Leela
Mad Math and Witchery
I met my best friend when I was six. Fell irrevocably in love with him at sixteen. Married him at twenty. Became a mother of two at twenty-two. And a widow at twenty‑nine.
When I was born, my father was fifty-five and my mother was forty-nine. No assisted birth techniques were employed in my creation; I was simply a mistake and a miracle. It also set the precedent for me to defy the math. Family folklore has it that my parents tried for years to extend their lineage before giving up all hope. Then destiny intervened and kicked logic and statistics out of the room. Without really trying, my parents defied the odds and obstetrics, and my mother gave birth to a healthy (borderline obese) nine-pounder, who arrived protesting like a professional mourner.
I always thought the algebra of me was unnecessarily complex. My paternal great-grandfather was British. He couldn’t take his unwavering blue-green eyes off a Punjabi girl from Pakistan, whom he married forty-eight hours after a chance meeting. The next generation kept the Punjabi bloodline straight and narrow until it came to my father. whose heart swerved and crash-landed for a Parsi girl. The result of that portmanteau was me—befuddlingly fair-skinned with a deeply embedded plumpness gene—the kind of kid that people find irresistibly cute, for all the wrong reasons. Needless to say, both my parents would have viewed me as a sonnet-worthy angelic cherub even if I had looked like “Rosemary’s Baby.” They were hopelessly blinded by love and gratitude and were mostly just scrambling to make up for lost time. When I turned five, they turned fifty-four and sixty. If they’d been granted one wish, they would have stilled the clocks of time on themselves and set mine to an accelerated pace, just for the pleasure of walking beside me longer. Stronger.
You can have everything, as my parents pretty much did, but you can’t slow-melt real time the way Dali did so effortlessly on canvas. If, like me, you prefer to ignore the rules, the best you can do is snafu the timeline. It helps when you have a reputation for willing things to happen. For seeing things before they happen. For talking like you know what’s going to happen. My Dadi (my father’s mother), straight-talking and mentally tougher than a pugilist, labeled me a witch very early on. Not in any denigrating manner, more as a robust confirmation of my mostly self-proclaimed powers. To be clear, I didn’t exactly spend my childhood reciting incantations to the beat of the dhol. I did, however, have vivid dreams, sometimes sinister, sometimes wondrous, which I shared promiscuously with those who cared to listen. I’ve always seen dreams as messages from someplace we don’t know yet. Like notes across planets. Wasn’t everyone receiving them? How else did I sometimes know what someone was about to say before they said it? Or anticipate something perfectly ordinary—like the cook in the kitchen dropping a plate and me sensing the shatter—before it could be heard outside. Call it nothing, or something, or the sharpening of an instinct, but I began to develop a sense of knowingness about people and events, as if I was already familiar with them. It urged me to run full pelt toward my destiny, convinced it was mine, often well before it had a chance to come my way.
And yet, when it mattered most, my witchy prescience gave me no warning that everything precious was about to crash and burn.
Excerpted with permission from Eighteen Inches Apart by Sonia Bahl. Excerpt permission obtained via author Sonia Bahl.