The night Megha decided that I was the one was the night, I’m certain, when I invited her back to my room—an austere room, halfway up the west side of a high rise, with walls of brick, and laminated floors, and knots of copper plumbing arbitrarily exposed—and she laid eyes upon my mason jars, all eleven of them, lined up neatly on a single wooden shelf above my bed, each containing a single reconstructed cockroach peacefully suspended in a solution of H2O and ethyl alcohol.
That was also the night I decided that Megha, while not the one, would have to do.
“Oh my god,” she whispered, transfixed before the mason jars, which were refracting saffron glimmers from a setting winter sun. She’d come straight from her office—she was interning: law—and was dressed in a beige blazer, black slacks, and sensible but elegant shoes. Women of less impressive wardrobes, less distinctive accents—the vowels of her Anglo-Indian lilt were as expansive as the silver hoops that gleamed in both her ears—and less impeccable credentials had made it this far, only to recoil at the sight of my collection, and so I braced myself, as best I could, for the inevitability of Megha’s exit.
But when she turned, her face was blazing, not with horror, but with a wonderment brighter even than the sunset: “Bugs! How much I love them…my god, you have no idea!”
That night, we very nearly missed our reservation. Of course, I’d expected to miss it, and so was not quite psychologically prepared for the contingency, which in fact did come to pass, that I might have to pick up the tab at that particular restaurant, but I’d simply imagined that my date would desert me. Instead, we lost track of time, spending what later turned out to have been the better part of an hour on the edge of my mattress as she breathlessly relayed to me each facet and phase of her lifelong entomological obsession.
The daughter of a well-to-do family from Bangalore, she’d spent her earliest years in a sprawling, post-colonial villa surrounded by verdant gardens. These Edenic circumstances had afforded her ample access to the insect world; yet she’d been summarily discouraged, chastised, and relentlessly reminded that women of her station were to fear and revile these creatures, not make common cause with them. The main effect of all this had been to imbue insects, in little Megha’s mind, with the irresistible allure of the forbidden.
Soon enough, she’d been shipped off to England, where she’d attended boarding school, and from there to Canada, where her parents were bivouacked, gathering empirical data to help them decide whether to surrender their Indian passports in exchange for Canadian citizenship. During this period, Megha appeared, for all intents and purposes, to have renounced her fixation. She thrived in those northern climes, finishing high school, completing a BA in economics, then pursuing a JD in law. Yet, all the while, deep within the solitary confinement of her soul, there’d lain dormant a certain immaterial desire.
Here, she broke off, remembering the time, and we were prompted to leap off the bed and make a mad dash out the door and down the stairs. We made it on time to the restaurant, which was only a few blocks away, and she ordered the lobster, whose segmented anatomy seemed to excite her, and later that evening, beneath the watchful gaze of my eleven mason jars, we made passionate and unrestrained love.
Later still, curled like a cat in my arms, she asked me where my cockroaches had come from.
“Well,” I said. “Since we’ve been intimate, I might as well tell you. I pulled them out of poor people’s ears.”
She rose up at once on one elbow to get a good look at me. This had the unintended but welcome effect of allowing me to revise my position, thereby relieving some of the discomfort that had been accumulating around my spine. It would be many months before I learned to share my bed without compromising my own rest and relaxation for the sake of a romantic atmosphere.
“They come out in parts,” I explained. “It’s very difficult to extract a whole one. I save the bits and pieces in a bottle, and bring them home, and whenever I can’t sleep, I get out my magnifying glass, and my glue, and my tweezers, and I rebuild them.”
Encouraged by the eagerness with which she listened, I switched the light on, got out of bed, and retrieved, from the little bag I kept beside the door for nights when I was on call, a pair of alligator forceps. This was my special pair, bought with money from my very first paycheck. It had a handle like that of a pair of scissors, but instead of two blades, its working end consisted of a slender metal shaft, which diverged from the handle at approximately a forty-five-degree angle and terminated in an almost comically miniscule set of jaws.
“Cockroaches are not the only objects that I must occasionally extract,” I explained as she studied the forceps reverentially, as if she’d been entrusted with an obscure religious relic. “And ears are not the only orifices from which foreign objects must occasionally be extracted. But those objects, I don’t really like to preserve.”
Her gaze rose up to meet my own. I saw the question burning in her eyes before she asked it: “But whatever are they doing in people’s ears?”
So I explained. I explained that Chicago’s low-income apartments were known for their roach infestations. I explained that these roaches, finding in the concave structure of the human ear a certain irresistible appeal, would often venture into such a cavity as its unsuspecting owner snored. I explained how such an owner might, without waking, plunge a finger into the invaded orifice to put a stop to the intolerable sensations that ensued, thereby impacting the poor creature into the waxy depths. And I explained how I’d become a man of some renown, at least among my colleagues at the clinic, for my dexterity and fortitude, so that whenever such a case presented, the assignment always seemed to fall to me.
Even as I relayed all this, a secret part of me was marveling at the fact that I, an upwardly mobile de facto ambassador of the greatest country in the world, should have to sit here and explain such things to a woman from an oriental backwater.
Of course, experience has long since corrected my error. The family into which I’ve married has gently but firmly impressed upon me that although there is indeed great poverty in India there are also great fortunes. The most comfortable moments of my own life—comfortable in the physical sense, that is—have almost exclusively occurred on the subcontinent, in ornate guest houses and elaborate bungalows where armies of servants wait on hand to meet one’s every need.
My eyes have thus been opened—yet I still prefer life in my country. Megha does, too, but for a different reason. The draw, for me, is independence. There’s something stifling about relying all the time on others. Only when I wash my own dishes and shine my own shoes do I feel truly free.
For Megha, meanwhile, it’s mainly about the prestige.
This is just one of many ways in which our idiosyncrasies, though not similar at all, have nonetheless fitted together quite neatly to form a satisfying whole. She always loved the vague ideas she had of me—loved, I say, because she passed away two years ago of cancer, an awful shock considering that by all accounts, she ought to have outlived me—whereas I appreciated the reality of her. It’s not true, as it turns out, that you must love your spouse, or even share her interests, in order to sustain an enjoyable marriage. Cooperation, really, is the most important thing.
But were the insects not a common interest?
No. They were not. For each of us, I suppose, they were an obsession—but the symbolic value of those chitinous bodies diverged radically in each of our minds. For her, they represented scintillation. For me, they were the very opposite: the stuff of nightmares, buried, tamped down, built over by the solid structures of my adult life, yet forever bubbling up in the forgotten corners until, at last, discovering that my sanity itself was at stake, I drew my armor on and resolutely turned to face my fears.
This is something that I never shared with Megha. It would’ve accomplished nothing and might’ve even led to certain complications. By the time we met, I was in my mid-thirties. If I still lived as I had in my twenties—in a single, spartan room, which felt much larger than it was by virtue of its emptiness, on weekly pots of rice and beans occasionally seasoned with packets of ketchup from fast food diners—then it was out of habit more than need. I was earning much more than I knew what to do with. I’d finished paying for medical school. I’d even taken on a mortgage.
Megha never knew about that house, of course. Nor did she know about my parents, its occupants until they died. Likewise, they never knew about her. Her complexion wouldn’t have impressed them. They knew that I’d become a doctor, but not the names of any of the hospitals or clinics where I practiced, and while they wanted me to marry, it was to satisfy my colleagues, not them, that I finally put the golden band on Megha’s finger. It was my colleagues who rallied when the time came, who came together to celebrate the end of my extended bachelorhood, and with it my orphanhood—by then a well-established fact among them—for I could start calling Megha’s parents my own. They sat on the pews on my side of the church. They served as my groomsmen. One of my old friends from medical school was my best man. And if there was a flicker of confusion in his eyes—had I not mentioned once, offhand, that I’d mastered the technique for which I had become so famous by extracting those writhing, mahogany fragments from my own brothers’ ears? Where were those brothers?—he did me the kindness of keeping his peace.
*****
Itto and Mekiya Outini write about America, Morocco, and all those caught in between. They’ve published fiction and nonfiction in The North American Review, Modern Literature, Fourth Genre, The Good River Review, MQR, Southland Alibi, Chautauqua, The Stonecoast Review, Mount Hope, Hidden Peak Review, Jewish Life, The Brussels Review, DarkWinter, Lotus-Eater, Gargoyle, and elsewhere. Their work has also received support from the MacDowell Foundation, the Steinbeck Fellowship Program, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. They’re collaborating on several books and running The DateKeepers, an author support platform. They hold an MA and an MFA, respectively, from the University of Arkansas.
