A Handbook For My Lover

by Rosalyn D'Mello

  There were two options at hand.

  One: you could leave me your keys so I could visit when I wanted and park myself in your house at will.

  Two: you could make room for me in your already crowded house, nothing flamboyant, just a shelf or two to keep my things.

  We veered towards option two, but too many episodes got in the way. I couldn’t deal with your sudden tantrums, when, for no concrete reason you’d tell me to ‘Get out’. So I’d leave, despite the lateness of the hour, and then I’d find myself returning because I had grown roots in your house. I had too many things all over the place, and they kept bringing me back.

  So I decided I wouldn’t leave my belongings with you, despite the many times you pleaded that I should. I had to preserve my dignity. I needed to have the option of leaving you at any given hour without having to worry about the ‘Chinese cigarette case’1.

  But I slowly became part of your neighbourhood, part of the ecosystem of your house. You had to rely on me for grocery lists, for lost items, for details of leftovers. You came to depend on my spare pair of eyes to read the expiry dates on Gelusil bottles and Crocin strips, and on my spare pair of hands to scratch the itch on your back or smoothen the bundle of nerves along your right thigh when your sciatica acted up.

  Which brings us to the second twist in this narrative for which there is no easy resolution: how do we confront the fact of our interdependent yet independent lives? How do we undo this mess we’ve found ourselves in?

  And here you are asking me to quicken the pace of this treatise, begging me to seek answers to questions I’m still unable to frame, coaxing me to reveal to you everything I promised I would, while you’re still unwilling to entrust me with your keys; those few hundred grams worth of metal that hold the secret to the future perfect.

  Here’s my last offer—a book for a key. Take it or leave it. But decide now, before we proceed, for the next section is the beginning of the end. If you choose to read further, you hereby surrender all rights to a life of solitude. If you sign against the dotted line, you must make available an extra set of keys, failing which you will have made a mockery of this handbook.

  Mine is a conditional love.

  * * *

  1‘Grounds for divorce’ (2008), Elbow (There’s a Chinese cigarette case, and the rest you can keep, and the rest you can keep)

  What I See in You

  One night, after a petty, meaningless fight, you walked into bed as if it were the sea. I dived in too, but instead of keeping to the other side of the shore as I am prone to do in the aftermath of a hurricane, I swam over and lay beside you. You climbed onto me as if you were shipwrecked and I was the only log of wood in sight for miles.

  You were fishing for forgiveness. I had already forgiven you. You had sprung a leak inside my soul. It was just like you to row me gently and then threaten to have me capsize.

  ‘What the fuck do you see in me anyway?’ I said.

  ‘Well, I could ask you the same thing,’ was your cocky reply.

  You then curled your back against my belly and drew my hand over your chest like the edges of a quilt and fell asleep.

  I’ve spent months mulling over that question. What is it that I see in you? And how different is it from who you really are or seem to be?

  I see an arrogant man with too many lines on his palms, as if you’ve lived through so many lifetimes your body is struggling to adapt and can no longer keep track. There are long lines and split lines, curved lines and faint lines, bruised lines and chipped lines, smooth lines and dark lines that intersect with your head, heart, and life lines. When I read between all the lines I look to see if I’ve been written onto your body, if I was ever part of the script; if I’m a co-ordinate, an intersection between latitudes and longitudes; if I’m a bright, sizzling star in your constellation or if I’m just a meteor, a passing delight. Your fingers are broad and long. When you close them to make a fist, I get a brief gist of how big your heart must be. In the beginning I accused you of having bulletproofed it so you were impervious to my affection. You assured me it was as naked and wounded as mine.

  I see an aggressive man who conducts himself with more style and confidence than I could ever muster. You get away with too much. You are respected for your rabid intolerance of mediocrity, revered for your irreverence, saluted for your tendency to shoot from the hip, to say things that sting and to yet be loved for your brutal honesty. You don’t indulge in the art of mincing words, and you don’t make small talk. You’re no gentleman. You’re a grouch; hot-tempered and belligerent, and yet kind and compassionate.

  Plath had a point in her poem ‘Daddy’:

  Every woman adores a Fascist

  The boot in the face, the brute

  Brute heart of a brute like you.

  You like to prolong the life of things. You’re the only man I know who still drives a Gypsy. You’ve had it for years, I can tell, and like your body, it’s beginning to deteriorate. The lining of the seats is wearing thin, the rear-view mirror to the left of the dashboard has come off and refuses to be reattached, the engine growls when the wheels are in motion, like a restless chest-beating rebel, and the carburetor throws more tantrums than a bratty five-year-old boy. It’s not like you can’t afford a brand-new car. You’re just so attached to this machine, and I can’t blame you. It’s a gorgeous beast with a masculine guile. Anyone else would have given up by now. It’s exhausting to have to pull over in the throes of the afternoon heat, or amidst peak-hour traffic, just to open the hood and bang the carburetor with a spanner until it is disciplined into submission so you can be on your way.

  ‘Can’t you replace the carburetor?’ I asked one day.

  ‘I could, but I’d rather get it fixed,’ you said.

  ‘So why haven’t you got it fixed?’ I asked.

  ‘Because no mechanic seems to remember how to,’ you mumbled. ‘That’s the thing about the time we’re living in. We’ve forgotten to repair things, we prefer to replace them instead, get new parts in exchange for the old.’

  I once had a lover who was too callous with everyday things. His bed was always unmade, his room always seemed like a hurricane had thrown up on the floor. His books were always dusty, his clothes were strewn around, and his kitchen sink was always spilling over with dishes. He had a penchant for misplacing things. He was so clumsy with his fingers he once ripped a 500-rupee note accidentally while fishing it out from his wallet to pay the restaurant bill.

  He was a writer too, so I forgave him his inadequacies, treated them as quirks, as eccentricities. But I always knew I could never be with him beyond the present tense. It isn’t wise to give your heart to a man with butter fingers.

  But you—you are graceful with your fingers. There’s poetry in the way you stroke your beard while you’re driving, the way you sign against your prints, the way you hold a knife, the way you adjust your lens and shoot.

  You refuse to give up on things, carburetors, water heaters, air conditioners, amplifiers, crusty ceilings and sun-baked walls. As long as there is an ounce of life, or the promise of resurrection, you refuse to abandon them. You hoard them. You prefer to renew their lease on life.

  Anne Carson makes a surprising statement in her elusively titled book, The Beauty of the Husband, a Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, her poetic treatise on her liar of a husband who was ‘loyal to nothing’ and who she yet loved from ‘early girlhood to late middle age,’ who was indecent enough to send divorce papers in the mail. In the second tango, she tells the reader quite frankly why she continued to love this brute of a man. ‘Beauty,’ she says. ‘No great secret. Not ashamed to say I loved him for his beauty. As I would again if he came near.’

  Beauty convinces. You know beauty makes sex possible.

  Beauty makes sex sex.

  You if anyone grasp this—

  Sometimes I wonder if I would have loved you had the circumstances been different, had I been born closer to your generation, had I known you when you were
still in the crux of youth. You were outright gorgeous then, eyes as intense as burning coal, you of cocky smile and sunburnt skin, your hair still flaming black without a single strand of grey. I look at your self-portraits when you were the age I am now, and I marvel at your beauty. I look at your photographs of your then lover, the one with the kohl-lined eyes, and I’m envious of her beauty. I know I could never compare. You are known for all the women you’ve bedded, each one uniquely compelling, I am told. I’ve seen the pictures you’ve made of them lying in unmade beds, wrapped in sheets, glowing in the unmistakable light of post-coital love.

  I could have had any other man I wanted. But you fixated me, despite your now middle-aged eyes, your more-salt-than-pepper hair, your still-bristling beard, or perhaps because of it. You’d been tempered by time, the creases on your forehead had taken shape, the pudge of your belly was more defined.

  Maybe it’s because you still have no signs of a bald spot or a receding hairline. Or maybe I enjoy feeding off your age. I remember one day when you were unwell and I decided to play nurse. I asked if there was anything at all I could do for you, massage your feet, bring you breakfast in bed, cook you a meal. You didn’t want anything of the sort.

  ‘There must be something I can do for you?’ I pleaded.

  ‘Give me back my youth?’

  You are beautiful. Each time I see you I am confronted once again by your beauty, by the utterly gorgeous twist of your lips, the suave, sexy way in which you orchestrate your body, the way you walk, the deep baritone of your voice that resounds within the walls of my body, the broad sweep of your palms and the taut feel of your calves.

  Above all else, it is beauty that I see in you; a strain of beauty that I am powerless to resist.

  Barthes, in A Lover’s Discourse, speaks of the condition of ‘atopos’, which translates as ‘unclassifiable, of a ceaselessly unforeseen originality’.

  The loved being is recognised by the amorous subject as ‘atopos’, he says. Being atopic, the other makes language indecisive; one cannot speak of the other, about the other; every attribute is false, painful, erroneous, awkward: the other is ‘unqualifiable’.

  I find I am struggling with words.

  If you were a ‘type’, this whole exercise would have been much simpler. But I’ve never known anyone like you before, and haven’t since encountered anyone similar. In fact, I could argue that is half the problem—the fact that I’m no longer drawn to other men, because there’s an undefined set of attributes you possess which they presumably lack.

  Alain de Botton, in The Romantic Movement, reminds us of a quote from George Bernard Shaw: ‘Love is only a curious process of exaggerating the difference between one person and another.’

  Somewhere, the two questions get conflated: why I love you, and what I see in you. Both are impossible to answer because of the complicated constructions of each question. For the moment, I’ve chosen to deal with the second question, what I see in you, but I realise how immensely subjective my answers must be. In the beginning you accused me of being too starry-eyed about you. I insisted you misunderstood my way of seeing and I maintain that position.

  I’ve always had a sixth sense about men. All I need is to spend three intense days with a man and I can then enlist for myself all the many quirks and kinks about him that would drive me up the wall. The butter-fingered lover, for instance, had this way of softly clicking his lips together each time he spoke. It was charming at first, more an ethnic trait than something unique to him. But it steadily began to grate on my nerves until I couldn’t stand it any more. Added to this was also the fact that he, like a few others, had fallen too irrevocably in love with me. He had made a fucking myth out of me.

  You haven’t erred yet on that front, and there is no immediate danger that you will anytime soon. That’s your edge. It will soon be four years, and I still don’t have a list of things that annoy me about you. There is nothing I would like to change about you. Yes, there are some amendments I’d like to prescribe, but nothing severe, nothing that would alter you in any significant way.

  This is not to say I don’t see your faults. You have many. I haven’t put you on a pedestal. But maybe there’s a case to be made for the way in which you administer varied doses of hope and despair so that at no point can I rest assured about your feelings towards me. You keep me on my toes. You don’t care for stability, certainty.

  You only know the gospel of flux, of eternal change. You demand the impossible of me. You are my joy and my suffering; my jury, executioner and judge. You insist on pushing me to the edge of the cliff, even nudging me on occasion. You make me falter with my speech. I feel the ground slipping under my feet, and just as I am about to fall off the precipice, you draw out a rope and pull me into the safety net of your embrace. That’s the thing—I can never trust you to rescue me, and yet you do. Unfailingly.

  Charter of Demands

  Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are so dangerously close to wanting nothing.

  —Sylvia Plath

  I will not be moderate.

  I want everything from life or nothing at all.

  I am disgusted by lives that go on come what may, by the promise of a humdrum happiness provided I don’t ask too much of life.

  I want everything!

  I want everyday things: vessels of stainless steel, spoons with secrets cast upon their skin, bread from three days ago left untouched in the fridge and fruits I’ve plucked from orchards of ill repute.

  I want my garden of earthly delights with all the seven deadly sins for company.

  No, I am not meek or humble, pure in heart or selfless. And I don’t want paradise with its happy endings and countless beginnings.

  I want a feast of sin and flesh. I want this world, not the next.

  I want this body with its cellulite and sensuality and not some untainted other. I want this weight, these lines that stretch across my skin, the rings that mark my tender age, the scars that mark my experience and all the wounds that never healed.

  I want a share of everything that’s mine and everything that isn’t.

  I want a tongue that’s unrestrained, uncensored, rife with obscenities.

  I want Miles on his trumpet wailing as I wail.

  I want you with all your empty promises, you with your tongue of fire.

  I want your house too.

  I want your vessels with their receding sheen, the cane furniture you inherited from some other lifetime and your bed that’s lined with all your dreams.

  Give me your cotton shirts and your dirty linen and I will show you the terror of a housewife. I’ll fill your kitchen with blueberry pies and make you all kinds of spicy combinations to please your seasoned appetite.

  I’ll accost you with the violence of everyday things: morning tea and evening single malt in crockery I’ve inherited from generations of hospitality.

  I’ll ring roses around your bed and polish your floors with my lust.

  I’ll inscribe my name on all your letterheads, wreak havoc on your household and punish you with my words.

  I’ll poison you with my body. Everywhere you tread, on cobblestone footpaths or unmade beds, my scent will be sure to follow.

  I’ll mark your body with bruises that will glow in the naked sunlight.

  I’ll haunt you with more happiness than you can bear. Nothing humdrum or predictable, everyday a surprise.

  You could never complain about spiders in your study or dust among your books. Your bathroom will reek of my peach-scented lotion and every morning, my toothbrush will stand erect to salute you, my beloved hostage. And every night, when you’re home from your escapades, I’ll hold you captive once more. I’ll take the sandals off your feet, for the ground I tread on is holy.

  I’ll infest your house with paintings and I’ll scribble over your decaying walls in rich calligraphy. I’ll infuse your bedroom with my perfumed clothes and swollen dreams and the drudgery of my imagination.
r />   Who are you to question my motives?

  Who are you to cure my despair or channel my outburst into more creative streams?

  I cannot be tamed or trimmed, or cut down to size.

  I am larger than life.

  I am fierce, violent, resplendent.

  Come smell me.

  Come watch me burn.

  I am combustible.

  Flammable.

  And I want.

  I want. I want. I want.

  The ‘M’ Word

  One summer morning during our first year together, I woke up to find your moist body glued to mine. The night had been sultry. I’d shorn off all extraneous layers, had shed my clothes hours before; so when I woke up, my black body was reflecting light.

  Half awake, half asleep, still lost in dreams, your fingers wandered across my body like pilgrims in search of the Promised Land, finally arriving at the threshold of my cunt. You lost the battle against sleep. Your now limp fingers bore witness to this defeat. They floated in the wet of my spill. I saved them from drowning. I taught them how to swim, how to tread the waters’ depth and stay afloat.

  I surprised you with my gesture, rescued you from the snares of sleep. You drew closer, buried your lips in the warm cove where my neck meets my shoulder. I continued to walk your fingers through worlds buried undersea, submerged hallways and ancient palaces. You cast away my grip so your fingers could voyage independently. You travelled through desolate routes, went in circles, but refused to stop to seek instruction. You ambled your way into hidden continents until finally you arrived at the core of my second heart and tampered with its pulse.

  You held me as I released that final ounce of breath that would bring me back to the sun-curled morning.