Marginal Man

by Charu Nivedita

  Kissing her lips, I’d carry her to the bed. If I hadn’t exhausted her, she would tell me how dirty and depraved she thought I was and squabble with me. But during our crescendo, she would feast on my lips that smelled and tasted of her juices. Once we were done, I’d ask her, “So, how do you like the way you smell and taste down there?” She would feign incomprehension to draw out an explanation only to chastise me for it. Sex with Anjali never palls.

  She has a bath every evening, but one evening, she didn’t. When I asked her why, she said, “Your smell is still lingering on my body even though you touched me in the morning. I don’t feel like washing it off.”

  ***

  Gnanam, Raja and I went to the restaurant Pelita one day. Over a dinner of fish head curry, we started to speak of health and that broad topic narrowed itself down to the bypass surgery I’d undergone ten years earlier.

  “People who’ve undergone heart surgeries are so scared of even a bajji,” said Gnanam, “but you are still eating like a king, drinking like a sailor and womanizing like Don Juan.”

  I retorted, “I can make merry, I can eat, I can drink, I can fuck, but I can’t lift a woman.”

  Although I am, by admission, an extreme Francophile, I still live in Tamil Nadu. Tamil cinema has always been a big part of my life, wielding a massive influence over me even after my exposure to European film in my later years. I have watched Tamil actors carry women with such effortless ease since my childhood. In Tamil cinema, carrying a woman is a man’s highest expression of love. I had become a piano enthusiast thanks to Sivaji Ganesan. He made the playing of the instrument a class act. When he played, I was not captivated so much by the movement of his fingers across the keys as I was by the expressions on his face – his lips, his mouth, his jowls – when he played sadly at his lovers’ wedding receptions… Even Marlon Brando would never have been able to surpass Sivaji in a scene involving a piano and the playing of it. I can’t pretend to even have a scrap of Sivaji’s talent in acting, but I don’t think I need to master acting to master the piano.

  Raghav, my friend, a film director, convinced me to slap on the greasepaint when he promised me the role of a musician in one of his movies. When he told me I’d be playing a musician, I was reminded of Jamie Foxx’s Oscar-winning portrayal of Ray Charles. I aspired to act with the same fervor. Only after the shooting commenced did I realize I was only a harmonium player and was quite disappointed. If a piano could be compared to the Everest, a harmonium would be an anthill. It just did not have the same cachet that the piano and the saxophone had. But Raghav flattered me, saying, “Work those nimble fingers, Udhaya!” I wanted to swear at him so bad, but then I remembered I was going on a pilgrimage to Sabarimala shortly, so I couldn’t even think or write bad words, let alone yell them at the top of my voice. I’m good with fingering only when it comes to a woman’s cunt. Maybe I could have thought of a piano as a woman’s cunt and played my part to the tee, but there wasn’t much “fingering” one could do with a harmonium. And Raghav was not even willing to let go of me. He was a voracious reader of world literature and a fan of world cinema and used to tell me about Andrej Wajda’s The Conductor, a movie that was very much to my liking because you never just heard the music in it, you felt every note, every beat in your fingers. I started to firmly believe that I could make the same magic with my fingers, but my hopes were shattered on account of Georges Bataille. Let me tell you how.

  A great admirer of Bataille, Raghav gifted me Story of the Eye. I happened to have written a novel called Midnight Stories in Bataille’s bizarre erotic style, but Raghav, in a magazine interview damned it for being nothing but third-rate porn. This ruptured our friendship and as a consequence, my fingers were given a mere fifteen seconds of screen-time in the movie, putting an end to all my hopes and dreams of making a memorable debut in the industry.

  All the Tamil movies I’d seen made me desperate to lift women. In Nagore, it is customary for the groom to carry his bride into the bridal chamber. It was a custom that made the grooms highly nervous as they were forbidden from seeing their brides before the marriage to “size them up.” My desire to carry a woman remained unfulfilled until I met Anjali, a woman who needed a thousand reasons to be kissed. Do all Tamil girls fancy a kiss to be some intangible thing or a mere brushing of the lips for a split second? I can never forget the day I kissed Anjali tenderly on the cheek, two days after we’d first met. Now don’t start moralizing! I did it because I felt we’d known each other for years. When we were talking about it after a few days, I asked her, “What do you see in me? You’re thirty and you look twenty and I’m sixty. What made you fall for me?”

  She sent me a long e-mail in response to the burning question:

  “Honey, you showed me what love is… I thought I was destined to never find someone who would love me truly – the way you love me. I learned to live with what I had, but I never did imagine that my noir days were numbered. I realized what had been missing all along when I found you.

  Initially I thought this would be a risky nosedive, I thought I was expecting too much. I was desperate. I didn’t want to listen to that voice inside me that kept crying out for love, love, love – something I never knew about.

  You made me feel love in a mere handclasp, a smile, a peck on the cheek, a hug… My heart and soul are gravitating towards you. I can’t seem to control them any longer. Even though I saw you three times today, I’m not satisfied. It just wasn’t enough! My God, am I actually starting to fall in love?

  After you walked into my life, you turned everything inside-out. You pulled me out of the deep, suffocating waters; now, I can breathe again. I feel light; I feel free; I feel saved. You are the first and the only person to take away my loneliness, to warm my heart which had frozen. Now, my heart flutters like an excited butterfly when I see you. I don’t ever want you out of my sight even for a minute. I know, I know I have to take it slow…

  Also, you asked me why I’ve started praying. I’m praying now because I want this to go on forever. I love you, I love you so much!”

  Anjali became acquainted with my writing only accidentally when she had accompanied one of her friends to the Tamil bookshop in La Chapelle where she found one of my books. Attracted by the blurb, she picked it up. The considerable sprinkling of French words and expressions in my book interested her. That was the beginning.

  She said that my book had terrified her. Her reading had been limited to Hugo and Maupassant. My novel was unlike anything she’d ever read before. She later told me that my writing had penetrated her all the way to her soul. Little did she think that destiny and coincidence had conspired to bring her face to face with the man whose book she was holding in the La Chapelle bookshop. Once we met, our lives were never the same. The moment our lives became intertwined was one we’ve relived together several times.

  “Coup de foudre,” she said. Love at first sight.

  When I asked her about it on another occasion, she said, “It was magic; it was a miracle. I don’t know how else to explain it.”

  On the third day, we met in a café. On the fourth, we met in my hotel room.

  “This is the fourth time we’re meeting and we haven’t kissed yet,” I told her.

  “You did kiss me,” she said.

  She’d been living in Paris for ten years. French kissing there was as common a sight as public urination here. You’d see plenty of couples kissing, oblivious to the world, in parks, metros, buses, pretty much anywhere. Was Anjali referring to that feather-light brush of my lips as a kiss?

  “Is your son your own, or is he adopted?”

  “Why do you ask? That’s how Suresh kisses me.”

  When I cut to the action, she didn’t protest.

  I was fifty when I had to undergo heart surgery. That was when I’d given up my desire to lift a woman as I was told that people who had gone under the knife aren’t supposed to lift anyone
or anything that’s heavy. So, could I ever have imagined doing what I’d always wanted to do at the age of sixty? I might have told my friends that I couldn’t ever lift a woman, but you know what? I lifted Anjali, and you can’t even imagine how satisfied and accomplished I felt when I did.

  “Anjali, my seductress, my lusty lady! Yours is a body that has been made wholly and solely for sex. How is it that you think so lowly of the body that turns me into an animal in bed – that body which makes me do it like I’m twenty instead of sixty?”

  “Suresh doesn’t love me. Hell, he doesn’t even lust after me. I masturbate from time to time, but even that gives me no gratification.”

  One day, after having had sex for two hours, neither of us climaxed. At one point, she began to scream and bite the pillow.

  “I thought we’d be doing it until the ambulance arrived,” she said afterwards, laughing. “I’ve never experienced such ecstasy even in my wildest dreams.”

  “But you didn’t climax,” I said.

  “Who needs to climax when you’re having sex like this? If we climax, it will be the end of the experience. Today was like a day without end. Think Udhaya, what would it be like if we were able to transcend death? I felt like I did. I wonder if there’s anyone else who’s done it. As far as I’ve known, from books and from experience, you can climax in five minutes – ten, tops. But us, we’ve been at it for two hours! Who would believe that? We were so tantalizingly close to our climax. It was like coming this close to a fire –” she showed me how close with her thumb and her forefinger “– and not falling into it. My goodness, what a man you are! The greatest fucker in the world! But Udhaya, answer me honestly. You’ve been with many women. Was it the same for them too?”

  “Sex has more to do with the mind than with the body, honey,” I said. “I convince many women to let me screw them with my falsehood and my charm, but they are never satisfied with what I give them in bed and they leave. They tell me I don’t make myself desirable to them. Here’s the thing: I can’t “provide” desire. I can’t make myself desirable for them. You can’t be passive in bed. It doesn’t work that way. It takes two to tango. Our lovemaking is so fulfilling because we are each other’s missing pieces.”

  “I tried to suppress my lust for you by working hard. I wanted to push you out of my head. I worked to the point of exhaustion every day and then I’d come home and go straight to bed. There was this chap in the dance class who wanted to sleep with me. He was handsome and he was committed to someone, but he still fell for me and he begged me to do it with him “just once.” Do you know how disturbed I felt after this? I stopped going to classes. Thought of switching over to another job. But you know what? I did consider taking him up on his offer. I didn’t see what was wrong in it. I’d been married for ten years and had never experienced thrill or desire even once. My life was desert-dry. I’d forgotten what sex was. I’d considered his offer several times. Just once. But I couldn’t do it. I was scared of the aftermath. Then I thought of becoming a monk, but I realized that renunciation would be a greater pain than this would ever be. I didn’t want to escape from my body.”

  “I get it, Anjali. In the movie Dead Man Walking, Sister Helen confesses that she chose to become a nun just to escape interaction, she wanted to sever all her ties with the world. Such is the resolve and the clear-sightedness one would require to become a renunciate. It isn’t right to choose renunciation as an escape.”

  “I had a friend called Nina from Pondicherry who became a monk. I wasn’t proud of her. I disapproved, in fact, because I know she chose that path out of hatred. My mind feels heavy when I think of her. Our choices in life must be dictated by love, but hatred influenced Nina to choose the path of renunciation. The same thing happened to me, albeit in a different way. It would most certainly not be fair to compare Nina’s life with mine, but like her life, even mine was like a parched desert, devoid of love, affection and desire. There was also this other friend called Anuthama whose husband, Sundaram, was Suresh’s college mate. Anu and Sundaram have only agreed to disagree on everything since they were married. They fought when they were alone, they fought in the presence of friends and in the presence of strangers too, but they haven’t separated although Anu would tell me that death was preferable to living with her disgusting husband. She confessed to me that she was staying with him only because nobody could beat him in bed. You should see her eyes widen when she says that. I never did understand their passion for sex. But now, I see in my own eyes the very same passion.”

  Chapter Eleven

  1 – Metamorphosis: When Siva Became Amba

  When I look back on my time in Nagore, I am led to the especial remembrance of one friend who distinguished himself from the rest of the pack.

  His name was Siva.

  It was during our stint as students at Arignar Anna Arts College that his interest in numerology was born. He soon became slave to his newborn passion, obsessively informing himself about it, going so far as to peruse tomes in both Tamil and English on the subject and applying himself to painstaking research.

  Soon, he was so gripped by the subject that it became the sole occupant of his thoughts. He was convinced that numerology held the answer to every unanswered question. He claimed that numerology had helped him deduce why India was eclipsed by European nations, why the Pandavas were relegated to a life of exile in the forest and notably, why he was obsessed with sex.

  The more deeply he immersed himself in numerology, the more convinced he became that he had attained samadhi. This notion led him to style himself Balayogi– the all-knowing youth.

  He shed his old identity like a snakeskin. He would fly into a fit of fury if anyone addressed him by his given name, Siva. He was so crazed that he would deliver sermons exceeding the two-hour mark on the wonders of numerology to hapless fellows.

  He went on to publish his change of name in the gazette and performed elaborate pujas, prayers and rituals that he believed would render his name powerful.

  He then went abroad – to one of the Gulf countries – where he lived for three years.

  Siva’s family was in fortunate circumstances, financially. His father practiced law and was regarded with general disfavor as he, in cahoots with affluent businessmen and cops with greased palms, banished the peasants from their own land in order to help the businessmen erect and establish a new company. He earned a lot of money in this deal.

  Siva had a strained relationship with his father as he did not subject himself to his old man’s will.

  I remember Siva telling me how he was so flat broke that he couldn’t scrape together the money to buy himself a spare set of underclothes. And I don’t think numerology held the solutions to such problems. Siva soon understood that his father, who could not spare him an allowance for underwear, would not even entertain the thought of settling him through marriage. Thus, at the age of twenty and seven, he set out to the Gulf on borrowed money, and there eked out his living as a garbage collector. The wretched job had him working two shifts.

  In his bitterness, he wrote me a letter, describing in vivid sensory detail the filth he was suffered to handle – ill-disposed, bloody sanitary napkins, goat innards, offal and putrid food. He was plagued by these smells that lingered like indelible bad memories. Even a dozen baths in succession would not render him stench-free. His letter would not be complete if not for his assertion that he had not abandoned numerology.

  Give or take some time, and Siva had met Ashwini, a beauty from Thrissur. Ashwini’s story shares certain pathetic elements with Siva’s. When she was of legal age, she was married off to a man in Palakkad, bearing him a son and a daughter within the bracket of two years. Her husband conceived suspicions of her infidelity and in that respect, her beauty soon turned out to be a scourge, as it only intensified his misbegotten feelings. For close to a decade, she allowed herself to be battered and tortured by him.When he finally
left her for an older woman, she returned to her parents’ home. Her father had died and she had two younger sisters – dependents.

  As if by a stroke of luck, an agent promised her a job abroad. After six months of uncertainty, she ended up in Qatar on a visitor’s visa. As for work, she was forced into the whorehouse. And the only remotely good thing that came out of whoring was that it was a job – though an illegal one – that helped her convert her visitor’s visa into a work visa.

  Once she parted with whoring, which was eight years since her arrival in Qatar, she found work as a nanny and raked in fifty grand a month. Her earnings sufficed to marry off her sisters and erect a small house back home.

  I chanced to meet Ashwini when I attended a conference addressing the rights of sex-workers in Thrissur. We ended up talking in a bar from dawn to dusk. We spoke mostly on the subject of my work – my novel and my essays, most of which she had read.

  Alcohol is assistive in loosening even a mute man’s tongue. After four rounds, I declared my love which she happily accepted. We ended up going to my room and, instead of having sex, had a discourse on it. We also discussed our respective lives and families, and Qatar. And at some point in our conversation, numerology reared its head like a jack-in-the-box, and it was discovered to me that Siva was no stranger to her.

  What strangely marvelous designs was fate responsible for!

  You see, Anjali, Siva had gone to her once. He made enquiries about her name and date of birth and then proceeded to make some calculations. At long last, he told her that a slight modification of spelling would bring good fortune in its wake.

  He rewrote her name as “Auschweenee,” and that respelled name bore eerie resemblance to that Polish concentration camp.