In Search of Silence

by Poorna Bell

  Mal looked at me like I’d lost it. I think I had.

  ‘I just think,’ I said, wiping the rabid froth from my mouth, ‘that if someone likes you, whether they are a man or a woman, they don’t take a specific time frame to message you back. That actually requires more thought and effort than just replying to the text straight away.’

  That was one thing I learned from being with Rob. It’s not rocket science. When we first got together, I didn’t worry about whether he’d reply, because he did. So I didn’t angst about whether or not the text actually got delivered, or whether he was in a coal mine with no reception.

  Married or coupled-up friends don’t think you should sign up to a dating app, but similarly don’t have a warehouse full of hot, eligible people either. You go on a lot of dates because someone told you it’s a numbers game. No one tells you that if you go on a lot of dates, the likelihood is you will also have a lot of bad dates, and it feeds into the idea that dating is a negative experience.

  Stepping back into that when you are a fragile baby bird from whatever experience you have had can be tough. Or – as I choose to see it – it can act as a whetstone and sharpen what you want from dating.

  I had to be physically attracted to them from the start. This whole ‘they’ve got a great personality’ thing may work for long-term relationships, but it wasn’t working for me.

  There was going to be no flexibility around the texting thing. If I started to feel like it was too much work or like I was hassling a guy, they were out.

  Whatever the interaction – casual dating or relationship – I had to feel good about myself.

  There had to be some type of connection – sense of humour, intelligence, something. The world of Tinder can work sometimes, but there is undeniably a fast-food element to it where people just meet up to have sex. Some people would just say, ‘Hey, so can I come over?’ before we’d even met. It boggled the mind.

  Also, as perverse as this sounds in the context of being with other people, being with Rob taught me so much about myself, and how a person should feel about any form of romantic interaction.

  When I met him, I don’t think I realised how fragile my self-esteem was. I didn’t learn how to fortify my sense of self in my twenties; how to make better, smarter choices around men.

  When we met, it says a lot that my default expectation was that he wouldn’t call, would shy away from connection, or would reveal himself to be a complete freak. (I mean he was a bird freak, but that was a softer, more lovable attribute than this one guy who invited another girl along to our date.)

  It was more than just loving him. He helped me to love myself. What he saw in me made me look more closely at what I had to offer, and who I was as a person. And when I came through the other side of his death, when I was here because I’d fought to be here, I thought, ‘Hang on, am I going to waste this new life on someone who doesn’t make me feel great?’

  I debated this (and won) with a friend, who said, ‘Well, you felt like that because you were in a relationship. Casual dating is brutal and it sucks.’

  ‘Hang on,’ I replied, ‘so what you’re saying is that respect, or being kind, is only the preserve of people in relationships? And that if you aren’t committed to someone, then they have the right of way to treat you like shit?’

  As far as I see it, being a decent human doesn’t just extend to your significant other. It should extend to your parents, your friends, the person who makes you coffee or hands you a newspaper in the morning. It should definitely extend to someone you’ve exchanged bodily fluids with.

  More than that, there’s the sexist, default expectation (along with the fact that obviously every woman wants kids simply because she has a womb) that women ALWAYS want more than what men want from them.

  I’m sorry, but no. Maybe it’s because once upon a time women were dependent on men to choose them because marriage represented a financial and social alliance back then. Or maybe that’s part of the conditioning, the age-old story that a man will come along and sweep you off your feet. Maybe it’s because a woman is told – repeatedly – that her worth amounts to nothing if she can’t tick the boxes of romantic fulfilment and domestic success.

  But saying that the default of casual dating is bad conversely feeds into the idea that marriage is always great, or that long-term relationships are always good.

  Both aspects have the potential for good, and the potential for bad. It’s time we were honest about it.

  I told Mum and Dad I had started dating because I thought it might make them happy.

  We were in a crowded pub in Victoria, squashed in by the after-work crowd. Dad had just bustled over with a bottle of prosecco and three glasses.

  ‘So I’ve started dating again, but I need to warn you – it’s nothing serious.’

  Mum and Dad nodded cautiously. In hindsight, I have to give them credit for their style of parenting. During my teenage years leading up to this point, they have somehow always known not to overcrowd Priya and me, and let us arrive at things in our own time.

  ‘His name is Jake, and he’s an engineer. He trains for Ironman, and he’s really clever. But I don’t think I’m going to see him for much longer.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Mum slowly, ‘that’s good to hear, Poo. Why don’t you want to see him again?’

  ‘We don’t have much in common, and to be honest, I’m getting a bit bored.’ I watched their reaction. Dad was busying himself pouring the wine.

  Then Mum said the words that made me love her for ever, if I didn’t already love her for ever. ‘It’s fine,’ she said waving her hand. ‘You date this one, then you find another one and then date that one.’

  At the time, it was nothing short of relief. That Mum understood it wasn’t about me replacing Rob, and that as an independent woman I had options, was huge.

  Fast-forward twelve months to me and Dad in the car in India after Assam, on the way to the gym, and I relate an anecdote to Dad about a date I had before leaving England. My hands get really calloused from lifting weights, and when I was moaning about the peeling skin, Dad had said, ‘No one will notice, it doesn’t matter.’

  I reply, ‘Yeah, but . . .’ and then I stop myself, realising I’m about to tell him this anecdote about a guy I was seeing in England, and then it dawns on me that I have no way of explaining who this person is.

  For a start, he’s about eleven years younger than me. Will Dad disapprove?

  Then I think, ‘Hang on, men have been doing this shit since the beginning of time! They never get crap for dating younger women. In fact, they’d probably get a pat on the back and a cigar to celebrate!’

  That’s the other thing about thirty-something dating – everyone has an opinion on who you should be doing it with, how you should be doing it. Not too young, not too old, what job does he do, will he fit in with our social circles? We hang out as a group at best ONCE A YEAR, so I’m not making my romantic choices based on how they slot into my social scene or whether they are age-appropriate.

  Fuck it, I think, and I tell Dad.

  ‘There’s this guy I’ve seen a couple of times, Dad, and he was holding my hand. And he says, really deadpan, ‘You’re really pretty and you have lovely skin, but your palm? Your palm has the texture of a dog’s paw.’

  Dad and I both burst out laughing.

  A few days later Dad says, ‘So what about Dog Paw? Does he have the potential to be serious?’

  I sigh. ‘Dog Paw is twenty-five, Dad.’

  Dad’s eyebrows shoot up but he doesn’t say anything.

  ‘He’s a great guy,’ I continue, ‘but he’s too young.’

  I am hyper-aware that the more time goes on, the more people are waiting for my next significant other. I can regale them with all the dating stories I like, but that’s what they are holding out for.

  They want me to have someone so I can join the dinner parties again, be there for group gatherings, kids’ birthday parties. Or maybe they just don’t want me
to be lonely.

  I think they forget that I had all of that, and I still got lonely.

  Or maybe they think that with Rob, I judged things badly, maybe I made a bad choice. Do I wish I had known more, that things had been done differently? Yes, a thousand times, I do. Were things at times impossibly hard because of him? Of course. Do I regret being with Rob? No, because it wasn’t all tragic.

  During my life with him, I experienced my most challenging times, and I had to muddle through it on my own. But at the same time, I experienced the most love I have ever received and given in my life. All of those good moments, from being bought bunches of daffodils to a soft, long kiss with Rob, were worth all of it.

  When people read about him – he had depression, hid an addiction from his wife – they may wonder if he was worth it. He could be a horror at times but of course he was worth it.

  People are not measured on the Scales of Anubis: good or bad. We are wholly compiled of shades of grey. So instead of imagining my capacity to put up with tough times, imagine instead the good he had in him, and how that was able to inspire that kind of love in a flinty-hearted woman.

  There’s another thought that still hangs in the air, unspoken, gathering molecules of emotion: what would her life have been like if she had met someone other than Rob?

  Truly, I don’t know. On the one hand, we had this huge, big love, and Rob told me early on that he had depression. He did everything right in one sense: added me to his pension because I was reckless about my own future, owned his own house, looked after me (mostly), was kind, considerate and funny.

  Yet, I missed all the signs that he was a drug addict because I trusted him, and there was nothing in my brain that would connect those dots. That trust allowed him to manipulate me around his addiction, allowed things to spiral out of control, and he ended up virtually bankrupt. Genuinely, I thought that as long as you had love, you could do anything.

  In the most brutal sense, the ending of every relationship should teach you something valuable and useful that you take into your next relationship. The biggest lesson for me was to ask more questions.

  To push more, not allow the other person’s sense of ego or pride to prevent me from finding out more about what I know in my gut isn’t right. Rob was always vague about his schooling, distant about relationships he’d had when he was younger. That absolutely should’ve been something I asked more questions about.

  Because really, it wasn’t just about being a good partner, or figuring out how to better help Rob. I thought it was all about him for years because that’s what being a carer does to you.

  It was: what am I doing that nurtures and protects me as a person? Am I doing right by myself in being in this relationship that, yes, makes me happy on some days, but on other days makes me anxious, upset, bereft and lonely?

  To survive Rob’s death, I had to conduct an open dialogue between two halves of myself – the one that wanted to self-destruct and the one that wanted to live.

  There’s a saying that after the death of a child, parent or spouse, in order to get through the chaos and grief, you have to create a new normal. I don’t really like the word ‘normal’, but I know the person I am is no longer the person I was when Rob was alive.

  She died the day he died. We buried her on the same day we buried Rob, as he lay on sheepskin in his rimu coffin. We scattered rosemary on his casket and she was in there with him, curled up in the crook of his arm, holding his hand.

  The woman who stood by his grave looking down as he was lowered into the earth was a different person. She was exposed to the elements, her skin and her mind flayed open, her eyes the colour of the storm, her heart filled with sadness.

  But, over time, she learned to build a new mind, a new skin. Her heart would never change its shape, but it stopped tearing apart with grief. There is a price for surviving that, and part of the price is not knowing what parts of me survived, and what parts are completely new.

  I am myself, but I don’t fully understand myself yet. What are my limits? What broke irreparably? What is stronger?

  When I think about Dog Paw, I wonder if I’m picking people I can’t get close to on purpose.

  Maybe it’s that, the more time goes on, I am coming to the sinking realisation that I may never enter into a long-term relationship again.

  The last time I saw Dog Paw, which was a week before I left for my big trip, I thought about this need we have to attribute value to something.

  I recall Puja’s words, how everything has to serve a purpose that shows you are economically successful.

  If it’s a job, it’s about the company you work for, the job title you hold. If it’s a relationship, it’s about the ring on your finger, the house you buy. If it’s your child, it’s what school she goes to, what grades he gets.

  Dog Paw is an emerging musician, and like most people who are starting out, he juggles jobs to fund the thing he is passionate about. He is clever and funny, but because of his age, he hasn’t yet acquired that filter where your brain edits what’s going to be interesting as a story. Listening to him is sometimes exhausting.

  Factoring in Dog Paw’s age, the fact that I am going away for eight months, and the creeping suspicion that he’s just fulfilling a boyhood crush he once had on Amara Karan, the Indian actress in The Darjeeling Limited, this is probably the last time I’m going to see him.

  But as we spend our last evening together, I learn that intimacy is not the exclusive preserve of a relationship. Because whatever this is, for a moment, after the fire is lit and the blaze roars through our bodies, in the embers, there is connection.

  He plays the guitar afterwards. He’s resurrecting chords from a memory, but because he has not yet pulled them into a song, they are fragmented clouds, scattered. He hasn’t yet gathered them into a thing that will tell the skies what shape it will be.

  Outside this room, people will try to tell us what this is. They will look at his age, and at mine, and they will form stories of what they think this should be – what it cannot be.

  He is a beautiful musician; his melody renders me quiet.

  Perhaps this is where I learn about the realms of words and silence, and realise the true power the latter has. Not articulating what I am feeling, but letting the emotion wash over me is sometimes more powerful than words.

  At that point, hair mussed, the imprint of him on my skin, I am held still and quiet in the moment of it, my body stretched across the bed, just the sound of strings and its beauty washing over me.

  I look at him, his fingers moving across the fretboard, lost in his own reverie.

  I wonder about emptiness and loneliness. I wonder how much he will feel after we have parted ways, what are the ballasts in his life and what would push him to love someone so much, in the way that I loved Rob? I think every human being is capable of it, the immensity of that kind of love, the warmth of it, the comfort.

  I think about myself, finding affection in temporary places. I think about the currency of love, the hierarchies and status we attribute to it. Where a night with a man much younger than me, conducted in absolute honesty, with tenderness and laughter, is viewed as less valuable than entire lifetimes conducted by people whose relationships tug at the strings of dishonesty.

  The chords start to quieten; the piece of music is coming to an end.

  Although I am half pulling away, wondering how to disappear like motes of dust through the window because I know that I cannot feel anything resembling permanence towards him, I will remember the sweetness of this moment and how it made me feel for some time to come.

  ‘We’re here, ma’am,’ says Susheel, smiling with teeth stained red with the betel nut he’s been chewing the whole way.

  After driving down a narrow and treacherous path, we arrive at Tyrna, the village where you can hire a guide to take you to the double-decker root bridge.

  Susheel asks me if I want him to recommend me a guide, and here is where I learn about not being a presumptuo
us dick.

  The standard operating procedure in India is that, as a visitor, you expect everyone to be running some sort of con, like a nationwide version of Ocean’s Eleven where the goal is to dupe the dumb tourist.

  You have money and most people don’t. There are a lot of people who do the morality maths of swindling you out of your fat-cat Western currency to feed their starving family, and it’s a no-brainer.

  If you are a regular traveller to India, you expect to be shafted almost by default.

  But what I’ve noticed is that there is a higher incidence of this happening in urban areas, where there are more people and the stakes of desperation are higher.

  Obviously, however, this is only a percentage of the population. In the more rural areas especially, they are kind, helpful and are trying to eke out a living as the rest of us are.

  On this day, I forget this. I instantly assume that Susheel recommending a guide means he’s working some scam. I find out quite quickly that he isn’t.

  Most people, especially Indian tourists, don’t want to pay out for a guide, so they attempt it alone, and some twits – one in particular we passed along the way – reach the first bridge – a metal suspension bridge – and think that’s it. Or they reach the second one that is also a suspension bridge but has the beginnings of a fledgling root bridge around it, and turn back. Also people are just fucking lazy and want to walk the least distance for their Instagram shot.

  At the drop-off point, there are guides clamouring around, little kids selling bamboo poles and a tiny café selling food at the entrance. He finds a guide – a small young man by the name of Steady.

  Steady is dressed in neat Nike tracksuit bottoms and a long-sleeved top. He tells me the rate for his services to take me to the village of Nongriat where the bridge is located, and I bark at him, ‘That seems like a lot’, to squash any chance of being cheated. He looks confused and I see there is a fixed-rate sign, and he’s telling me the truth. I am such a dick.

  The entrance to the village is humble: tiny houses and gardens, steps that begin as we pass people’s front yards. Most people know Steady, and they say hello.