MATCHBOX

I remember grief being heavy: I was carrying a dull, dead weight. It was enervating. I ran to shake it off. I ran persistently, seriously, which is to say that I turned up at the ground every day. But I could barely run 700 or 800 metres at the time, and far less than 500 metres at one stretch. I was lucky to live in a south Delhi colony with a couple of parks and jogging tracks. The park I ran in was popular—it hosted a busy cricket coaching camp, several walkers and a couple of joggers. The cricketers took over the better, more levelled half of the ground; the walkers and gentle joggers use the running track around it.

     I was a lump in those days—a squat, easily breathless lump. I ran in the lower, unlevelled half of the garden. I didn’t deserve to run on the jogging track—I wanted to be unseen. Some of this was the grief. I didn’t want to be.

     I come from a home that believes slimness is an inborn condition, like eyesight or hearing. Or, indeed, intelligence, for the Bengali. Either you were born with it or you were unlucky. My father watches sports on television tirelessly. His most frequent compliment is,
‘What a beautiful physique’, while bouncing his belly on his thighs happily, without a trace of resentment.
     Running was horridly painful: a deafening lack of breath within a handful of strides, the feeling that my chest would burst, my heart thundering in my ears, and, invariably, a running nose. I had no rhythm, no stamina. I went full pelt those initial days, no half measures. I stopped more than I ran, but I went again.
     The pain was penance: I was paying off my guilt. The pain was also a marker of my bereavement—I was here because of my loss, I was charging madly about a small patch of dusty green because I had to remember and grieve. It was my dawn cold-water bath, it was
my white-flower puja with incomprehensible mantras.     This is what kept me running—the sense that I was mourning, that I was accounting for my loss.
     It had been after breakfast, when the household was settling down to chores, that she suffered a heart attack. I would tell myself to go a little longer when I thought my chest would burst, to stop a little bit later. I made counting pacts—I would run till ten, then twenty. When I struggled to draw breath, perhaps I would intuit what her last moments were like. Perhaps I could be by her deathbed after all. I could grasp what death feels like.
     Was there this deafening, rushing sound in your head? Did it tear open your chest? Was it anything like this, Tabba?
     I could grieve after all.

***

‘When you are broken, you run,’ wrote Helen Macdonald in H Is for Hawk, her majestic memoir of grief and falconry. She meant running figuratively; I embraced it literally. Running was the only
way out of the claustrophobia of my grief. But might it also have
been a subconscious desire to live?
     In January 2015, the results of an ambitious twelve-year study by the University of Cambridge were made public: Inactivity is worse than obesity, doubly so, in fact. The lack of physical exercise, the researchers estimated, caused twice as many deaths in Europe as obesity every year. From the wasteland of my grief, had I instinctively reached for life?
     I didn’t make eye contact with anybody. I kept my head down and ran. I remember well the dusty, lumpy, green ground. Sometimes children would scuttle across my running path, but I didn’t look up to smile at them or their chaperones. I spoke to no one. I ran alone in a busy park.
     The haze started to lift after three months. I was still in shock. I cried easily and several times a day. I remember the feeling, distinct to this day, that I would cry if you shook me.
     But I also found myself thinking of other things. I got a haircut. I bought some clothes because the running had made the old ones loose. I bought a pair of running pants and a set of loose, cheap T-shirts. Those were not bought with any particular thought except that I wanted to be comfortable. I didn’t know my sweating patterns then—that I perspire especially in the upper body, that a good run particularly wets my back and chest, and marks out my bra line. Thankfully, a loose T-shirt sticks to the body less, especially if you keep pulling it down. I was to realize this, and many other things about myself, over the next months. Running offers many rewards, but self-awareness is the surprise gift.
     I soon realized I was the only woman who ran in that Delhi park. The other serious joggers were all men. Some women walked furiously, others chatted on the phone or caught up with neighbours. They all wore salwar-kurtas. I hadn’t learnt how to run long-distance then, yet, apparently, even a few weeks of single-mindedly charging around the ground can condition the body. I could go a few laps without stopping—five rounds or so of a 440-yard track. It was only a mile (1.6 kilometres), but I felt accomplished already—I was the only one of my kind. And I felt impatient, because I went faster than the male joggers who ran with rhythm. (It took only a few days to realize they were real, practised runners; I was an upstart novice.)
     I noticed that I never asked to excuse myself when I needed to overtake men on the track. Instead, I would stop running, sidle past, then run again. It disturbed my running rhythm, but I was afraid to ask them to make way. Didn’t it make me conspicuous? Didn’t it make me pushy, insisting on the right to my space and telling others to move aside? Yet, when I had to bypass women walkers walking on the track, I said ‘excuse me’. Politely, I believe.
     I realized this was my pattern even when I was out in the city. On the craggy, steep, poorly lit footpaths of south Delhi, I did not request men to allow me to pass, even if they were lounging around, slapping backs, drinking alcohol out of cola bottles and taking up the entire footpath. I would rather jump off the pavement into the path of impatient autorickshaws, get squeezed with bullied cyclists into the slushy drainage conduit, and climb up again a few steps later. On the slim streets of Kolkata, where the footpaths belong to roadside entrepreneurs and thoroughfares boast a rich diversity of traffic, from trams to hand-drawn freight carts to pedestrians, I mastered the sideways trot. Yet, with women, I asked to be excused and strode
past. When a couple walked side by side, I addressed the woman.
     What if I annoyed a man with my Oliver Twist-like asking for more place, and he grabbed me? Followed me and pushed me into a side street, pinned me to a wall? I remembered the reports of acid attacks in the past five years. You may have read them too. Did you hear of what happened to the Hindi-film actor Kangana Ranaut’s sister? She was attacked with acid some years ago.
     It was disappointing to accept how timid I was. A man I was falling in love with shook his head in annoyance when I told him why I avoided evening dos. ‘Acid attacks are horrible, but why should you think about them? You cannot allow yourself to be afraid. I once thought I was about to be mugged in Philadelphia, but I turned around and asked “What?” to the guy who was shadowing me. He walked away. That’s my attitude,’ he told me. I told him I wanted to be like him, but I was held back by the things I’d heard over several years. Warnings, advice, news reports, paying-guest-accommodation rules, living-room conversations. These had now
shaped my anxieties.

Excerpted with permission from The Day I Became a Runner: A Women’s History of India through the Lens of Sport by Sohini Chattopadhyay (HarperCollins Publishers India, 2023)