A Handbook For My Lover

by Rosalyn D'Mello

  Earlier in the book, in Chapter 7, ‘I Shall Carry You With

  Me’, Weisbord, who literally records each word that slips through Kamala’s mouth with her handy tape recorder, broaches the subject of the biography. At the time, both writers were supposed to co-create this book that recounts Kamala’s life after her controversial My Story, particularly the circumstances surrounding her conversion to Islam. Eventually, given her weak constitution and her insane schedules and writing commitments, Weisbord realised it would be a solitary endeavour. In this particular chapter, instead of the usual routine wherein Weisbord travels to Kerala, Kamala makes the journey to Canada as Weisbord’s guest. Over tea one morning, Weisbord, slightly perturbed by the situational change, is reassured by an empathetic Kamala that she can indeed ask her anything and she will be militantly honest.

  ‘I came for it, Merrily, I am offering myself,’ she says. ‘In the time I stay here, you can ask me any question and I will answer. Any awkward question.’

  ‘And we can discuss later if the book is published in Kerala,’ Weisbord says.

  This question of the future of the book in progress and its context looms over the biography from its conception. Given the conservative backlash that the Nair writer had to face in the aftermath of My Story, Weisbord is sceptical about the critical reception of this memoir-of-a-friendship in India.

  ‘It’s just that it will make things a bit awkward for me. I also have a family, a sister, brother-in-law, all of them puritanical, not trusting me enough. I keep quiet about my work,’ Kamala says.

  ‘I know too well what she means about upsetting family, having censored myself much more than she. I ask if she thinks all memoir writers have the same problem,’ Weisbord writes.

  ‘A writer moves away from family, old relationships, very far with the speed of a falling star,’ Kamala replies. ‘Otherwise, the writer is destroyed, and only the member of the family remains: the mother, sister, daughter, wife. The writer at some point must ask, “Do I want to be a well-loved member of the family? Or do I want to be a good writer?” You can’t be both at the same time. These days when you are with the children and are being a very good mother, you cease to be the writer. You feel repelled by the pen and the paper, which are definitely going to come between you and your loved ones.’

  Kamala persists with this unorthodox strand of thought: ‘The writer might fall in love with someone, she might have a love affair, but if she becomes a total writer within that phase, the relationship will be subtly destroyed.’

  ‘Because the writer can give all of herself only to that task of writing, she will have to write against her loved one, put him under the microscope, dissect him, analyze his thoughts, his words. After a while he is no longer the man you held in your arms at night. You have cut him into little slivers, everything is burst open, he is all seeds and pulp and juice, all spread out in little bits on your writer’s table. After that you can’t go to his arms the same way.’

  ‘If you are very wise, you try to conceal from the loved one that you know everything about him.’

  We work in different mediums, you and I. You see through a glass darkly, while I try to turn flesh into word. What unites us is a shared sensibility towards the process of archiving. You collect fragments of moments that you deem significant enough to be revisited later. As do I. Except you rely on the vicissitudes of light4 while I depend on the vagaries of my imagination. Though I don’t write fiction, try as I may—I find it tiresome to invent characters and plot lines—it is through my imagination that I transform everything I experience into the written word. We are both fighting against the consuming black holes of memory and forgetting; recording, intuitively, all that we know must be memorialised.

  In her classic treatise On Photography, a book even you have read, Susan Sontag puts it beautifully: All photographs are mementos. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.

  In our attempts to preserve, for imagined eternity, relics of ephemeral moments, we both invade the lives of others. I cut you open on the surface of my writing desk; you pry your way into the private moments of the everyday and steal their souls.

  To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have, it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of someone, it is a subliminal murder, a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.

  How do we define the centrality of each other’s being when both of us find ourselves solely committed to the supposed purposelessness of art? When experience forms the core of our individual practices, when our personalities are so central to how we perceive the world, and possibly each other?

  You’ve often accused me of being two selves—one who is rendered speechless in the throes of a tempestuous conversation, and the other who, after the moment has passed, is able to return to it through the medium of words and frame a frightfully articulate response that betrays any previous exhibition of astonishment.

  ‘Why is it that you are only able to show your strength in your writing? Why can’t you be like that when you’re speaking to me?’ you once asked me.

  I found an answer for you in an extract from Volume 1 (1934-35) of Anais Nin’s diaries: The writer is the duelist who never fights at the stated hour, who gathers up an insult, like another curious object, a collector’s item, spreads it out on his desk later, and then, engages in a duel with it verbally. Some people call it weakness. I call it postponement. What is weakness in the man becomes a quality in the writer. For he preserves, collects what will explode later in his work. That’s why the writer is the loneliest man in the world, because he lives, fights, dies, is reborn always alone, all his roles are played behind a curtain. He is an incongruous figure.

  Despite your complaints about having been reduced to a guinea pig, you have enjoyed this process of being documented; this role reversal where you are the focus of a lens and not the person looking through it. And I admire the grace with which you have surrendered yourself to my gaze; the way you have ‘offered’ yourself to me as a muse. Within these pages you are the one under observation; you are my subject.

  When I brought this to your attention, I asked whether this kind of dynamic had been explored in photography. You placed a book in front of me. Portrait, by a Japanese photographer, Seiichi Furuya. On the cover was a haunting frontal black-and-white photograph of a woman who, I would learn when I browsed through the book, was Christine, Furuya’s wife and muse. I went through the text, at the end, by Monika Faber.

  As Alfred Stieglitz portrayed his life partner, Georgia O’Keeffe, in her endless photographic images, so did Seiichi Furuya with his wife Christine. The only difference lies within the fact that their deep relationship spanned only seven years before her untimely death. In these desperately intimate portraits, the viewer follows Furuya’s growing understanding of the many sides of his deceased wife but also opens a window into understanding himself. As stated by the artist, ‘As I see her, take photographs of her, look at her in the pictures, I find myself.’ An amazing example of the camera’s ability to portray the soul of both its subject and the photographer.

  I also stumbled upon this revealing line by Stieglitz from a letter he wrote to O’Keeffe in 1918—‘All I want is to preserve that wonderful something which so purely exists between us.’

  I read Furuya’s statement within Faber’s text as something of a confession, and I speak of confession in a Catholic sense where contained in the admittance is a trace of guilt, of having committed a sin. Going through Furuya’s photographs one cannot but be overwhelmed by the absolute potency of the act of looking, the shameless intensity of photographing his wife in all her naked and clothed glory, of seeking her out in private moments, prying on her, and recording these a
cts of intimacy. You imagine him so besotted by her that any trace of light falling on her skin is enough to inflame his artistic frenzy. His gaze upon her is redolent of love. You imagine that this is about her, about immortalising her beauty and her vulnerability, her fragility, her mortality, and then he confesses that as he takes photographs of her, looks at her in the pictures after she is gone, he finds himself!

  In another note, in 1979, he reiterates: If you consider the taking of photographs to be in a sense a matter of fixing time and space, then this work—the documenting of the life of one human being—is exceptionally thrilling … in facing her, in photographing her, and looking at her in photographs, I also see and discover ‘myself’.

  In the case of Stieglitz, it was O’Keeffe who survived him, and it was she who curated for publication the first set of photographs of herself taken by him. ‘It was the person looked at, not the person looking at who found her vis-a-vis in years or decades of old pictures,’ Faber remarks.

  In 1978, O’Keeffe had this to say about the experience of revisiting those portraits. ‘When I look over the photographs Stieglitz took of me—some of them more than sixty years ago—I wonder who that person is. It is as if in my life I have lived many lives.’

  Faber assesses O’Keefe’s statement: Due to the long time that passed, there is a gap between the experience she’s made herself and the outward expression; her idea of her own state of being at a certain moment that is long past, and the evidence provided by the picture do not correspond to each other. The absent creator of the photographs, Alfred Stieglitz, cannot be asked about these pictures as a life partner, he remains first and foremost an artist.

  I must not pretend it is you alone I have been documenting. This handbook is, to remind you of the epigraph at the beginning of this handbook, a Barthesian version of a dedication. An episode of language which accompanies any amorous gift whether real or projected, and more generally, every gesture, whether actual or interior, by which the subject dedicates something to the loved being.

  Which makes me the subject, and you the recipient of my offering. And yet, this dedication would have been impossible had you not first made an offering of yourself, had you not submitted yourself to my scrutiny, had I not been permitted to archive our exchanges, make relics of our intimacies.

  The initial impulse, to chronicle for you a simple history of past lovers and a map of my body with places to visit, has changed. The need for either has been rendered redundant. This handbook has become uncontainable, it has assumed a life of its own, as if, in the act of writing, some force external to me was moving my fingers in directions I didn’t originally chart out, navigating me through twists and turns I’d in fact hoped to avoid.

  ‘Is it all true?’ X had asked me over the phone after having read the first ten chapters.

  ‘I’m afraid it is,’ I said, ‘all of it,’ not sure whether this was what he wanted to hear.

  We have both been implicated; we have both been inscribed.

  Somewhere along the way, your status changed from ‘inconvenience’ to inevitability; from ‘a disruption to my state of being’, to its elemental constituent.

  Embossed within these pages are fragments of our individual truths. Mine were revealed to me in the process of writing. Sift through the margins and you’ll find yourself too.

  * * *

  4 I love how you once put it, in the middle of a video interview you were doing with a newfound relative. He, very overtly Christian in his beliefs, asked you if you believed in religion. Nervously, you said, ‘I’m a photographer, I work with light, the sun is my God.’

  Retreat

  During an interview with a religious, newfound Burmese relative, you were asked if you believed in God.

  ‘I’m a photographer. I believe in the sun,’ you had said instinctively. ‘It comes up unfailingly every morning,’ you explained, suggesting, almost, that the sun, with the certainty of its presence, was God enough for you. While religious evangelists would argue that the sun exists because ‘God’ exists, you would probably say that light exists because the sun exists, and that God’s existence is irrelevant to that of the sun.

  You are not a man of faith.

  Faith is unconditional. It is not contingent on certainty. As the resurrected Christ said to his disciple Thomas, who refused to believe he had appeared to the others, not until he could witness first-hand the stigmata left by the nails, put his finger into those dented pockets, and thrust his hand into Christ’s side, ‘Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing.’ When Thomas finally did believe, Christ said unto him, ‘Thomas, because thou has seen Me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.’5

  You may believe in the sun when it isn’t shining, but your belief comes from knowledge, not faith.

  Until very recently, I did not have faith in you.

  ‘How does it end,’ you had asked me after my reading at Ziro.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I replied. ‘I think they part ways. There are last words exchanged. She asks him to remember her. It’s not a request, it’s an invocation, an incantation.’

  Until the sixteenth century, when Copernicus first proposed the heliocentric model suggesting that the earth revolved around a statutory sun, mankind believed otherwise. The Ptolemaic system governed philosophy. The Earth was assumed to be the orbital centre for all other celestial bodies. Until Copernicus’ model came to be accepted, the phenomena of sunrise and sunset must have been perceived as mythical, just like rainbows were seen as a covenant between God and man. That we continue to speak of the sun as moving across the horizon, as rising in the East and setting in the West, is an indication of how much currency we place on our perception of cosmic phenomena, when in fact our entire experience of solar light is an optical illusion.

  The sun doesn’t actually rise or set. The illusion is caused by our vantage point; by our being situated within a rotating reference frame.

  ‘What are you working on?’ you asked me last week.

  ‘I’m trying to understand sunrise and sunset.’

  ‘What’s there to understand? It’s about the quality of light. It’s that time when the sun is parallel to the horizon. There’s a lowness in the angle, there’s a warmth of colour.’

  ‘I’m trying to fathom its mythic dimensions. The fact that it’s an illusion, and yet it really does seem like the sun is either rising or sinking.’

  ‘Well, doesn’t it have a fairytale trope to it?’ you said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That whole idea of walking into the sunset being a metaphor for a happy ending …’

  ‘I didn’t think of that! You’re right!’ I said.

  I looked it up later. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, to ‘ride, drive, walk, etc. (off) into the sunset’ is ‘to begin a new, happy life at the end of a story’.

  I even found this quote by George Lucas: ‘If the boy and girl walk off into the sunset hand-in-hand in the last scene, it adds ten million to the box office.’

  I spent at least five hours this weekend rediscovering the 1995 BBC-produced episodic version of Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. It remains one of the most faithful adaptations of Jane Austen’s epic novel about Mrs Bennet’s unenviable predicament of having to find suitable husbands for each of her five daughters in a time when women were considered property and were therefore not allowed to inherit any. Since you were away in China, we resumed our WhatsApp thread. ‘My head is so filled with thoughts of Mr Darcy,’ I said over a text. ‘Mr Rochester, Mr Knightley, and Mr Darcy … my idea of the perfect man has always been a combination of these three literary personalities,’ I explained. ‘As for me, I always aspired, however unsuccessfully, to be a combination of Rosalind from Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Elizabeth Bennet.’ When we spoke over Skype the next day, you asked in an grouchy, over-possessive tone
: ‘Who is this Mr Darcy? Is he a real person or a character from a book?’ I was both amused and amazed. ‘He’s a fictional character,’ I said. ‘You come closest to being him … Have you never heard of him?’

  ‘I don’t read, so I don’t know,’ you explained, sheepishly.

  If you were here, across the table from me, I would have told you how I think Pride and Prejudice is perhaps one of my favourite fairytales. You would have asked me why I thought it was a fairytale. I would have told you it has all the elements of one: a fairy godmother-like personage (Mrs Gardiner), an evil stepmother prototype (Lady Catherine), along with an evil stepsister-like character (Miss Bingley), with Darcy as Prince Charming. Except Darcy is not conventionally charming in any way, and Elizabeth is too level-headed to believe in happy endings, at least not for herself. She doubts Darcy from the very beginning, even though he is taken by her not long after they first meet. His fatal flaw is his pride. Hers is her prejudice. It is only when each of the two lovers has learned to swallow these ego-impelled weaknesses that they can be equals.

  The line that stayed with me, though, after reviewing the film and re-reading the book was what Elizabeth says to the irate Lady Catherine, Darcy’s aunt, who, irked by rumours about Darcy’s impending proposal to Lizzie, which would go against his intended destiny—marrying her daughter—rushes to communicate her dissatisfaction about the affair. When Lizzie refuses to promise to reject any proposal Darcy may make, she calls her an ‘unfeeling, selfish girl.’

  ‘Do you not consider that a connection with you must disgrace him in the eyes of everybody?’ she says.

  ‘Lady Catherine, I have nothing farther to say. You know my sentiments.’

  ‘You are then resolved to have him?’

  ‘I have said no such thing. I am only resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me.’