A Handbook For My Lover

by Rosalyn D'Mello

  In your absence, when I am doomed to sleep alone in my own bed in my home, I feel unhappy. When you are in town I grow so accustomed to spending almost every night in your bed that occasionally, when we’ve agreed to take a one-night break from each other, I find myself displaced. It is then that I realise how my body is now so habituated to our various positions that when

  4 a.m. comes around, I wake up and am momentarily confused by the vacant space beside me. It takes a few seconds for my brain to compute that I am not in your bed.

  The Twilight Position

  Around 5 a.m. we retreat into our individual worlds of sleep. From then until we finally wake up, there is little contact between our bodies. I suppose these are the hours of pure, private, undiluted sleep, minus the melodrama, minus the erotica, minus the theatrics.

  The End of Sleep

  Based on my documentation, on average, there are two probable endings.

  The first is the most likely. I’m nearest to the window and so I’m more prone to the poetry of sunlight kissing my eyes, stirring me from the dark world of dreams into the clear light of day. I turn towards you and I start to massage your back. There’s a well-established pattern to my massage. I start by lightly pressing my palms against the surface of your back and eventually work up a vertical pattern wherein my knuckles travel across your spine and its neighbouring region with a consistency of rhythm and pressure. Then I sit up and I massage your feet. I begin by pressing the tips of your toes and eventually use the pads of my thumbs to make deep impressions along the length of your foot. I indulge you for a good half-hour until you finally decide it’s time to get out of bed and begin the day.

  The second is where you slip out of bed while I’m still asleep. I wake up and find you’ve disappeared and I’ve learned now it’s because you’ve had your fill and can’t have anymore. I’m still greedy, so I continue with my sleep. It took you some time but by now you’ve made your peace with it and no longer return to the bedroom to insist that I follow in your footsteps and wake myself up.

  The Economy of Tears

  I have never faked a tear.

  Not for me the edifice of pretence. Not for me the artifice of suffering. Every salty drop my eyes have ever shed on your account or otherwise has been authentic.

  I wish I knew the source of my flood. I wish I could tell you more about the origin of my tears, or how I devolve from a state of sobbing to a more uncontrollable state of weeping until I am momentarily emptied of all feeling.

  All I know is I shed two kinds of tears. One is more physiological. It is less salty and is not motivated by suffering. It is the consequence of bodily exhaustion. You’ve noticed it many times in bed, when I yawn incessantly and my eyes leak in response. It happens to me on mornings when you wake me up before I am ready to be woken. I yawn as much as I must have the night before and my face is similarly greeted with a soft stream of tears. This strand of tears also rises when I’m making small talk with onions as I work my way through the many petticoats that dress them, or when a speck of dust infiltrates my eyelids.

  This type of shedding does not constitute crying.

  You provoke the more insoluble variety of tears—bulbous, crystalline, laden with the weight of emotion. These are the instruments through which I perform my act of crying.

  It begins with a single tear that sits perched against the edge of a single eye, until it resigns itself to the gravitational pull of my angst. As the first tear meets its earth-bound fate, the next one starts to take shape until the gap between the falling of tears and the rising of new ones reduces sharply along with increased levels of humidity until I work up a more definitive pace. Sometimes I can hear them crash-land against a surface and it sounds like the breaking of raindrops. The deeper the grief, the more tangibly they fall past my cheek and create little monsoon puddles.

  Although my eyes are ostensibly the source of this deluge, they do not feel the pain of this birthing of salt-water. The pangs run deeper. I have managed to trace them to a nerve that runs close to my heart.

  When I was a child I cried about petty things. My tears were honest, but their cause insignificant in retrospect. Except for moments I cried out of fear, when I’d somehow manage to incite my father’s temper. He never hit me with his bare hands, always used a cane, or a ruler, as a symbol, I suppose, to demonstrate that the need for discipline was at the heart of his reprimanding, that no malice was meant, it was strictly business, parental business. He would lash at either my palms or my legs. There was no standard prescription as to how many lashes one could merit. The beating usually lasted as long as his temper, as long as adrenaline coursed through his body. Sometimes when his fit had passed, he would hold me unapologetically. All I remember was the feeling of relief. When it was over I would continue crying, my body would continue in its state of shock for a few hours, and then all would be well again. Until the next time I’d inadvertently rouse his anger. I learned how to appease. I learned how to stare anger in the face. I learned to be patient. I learned to love my father despite his apparent cruelty. As I grew older, he gave up the cane and the ruler and learned to express his temper through language. We became equals. I learned to pacify him, to entreat him to see things through my perspective, to expose the pettiness of his tantrum through the tenderness of my words. I healed myself from the trauma of childhood. I was convinced my experience with abuse would make me stronger, more immune.

  As I got to know you, as you began to expose yourself, I learned how wrong I was.

  To say you are short-tempered would be an understatement. You are prone to sudden fits of rage when something suddenly clicks and shifts inside your brain and your mouth spews venom. You say things you know you don’t mean, and then struggle afterwards to take them back. You try to keep yourself in check. You try to warn me about things that trigger your outbursts. I know, for instance, never to keep you waiting, never to yell at you or mock you in any way. But I cannot always control the impulse that leads to your anger. And, often enough, my feminism gets in the way. There are many moments when, try as I may, I cannot get myself to pander to your mood swings, so I meet your curtness with curtness and I pay the price in salt.

  So when you break, when you deliver your turbulent monologues, I say nothing, I do nothing except cry, not willfully or consciously, but almost involuntarily. The act of crying is my complicated version of paralysis, an articulation of a state that lies between the two impulses of fight and flight. My gift of speech abandons me. Words swirl inside my head and form various permutations and combinations of sentences, but they are not transformed by the coherence offered by language. My mind replays over and over and over the scene that led to this state I’m in of heightened pain, adding, in the process, fresh salt to my wound.

  You make a mockery of my tears. You are indifferent to my body’s spill; in fact, you are frequently amazed and astounded by how you have reduced me to tears. You tell me that I should be stronger, that I should cultivate a resigned indifference to your tantrums, that I shouldn’t let it affect me, that by crying I surrender my power.

  You do not console me when I weep. You do not exactly know how to. You have led me to bouts of madness in every conceivable public place. I have wept, on your account, in all forms of transport—buses, autos, planes, trains, scooters, cars—and in all habitable spaces—stranger’s bathrooms and living rooms, in kitchens and hallways, and corridors, on terraces and in basements. Every corner of this city has, at some point, been speckled with deposits of salts from my dried-up tears. I have managed to stain clothes, books, sheets, pillows, plates, mugs, and everything in between, with the acidic fervour of my tears that bear, in each molecule, the memory of some fragment of pain you have inflicted on me.

  The first time you led me down the underground of tears, you were as shocked by your influence as I was.

  ‘So I guess the spell has broken. The veil has been lifted. You probably don’t feel the same way about me.’

  I should have
read it for what it was—manipulation. I told myself that if I was convinced I was in love with you, I had to learn to love all of you, even the non-flattering bits. When I look back I realise the slyness of your move—you were trying to challenge the intensity of my love for you by insinuating it was merely the consequence of a spell, a delusion, a blind spot. And with each subsequent act of cruelty you started to push the limits, stretch the boundaries to see how much I could withstand, to measure how long it would be until I cracked, until I gave up and abandoned you. You were trying to test the veracity of my feelings towards you.

  It was a complicated game with lots of checks and balances. For instance, one evening, again, during our first year together, when we were still negotiating distance, when we lived in different cities, you went crazy on me about something as mundane as clothes. It was winter and I hadn’t packed adequately. My shoes were shabby, as was my outfit. You wanted to make sure I’d be warm enough that evening. We were supposed to go to the opening of a show of your father’s photography, and you were distressed by my apparent shabbiness. You wanted to remedy the situation, make suggestions, find alternatives. You started to nag, then badger, until you built up a little storm and I didn’t know what to do. So I decided to flee. I opened the door and I ran away. You shut the door behind me.

  When I got into an auto I received an SMS from you. It was curt but precise, and surprisingly free of grammatical errors.

  ‘I don’t think I want to see you again after tonight.’

  That January evening, in the snare of a thick, foggy Delhi winter, I learned how hot a tear can be. As they strolled down my face, first leisurely, then like a torrent, I learned the significance of opposites—hot, explosive tears on cold, exposed skin.

  I wasn’t sure what to do. All my luggage was at your house, and you hadn’t given me a spare key. So, after roaming the streets of Connaught Place, I decided to make my way to the gallery. I wasn’t sure where else to go. I was the first visitor. I spent time with each photograph, fell in love with quite a few, especially the one your father took of you when you were two-feet tall. Your mother lay naked on a bed, a maternal smile on her face as you sat beside her and held on to her tits. As I stood there staring at the strange similarity between the way your infant fingers tugged at your mother’s nipples and the way you tend to tug at mine, I heard your voice echoing against the white-cube space of the gallery. So I quickly walked over to a corner at the opposite end of the entrance. You left the gallery to speak to someone and when you entered, caught me staring at you. For a few seconds we simply made eye contact. Then you moved your right hand in the air, curled your fingers towards the inside of your palm so that only your pointer finger stuck out. Then you moved it back and forth to form a silent gesture. ‘Come here’ is what you seemed to say.

  I obeyed, my heart still reeling from the impact of your message.

  We stood at the threshold of the gallery. I wanted to tell you how I didn’t care for clothes. That I had flown all the way just to be here for you, that I knew how important this show was for you, but I couldn’t summon the words. All that emerged were a few tears.

  You looked at me and you raised your right hand once more so that the flesh of your palm made soft contact with the surface of my left cheek. It wasn’t a slap. It wasn’t a pat. It was something softer and more vulnerable, something akin to love.

  ‘Please don’t run away on me again,’ you said, and smiled pleadingly.

  ‘I won’t, I promise.’

  ‘Have a glass of wine.’

  ‘Sure.’

  It has never been easy, but I’ve tried, relentlessly, to stick to my promise. I suppose what you wanted was that I stay, despite your badgering, so we could work things out instead of my running away from you. But there have been exceptions; there have been moments when it just didn’t seem worth it to stay, and times when you didn’t even have the courtesy to extend to me that choice.

  For instance, one evening, during our second year together, when I had moved cities. You were disappointed because I’d been busy two nights in a row and couldn’t see you because of that silly rule you had about my showing up at your door no later than 8 p.m. So I decided to drop in unannounced around 7 p.m. You opened the door, were surprised to see me. You let me in and then promptly went back to your desk. When I went up to you, expecting to make small talk, you blew your top.

  ‘I have a million things to do. Don’t assume you can just traipse in whenever you like. If you’re free, and I’m free we can meet. If not, then let’s just stay away. Please leave now.’

  I walked out the door. You latched it from inside. I was too stunned to move; I sat outside on the second stair and wept. After a few minutes I heard the click of the inside door and before I could make a dash for the stairs you were standing in front of me.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m leaving,’ I said, almost reassuringly.

  You said nothing. As I made my way down the lane near your house, I heard the roar of your Gypsy and before I could turn to look, you had whizzed past me and I lost sight of you.

  I cannot remember how we reconciled, but clearly we did. And I think all was well until this other incident, when I was forced to renege on my promise and walk out on you.

  It was more recently, sometime during our third year together. We were scheduled to meet one evening, except your Gypsy had been given for servicing, and you were slated to attend an opening and then a private dinner in honour of an artist friend.

  If only you’d left me your keys.

  I decided I’d catch up with you at the opening and take the keys from you, then head to your house and wait for you to get back from the ‘private’ dinner to which you didn’t want to take me.

  Except, everything went off schedule. You’d already left the opening by the time I arrived. You went to the Press Club and hoped someone would drop me there, which of course, didn’t happen, until finally, I had to meet you outside the venue for the dinner. Now that I was already there, you ushered me in and told me to stay.

  And when we got home you unleashed on me a grand saga about how uncomfortable it made you, how you prefer to go to places alone and leave alone, that that was the way it has always been with you, that I didn’t belong to your world and should stop trying to fit in or assert my presence in that hemisphere.

  ‘You know what, I don’t need this. I’m off.’

  I was exasperated. I picked up my phone and my purse and I stormed out of your house.

  As I walked out of your lane I suddenly remembered how much I had left behind. My laptop, my charger, clothes, books, cash … So I walked back very self-righteously and rung the bell. You opened the door.

  ‘Thank God you had the sense to come back,’ you said.

  ‘I haven’t come back. I’m just here to collect the rest of my things.’

  ‘It’s really late. If you insist on leaving, can you just do it tomorrow morning? We can also talk then, after we’ve both cooled off.’

  ‘Fine.’

  That night we slept apart, all those unexplored continents reemerged on the atlas of your bed. I woke up early and collected all my things. I was about to shut off my laptop when it shut itself off. I panicked. I asked you to return to me my back-up drive that you’d borrowed. You did and even made the gesture of executing the back up. It meant I had to wait until you were done before I could leave.

  You went back to your study to work. I waited until my precious files had been copied onto the external drive. When it was done I packed up my computer, picked up every tiny thing of mine that lay in every room, a pair of earrings, a set of bangles, a hairclip, a dupatta, anything that could be used to lure me back to you. Then I headed to your door and shouted, ‘I’m off. Goodbye.’

  ‘Wait … Come here.’

  I stayed by the door of your study.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can we talk?’

  ‘What’s there to talk about?’

  ‘I’m sorry about last night. I didn�
��t mean to get so upset. It’s just that I’m used to being a certain way, and I felt uncomfortable having you around. I didn’t mean to yell at you and I didn’t want you to leave. But you have to understand that I’ve lived alone for so many years, I’ve become set in my ways, I’ve allowed myself to fit into the mould of a jerk. That’s what I am, a jerk. And somehow with you I’ve managed to contain it to a certain extent. In fact, in my past relationships, I have been known to be physically violent. I have a bad temper and I have some really horrible sides to me. But fortunately, you bring out my good sides. Also, I know that if I ever raise a hand on you, I’ll lose you. I know that you will leave me for good. And I enjoy your company. And I have strong feelings for you … So if you feel you’d like to stay, please stay, but if you want to leave, I want you to go in peace, I don’t want you to have bad feelings or leave in a bad mood.’

  I left.

  I needed time to process all this information.

  Later that evening I bumped into you at an opening. Your eyes lit up when you saw me. We drank many glasses of wine, smoked a lot of cigarettes, and when it was time to leave, since you were still Gypsy-less, you decided you would first drop me home in an auto and then head to your place. But when we got to the auto, you just told him to take us to your place.

  ‘Just come home, it’s easier that way.’

  We held hands throughout the ten-kilometre ride. I closed my eyes through most of it and savoured the ecstasy of having your heart beating so ferociously close to mine, to have this current coursing through our bodies.

  I rarely respond verbally to your assaults. Like I said, my body often just freezes into a paralytic state. All communication is limited then to the liquid upheaval that articulates itself on the canvas that is my face. I do not make eye contact. I lower my gaze and I try to will my fingers into stilling the storm by absorbing the tears.