A Handbook For My Lover

by Rosalyn D'Mello

  Until one morning, after a stretch of sleepless nights spent making love to J (the sleep-fucker), days before I was to leave university and return home, I found myself besotted by him. Soon it was mid-May, the season of returnings. I was back in Bombay, had spent my last hours in Delhi with J so that I had barely any time to pack my things and I had to leave so much behind. J was back in Paris, but before leaving, came to visit me in Bombay and we spent three nights together on the kitchen floor of a friend’s apartment. G was done with his stint in Hyderabad and was back in Bombay. He’d been accepted into Columbia and there were barely three months to go until he left for New York.

  J had seeped into my body and the scent of him was attached to every fibre of my being. The territories between love and sex, which were once so perfectly defined, had begun to collapse. I found myself repelled by every touch that wasn’t J’s, and I felt nothing when G fucked me. In fact, his caresses would leave me numb and dry—no man has ever left me that dry. I realised only later that what I had begun to feel for him was the opposite of love: contempt. It was sparked off by a chain of events that followed once he discovered I had slept with J, and was besotted by him, and then understood that there had been other men too, and that I had taken his advice about my body being my own to heart.

  Over the next two months we began a series of negotiations. He would ‘forgive’ me my ‘sins’, as he called them, if only I shared with him each glorious detail. When I refused, on ethical grounds, we proceeded into war. I was cornered into playing defence and I eventually crumbled into a paralytic silence. And all the while, all through this mindless torture, through our alternating peace pacts and blitzkriegs, we continued to end each correspondence with the love cry. The words ‘I love you’ had become a habit, an involuntary tick. Over the six years we had spent together, we had said it so often that by now it had lost all significance. It had become hollow. It was neither an avowal nor a symptom of some kind of pathological condition of being in love, it was merely a learned habit, like covering your mouth when you cough or saying, ‘Excuse me’ when you sneeze; a polite, hygienic, neutral habit, neither good nor bad. We had arrived at a stalemate, but we were both too polite to call it quits, too scared to admit that our love was, in the end, contrary to what we would have liked to believe, neither unconditional nor eternal.

  Everything unravelled much like it does in Botton’s Essays in Love when Chloe finally admits to the narrator that she’s been seeing his friend Will. Even before her confession, he had sensed the rupture within their relationship when all the little things she used to find adorable about him suddenly became irritants, and he found himself indulging in acts of romantic terrorism, much like G had begun to do. Botton’s narrator, foreseeing the end of his relationship with Chloe, has a disturbing insight about how the thought of the end hangs over every love story, even when it is at its climax. The only difference between the end of love and the end of life, he says, is that at least in the latter, we are granted the comforting thought that we will not feel anything after death. No such comfort for the lover, who knows that the end of the relationship will not necessarily be the end of love, and almost certainly not the end of life.

  G, in a final fit of rage, emailed me a set of curses:

  This is over! There is nothing more to be spoken about this. There is only a past and there is no future. You are a selfish and abhorrent person and I wish no one has to go through the distinct dishonour of having to love you or be loved by you. May you die a thousand deaths at the hands of your shrivelling conscience. I would wish hell on your afterlife, but then that would be too light a punishment for what you are becoming.

  I hope you fry in your own juices every day, I hope that your heart turns to stone and that you can’t feel a thing. May the numbness spread to your brain and may you never write another word that satisfies you. Every time you have sex or look lustfully at a man or a woman, may your cunt freeze and turn dry. You should live in the daily hell, knowing that you drove the man who made the mistake of loving you to hatred and rage.

  By the end of July, I was empathising with Miller’s condition. Down and out in Paris, struggling to survive, he thinks back to the impasse he and his wife Mona (June) had found themselves in. We came together in a dance of death and so quickly was I sucked down into the vortex that when I came to the surface again I could not recognise the world. When I found myself loose the music had ceased; the carnival was over and I had been picked clean, he writes in his epic Tropic of Cancer.

  I was still dying when I met you. I was in a state of trauma. I was struggling with language. The juice that had once flowed so swiftly through my body had indeed been sapped dry. I was empty. But when I met you, in the middle of the monsoon, on that fated day, the second of August, the roots of my being that I was sure had long since withered were suddenly replenished. Some small sliver of life was resurrected. It would take time for me to heal but I found, suddenly, the will to rise from my ashes and renew myself.

  In the beginning there was uncertainty. After the first seduction, after the first orgasm, when there was, in my mind, no thought of any continuance, you took it upon yourself to pursue me.

  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 had other designs. You seduced me. First with your persistence and later, after I’d relented, with your measured indifference.

  In the beginning there was resistance, there were thoughts of escape, as if I had already some inclination of the monumental possibilities of our passion and, threatened by the thought of having to surrender to spiritual bondage, thought it best to flee. But you had already seeped into my system, you had already planted fresh roots, and I found myself incapable of letting you go. You mystified me. Your gait, your charm, your contented solitude, the aura you radiated of being so blissfully unattached to anyone and yet desirous of a dialogue with me. I was convinced your heart was bubble-wrapped and bulletproof, too cautious to yield to the dictates of another and yet, when I confessed to you how deeply you had entrenched yourself under my skin, how you had begun to invade the landscape of my dreams, you made me seem like a coward who was too afraid to let go.

  I told you once, over the phone, that I found myself hung up on you. ‘It’s horrible,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to be hung up.’

  ‘Why is it such a horrible thing?’ you said, and for a few moments I was speechless.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I finally admitted. ‘It’s you. Your heart is made of lead4, or some really strong metal. It’s bulletproof. You are impossible to penetrate.’

  ‘That’s not true. What makes you think that? Give it some time,’ you said.

  I was in love with you long before I knew it. And when I did, I wasn’t sure what to do with the revelation. Neither did you. Often, it seemed unnecessary to have to articulate it, almost extraneous, so we left it as something unsaid, unspoken, an implicit fact, a given, and we chose not to confront each other with the obvious. We relegated it, instead, to the region of nuance. Occasionally, over an e-conversation, fragments of this ‘love cry’ would slip. ‘Love you’, or ‘Love’ or extensions, like ‘Kisses’, ‘Hugs’, but never the whole phrase, always parts, and always on paper or through virtual prisms, never face to face.

  Sometimes, when your rhythmic snores signify your fall into sleep, I, still awake, still haunted by the throes of consciousness, gaze at your moonlit face, and I utter the words, but with such practised softness that no sound ever escapes my lips. I mouth the words and imagine their resonance, but I never allow them to slip past, I do not breathe them into life, and thus, never give you reason to hear my incantation. And yet you often do. And when you do, you do not reply, you do not say a word, you simply reach out for my hand and in the middle of your sleep, kiss the back of my palm, reasserting, through the medium of touch, this skin-communicated thing that exists between us.

  The morning after your babbling, I woke up befor
e you, a rare feat considering I get my best sleep after dawn, and I went into the living room to find my moleskine. I set it on the table and dug through my purse for the perfect pen, the one with the thin nib that is just the perfect weight, neither too heavy nor too light, to facilitate a quick long-hand session. I made myself a cup of tea, sat down before the marble-top table, and immersed myself in recounting on paper last night’s wine-infused exchange. I was ecstatic. I had spent so much time agonising about this chapter on love, I was getting nowhere, the subject seemed as elusive as ever, and no amount of reading, no amount of theory could illuminate for me its vagaries. And then we stumbled into conversation last night and everything suddenly seemed to come together, language didn’t seem as mucky, and though I knew there was no hope for ordered thought, because the very nature of love resists structural makeovers, I finally had something I could work with.

  You emerged from the bedroom about an hour later. It was now around 8 a.m., and you found me busy transcribing.

  ‘Good morning,’ you said.

  I tugged at your hand, drew you towards me and kissed you.

  ‘What are you up to?’

  ‘Remember that chapter I told you I’d been struggling with? The one on love? Well, last night came as a revelation, and now I have to document it before it gets eclipsed.’

  ‘So you mean I had to perform?’ you said.

  ‘I suppose,’ I said, and returned your impish grin.

  ‘I’m your guinea pig, am I not?’

  ‘Those are your words, not mine,’ I said, citing the same phrase you are known to use when, in jest, I accuse you of crimes like not missing me enough when you’re away, or not caring enough about me.

  Your glance fell on my cup of tea.

  ‘You made yourself tea but didn’t make any for me?’

  ‘I’ve noticed that whenever you wake up before me, you make yourself tea but don’t make any for me, so today I didn’t make any for you,’ I lied. There was a full cup waiting for you in the kettle on the kitchen counter.

  ‘But that’s because you only get up after eight.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean I don’t want tea,’ I teased.

  ‘So if I were to bring you tea, you’d get up?’

  ‘You’ll have to find out. Now give me two minutes, I’ll get you a cup.’

  The next morning I woke up to find your side of the bed vacant. I reached for my phone and checked the time; still 7 a.m. I moved myself to the centre of the bed, so I was in between your side and mine, and fell into a trance-like state of sleep. I woke up to the sound of movement. I could feel your presence hovering over me. I opened my eyes to find you leaning over me, mug in hand. You lowered it towards me, but only so much so that I had to sit up to meet you halfway. You propped a pillow against my back so I could lean against the wall, and then rested the mug within my palms. I said nothing, neither did you. We simply exchanged consensual smiles.

  I knew this was a one-time gesture. You were making a point. I savoured the tea, nonetheless. You’d mixed the roasted leaves with a spoonful of Marguerite Hope, a combination I’m not crazy about, but you’d excitedly ordered two tins of each, and we were stuck with them and they needed to be finished.

  However, within the next two weeks, you served me‘bed tea’ at least six times. Each time felt like a fresh surprise. You also began to pay attention to detail: you’d use the right mug, the one with my name on it, unlike in the beginning, when you’d give me your mug instead. You managed to perfect the brew so it was neither too bitter nor too weak. It is now consistently crisp and smoky.

  Each time, you prop the pillow behind my back and leave the mug in my hands, and I look up at you and smile and recite a sheepish ‘Thank you’. What I want to tell you, in fact, is that this new little gesture that you’ve begun makes me fucking joyous. Not because I enjoy being served, in fact, I usually display much resistance towards being pampered in any way but, in part, because this simple gesture always manages to transport me to my childhood when, on mornings when I was either sick or would wake up with a coughing fit, my mother would come to my bed with either a hot cup of tea or eggnog, place it in my hand, and then leave me to finish it. I would sit up and sip the soothing warm liquid and feel it glide down my throat and into my belly, my mind still caught up in sleep, so that the physical act of sipping and swallowing mingled with the psychological act of dreaming and I would find myself lulled by the liquid heat. I’d then place the glass on the floor and fall back into sleep as if I were under a spell.

  What I thought was a one-time performance has now become a ritual. And perhaps I am still in that stage of instrumental conditioning when I haven’t made the link between your exiting the bed before me and the subsequent offering of morning tea. I still find myself utterly surprised. Part of my astonishment stems from recognising how this sort of gesture isn’t coded into your being. You are not a natural caretaker. In fact, within the dynamics of our relationship, I am the nurturer and you are the one that enjoys being pampered. I am the one giving you hour-long massages and administering to your aches. And I never expected it to be any other way, because I have, since I met you, never wanted to change a thing about you, because for you to change on my account would be for you to no longer be the person I fell in love with, because the who is so indelibly connected with the what, and the what with the who. They are not the distinct categories that Derrida would have us believe them to be. And‘absolute singularity’, too, is a myth.

  It makes me wonder if being in love with someone and being loved by that someone is in fact a process of constant revelations; if one’s ‘being’ is not, in fact, a fixed phenomenological category because at any given time, we are always a subset of multiple selves, never a single, unchanging one. If we are not indeed in a constant state of flux, permanently altering what we believe to be our true selves in relation to the also persistently transforming loved one, we are shedding old habits to acquire new ones, adopting new sensibilities because the previous ones don’t harmonise well enough with the loved one’s eccentricities.

  Our six years together have involved a series of exposures where everyday we come closer to knowing the other’s true core. As we continue our individual transformations, spurred by our relentless contact with each other, we mould ourselves to fit against the other, we conceive of new tricks, fresh devices with which to manipulate the other, we navigate the compulsions of our innate proclivities in order to be better versions of ourselves for the sake of the other, we seek out shreds of wisdom from our slew of previous encounters, so that love becomes an ongoing quest towards perfection.

  Ours is no mediocre love. There is a tragic monumentality to its passion and dimensions. It exists despite reason or logic or convenience, and it continues to consume us, hold us captive to its whims. It is a love that aspires to reach out to the eternal but the realm of its existence is stubbornly yet exquisitely entrenched in the dictates of the everyday. There is no future in sight; there is only the pronounced absence of any. Ours is a present-tense love. And that is reason enough for its sublimity.

  * * *

  3 Intriguingly, in Ali Smith’s Artful, an insightful, genre-bending book about a narrator who is haunted by the ghost of her former lover, who, around the time of his death, was writing a series of lectures about art and literature which the narrator decides to complete in his absence, there’s a passage towards the end of Chapter 3, ‘On Edge’, when an uncanny imagining on her part has suddenly been decoded, the narrator is mystified. It is nighttime and she decides to hit the sack: ‘I got in on my side and put my head back on to the pillow. I stretched an arm and a leg over to your side of the bed. Then I moved my whole self to the middle of the mattress, actually the best place in the bed for a good night’s sleep.’ I would have included this passage in my treatise on our sleep patterns, but I chanced upon Artful much later and was amazed at the significance of that one phrase: the middle of the mattress. It is interesting that when either of us sleep alone in be
d, like when we take our afternoon siestas, we both tend to occupy the centre, as if it were indeed a bridge connecting us to the absent other. As if in the act of occupying it, we could suddenly, magically, be two people at once. It is not as though our identities merge, but it is as though they exist on the edge of each other’s consciousness. Sleep with the absent present.

  4 When I read this out to you, you corrected me, ‘Lead can’t be bulletproof. It’s a very soft metal; in fact, bullets were made out of lead. The ones that are now banned were called dumdum bullets. You should look it up.’ I did. They were called expanding bullets. This is what Wikipedia had to say: ‘An expanding bullet is a bullet designed to expand on impact, increasing in diameter to limit penetration and/or produce a larger diameter wound. It is informally known as Dum-dum or a dumdum bullet. The two typical designs are the hollow-point bullet and the soft-point bullet,’ all of which made me wonder if you were always made of flesh and if cupid’s arrow had lead at its precipice.

  If We Were to Part

  I write this from the seat of a rocking chair in your friend K’s loft, perched at an elevation of approximately 2,146 metres, in the town of Mashobra. The mountains stretch forth, invading the horizon. Below, at their pit, is a valley where I can see little houses propped against the backdrop of grand pine forests. It is seventeen degrees Celsius, so my weather forecast app informs, in addition to the icon it displays of a dark grey cloud milking raindrops. For the moment, the sky isn’t exactly clear, a sheet of clouds looms over, but there are moments when the sun permeates through their fluffiness and shines buoyantly over the mountain peaks. Having spent three days here, I know enough to predict that the skies are temperamental. Yesterday, for instance, when I woke up, the sun dominated the landscape, its rays streaking powerfully through the clouds, drenching the scenery with a precious luminosity. And yet, a few minutes later, I saw the mist parade swiftly through the valley below. Within seconds, it had drawn a veil across earth and sky, and behind this densely white curtain, the clouds had begun to quarrel, while the wind seemed to blow with such force, it felt as though the celestial scaffolding that holds us all in place was about to collapse.