps up the stairway through the hall. Under the archway of Gibran’s words, we saw the girl tip her head back as the shawl and tendrils of hair dropped to the ground. Leela embraced the short-haired figure by the mouth, her fingers clasping behind the crouched neck. Leela smoked long menthol cigarettes and we once believed this habit part of her alluring charm but really it was an excuse to linger outside, veiling her secret trysts. We could not imagine Leela in the earthly act of sex. She had once referred to men as vehicles to the road to enlightenment, and with her we knew intercourse would become a ritual, the union of the divine, where, at the height of pleasure, there must be withdrawal. The semen must reverse its flow for consciousness to fall apart. In her absence we searched her room for signs of her human condition, a wet patch on her sheets, strands of hair, any revelation to hint at the intimacy of deep release. We were startled by the nakedness of her room, plain white walls and an unadorned cabinet, with only the wire of the television sneaking from under the bed to disturb the order of things. We unplugged the television she had hidden behind the bedpost. She must have watched as she slept, the images flashing beneath eye level. Holding the tail of the television, we pulled it out from its dark lair and placed it in the center of the room like a dead thing we had killed. Part of us wanted to rid ourselves of these Distant-Scenes that left us craving more. As we stood above the television, we saw the reflections of our own faces, and we waited, our hands limp and aching, in anticipation of what was to come.

  Cheeze was a secondary character in Soldiers’ Diaries. He appeared only in a handful of episodes. Early on, viewers learn he’s from Minnesota, grew up on a farm, and loves his dog Cookie. In episode fifteen, he spends a good five minutes picking at a scab on his arm. Near him, a twelve-year-old civilian boy nibbles on a Galaxy chocolate bar. It’s not clear if Cheeze is speaking to the camera or to the boy. Cheeze talks about his dog Cookie, mainly. He is lonely and misses the smell of wet fur and grass when he and Cookie would run down the field and jump into the creek, waking the dragonflies. Besides this snippet from the episode, he mainly fades into the background of the main cast.

  You look between the young Cheeze on the TV and the nutrition-less face staring at the ceiling. Years have passed since Soldiers’ Diaries was released, even more since it was filmed.

  It’s him, Rosalyn says. I’m sure.

  She found him on the Upper East Side on Park Avenue, asking for e-credit outside Plasme, a high-end recycled plastic clothing boutique for people who probably don’t even have a credit limit. Because nothing Rosalyn says makes sense, you ask her to bring him to the grocery store down the block and after you say you’re buying the man two premade sandwiches, his eyes are scanned. His name comes out as Dustin Creed, and you’re relieved, looking at Rosalyn and then at the man formerly known as Cheeze.

  Cheeze is not his real name, obviously, Rosalyn says, and shows you the list of names at the end of the show. See? Dustin Creed.

  Outside, Cheeze huddles near the ground with his two premade sandwiches. His chest is exposed. It’s slightly chilly.

  We can’t just take a semifamous houseless man back with us, you say. That’s not what you’re supposed to do.

  Yes, we are supposed to just leave him on the sidewalk, where he can starve or be murdered.

  There are thousands of houseless people in the city.

  Remember, a few months back when you wandered the streets, space traveling or whatever, like you didn’t even have a home?

  Rosalyn, we are not bad people.

  Radical compassion is just an idea, right?

  Cheeze sleeps on the couch. He snores and reeks but for the most part he’s quiet. For the first time in years, you sleep with the door locked.

  * * *

  Baseema lifts her red yarn, showing you the chaos of your mind. You head to work before Cheeze or Rosalyn wakes up. Alone in the office, the sky still murky, you fiddle with a sentence until it feels right: Everyday life had become predictable, desolate, and in our search for transcendence, did we hope to find refuge in a glowing box, where life was more visceral and complete, by opening our eyes rather than closing them?