When the island taxi drops me off at the rickety gate of the driveway that heads to Cat’s cabin, the sun has set and the path through the woods into the cabin is dark. The driver glances at my carry-on suitcase and my cane and asks if I’d like help carrying my things into the cabin. I refuse, gently and with a wide smile, and I say my husband is coming over on the very next ferry and he’ll haul my suitcase inside. I toss it into the inside of the gate for good measure.
The driver leaves. I hate that I still must do this, keep up the pretense of having a husband or boyfriend to ward off any sort of criminal advance from strangers. Do younger women still have to give out incorrect phone numbers to persistent men, or have social media and DMs put to rest all of that, I wonder. When “following” and “stalking” have gone virtual, are we safer, somehow, or worse off?
The cabin is on some twelve acres of property that are glorious but have fallen to disuse somewhat, even though Cat and her husband have someone come around occasionally to clear the woods and tidy up. I unlock the cabin in the dark, find the drawer that has the candles I’d brought here a few visits ago, and I light them. The cottage is bathed in a warm glow, and my breath starts to slow. The night is too warm for a fire, but I light a small one anyway in the small Ulefos woodstove.
I have rituals here and have learned to build rituals in the many islands and forests of the Pacific Northwest. I used to occasionally go camping on my own, although that is growing rare after the time my right knee buckled from its weakness on the gravel at a campsite in Chehalis and the nearby campers who found me after several hours had to cut their own trip short and drive me to the ER. Now, it’s cabins and cottages that hold my silence.
Some of my rituals are to ward off ghosts. Incense. A verse or two from the Hanuman Chalisa. Despite my efforts to exorcise my mind of them, I still believe in ghosts. And yet, as the firelight casts shadows on the cabin’s walls and the coyotes howl at the owls to go tell the spirits that I am here, alone, I kick back in an easy chair by the fire, sip on rose tea, and feel myself grow calm. I turn sweet and beautiful.
It took years to get to this point. I used to be frozen in terror the first few times I arrived here or at other retreats where time and breath sounded too loud in my ears. I had grown up in a noisy Indian metropolis, a screaming family, two tumultuous marriages, and the unrelenting din in my brain that was motherhood. After the divorces and sending Karan off to college, I threw myself into work, spent cheery evenings with friends, and then the silence hung heavy in my late-night hours.
My eyes grow heavy from sleep. The bed in the guest room (I never sleep in the master bedroom) is unmade, but I don’t have the energy to put on the fitted sheets. I climb into my soft cotton pajamas, throw a cover sheet down on the bed, and pull the duvet over me. I fall into a deep sleep. In the morning, I awake to the call of that bird that I look forward to encountering every time I’m in these woods. Tuh-tooh-tah-tee! I have sometimes had to wait for this bird, whose name I never intend to find out. He, or perhaps his grandparent or aunt before him, had first called out to me years ago, in what sounded like “Where have you been?” It questioned me over and over. I even tried to phrase a response and whispered, “I don’t know.”
His questions kept changing over the years. Sometimes, he asked, “What-a-bout-mee?” On another visit, it sounded like “Oh-don’t-you-see?” and on another, “How-could-it-bee?” Today, I can’t understand what he is saying. I listen for hours. My retreat is not dissimilar to Thoreau’s retreat into the woods around Walden Pond. Some say he lived a voluntarily austere life there, and there’s debate about that, but mine is decidedly laden with treats I bring with me and meals I cook to perfection. Today, I cook a rich lamb biryani. The woods grow thick with the scent of cloves and kewra water and black cardamom, and onions frying in ghee. I realize I have forgotten to bring mint leaves, but I know where in the garden to get some.
I have been here in the summer, when figs have been so ripe they have plopped into my palms on the pluck and reddened my cheeks when I parted open their flesh. I have watched for hours as a plum ripened on my windowsill. I have been here to gnaw noisily on fall’s apples, a variety somewhat different from those on which Thoreau fed himself in his woods. I have let the juice of the apples trickle down my chin and dry to a sticky laminate there. I have lain on my stomach in the slippery green moss, watching a banana slug make its way out of the rain toward the canopy of a fallen red leaf. I have resisted the urge to pull the leaf closer to the slug and shorten its miserable journey. I have been here once when a rare winter snowstorm trapped everyone on this island indoors and I ran out of tea in the cottage. I thought of tea all day and vomited by nighttime and realized I had an addiction to caffeine. I have written books from here, surprised at the prose that seeps out of me when I bestow it some days of wordlessness. I have spent hours staring listlessly at oaks when too much silence in turn asphyxiates the Muse. I have wept from the knowledge that a marriage must be axed, a knowledge that is permitted arrival only when there is nothing to do but lie down and let a kettle scream itself dry on your behalf.
In such a retreat, I am not lonely. This is the only place where I am not lonely. Loneliness only settles within me when I imagine there is any other way to be but alone.
I take few showers when I am here. I get acquainted with my true scent, unmasked from beneath my usual layered emollients that emerge from glistening little beauty-store pots with scents mimicking patchouli and rose. My un-showered scent is olive and mud on my scalp, turmeric and lemon under the arms, and molasses and warm butter in the folds of my vulva. My hair is hay, my eyes look sleepy without their usual streak of liner (or lately the kohl from the silver box I deliberately left behind at the houseboat), and my lips are a dull purple without the dab of lipstick I wear in the outer world. Still, here, I balm my lips to stay tethered to the human. In this inner world, I am the woman who finds newer, more languorous ways to pleasure herself—fingers, toys, raindrops, winds, the warm sun, unfettered fantasies. In the outer world, I would soon be that invisible woman who excuses herself when she bumps into you on the ferry, but you are not expected to respond to, kindly or otherwise. Here, in my cottage, I am faerie and gnome, undisturbed genie and examined demon.
As I pluck fresh green leaves of mint for my lamb biryani, I turn my face up to the sun. I crush one of the leaves into my palms and inhale the scent. My bird swoops close and screams out something. My eyes startle open, and I look for him but now his call is going farther and farther away into the pines and I am sad I still didn’t get what he said.
I walk back to the cabin. Here, in the woods, my limp grows deeper. The land is uneven, yes. But it’s also the unabashedness that I am gifted in solitude. Women who are so alert to the way they are seen can feel such ineffable abandon when no eyes and no mirror are turned on them.
I think often about how Thoreau, even when he would retreat to Walden Pond, would have women wanting to be in communion with him. Sophia Foord was one such woman, a middle school teacher in the town of Concord, where Walden Pond was situated. Sophia was an abolitionist and a brilliant thinker, among whose students was the little girl who would grow up to be the writer Louisa May Alcott. Foord was fifteen years older than Thoreau. She fell in love with him. She is said to have thought of them as “twin souls.” She asked him if he’d marry her and was spurned by him. For years after, she stayed in love with him and wrote about this love in letters to Louisa. She died in 1885 at the age of eighty-three, a single woman. Years later, researchers would find a letter from Thoreau about this marriage proposal from Foord. The letter is not kind. It speaks only of how her proposal makes him feel sort of put upon. So little research exists of Sophia Foord’s life aside from all this love and proposal business.
I am afraid that the pursuit of love and marriage and its questions has been a distraction from all the other work I could have done in the world, responses to the urgencies of elevating the human condition in one way or another, and yet here I am, tending to my heart and the hearts of friends. Here, where thinking gives way to sensing and sensing gives way to being, ought my being not give way to peace, perhaps even enlightenment? Or are those things reserved for men like Thoreau? I hurt that those two things have eluded me. I have seen the saris of peace swirl around the corner of a room here and dart behind a tree there, just out of view and just within reach. I have always then been reclaimed by ennui or some preoccupation and been unable to give chase.
Why, now, when I have overcome soul-deep loneliness and can embrace a life of being solitary, do I still not lie back into a solitary life, a life of easeful solitude? Why, now, do I imagine bonds and communion with a partner? Perhaps I will find one who will also understand my need for solitude from time to time. He will know that when this woman heads into a forest in a cultivated, organized solitude for a while, she returns nourished, a few pounds heavier from the feasting, but softened from sleep and turned ravishing from thought.
Will he? Do I know of any such husbands who would be content to have their woman come and go as she pleased, not merely from work and social engagements, but from disengagements? Perhaps an asexual man would, but I am seeking sexual union too! What sort of man would meet me at this delicious ebb and flow of union and solitude? For what sort of man would I risk this seduction of my own seclusion?
Karo-ge yaad toh
Har baat yaad aayegi.
If you set out to remember, every memory will return.
My blood runs cold at these merciless lyrics, and I let them wash over me as I lie in bed for as long as I can between Zoom meetings. I move to the whole playlist devoted to different renditions of “Chaap tilak sab cheeni moh-se naina milaake,” a sensual love poem penned more than seven hundred years ago by Sufi mystic Amir Khusro for Nizamuddin Auliya, in which he coquettishly chides the Nizam for stealing his identity, his pride, his form, everything, with just one look into his eyes.
I dance slowly, my eyes closed, my feet in pain and yet not, and before I know it, I am a whirling dervish in my living room. The houseboat holds its breath.
When I tear myself away from the unconditional embrace of my bed and venture out in search of myself, this time in the city. I take my arousal with me for a good dousing at the university pool, where I swim laps every Tuesday and Thursday. I don’t do this for any sense of vigorous exercise. I do it because it is in the pool, deep in the water, that I can re-create the silence that has become essential to me. In the swimming pool, I am beautiful.
I go slowly back and forth in my lane. I don’t know any stroke other than freestyle, and even that is imperfect. I don’t know how to modulate my breath. I must look like a flopping fish sometimes to anyone watching from the deck. The lifeguards have stopped watching me with concern over the years I have been coming here. No one here knows I am a mermaid, a jalpari.
Through swimming goggles, I can barely see a thing. Objects at a distance are already hazy. All this has the effect of immersing me as if in a watercolor painting still watery in the making.
In recent months, a man swims in the lane next to mine during the same hour, 11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m. He and I have fallen into a rhythm, swimming from opposite ends. Through my swim goggles and my fading eyesight, I have the sense that his skin is somewhat like my own in color. I can’t tell if he is tall or short, young or old, but his comportment suggests youth. He is broad shouldered, and despite looking able-bodied to my failing sight, he swims at the same unhurried pace as me. Sometimes, I come face-to-face with him underwater when we swim past each other. Last Thursday, the man seemed to grin at me as we passed in the water, which startled me, not just because his teeth looked eerie in my watery view but because it was an odd thing to do when submerged in a chlorinated pool. I couldn’t possibly return his smile, even if I’d had a moment to tear myself away from the reverie of water and react before we both swam off on our own way. The underwater encounter did cause a drop of water to be trapped in my ear canal, and I tried all day to shake it out. It began to sound like the flapping of a bird’s wings. By the next morning, the bird was gone.
Today, I arrive earlier than usual and have the pool almost to myself. The man, or someone who I think is the man who usually swims in the lane next to mine, walks in as I am leaving the pool deck, leaning heavily on my cane so I don’t slip on the wet floor. To make up for not smiling underwater the last time, I nod at him and smile. My eyes are still behind my goggles and I don’t register his face clearly, but I see enough to notice that he neither nods nor smiles back. I decide not to be offended. Perhaps he doesn’t recognize me outside the water, perhaps he had been offended by my nonresponse last time, perhaps he is preoccupied and doesn’t notice my greeting. I turn around as we pass each other, and I see his eyes on my legs. Ah. He didn’t see me smile because he chose to stare at my lurching gait.
Oh, well. I shower and drive home, and for the rest of the day, I savor the scent of chlorine that lingers in the webbed base of my fingers.
Back in my home, I listen to the voices coming over from kayakers and stand-up paddleboarders. Snatches of conversation. The shrieks of revelers on boats, canoes, and dinner cruises mingle and come up to me like a chorused taunt. My mind wanders to factoids like the one a therapist had once told me about how it wasn’t seasonal affective disorder that caused the most suicides in this city; it was the arrival of summer, when it sunk in for some people that they weren’t at home alone because it was raining outside and too cold and damp to venture out with friends but that indeed they had no friends at all, even in the warmth.
I start with guilt then, for I am the one settling deeper into my solitary ways despite the call of friends, despite the state of relevance that is still assured to me. Silence could hardly be a bad habit. Solitude could hardly be bad for health if it made me so ecstatic. I know that when I wrap the cotton top sheet around me and let my body temperature drop enough in the stillness to next wrap the Jaipuri cotton quilt with its pink and blue florals over my torso and my head, roll myself up tighter and tighter until I turn the world almost soundless, until it becomes just a little difficult to breathe, I would be cocooned in my sweetest state of being—a loneliness chosen for the way it left me thoughtless, unseeking, unsought, wrapped away from dread, ultimately unraveled into the intimacies of hope.
In the first hour of such intimacies, the world would fall away. In the second hour, I would move between a state of waking and unwakefulness. It wasn’t until the third hour that my eyes would stare open against a cottony absence of color, my body would be breathed by something outside my own breath, and the silence would spread from inside me to the outside.
I had never imagined such a state was possible. It wasn’t until the years of enforced solitude, that time when the whole world was gripped in a sickness, sent scuttling home by virulence, that I eased into this intimacy.
It didn’t arrive often. In fact, it was so willful in its attentions to me, I was beholden to its comings and goings. And yet here I am, yearning once again for something as vulgar as matrimony. Isn’t the pledge of matrimony to be in a state of near-perpetual togetherness? What would a husband make of my head and torso being rolled up in a Jaipuri quilt? My solitude may look silly from the outside. Or it may look like death. Its vastness may be rendered trivial to the unaccustomed eye. My space, my contortions, my breath, my stares into the nothingness of bridges and boats outside might be plundered for something as tawdry as male arousal.
I allow myself a shudder at this thought, wherever I am.
Here I untether myself from the dread of youth slipping away and feel instead the benevolent fear of losing life itself. Like runners keep jogging when halted by a traffic light so their heartbeat does not slow down, I keep bringing myself to stillness so my heart goes on.
They imagine me disenchanted, but here I am, in an enchanted forest of my mind in the heart of the city. Is reclusiveness allowed for women? As romantic and lofty? What do we do when we no longer have to be trying to shed pounds, expected to show up for friends, be present for family, stay visible, stay relevant, stay in association? Is the sumptuousness of solitude as sexy on a woman as it is on a man? Pico Iyer writes about Leonard Cohen disappearing himself into stillness, something Iyer describes as sumptuous and luxurious. Does a woman ever really disappear?
I have parties, friends, chosen family. Choice upon choice. But here I am, seeking to be free and yet be pleasantly inextricable from the lives of others. I forsake alienation, not loneliness; I am troubled by isolation, if I am isolated at all, not by solitude. No one is looking. No one has expectations anymore. Somewhere between the void of expectations and the abyss of irrelevance, I want to float up, one arm outstretched, to find an intimate other. I could forgo sex, perhaps, but my feet, oh, my feet! Oh, how they ache, twisted and turned around as they are. The thing about feet, let’s face it, is that they are best massaged from the other end, by others’ hands. The stillness, the silence, the solitude, have fed me and then turned outward to ease an opening. All is light here where I am alone, but a different hue of light seeps in from the opening. In the refraction, I sense a future where there is both communion and quiet.
Once again, I wonder about the impending sacrifice of this silence, this loss of hours, to the companionship of a man. What sort of man would I permit to crowd into my consciousness, sully my spaces here on the bed and there in my head? Will he want words from me to describe my wordlessness? Will he be content to leave me unknowable? But see, only now, when I have overcome the fear of being seen by the world as the “unloved woman” do I truly desire to be a woman in love.
A recent buried memory flashes into my head. When I had crushed the mint leaves into my palms back at the cabin on Whidbey Island and that bird had called out to me, I did, in fact, hear what it said. I just hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it then. It said, Do you want meeee?
Of course I want you, you fool, I whisper.
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Excerpt adapted from Intemperance. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher HarperVia, an imprint of HarperCollins. Copyright © 2025 by Sonora Jha
