Professor Ranji did not come to class on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday. He did not call, send flowers, or write. The first days, recalling what I’d eaten, I felt hungrier than ever and wished for more of the same. The French say, “L’appétit vient en mangeant,” and I hold this to be true.
I spent those afternoons marinating Professor Ranji in my mind, in lassi and rose petals. I rolled him in unleavened dough and sharp Indian spices before deep frying him, set his crispy carcass on the sheets of my bed like greasy French fries on paper towels. The very thought of him fed me intravenously with the sweetest nectar I’d ever tasted, that is what made the experience so unique, for I did not taste anything in my mouth, but feeling it in my veins, I knew it was sweet. I was tortured with another feeling, as new to me. It were as if I had left parts of myself behind in his possession, and could not long survive if he personally did not return them to me. I was living, more than knowing it, I felt it. How ironic that in the most heightened moment of my life, I was willing to give my life to him, allow it to be transformed into a food, ready if not begging to be eaten and discarded.
But deprivation curtails appetite and I found myself playing with the sheets of my bed, making turbans on my knees, mummies out of my limbs. I could not believe it; his flesh had been welcomed into mine, yet this meant nothing to him, not even enough for him to pick up a telephone. At first, I found excuses for him, but I had to face the facts at length. Professor Ranji simply passed his meat around to whomever would take it.
Within a week, I discovered that instead of offering me a caloric boost, what little I’d consumed of him was actually robbing me of my usual energies and happy disposition. Basically, it was a tapeworm eating away inside me.
A shiny red Christmas garland was taped around the name tag on Professor Ranji’s office door. We were still months away from that time of the year. I knocked vainly with that dull feeling one has when the door already feels abandoned, knowing no one is going to answer, but needing to alleviate the frustration on some object.
“He’s ill,” the department secretary informed me as she tacked a poster on the corridor wall with twenty-two pairs of dancing X’s, some long-legged, some short-legged, all joyous, though none had heads. This miraculous ballet is called “chromosomes”.
“Do you know when he’ll be back?”
“His wife said not for the time being.”
I felt humiliation and sadness stirring in me, until they mixed into one, and I hated him suddenly. He hands out his flesh to anybody. Yet, Christ does the same, I thought. Still, it was different. Could this be what the Bible meant by adultery? Yes, it sounded quite right “adult” – ery.
A fly landed on the corner of my mouth. I hit my face. I blew my nose violently. When I opened my eyes, Dr. Timberland contemplated me with the worried concern a true Christian might feel for one gone astray. In large letters, he had already written SIN on the blackboard.
Dr. Timberland was a disappointment to the eye in comparison with Professor Ranji. There was no meat whatsoever on his face, not even enough for a cold cut. He wore thick black glasses, which from some bony angles made his bleached blue eyes magnify like an eerie hallucination. Deprived of meat and muscle, his buttocks were indented and his legs, arched. His mouth was a vague dash, but when he smiled, the thin line opened and stretched into a large cavity as though his face could be literally peeled off. His teeth were a few millimetres too short, which gave him the benign look of a born vegetarian.
Yes, I thought to myself, he must be popular with women, and extremely beloved to have achieved a thinness like Christ’s. I contemplated him days on end.
I wished for willpower, yes, prayed for the willpower to stop hungering for him. I cannot say that I was never alarmed by the contents of my fantasies. It was always the same. There he was, calculating inside a microwave oven. Behind the door, one could hear the eruption of the mushroom cloud, a blown up replica of his intelligent brain. When he stepped out, his glasses were intact but the skin hung from his bones. His eyes were melted and bubbled like raclette. With my teeth, I scraped off the feverish skin, tender as the foreskin of a newborn child. Particles like fig seeds popped out of the taste buds of my tongue and my raw face burned like chilli con carne.
Dr. Timberland ran back and forth, equalizing letters and numbers, x = y2, y = 2x – x2, sin’s and co sin’s. A parabola fell down, another stood up, one parabola was large enough to contain a feast of fruit, another so thin that only a stork could have drunk from it. He placed his notes, meticulously handwritten into his briefcase, patted them as if he were putting them to bed; he locked the briefcase with a tiny golden key. He had those long, bony fingers one easily associates with pianists, or artists before they’re well known (and well-fed).
I pushed my way to him through a forest of standing bodies and intercepted him just as he descended the podium.
“Dr. Timberland. May I see you a minute in your office?”
I had grown self-confident. I rubbed coconut oil into my legs, sprinkled cinnamon in my arms pits, kept a vanilla bean in my bra and a prune stone in my underwear. That, I was certain, had something to do with it.
Dr. Timberland avoided my eyes, glanced at the door desperately. Four other girls from our class approached him. His eyes shifted nervously left and right, exposing the whites before he left the auditorium. He hurried down the hall without acknowledging our presence. His introverted mannerisms made me feel like we were attacking him, and tempted me, or some impulse deep inside of me, to do so.
“So, what is it?” Dr. Timberland asked me as he entered his office backwards.
“Go ahead, please,” I offered the other girls; my generosity was only in appearance; inside, I was worried about my own share.
When they solicited the date of the midterm examination, the maximum days of absence allowed before failing, and where assignments could be left should they ever miss class, one cannot imagine my relief. Dr. Timberland’s answers were, the eighth, three, and a nod at the flap in his door.
With prolonged gazes from one to the other, they confirmed their mutual opinion of him and took their leave. I could not help but smile, squeeze my breasts together with the sides of my arms until they kissed and stir my hips around idly.
“And you?” He purposely avoided looking at my body, directing his fugitive eyes to his office walls which were covered with landscape wallpaper. A forest, lush, shiny and green, opened up around us, and a gentle waterfall remained suspended in time.
Without a word, I left my vanilla bean on his desk and walked slowly, silently away. It is better to be mysterious than awkward in such situations. Appetites are as much to be enjoyed as cooking and cleaning.