A Handbook For My Lover

by Rosalyn D'Mello

  You were supposed to be a one-night stand. A quick fix. A conquest. A ten-line poem in my grand anthology of lovers.

  But you seduced me. First, with your persistence, and later, after I’d relented, with your measured indifference.

  I tried to resist you. I attempted an escape the first time I found myself consumed by the weight of gravity. By then you’d already interfered with the rhythm of my heartbeat so that my blood began to thin and my arteries had to work overtime to contain the flood. I confronted you about my strange condition. You said, with the air of a professional, that I was exhibiting an early symptom of that peculiar disease called love. I was confused. Last I checked I’d bulletproofed and bubble-wrapped my heart so that I’d be immune from such infections. I told you flatly that this had to end.

  ‘You mean you’re scared and you’d rather run away?’ you jeered.

  I held you personally responsible for my fall from grace.

  You conned me. You were calculating, like a criminal. Stealthily you made inroads into my routine so that steadily, the day was no longer complete until you’d appeared in my thoughts. Before I knew it, you’d made yourself indispensable.

  You were an aberration to the narrative of men I’d known. You were older. Grouchier. Celebrated. Indifferent to my beauty or lack thereof. Self-assured to a fault and yet unexpectedly vulnerable. A man with impeccable taste. So unabashedly and unapologetically yourself.

  You were nothing but a disruption to my state of being. You awakened in me something more dangerous than hunger, more desperate than fervour, more potent than hatred.

  This fit of madness is still at its height. Ovid was right when he was dispensing advice in his handbook, The Cure for Love: ‘It is difficult to stop it mid-career.’ I’ve tried. Religiously I wait for the day when it will all be undone. When the spell is lifted and I’m no longer consumed by you and you’re no longer obsessed with me and we can both return to the way we were before we met—un-entangled, uninhibited by love, committed to no one but ourselves.

  There are no other likely endings. This affair of ours refuses to surrender to the trappings of marriage or even the non-committal everydayness of a live-in. You’d drive me up the wall with your apprehensions about space since you can’t seem to trust yourself to leave me your house key.

  This was doomed from the beginning.

  I transgressed all norms when I chose to associate myself with you. I’ve been punished for my deviance. I’ve no choice but to put up with this exile between your home and mine, forced to live between boundaries, forced to relinquish every possibility of permanence. Your house can at best be a makeshift home for me. In your absence, when you travel the world with your cameras documenting lives in transition, I live in my rented apartment where I learn to temper my longing for you and my absurd nostalgia for a home and a life we can never share.

  Like lovers without a destination, we seem fated to seek refuge in the transient.

  We tried to address this once, when H seemed to want me.

  ‘Consider it,’ you said. ‘I’m always away. At least he’s around.’

  I thought about it, but my spirit wasn’t willing, neither was my flesh. I wrote to you categorically: ‘Just because you’re always away doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to have someone to come home to,’ I said, digging my own grave, innocently etching my obituary into unforgetting stone—‘Someone he could come home to’, it would read.

  I didn’t fathom the extent of the mess I’d inherit through that declaration.

  And yet, even in retrospect, I can see how it was inevitable.

  I’ve made my peace with the broom. Each room, I’ve figured, ought to be swept at least twice before I proceed to swab the floors. We’ve negotiated a strategy; you’d vacuum the cobwebs while I took care of the surfaces. You’d clean the toilets and the bathtub while I contended with the pigeon poo. All the vessels would have to be washed and baptised in potassium permanganate to vanquish any trace of rat prints. We agreed I’d do the dishes if you’d tackle the bedspreads and the clothes.

  As I waged war with dust, I wondered if you were exploiting my youth. If you were taking advantage of my supple muscles and my capacity to care. But then I wondered if I was exploiting you, mining you for material without allowing you the privilege of being a muse.

  I rant about your house when in fact I’m in love with every square-foot of it, not because it houses you but because it is such an undeniable extension of you. I love your kingdom of ruins, the looming towers of newspapers stacked upon newspapers, the bottles of single malt, green and gleaming and empty, more than there ought to be for a man with a fatty liver. Six ashtrays—two makeshift, the ruins of old music blaring from your centuries-old speakers, the fossils buried under cartons of photographs, the pen stands filled with pens with rusty nibs and dried up ink, the razor-edges of blunt scissors, the squirrel’s nest by the bathroom window, so fluffy I have to resist the urge to touch it, the stains on your marble floors that have been around for years, the kitchen lined with memories of past loves, past loneliness, your cupboard a collection of clothes you refuse to surrender.

  You’re a hoarder in denial.

  To the world you’re unattached, but within these walls is all that is precious, all the ghosts from the past you can’t seem to exorcise. And yet, try as I may, I cannot find traces of other women. No abandoned bangles, no hair clip, no loose strands of hair save mine, no bindi stuck against the frame of the mirror.

  If an archaeologist were to survey these ruins, he’d have to bring in a collegium of scholars and carbon-dating machines. I wonder if they’d find what I’ve found, remnants of your heart beating wildly with a rhythm that hasn’t yet lost its pace, despite your cynicism, despite your bitterness. A smouldering bit of bloody flesh that refuses to rot, refuses to ash, a thing of terrible beauty, immense and glorious, full of depth and soul. Unbroken still.

  Unlike mine.

  Perhaps it is love that dictates my dedication. I’ve never quite admitted to being in love with you, nor have you admitted to being in love with me. We’ve left it as something yet to be understood and acknowledged. We haven’t yet made an ideal of it. We haven’t yet made a mess of it. The only evidence we have is encrypted in the language of gestures.

  As my body melts into sweat, as sweat mingles with dust, as heat and dust collide, as the floor reveals itself with each stroke of broom and cloth, I’m convinced that love isn’t many-splendoured or virtuous. It is a dirty, beleaguered thing. I wonder if Jimmy Porter, the angry young man in John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, was right when he told his wife Alison, ‘It’s no good fooling about with love, you know. You can’t fall into it like a soft job without dirtying your hands. It takes muscle and guts. If you can’t bear the thought of messing up your nice, tidy soul, you better give up the whole idea of life and become a saint, because you’ll never make it as a human being.’

  Day two.

  It was evening all afternoon. It was raining and it was about to rain. My back had given way after all the sprucing. I took a pill and fell asleep on the bed while you worked in your study. I woke up and made a pot of Castleton.

  ‘What else can I do?’ I asked.

  ‘If you could just wave a magic wand and make all of this go away? Like in the movies, just a single swoosh and everything that was messy is suddenly in order,’ you said.

  ‘You’re confusing me with Mary Poppins,’ I said and smiled and meant it.

  Three hours later, when we reconvened on the marble-top table-for-two for some single malt, you were amazed by the transformation.

  ‘I see you waved your magic wand,’ you said. ‘Are you working?’ you asked.

  ‘Yes, I was writing about the rats.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you told me to.’

  Last evening two rats had walked into your trap. You’d called me to see for myself. I was afraid if I made conversation with them, I might feel the urge to adopt them.

&n
bsp; ‘Come on, say hello,’ you said. ‘Maybe you can write about them.’

  ‘Is that a challenge?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  I watched the two rats. One of them was resigned to his captivity. Maybe that one was your embodiment. He sat idly in a corner and awaited his fate while his companion who, I imagined was my animal counterpart, seemed determined to push herself through the narrow bars and escape.

  Later, when we went to release the couple in the wilderness behind your house, I wasn’t surprised when one rat made a quick getaway and pranced out of the cage while the other had to be cajoled into leaving.

  ‘Come on,’ you urged him.

  ‘Stockholm syndrome,’ I said.

  I thought of Barthes’ definition of catastrophe: violent crisis during which the subject, experiencing the amorous situation as a definitive impasse, a trap from which he can never escape, sees himself doomed to total destruction.

  As we sipped the peaty Ardbeg you’d bought, duty-free, I wanted to ask you if you felt the same way about the rats; if, like me, you saw in them a reflection of our catastrophe. But you distracted me.

  ‘So, if I’d told you not to write about the rats, would you not have written about them?’

  ‘No. You can’t control what I don’t write just as I can’t control what I write.’

  ‘Do I figure prominently in what you’re writing?’ you asked.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘So when you’re done, should I go through it with red ink and cross off the parts that misrepresent me?’

  ‘You could, but it wouldn’t deter me. Don’t worry; I haven’t revealed your identity. I haven’t used your name. Just your initials, and only once, in the dedication.’

  I have my doubts about whether you’ll even read this from start to finish. I debated writing it to begin with, especially since you’re such a reluctant reader. But I took Barthes’ advice. To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love, to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not—this is the beginning of writing.

  It’s a peculiar book I’m writing. It isn’t a love letter. It isn’t an ode. It pretends to be an instruction manual, but only succeeds in parts. I prefer to call it a handbook, or a survival kit, or an episode of language. I know I said it was, but it isn’t quite dedicated to you. Rather, it is directed at you.

  It was something I started a year ago, after a conversation with you over the phone after midnight, a few months after we first began, long-distance. I was in Bombay, the city of my childhood. You were home in Delhi. I heard my phone ring just as I was about to sleep. It was the ringtone I’d reserved for your calls, Madeleine Peyroux’s version of Cohen’s ‘Dance me to the end of love’. We exchanged details about the day. Mine was charmed as usual. I’d spent hours staring into the sea, as if in search of some epiphany. Your body burned in Delhi’s afternoon heat and the sky sent no breezes to quell you at twilight.

  I can’t recall exactly how it came to pass, but the conversation drifted to an old flame of mine (he who could make the violins come). Yes, I had spotted him that morning and he had appeared luminous, as if he had swallowed all of last night’s stars and his skin had begun to gleam. You were confused. Justifiably. Who was this ex-flame? What was his co-ordinate on my map of lost lovers? Did he come before or after you? Did he like my taste? Was he still attuned to my scent? Had I mentioned him before or had I just constructed him out of thin air?

  ‘How many lovers have you had?’ you asked, your voice carefully disguising each word so that the question mark at the end of your statement would seem like genuine curiosity. Except, it wasn’t really a question. There was a tinge of sarcasm and an unmistakable hint of jealousy.

  ‘You’re one to talk!’

  ‘Well, I’m much older than you. It’s only natural that I’ve had a few.’

  ‘Maybe someday I’ll tell you. When you’ve earned the right to know.’

  If you are indeed reading this, it’s too late. You’ve wandered into my trap. You chose to sink your teeth into the apple’s hard flesh. Now you must eat of it until you arrive at its core, until its bitter seeds unravel upon your tongue.

  We began with the body, you and I.

  Our first ‘date’. I am ushered into the living room of your absent friend’s home in Bombay. I peep through a door on the right and find you tinkering with your laptop. On the dining table stands a half-empty glass of wine. I announce my presence. You emerge from the bedroom. We shake hands.

  We’ve never met before, except on Facebook chat.

  You pour me a glass of red wine; my poison. I slump into the sofa across from you. Before I can even begin to sip my wine, you start to investigate, decipher. You want to break me down into chewable fragments so you can piece together the story of my short-lived life. I indulge you. Rarely have I been the subject of such curiosity.

  We evade the body.

  I stick to your eyes, steer clear of your lips. You prefer to look away. Your gaze is focused on tangible things like the glass in your hand, the wild red roses that stick out of the short vase in which they were stashed, the bookshelves filled with titles neither of us would ever read.

  We talk until we reach a pause. A gap. I’m unsure what to say next. So are you. So you leave me alone in the front room and walk into the bedroom. When you step back out, J.J. Cale is singing the blues:

  A perfect woman, she’s got no rules

  Soft to the touch, silky smooth

  She got everything a man could use

  Ain’t no doubt about it, when we make love

  She’s good down under, she’s good up above

  Nice move.

  Three glasses down. My head is swirling in a crimson haze. I need to stay still so I focus on you; the soft twirls of your hair, the black and white tufts of your beard, the way your body sways to the beat and your fingers keep time on the hard brown wood of the table that supports your feet. You sift through a blue pouch, slip out a film of paper upon which you stack a small heap of tobacco. With sleight of hand and flick of tongue you roll yourself a cigarette. You roll another for me. I don’t smoke but I want my mouth to taste like yours.

  I watch and learn. I observe how you hold the butt between your fingers, how your fingers move so deftly between air and lip so that now the cigarette is alight. You take a drag. Your breath wets the paper.

  Presumptuously, you pour me another glass. You draw the rim toward your lips, sip, smile, then tap your toes to Cale.

  We delay.

  We defer that moment of contact we both know we want. We’re unsure of how to seize the chance to make lips graze. We dilly-dally. Meaningless chatter about theatre and poetry and photography. Words are poor substitutes for touch. All I want is a mindful fuck, an exquisite escape into the ethereal, a feast of sin and flesh, excess.

  The clock is ticking. It’s near midnight, the Cinderella hour. So much anguish about how to cross over to your side of the room, how to engage with the texture of your skin, so much inhibition. I cannot guess your age but you’ve lived at least two decades longer than I have, I imagine, and I’m hoping you’ll heed to your superior wisdom and say something intelligent, something that will lead to touch. You’ve whetted my appetite, what I want now is an opportunity to bite through your flesh, rummage through your skin.

  I can’t tell if you’re the hunter and I’m the prey or if it’s the other way around. You’re new territory for me; your body seethes, your eyes are alive, aflame.

  I’m restless. I walk across the room. You follow me with your gaze. We continue with our distracting conversation. I venture into the inner room and discover the beautiful four-post bed cloistered by a beige canopy peopled with embroidered birds and leaves and fruit. I sit by the edge and dangle my legs like a coy girl child. You stand twelve inches away. Too far. Too inaccessible. You drink your wine indifferently. For
a moment I wonder if I’m imposing on your time.

  I’m drunk and I’m hungry and I want to make a feast of you. I want to nail you against the mattress and bite into your muscles, chew on your past. I want to carve my initials on your flesh so you won’t ever forget this hazy evening and all the redundant talk about politics and art, all the meaningful moments of delay.

  You draw closer. I invite you to sit beside me. We talk, softly this time. By now we’ve understood the worthlessness of words. Your breath sticks to me, clings to my skin. I say something silly, you turn your head towards me and bits of laughter spill over. I tilt my head so I can face you but you turn away at that very moment so my lips graze lightly against your beard. An accident. Until you realign yourself so that your mouth is now right above mine, and your tongue slips between my lips and makes small talk with my tongue.

  Almost midnight.

  I have to leave.

  I pull away, undone. It is unfinished but I have to go.

  ‘Pity,’ you say.

  ‘You had all night … I was willing …’

  ‘One has to take the time to get to know someone,’ you reply.

  I want you to know me in a biblical way.

  You reach for one last kiss. You pin me against the wall and in the middle of our rapturous conversation reach for the edges of my kurta which you then roll over my head and cast away. You’re pleasantly surprised to discover there’s no lacey bra underneath for you to unhook.

  ‘I have to go,’ I beseech one last time. You press yourself against my cunt as if your lust is reason enough for me to stay.

  It is …

  ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ you say.

  ‘Even if I wanted to … I can’t. I’m menstruating.’

  ‘So what? It’s completely natural,’ you say after you’ve unbuttoned my jeans.

  I unfasten your shirt, undo your trousers, kiss parts of you that only I can reach with my tongue.

  You leave me for a minute, walk to the bathroom to slip on a condom. When you return, you’re naked, except for the condom. You hold two sets of newspapers in your hands.