They remained this way for fifteen minutes, half an hour, or maybe even an hour, it was difficult to say, it was as if time wasn’t passing, or as if all time was contained in this one time, though at some point, shifting onto her side, Anjum placed her hand on his thigh and traced lightly up toward his groin in inquiry. Her hand dwelled there till she sensed a shifting, which soon turned into another series of movements, which led them again to a slow, vigorous immersion into each other, this time longer and more explicit, each of them plundering the other more boldly now, taking as much pleasure in taking as in being taken from. They shifted from one position to another, consuming each other in turns with their eyes and hands, each of them torn between the urge to physically possess the other body and the urge to be able to admire the other body at a remove, caught between the conflicting needs for proximity and distance so central to desire. When they slowed down once more they lay side by side on their backs in exhaustion, his right leg sprawled over her left leg, her left arm stretched out over his stomach, each of them staring at the ceiling in the warm glow of the lamp. They were silent for some time and then began to speak, Krishan could no longer remember about what, to speak with the strangely confessional intimacy that so often arises between new lovers as they lay beside each other after sex, an intimacy that sometimes feels artificial or performed but which, when two individuals have been longing for each other so much that their desire isn’t exhausted in the act of union, can feel strangely profound, an intimacy in which each person feels that what they are sharing is something they’ve kept deep inside themselves all their lives and have only now, in the safe vulnerability of the moment, become capable of expressing. It was an intimacy Krishan had felt once or twice in the past with other people, but which was magnified now to a degree he’d never experienced, as though the words he spoke at that moment to Anjum and which she spoke to him would not, as most words did, fade gently into the world’s endless stream of sounds and silences, as though their words were somehow really being heard or really being received, being given some kind of objective validation outside the boundaries of their individual selves, as though in speaking at that moment within the warm cocoon of their bodies they were writing their souls out into the sky or inscribing it into the earth, making themselves, by means of their words, permanent somehow or eternal.
They did not sleep that night, moving continuously in and out of these states of vigorous exertion, peaceful exhaustion, and quiet, confessional revelation, as though none of these states were distinct from each other, as though none of them had any beginning or end but were all simply different aspects of the same larger condition. At six or six-thirty in the morning, knowing he would have to go home before going to campus, Krishan got up to search for his clothes in the mess of things beside the mattress. He put them on with some awkwardness, knowing that Anjum, naked under the sheets, was watching him, then kneeling down on the mattress he kissed her on the cheek with a chasteness she did not seem to expect and took his leave. Outside the day was colder than he’d expected, perhaps because he hadn’t been outside so early in the morning in a while. The morning light was pleasantly dusky through the thick fog and dust, and he felt as he walked a gentle invigoration from having not slept all night and not eaten. Despite the poor visibility the scenes around him possessed an unusual clarity, the edges of things sharp and their surfaces distinctly colored, the tea shops already open, fruit and vegetable sellers already pushing their carts, laborers going here and there, the roads packed with cars, vans, buses, and three-wheelers throwing up large quantities of noise and smoke into the air. Looking at all the people around him already beginning the day, already fully engrossed in obligations, in the routine of their daily lives, he felt as though he’d stepped from one realm of existence into another, each of which seemed to deny the possibility of the other. As though the appearance of the world of everyday life, which had seemed so far away just a few hours ago, called into question now the existence of the world he’d just left behind, a world so different in nature that he might actually have begun to doubt its existence had he not been carrying the smell of it still in his body, the scent of sweat and bodily fluids and the faint pungency of condoms, all of which enveloped him against the morning cold like a warm, invisible layer, a constant proof and reminder of the night before. The scent remained with him on the ride home and even after he had showered, changed his clothes, and gone to campus, leaving him only after he’d slept in his own bed that night and then bathed again the next morning, and perhaps it was its dissipation that was responsible for the quiet anxiety he felt in the following days, as if reimmersed into his ordinary life without any physical token of the ever more distant world he’d shared with Anjum, he could no longer be sure whether the profundity of the experience had been real or just imagined, whether Anjum had felt the same way or whether, blinded by his heavy intoxication, he had misread the situation, in which case, it occurred to him, it was possible she might not even want to see him again. They did in fact meet a few days later, this time at his flat rather than hers, and this second night too had gone the way of the first, the two of them again hardly sleeping, again moving in and out of those different modes of bliss, and again followed, not long afterward, by a kind of anxiety, less this time about whether he’d actually felt what he remembered feeling or even about whether Anjum had felt the same way, but about whether, rather, what they’d experienced together could possibly continue, whether it wouldn’t somehow just vanish into thin air. Even if their two meetings had been as revelatory for her as they’d been for him, how could he be sure she would continue to find in their encounters that same quality and pitch, how could he be sure it would continue, not just for her but for him too, for how after all could such intense desire and attraction really last, how could a way of being so manifestly at odds with the so-called real world possibly be sustained?
In the three or four months that followed, time that felt, in his memory, strangely outside time, Krishan had oscillated continuously between these two conditions, between the thoughtless, rapturous, and seemingly endless present that he experienced in physical proximity to Anjum, and the restless, agitated uncertainty that he felt when they were apart. They met each other usually no more than once a week and sometimes even less frequently, depending on Anjum’s schedule, for most of her free time was devoted to her political work, to organizing, going to protests, and running workshops, for which she often traveled out of Delhi on weekends too. When they did meet they would spend extended periods of time together, sometimes, if they met on the weekend, up to two days without break holed up in one of their rooms, smoking cigarettes and hash, having sex, talking and reading to each other, the sleepless nights followed by mornings and afternoons in which they drifted continuously between dreams and coitus. Even in the excursions they made out into the world to eat or to obtain fresh air they were unable to break away from the cocoon they formed together in bed, so that even sitting in tea stalls and smoking cigarettes, walking together directionlessly in parks, standing opposite each other on trains, they were as though wholly ensconced in each other, unable to break away from each other, as if the world consisted of only the two of them, as if everything outside them was some kind of trick or illusion or lesser reality, a feeling no doubt related to the strange quality that time seemed to acquire while they were together, for though this time could be measured objectively, could be counted, once it was over, in terms of hours and minutes, it seemed at the same time recalcitrant to the metrics of standard time, as though it had a duration that was fuller or vaster than the time that constituted the other parts of their lives, as though while they were with each other they were held together in a single, depthless moment that could be stretched out forever and that, while they were in it, went on endlessly, though eventually of course it always came to an end. The longer they spent together in this way, hardly eating and hardly sleeping, as if their time together were some kind of ascetic practice, the more dan
gerous being together somehow seemed, their personalities beginning to disintegrate, their private moods beginning to dissipate, as if in the time they spent together they were pushing farther and farther into some realm of existence or being that was connected to the so-called real world by only the slenderest of threads, so that the farther they went into this other realm the more possible it seemed that the thread might be cut, that they might find themselves suspended, suddenly, in some other place, unable to return to their familiar selves. It would seem more and more urgent for each of them to obtain brief moments alone so they could verify that they continued to exist as individuals, so they could attempt, in whatever small ways, to preserve at least scraps of their individuality, one of them going outside in order to buy cigarettes, taking what was obviously a longer amount of time than necessary, the other spending several minutes in the bathroom, answering the various messages that had accumulated on their phones under the pretext of having to use the toilet. Having reassured themselves of their separate existences they would lose themselves once more in the world they formed together, this dissipation or disintegration of the self holding such an ineluctable pull over them, despite the need they felt for self-preservation, that they couldn’t stop themselves from spending more time together, though eventually of course it would be necessary to separate, eventually the pull of the outside world and their separate lives grew so strong that they could no longer continue ignoring it even as they tried, postponing their social or personal commitments and sometimes even canceling them, extending or prolonging the moment of departure in small ways, one last cigarette, one last cup of tea, or one last quick, urgent ripping apart of clothes, so that five minutes more became half an hour and half an hour more became three full hours.
When they did finally manage to part ways Krishan always felt a quiet relief, mingled with the sadness of having to confront the strange nonexistence of his person, a nonexistence he felt as a blissful, exhilarating condition in the presence of Anjum but that, as soon as he was on his own, he experienced only as an unsettling loss of self. Too exhausted to think or feel or do anything productive he would go home and lie down for a while, and when he finally recovered the strength he would go to the bathroom and shower, attempting, by washing his body, to recover something of his former self. He would try then to do something quiet, to sweep his room, the rhythmic, repetitive motion of which always comforted him, to read, which allowed him to feel he had an inner life of his own, to try in whatever way he could, in other words, to rebuild his depleted resources and reconstruct a self that was independent of Anjum. Sooner or later though he would feel the need to contact Anjum, to hear from her and to obtain from her some kind of external corroboration of the thoughts and feelings still lingering in him from their encounter, some kind of proof that these thoughts and feelings were justified, a consolation for the loneliness he began to feel as their separation became more concrete. Anjum rarely responded quickly to his texts once they’d separated, often taking hours to text back, sometimes more than a day. Her responses were sometimes sweet, sometimes more matter of fact, but they were never long and seldom conducive to further conversation, as though she wanted to maintain some distance from him once they were no longer in the same physical space. Maintaining such distance was healthy, Krishan knew, it was necessary for regeneration, which was necessary in turn not only for the endless task of daily living but also, more importantly, in order to be able to see each other again. He did his best not to seem desperate or needy, not to create the impression that he wanted her more than she wanted him, never sending more than one text message at a time, never sending a second message till he received a response to the first, always waiting at least an hour before replying to the messages he finally received, even if he wanted to respond immediately. He did his best to appear unbothered by Anjum’s silences, but obtaining little reassurance from her that she was thinking about him as much as he was thinking about her, that she wanted to see him as soon as he wanted to see her, he would begin in the days following their meetings to feel anxious, to wonder whether he might have said or done the wrong thing, whether she was beginning to get bored of him, whether the profundity of their time together was being lost to repetition and routine. Such anxiety was, of course, experienced to some degree by every person newly in love, by every person who finds in another a bliss or rapture that they were unaware till then was possible and that they became terrified, having experienced, of losing. It was an anxiety that usually diminished as time passed, as interaction became a little more habitual and as each person became to the other someone whose continued presence could be taken for granted, and Krishan’s anxiety too began to diminish a little with the passing of time, as he became more confident that the quality of transcendence in their encounters was not going to subside just because they were becoming more familiar with each other. He could tell how much Anjum liked him, not just his body but his sensibility and the things he said, could tell how interested she was in him from all the questions she asked about his youth in Sri Lanka, which seemed to her like a distant, mythical place. He could tell from how she sometimes held him while they slept that she was opening herself up to him, allowing herself to become more attached to him, but even as she seemed to become more vulnerable, even as he sensed, in the way she sometimes looked at him or sometimes touched him, that she too was perhaps developing the tenderness that marked the transition between falling in love and actually loving someone, Krishan couldn’t suppress the sense that in some private way she was resistant to becoming too close to him, that despite being willing to abandon herself fully when they were actually beside each other, she was wary of spending too much time with him or of incorporating him into the rest of her life—as though she felt that what they experienced together could not go on forever, that it would inevitably cease to be gratifying or fulfilling if it did, as though the yearning for other worlds he sensed so vividly in her could be permanently satisfied only by something else.
He’d wondered initially whether this resistance might have to do with wanting to be with other people, for Anjum would often express her attraction toward people they knew or saw in passing, both boys and girls, making these remarks almost conversationally, as if she couldn’t possibly imagine him being affected by what she said. She sometimes mentioned lovers she’d had in the past and during her previous relationship, which had been open for two years, and it occurred to him that maybe she wanted to sleep with other people—maybe women in particular, who could give her something he could not—that possibly in fact she already had other lovers, which was maybe why they saw each other no more than once a week. Or perhaps she was in some way embarrassed by him, embarrassed to be seen in a conventional relationship with a male, and maybe this was why she seemed so reluctant to meet him at social events and in the company of friends. He didn’t raise the issue with her explicitly, partly out of shyness and partly out of fear of what he would learn, and it was only two or three months into their relationship that he began to sense that Anjum’s distance came not so much from desire for others or embarrassment at their relationship as from the fact, simply, that she didn’t seek transcendence in sexual or romantic relationships at all. She liked intimacy, of course, had a strong, sometimes overwhelming need for sex, and was clearly capable of losing herself in the rapturous world they experienced when they were alone, but for some reason it was as though she didn’t fully trust this world of theirs, as if she didn’t believe it could do justice to what she ultimately yearned for. This yearning, Krishan began to understand as they spent more time together, as he learned more about her life outside their meetings, was a yearning she saw only her political work as capable of fulfilling, not exactly the utopian vision that animated this work, since she was too cynical to imagine that a perfect world could ever be brought about, but the life she hoped to create with the community of people with whom she did this work, with her comrades, as she liked to call them. Listening to the way she tal
ked about the various cases of gender and caste violence she saw at her job, the way she talked about the protests she went to and the police violence she’d witnessed, the fervor with which she discussed plans and visions for future work, always collaborative, always with comrades, it dawned on him that Anjum was willing to give up everything for these plans and visions, that if the circumstances were right she would drop everything for their sake and disappear, and though he sometimes hoped, in moments when he felt close to her, that he too might be able to share in this life she sought, that she might at some point be willing to invite him into it, he couldn’t help suspecting, at other, weaker moments, that she viewed the time they spent together as only a distraction, that no matter how much she liked or even loved him their relationship was something she allowed herself only as a break from what really mattered to her, that she was, like the female Tiger cadres he’d read about and listened to in so many articles and interviews, one of those people for whom love, no matter how otherworldly it seemed, was always bound to the so-called real world, a world whose basic structure she could never accept, that she was, in other words, one of those people whose being was so taken up with yearning for another world that no single person, no love or no romantic relationship, could ever fill the absence in her soul.
A Passage North Page 12