THE YEAR OF THE TOOTH

In 2022, the loss of an incisor left a bad taste in the mouth. As I look ahead to a happy 2023, I weigh all that I gained and lost in the year of the tooth.

A painted wooden Ganesha at a doll shop in Assi Ghat in Benares.

When we look back at each year, it’s possible to establish the one thing that seemed to define our lives during that year. For me, the year 2022 was most certainly the year of the tooth. Many things happened during the year to distract me from my dental issues, of course, but the loss always caught me unawares whenever I looked in the mirror.

At the very start of 2022—on January 2nd—I found myself flying alone to India’s Benares, one of the oldest cities in the world. I’ve found that solitude is valuable in order to process what I see. In Benares, everything is there for everyone to see. Life. The prayers for a good life. The commerce of life. Those who live to eat. Those who can barely eat even to live. Everywhere in Benares is the reminder of death, and, of course, the commerce of death and the prayers for a good death.

Right by Assi Ghat, by the busiest pier of the river Ganges, I stepped into a bookstore called Harmony Bookshop and struck up a conversation with its owner Rakesh Singh. As he and I talked about books and writing, Singh told me to wait. Then he skittered off to a section of the store and returned with a book in his hands. To my surprise, he was holding my second book, An English Made In India. I signed his copy and we captured this completely unexpected moment with a picture. Here I was, not even thinking about my book, and a book curator actually remembered where it was in his shelves.

Rakesh Singh, owner of Harmony Bookshop in Benares, posing with a copy of my second book. I signed the copy and captured the moment.

What I learned that day was that the journey of a book was never predictable. Finding my book in a thoughtfully curated space in India felt like a genuine validation of my work. That moment set the tone for the year, that the most wonderful things often happen in the most unexpected ways. Starting in the spring of 2022, this one value for ethical conduct would be dinned into me through the rest of the year: Do your duty without expecting results.

I flew out of Benares with many conflicting feelings about my faith. In this old town, I was constantly confronted by the two sides of Hinduism—the loud, ritualistic, glamorous aspects of the aarti ceremony on the river Ganges pitted against the immanent silence of spirituality palpable in little corners by the ghats of this sacred river. It was the silent, unseen aspect of my faith that would become significant for me during the year 2022.

By mid-January, upon my return to my home in Chennai (from Benares and Gujarat), I too succumbed to Covid-19 during the Omicron wave that crested through India. For the first time in our travels, my husband and I were uncertain and a little shaken. Our travel plans hung in the balance even as most people in India continued to wear a mask under their chin.

It was right around this time that I began to ponder the direction of my writing. By early February, I began to write weekly on Substack about books in translation. Driven by my own excitement in discovering both old and new works in translation, I have persisted in reading and writing every week over the last year. Among the books I read were works in Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Vietnamese, Portuguese, Japanese, Bengali, Romanian, Hebrew, Tamil and many other world languages. Even though I took some breaks during my vacations, I managed to read 42 books across many of the world’s languages.

By the time I reached the end of March, my children had gained another year. They were now 32 and 28. I also found myself confronting one of the most visible losses to my physical self: I was minus one tooth. An incisor that had once made my smile the best feature on my face was now gone. I was like a strand of jasmine without its telltale fragrance. Imagine a house missing its garage door, a monkey minus its tail, an elephant without its ivory.

In April, I joined four others in Sedona. My close friend from high school had turned 60 in January and we spent a girls-only weekend together.

I was confronting a serious issue in my mouth. I had lost a lot of bone where the incisor once bit off more than it could chew. The maxillofacial surgeon warned me that the scheduled bone graft following the tooth extraction may not work at all. Naturally, by the time May rolled around I was anxious.

Extraction especially of an incisor is life-altering. The procedure only takes all of five to ten minutes. When I saw the result of the extraction, however, it was clear that for the next year, at least, I would look my very best only late in October—on Halloween evening—when a witch’s hat and a broom would round out my stunning self.

A few weeks after the extraction, the dental surgeon packed cadaver bone after cutting across my gum line. If I were lucky, new bone would grow inside, in which case I would not need another bone graft before my dental implant.  As with everything in life, this toothlessness soon became the new normal. Right around the time of my dental surgery, two friends passed away—very suddenly and in almost exactly the same way—reminding me that there were far greater crosses to bear in life. At about the same time, a dear friend contacted me to talk about her son’s upcoming wedding in October. Life continues to happen even as life ends. It seems human beings must be reminded of this year after year.

In the month of June, our family flew to Tampa, Florida, where our niece performed a Bharatanatyam solo dance debut. The day before we flew to New York from Tampa, we spent many hours in an emergency room with our son; he had badly damaged his left eye. A contact lens he had used had been compromised by dish soap. That week I learned that of all the organs in the human body, the corneal tissue grows back the fastest. Our son’s eye trouble did get resolved after a nasty few weeks but it certainly put a damper on a New York stay with our children, reminding us that so often in life the good accompanied the bad to keep us all grounded. Among the many highlights of our July stay in Brooklyn were enjoying a meal on the rooftop at our daughter and son-in-law’s new place and, of course, spending hours browsing through the books in translation in Brooklyn’s terrific bookshops.

After our meal out on a rooftop in Brooklyn, we stayed back after the sun went down.

As time went on, I did actually forget about the awful bone graft, thanks to the flipper tooth, an acrylic removable retainer with a prosthetic tooth attached to it. My smile was deceptive. No one could tell. I also began to tell myself that I might simply have to live with it if the graft never took. The first few weeks were difficult, physically and mentally, as I resigned myself to this new life with a denture. A jalapeno bagel every two weeks was now out of the question. This other way of being—of consuming less—over many months had a delightful end result, by the way. I had absolutely no idea that I had lost weight until, later, in mid-August, when our Canadian friends Berny and Mark met us at Denver airport.

Berny (who is reed thin) was aghast. Apparently I was now a shadow of my former self. If I became any thinner I would disappear. Would an African elephant ever downsize its ears? No, no, I told my friend, I had no fear of melting away into nonexistence for I was still teetering on the brink of obesity, at least according to my BMI chart.

What began as a plan to see Yellowstone National Park rippled into a longer road trip, thanks to our friends. Of all my trips through the North American continent, this two-week road trip—through the states of Colorado, New Mexico, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming—made me wallow in regret for not bringing our children when they were little to experience these natural wonders.

From ambling through the old Raton museum dedicated to the Santa Fe trail to standing under the red rock formations at the Garden of the Gods, from spotting moose in the trails at the Grand Teton National Park to then holding on to dear life while my husband drove madly for three hours simply to arrive by a designated hour to spot the bisons and wolves at Lamar Valley, this was a trip of a lifetime. As the gigantic prehistoric bisons ambled about our van, I was keenly aware of the immensity of another truth. I had so much left to see—in my adoptive nation and the rest of the world—but I didn’t have too many healthy, active decades left to accomplish all I wished to do.

Midway through 2022, I decided to join a group enrolled in weekly lessons on The Bhagavad Gita taught by a retired pathologist in Massachusetts. I was interested in being a part of the group because I was interested in the literature of the text. Dr. Dwarkanath’s Monday lessons became a highlight for me for this year and we completed the sessions in early December.

Some chapters spoke to me personally. The chapter on the nature of work was an affirmation of why my own choice of a writing career felt fulfilling for reasons I could not even articulate before. These lessons came at a critical time in my work. It was heartening for me to know that doing what I loved with a hundred percent of my energy, and with selflessness and detachment, had its own rewards.

Yet, despite our teacher’s warnings, I will admit that I’ve found it hard to extricate my career goals from anxiety or from expectations. How could I ever reconcile the teachings of The Gita with the commercial expectations put up by the world of work? I’m learning, however, that it is all about attitude. The Gita tells us, repeatedly, to show equanimity and composure. This means—even in daily life—to not react but respond. In the world of work this translates to just doing the work by enjoying the process of it and not expecting anything beyond it.

I suppose the last several years have made us all keenly aware that nothing in the world is predictable. We can try to plan our year all we want but we must also learn to go with the flow. This year’s personal focus on the teachings of The Gita gave me much needed perspective in other ways too. I also began to consider the positive characteristics of my partner. Here was the least spiritual man I knew, yet he was so evolved in some ways. I had so much to learn from him.

A moment by the waters at the Roman ruins of Caesarea, Israel.

I celebrated my 61st birthday in mid-October, spending the week in Israel with my husband. Some of our best trips have been those we did not plan in advance. Our driving adventure through Israel’s holy sites was another personal highlight for us this year even though, as my family will often remind me, I didn’t exactly manage to float in the Dead Sea.

In a land that has erupted in violence and anarchy many times over—under the Romans, the Persians, the Crusaders, the Ottomans and the British—memories and mistrust seemed to run deep. The history of the Jewish people is one of survival, against the greatest odds, century after century, over many thousands of years. In Israel, I saw the extent of human achievement that was possible in under eighty years but I also saw clearly what had held us all back as a collective species. We had not conquered greed and hate. One of the seminal truths from The Gita returned to me in Israel, that the real war zone is the one that resides in our minds.

I plan to actually begin writing my third book in 2023. If things go as planned, in late February, I’ll finally receive my dental implant. After over two years of negligence and suffering, my teeth will return to another new normal. I will be able to bite into a sandwich. Now that I’m past the worst of it, I realize that the worst of every surgical procedure owes so much to our febrile imagination. Anxiety triumphs only when we let it control us.

In 2022, our old avocado tree actually bore fruit after over a dozen years, proving that the possibilities are indeed endless if only we are patient and continue to stay positive. Happy New 2023, everyone, and may all your dreams come true this year and beyond!