Turning 40 has reminded me of my body’s enormous capacity for grief, surrender, and healing. Now, feeling stronger than ever, I am eager to keep challenging myself as I venture into uncharted territory
I have been itching to practise calligraphy, perhaps because I constantly encounter spectacular fonts. Representation pic/iSTOCK
As I was walking along the street the other day, pushing the stroller in which our almost four-month-old was awakening from deep sleep, I thought about my impending milestone birthday on July 16. I would be turning 40. I began writing this column six months before I turned 30. I struggled to believe a decade had passed. Ten years ago, I also published my first book. Ten years since that milestone, I’m in the process of shopping around my second manuscript. It’s a very low output for a professional writer — one book every decade — but when each word is the result of an accumulation of sweat, blood, tears, and joy, then it is understandable, I tell myself. All of these facts aside, what felt somewhat overwhelming was the realisation that I could so easily not have made it to the other side of my 30s, considering that in November, my body failed me. I still have no memory of those three days of my life during which I was sedated. I remember nothing of my malfunctioning left side, how unable I was to utter my own name, or my partner’s name, my inability to smile, dress myself or even stay put. I survived meningitis with a 20-week baby inside me!
All birthdays are special, but this one felt momentous because it was a reminder of how much my body has endured, how enormous its capacity has been for grief, surrender, and healing. It has been cut open so many times in different places. It has been under the influence of general and local anaesthesia more times than I can count. It has nurtured a uterine fibroid, then recovered from its surgical removal, then endured two C-sections, not to mention gestational diabetes. In the last five years, it has had to cope with existing outside of the relational system to which it was accustomed… being so distant from family, friends, peers, and acquaintances. It has had to master new languages, my poor tongue feels caught between phonetics, sometimes having to flit between English, Hindi, Konkani, German, Dialect, and Italian. How it withstands all of these challenges, I do not know. But the one thing I can say with utmost certainty is that my body has never felt stronger. Living in an Alpine landscape means constantly navigating gradients, steep inclines… when I first moved here, I was constantly out of breath, my city girl body panting profusely. Now I don’t walk, I don’t strut, I float.
This year, I felt no pressure to do anything out of the ordinary. Maybe because my sister had visited and we had eaten incredible meals at some of my favourite restaurants, I didn’t feel particularly impelled to go out. My boss urged me to do something special, like go for a walk. I told her that was something I made a point to do every single day, so it wouldn’t necessarily be special. In the end, it occurred to me that I hadn’t eaten Sushi in centuries, because of my pregnancy, so we decided to go to the best joint we know in Bozen. Before that, my partner took me shopping for my birthday gift — a calligraphy pen and a new fountain pen. I may have mentioned that I have been feeling the itch to practise calligraphy once again, perhaps because I constantly encounter spectacular fonts around me. I wanted to respond to and honour this bodily call to a skill I learned when I was perhaps still in school, from a housewife in Andheri East. My mother had seen an ad in the paper all those years ago, and the 10-day course was affordable. It was the first time I travelled regularly by bus during the summer holidays. We learned three fonts, and I discovered how much I loved this art form. I’m excited to return to it in a more dedicated way. I am excited to be able to play around with words, to really get into the look, feel, and sound of each alphabet, fully conscious that the hobbies I take up at this moment in my life may have
generational consequences.
I’ve been thinking so much about the joy of living a life in which one is able to nurture hobbies… If I were to consider what makes me interesting as a person, I would say it is the range of these activities, from crochet to reading to writing. As I age, I find myself eager to pick up new hobbies, not to excel in them but to allow for an immersion, to challenge myself to learn something new, to keep my brain active by compelling it to continue to make new neural connections. This eagerness towards discovering the uncharted manifests most brilliantly in my culinary endeavours. For the longest time, I’ve been a tentative cook, someone who has depended on the validation of others to feel assured of any prowess. Suddenly, postpartum, relieved from the weight of hormonal obstacles to my sense of taste and smell that surfaced as nausea, I feel like I am on fire, as a cook. Who knows, maybe the next thing I birth with my new ink pen before I turn 50 is the cookbook I’ve always dreamed of writing.
Deliberating on the life and times of every woman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She posts @rosad1985 on Instagram
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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