I am knee
Confessions of a problematic knee (personal essay, mildly embellished)
I am knee
It was the end of my yoga class when the old movie started replaying. At the beginning of class, the yoga teacher, who taught students in America over video from India, had suggested several options for “sensitive” knees.
“A knee pad, rolled up blanket, or two pillows. Be kind to your knees!”
But all I felt for my knee was resentment—my right knee, that is.
“What’s the cause? Injury?” She wanted to know when I first started taking her class.
I shrugged. “Who knows!”
Then she asked me how old I was. Such a line of questioning is curiously common among us Indians. We judge each other on age, easily lie about being younger than we are, yet don’t think it rude to ask each other’s age in public.
“Fifty eight,” I said, a little irritable. She nodded.
Someone ventured, “Arthritis, maybe,” repeating what the orthopedic doctor had diagnosed. All this analysis pissed me off some more. I pulled a blanket, actually an old shawl from Nagaland, under my knees and continued on.
Now as I lay in savasana1 after many such sessions, the old movie was replaying in my head. Yoga’s like that. It will open you up in unexpected ways. The old movie of the road accident that broke my right tibia over three decades ago, when I was in college. Could it be that old injury? I hadn’t thought about the accident in decades even though I sometimes skimmed the memory laughing, if an old acquaintance reminded me.
You see it was no ordinary accident; it involved a dramatic tale—of romance!
***
I was all of twenty sitting behind my then boyfriend, astride a Vespa scooter, weaving through traffic on Delhi roads. If you know Delhi, you know rickshaws, bicycles, cars of every ilk, trucks, even humongous lorries simultaneously share the roads, and traffic rules are treated as benevolent suggestions. Back then the roads and vehicles were much less developed but the traffic was just as menacing.
The Vespa scooter actually belonged to my boyfriend’s father. It was a spare vehicle my boyfriend borrowed whenever he was in town. Being senior to me in college he’d graduated and now toiled in far off lands. We dated long-distance. Which sounds romantic, like he was a few hundred miles away. Nope. We’re talking separated across continents. In the 1980’s. We’re talking Ecuador and India. We’re talking no email, no cell phones, no internet, not even modems, nor STD—look the latter two up if you’ve never heard of them (hint: the latter is not a class of disease). If anyone asked me where he was located, I promptly opened up my paper atlas to show them.
“The equator passes through the country. The capital is Quito, city of eternal spring…”
All we had was snail mail to assuage our pining hearts.
To cover the long distance, we wrote even longer letters, spoke monthly for a few minutes when he “trunk-called”—me answering monosyllabically from the completely public telephone in the girls hostel foyer—and grew weary of the long separation. So when he visited India for the first time over the winter holidays, after over a year of separation, we clawed for every minute we could be together.
He borrowed his father’s spare Vespa, so we could efficiently run around all over town. To complicate things, very few people knew about us. The rest were left in peaceful oblivion. You see, dating was mostly frowned upon back then. We were firmly part of mid-80s middle-class India, a class that carried the weight of the nation’s sexual morality on its repressed shoulders. Simple hand-holding could get you in trouble even with people who, decades later, claimed they were “ALWAYS VERY open-minded” especially when their kids insisted on cohabitation before marriage. But back then, we had to look for anonymous spaces, hidden corners, nooks in parks, buildings, historical ruins, in one of the most densely populated cities in the world, to simply kiss. Defiant, delicious days!
But disaster struck before we could advance to the next base.
That day we were racing off to a restaurant on the other end of town, when the Vespa ran over an oil slick and skidded on the road. Its rear wheel veered right and forward, while the front one skidded leftwards. The unsteady steed went flying. So did we—me in one direction, boyfriend in another. When I landed, all I saw was the steed lying quite nonchalantly on its side.
Then I shut my eyes and screamed. My right leg hurt like crazy. Within seconds my boyfriend was bending over me. He had blood on the side of his head. I was so discombobulated with pain that I barely asked him if he was OK. Shocked that I was not entirely indestructible, I still didn’t fully consider the miracle by which we both got away without major damage. An errant truck, or even less, could have ended things for one or both of us that day.
Even so we knew to anticipate drama. The Vespa now bore signs that couldn’t be disguised. Parents had to be brought in. The defiant, delicious days seemed numbered.
But for now my right leg hurt like nothing ever had. My shin had slammed the back bumper of a car. The man driving the car seemed unaware of the dictum that if one is involved in an accident on Indian roads, one should make a quick escape before the cops arrive to involve you in a lengthy investigation to extract a bribe. But he was the decent sort. He helped my boyfriend pick me up and put us both in the back of his car. Then he drove us to the nearest hospital. Making sure we were in good hands, he left. I’m pretty sure I didn’t thank him properly. But whenever I think of the accident now, which I do thanks to my right knee, I send gratitude his way.
Soon a doctor was peering over me. I screamed before he touched my leg. My lovely lemon yellow salwar—specially purchased for this romantic rendezvous—was destined for only one wearing. An indifferent attendant came by, injected a painkiller, then cut open the right leg of the salwar with an enormous pair of scissors, and shoved the fabric up to my thigh. Then he wheeled me in to have my naked leg x-rayed. “Fracture… right tibia…,” was declared.
Before I could mourn too long for the leg or the salwar, two attendants engulfed the exposed leg in a tall plaster cast that ran from foot to halfway up my thigh! The painkiller kicked in. And I thankfully closed my eyes.
In the meantime, unbeknownst to me, my boyfriend called his father to tell him that the abandoned scooter needed to be picked up. His father, being the sensible sort, asked the right questions and got the scooter handled. Then he promptly showed up, especially when he heard that the pillion rider was in the hospital. And that the rider was a young woman!
So while I lay drowsy and self-pitying, in my ruined salwar, with my right leg exposed right up to my thigh, in walked my boyfriend’s father. I promptly put my hands together in a namaste to greet him, cringing and helpless.
Drama ensued. The dating cat was out of the bag! Parents got involved. Questions were asked. Aunts wanted to know details. Boyfriend stuck it out, starting with taking me home with my broken leg, valiantly facing my Army man father and suffering the cross examination like a man. Apparently, he won over my father that day.
Years later I watched the movie Speed (1994). In the last scene, when the hero Jack says, "I have to warn you, I've heard relationships based on intense experiences never work", I burst out laughing. Clearly he didn’t know us, for eventually we married. Best decision—bad knee and all.
A couple of weeks later my boyfriend returned to Ecuador, to his job. I went back to college. Where a different torture awaited me. My lab professors were unsympathetic, refusing to consider any accommodations (wasn’t even a word back then). My classmates were worse. You see, I was one of only two women in our undergraduate engineering batch of nearly three hundred students. Yes, fishbowl. Instantly, the scrutiny multiplied a thousand times. Especially in my chemical engineering class of about fifty odd nineteen year old men boys, and a one-legged, limping female.
We’re talking merciless ridicule. Any one of the guys would yell langadi (gimp, female) as I hobbled up the two flights of stairs (what elevators?) hanging onto the banister with one hand and a miserable crutch in the other, mortally afraid I was going to fall backwards and crack my skull too. My one equally outnumbered girlfriend had her own classes to attend but she and one or two of the guys tried to help when they could. The rest laughed, walking right on by, ignoring my struggles.
But the thing is, I showed up to class. Every single day. And I survived.
About three months later, the tibia healed. I was rid of the cast. Life was good again.
***
Now as I lay in savasana, feeling proud of that old hardiness, it hit me. This knee’s troubles, this pain likely stem from that old injury! How come I hadn’t thought of it before? Now I wondered what else, besides the tibia, had been mangled in the accident.
At that juncture, my reverie turned to a possible future. I may need a knee replacement at some point—a fresh new knee that carries me the next twenty years, if I am so blessed. And what happens to this old knee? Would it be discarded in a garbage heap somewhere? Would a crusty surgeon keep it for demo purposes?
That’s when I knew that if I ever have this knee replaced, I want to see it after the surgery. I want to trace all the signs of struggle, the scars of the good journey it bore. And hear its side of the story. An accounting of every day that it showed up despite the mangling, the misalignment, the ridicule, now possibly osteoarthritis, and whatever else it carried me through these years. I want to bear witness to all of it. Yes, I will insist the surgeon save the old knee. Not discard it or keep it to demo to unempathetic residents who will see an imperfect joint, and never know its gallant history.
In that moment I was overcome with deep compassion, even love, for my knee—my trusty partner of decades. Still serving me. Showing up daily. Despite the pain, the injury, the unacknowledged mangling, it stands up. Sometimes it hobbles. It makes room. It supports. It allows me so much. The daily exhortations in yoga class to thank our bodies arrived deeply within me. And in that moment, I became my body. I became my knee.
The fearless, formidable late Christopher Hitchens who I’ve greatly admired for a long time, said in his book Mortality, even as he lay dying from cancer, “I don't have a body, I am a body.” He was an atheist, and while I’m gradually drifting away from that materialist view myself, I could identify with what he meant.
For even as we’re souls temporarily housed here, perhaps mere bits of consciousness floating around, there’s no need to cultivate an alienation or resentment towards the vessel that serves. Instead, gratitude and compassion for the vessel’s loyalty is not just a better way for strict materialists, another way to alleviate suffering, such feeling may also serve as prayer, a mindful meditation on the gifts, even manifestations, of the divine, however the divine may appear, house within or be us.
Then as I lay there reflecting, my knee relaxed and I felt myself move beyond pain. In those moments I was whole again. Whole with the scars, the pain, the lifepath, the love that came to be, whole with all that I was given before, during and after the accident. Perhaps a mere accident, perhaps more, even so infused with deep meaning for me, made me whole. Whole with love. Whole within this body. Whole when I’m ready to travel beyond it.
THE END
—reena | 2024
Yes, it’s mostly true, although some details have been modified to protect the guilty. I’d love to hear what you think.
Savasana is the final resting pose at the end of yoga practice. It literally means corpse pose. We Yogis don’t mess around.
Hi Reena, and another so cool short story from you; but wondering if some dis -embellished also.Joke.
I will have to say that your age reveal surprised me ; not in the forefront of my mind before when reading your posts, but thinking as about 15 yrs earlier or more gen to me.
Loved the Vespa part, except for the accident and consequences etc.
My mum' s younger brother had a Vespa which he rode to the Gold Coast in 1950s for the weekend; about 200km round trip on a not then v good or safe road. He also had a nice small yacht; stored in a shed that he and grandfather built.
His wife to be, my Auntie Claudie (think short for Claudine), said, No Bike and the boat goes to our house deposit. The boat was sold, but the Vespa remained in the shed, and I can remember riding in the 70s around Ascot/Clayfield.
And know about Subscriber Trunk Dialing, or the lack of. We had a system called Party Lines out of metro; so an open line for multiple users; an interesting social experience.
And do you know the phone box scene from quaint Scottish movie called Local Hero with massively good sound track by Mark Knopfler. I had a similar experience with bag of 20p coins from the Isle of Barra to here in Brizvegas to join a friends wedding. It did work; they put the phone up to a mike when I spoke.And snail mail was faster then locally but not internationally.
Could reply to more of your statements.
And continue to love your knee and don't give up on it until the last gasp. And only then.
Yes, depending on where your tibial fracture was (like tibial plateau) and angulation of it afterwards if lower; could be relevant historically.
There is a big TKR Industry out there; a lot of money for orthopods and device manufacturers, but evidence based outcome is less certain, except maybe for very severe damage. So be canny, a Scottish term.
Also a long term fan of Christopher Hitchens and recall reading Mortality about 10 yrs after my dad's death.
And your Substacker response is so good to read.
Reena, it was such a heartwarming pleasure to read your knee story...set me thinking back to IIT days (sorry if I was one of the guys to poke fun at your predicament and pass by without a shred of assistance...). The trauma of meeting your future in-laws for the first time with your gash-filled "nangi latt" was precious...sorry to be entertained by your plight but then self-deprecating pose is soooo much more enjoyable...
much love and best wishes for more entertaining writing...
Raj