by Poorna Bell
For Mum and Dad, because you are the first two people I ever loved.
For my sister, Priya, because you are the third. Because this is a song of everything I am, and who I became, and it began with you.
It seems to me that, if we love, we grieve. That’s the deal. That’s the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable. There is a vastness to grief that overwhelms our minuscule selves.
We are tiny, trembling clusters of atoms subsumed within grief’s awesome presence. It occupies the core of our being and extends through our fingers to the limits of the universe.
Within that whirling gyre, all manner of madnesses exist; ghosts and spirits and dream visitations, and everything else that we, in our anguish, will into existence. These are precious gifts that are as valid and as real as we need them to be. They are the spirit guides that lead us out of the darkness.
– Nick Cave
CONTENTS
Prologue
1 Eat, Pray, F**k You
2 The Underrated Burrows of Moray Eels
3 Hello, It’s Me, Your Wake-up Call
4 Sand in the Crack of Your Emotional Swimsuit
5 Love, But Not as You Know It
6 So This Is What Clouds Taste Like
7 Woodsmoke, Fire and Ice
8 The Call to Weigh Anchor
9 The World’s Second Bluest Sky
10 In Search of Silence
11 The Cicada’s Last Song
Acknowledgements
PROLOGUE
‘Auntie Poo,’ my four-year-old niece, Leela, says plaintively.
‘Mmm?’ I reply, looking up from my book. We are in my sister’s warm living room, cuddled up on the sofa in a mound of cushions and blankets. A phrenology bust regards us sternly.
‘What is “married”?’ Except she isn’t old enough to curl the ‘r’s, so it sounds like ‘mawwied’. She looks at me. Her eyes are huge like mine, and they have been like that since she was a baby.
Where my eyes are green with an iris of flame, hers are the inkiest black. Though she is barely over a thousand days old, she is looking at me with those dark, solemn eyes like an ancient creature, as old as meteors passing through space.
I swivel a desperate eyeball at the stairs, but my sister and brother-in-law are lost in a black cosmos of exhaustion: the sleep of grateful parents.
Here goes nothing . . .
‘Well, you know Mama and Daddy?’ She nods. Her curly hair flops over her eyes.
‘So, Mama and Daddy are a couple. They’re married. They love each other.’
‘Okay,’ she says. ‘And what about Ajja and Dodda?’ Ajja and Dodda are the names for Grandpa and Grandma, aka Ashok and Jaya, my parents.
‘Ajja and Dodda are also married. They are also a couple and they love each other.’
I see her brain whirring, and, finally, she nods. I realise she will never see me with her uncle Rob, who passed away three years ago. My sister Priya has taught Leela about him, and I have given her books about all the things he loved – from the stars to the trees – with his name inscribed in the cover, but she will never remember him holding her.
A fine dust of sadness settles onto my shoulders.
Then she asks: ‘Will I get married?’
I look at her unlined face. I breathe in the magic and potential of her. Imagine: a creature that has not been told what it should be yet.
I feel a pang; I never want her to know sadness or disappointment. I want her universe to stay safe and small. I want her to be this perfect, sweet little thing that hasn’t been ground down by the world. But I know better, and I know that eventually these things come for us all, and all we can do is love the people in our lives well.
Sunlight lances through the room of our little kingdom and I bend down and place my hands on either side of her face. A pair of older green eyes look into the pair of beautiful black ones belonging to the smallest member of our family.
Through my hands, a silent wish of love, protection and kindness and a promise to protect her from anything that might hurt her. But, for now, a gift of words.
‘Leela,’ I say, ‘you can get married, but you don’t have to get married. You can fall in love, but you don’t have to fall in love. You can live in a boat, a tent, a house. Wear socks as gloves and gloves as socks. You can be a princess, a ninja, a pirate, a painter – you can be everything and anything. But, above all, be what you want to be.’
She nods but doesn’t say anything, because this is not the Auntie Poo she knows – the one who is silly, who flings her about in wrestling matches, tickles her while in character as a giant squid and yanks her socks off to do sock puppet theatre.
I don’t know if she understands any of what I am saying, but I know that every time the world comes along and lays its expectations at her door, when it whispers dark thoughts and says, ‘I will tell you the kind of thing you are . . .’, I will hold her hand and look the world in the face and say, ‘No. Let us tell you the kind of thing YOU are.’
1
EAT, PRAY, F**K YOU
It is spring in London, a late afternoon in April tugging at the threads of dusk. As the light softens to amber, a breeze slips through the streets to quieten fat buds of cherry blossom grown hot and flustered in the warmth.
The city has that pleasant hum of people migrating to parks for after-work picnics clutching bottles of prosecco, boxes of cocktail sausages. They line the pavements of pubs, sprawl across beer terraces like plants thirsty for sun.
It is a city that begins to flicker with mad hope, evident in the tiniest of ways – from commuters wiggling toes into flip-flops to people packing away their winter coats.
My friend Aman and I have forsaken outdoor activities for a hipster Indian restaurant, and our contrariness is rewarded with seats on narrow wooden planks better suited to teenage buttocks. Like a pair of ancient rotisserie chickens, we rotate different pieces of our anatomy at regular intervals to ease the discomfort.
‘Small plates Indian food,’ I say, peering at the menu. ‘When did this become a thing?’
Apart from the benches that would not sustain even a third of the average Indian aunt’s butt, there are kitsch little lanterns and pretty printed tablecloths. Not forgetting the real reason our mothers would slipper us over the head for entering such an establishment: minuscule pots of curry at an eye-watering £20 each.
As we swizzle our coriander-and-mango vodka cocktails like the middle-class wankers we are, I start to tell Aman about an idea I have.
‘So I’ve decided to quit my job,’ I tell him. Aman works in corporate law, loves the money, the members’ clubs, and this is tantamount to me telling him I’m going to forsake my possessions, wear a sack and beat myself with twigs.
His eyes bug out and he stops mid-sip. A piece of coriander is peeping out at the corner of his mouth like a green hand waving hello.
‘And why’, he says, ‘would you want to do that? Your job is amazing, and you get to do lots of really cool shit.’
‘Yes,’ I concede, ‘my job is amazing, but that’s not the point.’
‘Then what is?’ he asks.
‘You know,’ I mumble, ‘being happy. Having some time out.’
Aman is happily married to a doctor and he and his wife have a two-year-old girl. He’s a cool guy, a loyal friend, but when it comes to family and career, he has the same mindset as a 1970s Indian pharmacist. He always goes for the most conservative, traditional option. When his daughter grows up, if she decides to do what I’m doing, he’d probably have an aneurysm.
Looking at his disdainful expression and hearing the words come out of my mouth, I start to waver. This
seemed like such a great idea, with some extremely valid reasons behind it. But explaining it is like trying to separate the yolk from the white; one wrong move and it will come out in a mess.
‘Okay,’ he says, digging a fork into a teeny pot of quail biriyani. ‘And what are you going to do with this “time out”?’
I take a deep breath. ‘Well, I wanted to travel. Spend some time away from London, you know, see the world a bit. I’ve never done the travelling thing. And I could maybe write about it.’
I can see the emotions flicker on Aman’s face. She’s making a mistake. I should be more supportive. Jesus, there’s a reason our mothers never cooked with quail . . .
‘Right,’ he says slowly, ‘and where would you travel?’
‘Um, well, I’m going to try Italy, then India, possibly Thailand, and then I’m going to stay in New Zealand for a bit.’
‘Hang on,’ he says, while spooning more food on his plate. ‘Are you basically going to do Eat, Pr . . .’
I point my fork at him.
‘If the next two words out of your mouth are “pray”
The mistake I make, when trying to talk about why I’ve made this decision, is that I am trying to use Aman’s vocabulary. It is too narrow; his rules are too precise.
He sees only with his eyes, he feels only with his heart; no wonder my words are muddling. I am trying to articulate something so magnificently complex in his rudimentary language.
But that’s okay, because he doesn’t have to approve of what I am doing – in this he is merely a witness. While I would like his validation, and that of all my loved ones, I don’t need it.
Two years ago, before I sat in this restaurant to tell the first of many friends why I was leaving a very good job as executive editor at Huff Post, a huge and terrible thing happened.
On 28 May 2015, at 1am, while staying at my parents’ house in Kent, I received a phone call from my mother-in-law, Prue. I was married to her eldest son Rob and he had temporarily moved back to his home city of Auckland while we worked through a separation.
It was a call that would change all of our lives, the ground zero beginning with Prue, my father-in-law David and myself, and radiated out in a ripple.
It engulfed anyone who had ever known Rob, anyone who had kissed him, held his hand in friendship, laughed alongside him, rubbed his shaved head, bopped around to music, come to his house to eat at his table, danced with our dog Daisy, shared a cigarette with him.
Through Prue’s tears, her voice originating from a point so painful, the raw place where people have lost their children, she told me that Rob was dead. He had been found in the woods by the police. He had taken his own life.
Even though we knew Rob had been missing for twelve hours prior to this, that he had said his final goodbyes to all of us, that he had a previous history of suicide attempts, I heard my voice say with broken hope, ‘Are you sure it isn’t a mistake?’, because this couldn’t happen to us. This type of horror belonged to someone else, to some other family.
Because even though we had been separated for three months because I had reached breaking point dealing with Rob’s ongoing problems with addiction and depression, we were in love with each other when he closed his eyes for the last time.
Love was meant to conquer all; it was meant to make Rob well again so that one day we might get back together. Love was not supposed to stand aside like a coward as the person I loved most desperately stepped through a doorway I couldn’t enter. Love was not allowed to let him die.
But he did die. And so the vast being I thought was love was changed altogether, and it could never again be the hopeful, hyperbolic, naïve, cosmos-altering thing I had dreamed of since I was a kid. I always knew, once found, that it was a rare and precious thing, but now it was something far deeper, complicated and sad, but also more honest.
No matter how many times people tell me it wasn’t my fault, no matter how many times I tell myself it wasn’t my fault, there is always a part of me that says, ‘But if you were in love with him, how could you leave him? If he was in love with you, how could he leave you?’
And, in order to answer that honestly, we must put aside our childlike notions of love. We must extricate ourselves from the Hollywood notion that love is simple and that the right words at the right time can provide salvation.
We must allow the dark ink of reality to write our past, present and future, in words that are honest and, ultimately, hopeful.
2
THE UNDERRATED BURROWS OF MORAY EELS
Six and a half years before the phone call that blew apart my world, there was a phone call of a different kind. This was the phone call that introduced Rob into my life.
We’d been set up on a blind date by our mutual friend Tania, and it’s testament to Rob’s charm that it didn’t creep me out that he a) Googled a picture of me before we met and b) told me he’d done so during our first date.
My first impression, when we met at a Brixton sushi restaurant, was that he was a man unlike any other I had met. His broad shoulders and rolling swagger were deceptive: beneath the shaved head and the sharp jawline was a massive nerd who loved baby owls and nature and gardening.
Instead of scaring me off, however, his contradictions only drew me towards him.
In this he was the flame and I the moth (although he would have almost certainly said it was the other way round). He was a science journalist who actually had money and owned his own house (most journalists are bum broke and grift for freebies – I have cadged everything from holidays to a mattress in my time).
He was from New Zealand – a place I didn’t know much about beyond its ‘more sheep than people’ reputation. His photo, sent ahead of our date, showed him next to his dog, Daisy. In dating circles, men post pictures of themselves with their dogs because they’ve heard it’s appealing to women. Except Daisy, while beautiful and the colour of sandstone, looked like she would chew your arm off as a snack.
It wasn’t just that he was razor-sharp in his wit on email; he seemed like a straightforward, relaxed guy who listened to The Specials.
I didn’t have to check planetary alignments about the right moment to text him in case he got spooked off. I could be honest and soft with my heart because he was the same.
What started haltingly on my side – I couldn’t quite believe that there was this clever, beautiful man who was interested in me and he wasn’t a weirdo – soon snowballed into a full-blown love affair. As each week passed, another room expanded inside of me until he occupied every inch.
‘Why do you want to marry him?’ my father asked, six months later, when I had asked him and my mother on a seemingly innocent country walk, only to ambush them with our intention to get married. Mum – normally so talkative her stories often had to be culled halfway with our exasperated groans – was strangely silent, intently studying a centipede on the ground.
Rob had met them in their Kent home a handful of times, appearing nervous, sweaty and eager to impress. But they didn’t really know him. However, considering how my love life had been a sad, saggy state of affairs in my twenties, I thought they would’ve been happy that I had finally found someone I wanted to settle down with.
Lord knows I’d heard enough eye-rolling comments from people over the years ranging from ‘We just don’t get it – you’re such a catch, you deserve to meet a great guy’ to ‘So, when are you going to be the one getting married?’
Finally, I had met someone who would be my partner in everything, including holding a mirror below my nose to check whether I was alive in our advancing years. Yet I had underestimated my parents; they weren’t the type to be happy just because I was getting married. They wanted to know the kind of life we would have together; they wanted the measure of Rob.
So what was the measure of Rob at that point? Apart from the parts of him I had fallen in love with, he had told me fairly early on that he had chronic depression. But because I had such a poor understanding of what it was like a
s an illness, and he was in denial about how ill he could get, I couldn’t fathom how huge a thing it would become in our lives.
Besides, at that point, the love in our relationship was a phoenix: all-consuming and so fiery bright it made anything that lurked in the dark seem inconsequential.
So, when my parents asked me, I forgot about the depression. The way I felt was immense, and when it met the counterpoint of how he felt about me, it was as if even the stratosphere wasn’t big enough to contain it.
We wanted to be together until the end of our days, have babies, cook meals, spend holidays barefoot and on the beach wrapped up in each other.
Because when you find your big love, isn’t that what was supposed to happen?
‘He is extremely clever and makes me laugh more than anyone I know,’ I said, catching their less-than-convinced expressions. We all stood in silence for a few moments.
‘Because,’ I said, finally, ‘because he is the person I want to spend the rest of my life with. Because I have never been more sure that it’s him, and no one else.’
Dad nodded, while Mum went back to inspecting the centipede.
No one pressured me into marrying Rob. I didn’t go to other weddings feeling a hollow ache that it was the bride, and not myself, on that podium.
My parents always said, ‘We want you to be happy.’ It was never, ‘We want you to be happy and, P.S., can you get your arse moving and find yourself a husband?’, like so many other South Asian parents either implied or said outright.
We were a liberal, South Indian family, which included my older sister Priya, who was going through a divorce around the time Rob and I met.
Education and getting a job were considered far higher priorities than tying the knot.
At any rate, marriage wasn’t something I was naturally drawn to. Possibly because it didn’t seem like married people were noticeably any happier after getting married. But also because I didn’t know if I was capable of it, of giving myself and my life to another person in that way.