Wisdom Teeth, 2021
My wonky wisdom tooth x-ray scan.
First published in the ninth issue of the monthly queer newsletter, Mush Stories by Veer Misra.
At a time when survival and risk are both measured in the people last touched, loneliness hangs heavy in the air between us. It descends onto our tongues with the weight of silence.
At a time like this, the mind misses no opportunity to offer an escape, a ‘better time,’ from our limited roster of experiences. No wonder, the aftertaste of loneliness is memory. But I have learnt that the futility of the present cannot be mended by the resilience of the past.
It is said that the farthest back one can trace their memories is to the age of three or four and if we remember anything from before that, it is most likely fabricated - a patch job the brain did on itself to make up for its inadequacy.
One of my oldest memories is of a morning so early, it is still night for some. The world, asleep, except for the streetlight that is still on; working overtime, its constant hum only occasionally disturbed by the triumphant chirp of an early bird. The sun has not announced itself yet, but even in the darkest corners of the house, silhouettes take form under the light of whatever little has broken of the dawn. I remember the wetness of my hair, the smell of soap that followed me like a shadow. I remember the yellow porch-light bouncing off of the button on my favourite shorts — denim, very distinctly violet in colour, and ones that I would, later in life, refuse to take off until I could no longer deny that I had outgrown them — creating an illusion of a little, flickering metallic sun where my navel used to be. Everything that is outside of this little island of warm light, still submerged in the blue of slumber, is slowly stirred awake. As all life around me stepped out of bed, I remember standing at the cusp of a day (for all intents and purposes, my very first) and I remember nothing but feeling alive.
Around the same time as the birth of my first memory, I lost my first milk tooth. After days of prodding the gum tissue to give in, I climbed onto the cool marble counter of my grandmother’s bathroom and under the stark lighting, went so close to my reflection that my open mouth stared back into my eyes. There it was — limp and pitted with red, dangling loosely from the roof of my mouth - a tooth, a cliffhanger. With my tongue full of conviction, I flicked it and then ran to my mother with the pain and a hole in my grin. Between my blood speckled fingers, the first lost piece of the jigsaw. I feel a familiar pain at the far end of my mouth again, but this time it does not come with the enlightenment of living, but the nagging poke of maturity: Wisdom teeth.
When it comes to human evolution, to outgrow a need is to progress. As we rubbed two stones and created both life and death, our minds learnt to do more than what our mouths could. Our diet evolved from raw meat and coarse leaves to an appetite for thought and language. To outgrow a need is to progress. As for wisdom teeth, there is a belief amongst some anthropologists that with time, as the human brain grew bigger, the jaw got smaller to accommodate for space — outgrown, it yielded in its defeat against evolution. On days that are particularly heavy with silence, I find my tongue recoiling into my mouth; receding with every quiet hour until its presence inside my jaw is as good as gone.
In my family, when a milk tooth falls, we plant it deep in the soil with the hope that in some cosmic form of regeneration, what we give back to the earth, comes around to us when we are worthy — similar to magic beans, but with delayed gratification. Every fallen tooth that found itself lodged in the soft ground with the nimbu tree, marked the development of my consciousness, and with it, the development of my queer identity. Growing up, I do not remember knowing how, or feeling the need, to separate the two. My persistence and my disregard for gender norms, both offshoots of childly wonder, earned me a few Barbies of my own. Every morning, I would comb and braid their hair in my room as all the other boys in my house gathered in the garden for sports. If I was lucky enough for my absence on the playing field to go unnoticed, I would spin elaborate and imaginative lives for each of the dolls that would ultimately end in love. I do not know if it was their effortless smiles or their unwavering dimples, or perhaps the fact that the little lives of my polymer princesses and their princes were limited to a shelf together — except for the hour that we would breathe life into each other — that made living with love look so easy. In their company, love could only be as far away as a story well told.
I learnt the markings to the steel cupboard that housed my grandmother’s sarees after watching her pleat yards of rani-pink and gold zari with the same virtuosity as the moon reining in the tide. When alone, I would try in vain to replicate it from memory with just about anything long enough to wrap my tiny frame. But in a humble effort to never forget, I scrawled the last three digits of the key on the metal wardrobe with a sketch pen. The blue ‘051’ scraped off within the month but not before the fluidity of the silks against my naive skin reassured me, at a time when I did not know what I was seeking assurance for.
If you are familiar with the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, you know that the greatest catalyst for any decision is the menacing optimism of ‘possibility’. A dejected Jack found possibility in a beanstalk that defied gravity and bloomed through the clouds. Once inside the giant’s castle, he was amidst riches so obscene that his curiosity was surpassed by his capacity for desire. In the version of the story I read, the book says, “If Jack was pleased at the sight of silver, how much more delighted he felt when he saw such a heap of gold: he had the boldness to even think of gaining it.” The dolls and sarees laid down the path for my sense of self and my identity, but in a race towards acceptance, they felt like the second prize. The real win — the gold, was only to be found in the fulfillment of love and someone to share it with.
Not unlike Jack, I had the boldness to believe that all the little pieces put in the ground would come back to me as something - or someone - when I will be worthy. But acceptance and actualisation are two sides of the same coin, which is to say, that when you fall flat on reality, only one of them makes it to the surface. Soon my attendance in the garden became mandatory rather than recreational, and I was sent out in the sun to join other boys, who were to become men one day, in deciding which way they wanted to chase a ball that morning. In their defense, they had me do the easy albeit the grunt work out of what, I assume, could only be insignificance. But I had no complaints, or excuses for that matter — the dolls I would have otherwise spent these afternoons with were taken off their shelf, never to be seen or discussed. In the face of being perceived as an indiscretion, my identity receded within me for safekeeping. And I built a shield around it, not realising when it turned into a fortress armed so heavily with self-acceptance that it became impenetrable by desire. On nights that are particularly stifled with yearning, I carry the emptiness of the shared shelf with the lost dolls to my bed, only to lay awake with a discomfort that can be best described as loneliness.
As a late-blooming queer individual, it has been tough to make room for the realisation that the worthiness of love is harder to find as a queer body. When our expectations of love are dictated to be tame, and our expressions, timid, then love feels like a permanent state of hesitation. You learn to categorise it as ‘impossible,’ ‘uncertain,’ and ‘achievable’ to eliminate further chances of disappointment. With just achievability as its benchmark, the gratification of any new experience feels ephemeral on the best days and unfulfilling on the worst. Truth be told, I am still navigating the space of queer relationships, and no matter where I go in my search, there seems to be no promised land. This inability to tick enough boxes in an already meagre checklist of life experiences has often made me feel not enough; an insufficiency only deepened with the reminder of age that is sprouting at the end of my mouth. With its every pinch in my sore gums, the growing pains of identity resurface.
Wisdom teeth are named such because, besides emerging at adulthood, they come with a definitive expectation of lived experiences, and naturally with the anxiety of not having lived them all, I am forced to go over every moment where I have stretched myself to make room for two. Analysing them, rating them on a scale of one to ‘achievable,’ hoping that through some permutation and combination, I would feel greater — more enough — than the sum of my parts.
I think of all the pearly white pieces of me that dissolved into the soil like magic beans, blissfully unaware of all the hope I planted in each of them. They have returned to greet my gums with a familiarity that is so ancestral, it is still breaking out from under the strain of history. But by erupting both inside and in spite of the mouth, the wisdom tooth’s defiance serves as a reminder that the act of growing is perennial and so are the pains that come with it. Every night as I tend to the discomfort it stirs, I think of how the wisdom tooth — a faulty discharge of evolution — bursting through the ground of a full jaw is an act of resilience in itself. The wisdom tooth, confident in its identity, charges at the mouth from the ground up never seeking to be completed by it. The question was never of the worthiness of love, but of its dissent and its acceptance. I am learning that as a queer body, the only difference between not feeling enough and having room to grow, is perspective.
The wisdom teeth, like the Beanstalk, erupted from the tiniest grains of promise. And I know what you’re thinking — correlation hardly ever leads to causation, but to defy evolution is not far from magic. Yet unlike Jack, I feel prepared to part with my enamel-coated shoot of possibilities, which is to say, I have since taken an appointment for a tooth extraction. Not because the pain in my gums outweighs the persistence of the tooth, or because the memory of it will persevere in the form of a sunken shrine at the healing site - but simply because it is time I make room for resilience to sprout from somewhere much, much deeper within me.