A Handbook For My Lover

by Rosalyn D'Mello

  But everything was threatened a few weeks ago. You were out of town, I stayed back in your house. It was afternoon when you called to say you had reached Bombay. I told you it was unbearably hot. You told me to turn on the AC and park myself either in the bedroom or the office. I did as you said. Switched the relevant regulator on, turned on the AC and left the room to cool while I made myself some lunch, did a round of washing, put the clothes out to dry, and engaged in other household chores. When I was done I decided to take an air-conditioned nap. I woke up when I noticed the light flickering. I turned off the AC and went to the living room to work. An hour later I got a call from you. Your neighbours had called you to say they saw sparks in your front balcony. You asked me to take a look. I did. The wires between the two fans connected to the split ACs were on fire. It was a proper electrical fire.

  The next half hour you recited a string of instructions, got me to turn off all the fuses so I could pour water to stop the fire, got me to check on random things to ensure there were no more sparks, and finally told me not to even think of turning on the ACs again. You said you’d arranged for someone to come home the next morning to inspect what had happened.

  I agonised over it for hours. I knew I was not at fault. I’d done nothing wrong. But I was sure this meant the end of my relationship with your keys. This would be your excuse to take them back. And I was right. When you returned and witnessed the aftermath of the electrical fire, you knew we had got lucky. It could have been an outright disaster. The building could have burnt down. After you had the electrician fix it, you told me this was why you preferred to have the house locked. You could have lost everything, you said. I wanted to remind you of the times when my being in your house had saved you from ruin, but I thought it best to be quiet.

  When you had to leave again, I kept all my things together so I could leave with you, like we used to do before. We woke up at six in the morning so you could pack. I made tea and then took care to ensure there was nothing edible in the fridge that would rot. I disposed of the leftover milk and curd, toasted the remaining bread, and packed the few tomatoes that were in the fridge so I could take them with me. I covered all the kitchen surfaces with cloth so they wouldn’t gather dust, closed all the windows so the pigeons wouldn’t colonise the house in your absence, and ensured everything was tidy and in place. You were still packing, so I lay down on the divan to catch a few minutes of sleep. When I woke up you were bathed and ready to go. I got up and rushed to get my clothes together so I could take a shower. But you stopped me mid-way, as you were wearing your socks.

  ‘You don’t look like you’re ready to leave,’ you said.

  ‘No, just give me five minutes. I’ll be ready. I’m sorry. I was just really tired and needed to sleep.’

  ‘Listen, why don’t you just relax. I’m ready to go, but you can stay and leave whenever you like. Keep the keys with you.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. Keep the keys but don’t stay here at night because I’d rather you didn’t turn on the AC. I don’t want you to have to deal with fires and other calamities.’

  ‘Okay.’

  I helped you carry your luggage downstairs. The taxi was waiting. The same Sardar who normally drops you to the airport was ready to leave. I wondered if he wondered who I am, though by now he must have grown accustomed to seeing me with you. I kissed you goodbye.

  ‘See you on the other side,’ you said.

  ‘I hope so,’ I said.

  You meant Paris. You were scheduled to be there in the second week of July. I was supposed to meet you there. It was the first time I’d come this close to actually making it abroad. There were just a few weeks left until my twenty-seventh birthday. I wanted to spend it with you. There was also the matter of my yet unfulfilled birthday wish made last year—to go travelling with you. The fate of my trip rested in the hands of anonymous visa officials. You did your best to ensure I could get this far. You badgered me into getting letters from relevant authorities and making all the necessary phone calls. I submitted my papers a few days ago. I was yet to hear back.

  As clichéd as it sounds, all I wanted was to be able to look back at our romance years later, when we were probably no longer together, and remember with a tinge of nostalgia and delight that despite everything, we’d always have Paris.

  ‘We’ll Always Have Paris’

  Travelling is an act of surrender. Language is reduced to sounds, some familiar, some absolutely alien. One is left at the mercy of strangers native to lands that had only previously existed in the cartography of one’s imagination.

  A virgin traveller, I played safe and chose France as my ‘first’ because the muscles of my tongue and ears still remembered the language despite having learned it almost a decade ago. And you were already there, so there was just the matter of boarding the flight, landing at CDG airport, ushering myself to the right platform that would escort me onto the TGV I’d booked to get me to Nimes, where I was scheduled to meet you at the bottom of the staircase at the station.

  I saw your anxious body leaning against a shop front. You sensed my approach and turned to greet me. We grabbed a baguette stuffed with a delicious, generous serving of chorizo, and sat at the bus stop to board the bus to Arles.

  These were the preliminaries of our first trip together on foreign soil, a trip that would take us through the photogenic streets of Arles, Nimes, Paris, Burgundy and Kassel in Germany, and then back to Paris.

  I find myself unable to summarise the euphoria and the uncertainties I experienced during that fortnight together. I should have made notes. I should have carried a camera. I shouldn’t have been so stubborn about using words to document what my eyes were seeing when a lens could easily have sufficed. But then again, I am no photographer, and who wants to see stodgy pictures that would simply have featured the two of us framed against a river, or a monument, or the countryside. What could they have possibly recorded that I would not have been able to recall in words?

  For instance, I could have flashed a camera at that bum we encountered on the metro late at night when we were returning to the apartment of a friend of a friend where we were staying. His begging bowl resembled an ashtray, and he held it out at us almost arrogantly, like it was our duty to donate a cigarette or two, or some loose change. But instead of demanding our charity, he looked first at you and then at me. We were sitting with our hands interlocked, our feet so close to each other you could sense the circulating current.

  ‘Lui, il est ton mari?’ he looked at me and asked.

  I understood him perfectly. You didn’t.

  ‘We don’t speak French,’ you replied, and in the breadth of a whisper asked me not to engage with him.

  ‘Oui et non’ is what I would have said, had you not appealed to me to be silent.

  A photograph could not have captured the sagacity behind his question. Back home I’m usually asked if you’re my father, it was refreshing to think that we could appear to someone as husband and wife.

  Here, in the more tolerant French air, we found no need to disguise our relationship. We walked the streets of Arles, Nimes and Paris like lovers in heat, drenched in the humidity of a previously undiscovered strain of intimacy. There were movements our bodies felt permitted to make that seemed unimaginable back home, gestures we wouldn’t have dared to indulge in, in the suffocating conservatism of our homeland.

  You and I have always worn a face to meet other faces. Our relationship never had a public persona. In the privacy of your home we could be lovers, but beyond the periphery of your door, the ‘act’ must begin, in which we perform the role of individuals who are unattached to each other. We never quite engaged in public displays of affection. It seemed inappropriate to do so, so bothered were we by moralistic eyes. Sure, we had our secret codes—a specific look to communicate attraction, or a teasing smile if one was ever chiding the other, messages relayed over the lifespan of a whisper. Our love always wore a clandestine gown each time we took
it out for a stroll.

  It was the Parisian air that seduced us. When we got in after journeying through the sunny towns of Arles and Nimes, it was still unusually chilly for July. It was a miracle we had made it this far given that by our third day in Arles, the insides of your body had begun to rebel, your stomach started to reject everything you devoured. I remember that night in Nimes when we walked from our hotel to the cathedral amid the wild wailing of an Argentinian Gypsy band whose music seemed to gush over the streets and seep into our very bones. We were on our way to the cathedral to hear a woman sing the ‘Ave Maria’. Mid-way, you asked if we could pause for a moment so you could sit down on a bench you had spotted. Your body was giving way again, that bilious feeling was returning, the nausea was settling in. We stayed still for a few minutes. You were beginning to surrender your body to my care. You tilted your head against mine, so it could find a resting place, however temporarily, and you closed your eyes as the gypsy music continued to ooze, drowning us in its invisible flood. We did make it to the cathedral, and we did hear the ‘Ave Maria’, but fifteen minutes into the divinity of the experience, your stomach had begun to growl once more. You looked at me with half-appealing, half-apologetic eyes.

  ‘I’m really sorry about this, but can we please leave. I don’t feel very good.’

  I smiled and held your hand and led you out from the cathedral back onto the streets, bought a few bottles of water for you before we returned to our hotel room. Soon after we arrived, you went into the loo and closed the door behind you. I could hear the unpleasant sounds of your body expelling the nausea. You returned to bed, lay down for a bit until you felt the irrepressible urge to puke once again. This time I followed you. I’m not sure why. It wasn’t something I’d ever done before. Under normal circumstances you would never have wanted to let me see you like this. I went in on an impulse, and I held your head and I stroked your back while you attempted to banish the bile from your system.

  ‘What joy, to have to re-taste food one has already consumed!’ you said, and we broke into laughter, amused by the absurdity of the act of regurgitation.

  You decided that night that you would temporarily stick to the softest of foods, like yoghurt, and water; a completely liquid diet minus any form of alcohol. And then, unnecessarily, you apologised once more for being sick. I stayed awake most of the night massaging your feet so I could ease you into sleep. When I was convinced you were safely tucked away in the land of dreams, I moved aside so I could also fade away. I cannot remember what hour of morning it was when I noticed you were up once again, puking into the commode, but neither of us could sleep after that. I was on high alert to make sure you were okay; you were too troubled by all the churnings inside your stomach to rest.

  You felt better the next morning. At least you’d stopped vomiting. You were still weak, but you were adamant that we go sightseeing. So we did, and then got ready to leave around 4 p.m. to catch the train to Paris.

  The fact of your mortality haunted us through the journey. Your stomach persistently rejected everything you devoured, although you tried to find ways around it; soft foods, easy-to-digest soups and juices, plenty of water, cut backs on cigarettes. You were almost okay the first few days in Paris, before we went off to Burgundy to see S.

  When we arrived at X sur Argenteil, you seemed much better than before. We had a succulent home-cooked quiche and many glasses of rose. We returned to our room in S’s beautiful thirteenth-century stone house, and decided to indulge in a siesta. I had just begun to menstruate, yet, I woke up refreshed, painkiller magic running through my system. You found the act of waking up too tiring to attempt. You drifted in and out of sleep, and by early evening, had begun to puke once again. I was on constant standby, holding your head up, stroking your back, and then massaging your feet when you returned to bed. S had already begun to cook the veal in white wine. She’d kept the girolle ready too. You urged me to keep her company, so I left you and went into her kitchen where she was opening a bottle of rose. I sat with S for at least an hour, enjoying each minute of our conversation, savouring the warmth of her hospitality, the graciousness of her personality, and the fact that, unlike most of your friends, she took to me instantly. She’s as possessive of you as your other female friends, but not once did she patronise me or judge the merit of our relationship, unlike M, who once told me to my face (in your absence, of course) that I was everything I was because of you!

  When I returned to you an hour later with a cup of tisane, you had grown even weaker.

  ‘Please stay with me for some time,’ you appealed.

  In that moment, in that candid utterance, something changed irrevocably between us. We had arrived at a new milestone. Where before, in moments of sickness, your impulse was always to push me away, to be alone, now you sought not just my company but also my caress, as if it were possibly a form of healing. You allowed yourself to reveal to me the side of you that is vulnerable and mortal, like you were drawing me into a secret place that no one else had ever been privy to, that even I was not permitted to enter until then. Thus far, I had only loved you in health, this was my opportunity to love and care for you in sickness.

  It could have gone either way, the act of compassion. An associate, the wife of a renowned artist, who was in her early fifties when I made her acquaintance, told me, when I once asked her what it was like to be with someone thirty years older, that it was no different from being with someone closer in age.

  ‘I have women friends who married men their age, and quite a few of their husbands had severe health problems, so they had to care for them in much the same way I’ve had to care for A,’ she said.

  However, their relationship changed dramatically when her husband had a serious heart attack when he was in his late seventies.

  ‘It was then that he started perceiving me more as his nurse than his wife,’ she explained.

  When I came to you with a bowl of clear miso soup, you were too weak to even sit up, but you mustered the courage. I held the bowl in my hand and scooped a spoonful to put into your mouth, but you wouldn’t allow me this gesture.

  ‘No, I’m not yet an invalid,’ you argued.

  ‘You’re very sick, just let me feed you. Indulge me,’ I said, after which you relented. But two spoonfuls later, you felt the urge to throw up once again. When you returned to the bed, you groaned.

  ‘I feel like an old man on his death bed,’ you said.

  ‘Shall I press your feet?’ I offered, hoping to pamper you.

  ‘Can you just lie with me instead?’

  So I lay beside you, your legs curled around mine, your arms engulfing mine furtively with all the might of your leftover strength.

  As you faded into a form of almost sleep, I closed my eyes and listened to the echoes of your snores, and together, we drifted into a strange land that I had only ever dreamed of but had never encountered before, despite all my previous dalliances with romance. In our unsteady state of unconsciousness we wandered into unchartered territory and inadvertently stumbled into un-promised land, an unmapped space, which I, in retrospect, have decided to christen Intimacy. A surreal island space with no definite cartography where language is composed entirely of gestures, where words as we know them are redundant, where any form of verbal exchange, however profound or prolific, is irrelevant, where communication can only be facilitated through acts of seeming unmeaning. A private republic, where our two disparate bodies, each programmed by its own ordinary eternal machinery, have suddenly, in the aftermath of an unexpected epiphany, understood the triviality of one without the other. So that even the act of hurting becomes a manifestation of reluctant intimacy. We were now the sole inhabitants of a previously undiscovered territory, a land we had no choice but to carry back with us when we returned home, one that stuck to us so religiously we could no longer be what we were before. In that secret emotion, in that unstructured, ominous moment, we became eternal itinerants in the land of intimacy.

  Was this wh
y the bum on the metro looked at us the way he did? Scanned our knitted limbs, sized up our form, attempted to overhear all that our bodies were saying without even speaking? He gazed at us with the guilt of an intruder, as if he had caught us in the act of making love, as if we were under the false impression that we were the sole occupants of the train, like there weren’t all these other bodies inhabiting the same space.

  Until now we had always been lovers in exile, existing despite not having the comfort and security of either a designation or a destination. Now we had found a notional space, a conceptual territory in which our survival could be guaranteed. Refugees until now, we had finally found sanctuary.

  Until I actually journeyed overseas, the question of why one travels at all remained a mystery. Why are we so inclined towards upsetting our settled domestic worlds in order to discover ones that we only heard existed, of which we knew so little about? Some say it is so that we can come back home, so that we realise that our destination was, in fact, to return to the point of our departure. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves, writes Alain de Botton in his Art of Travel. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life but who may not be who we essentially are, he continues. I had no intentions or illusions of travelling to France to find myself. All I wanted was to travel with you, to journey together, to experience first-hand the joy you derive from being elsewhere. So keen was I at the chance that we might finally, literally and metaphorically, always have Paris, I didn’t fathom the extent of how indelible the experience would prove. When we returned, I understood that what I had taken back with me as a souvenir was the satisfaction of having arrived together, and yet, of having only just begun our travelling.