Love Story #1 to 14

by Annie Zaidi

  It is a new feeling. All her life, she has felt lonely, even in her parents’ house as a toddler. Then school, and later, college. It was all a blur of faces. Faces you couldn’t fully trust. Even after she moved out into her own apartment, even with a boyfriend, one who smokes and reads books too, even then she was lonely. Until now.

  It is hard to figure out but she doesn’t waste much time trying to figure this out. She doesn’t have any time these days. All day and half the night is spent in the invisible company of someone to whom she talks incessantly. She pours herself out in cascades – torments, confessions, trivia. Her lips do not move, but she talks and talks.

  Then one day, her boyfriend returns. He has been away longer than he intended. It has been ten days since they last met and when he calls her, he wonders if she will even take the call. When he hears her voice, he is relieved. Still, he is afraid of asking if he could come over. Cautiously, he mentions that he will be coming into the city. In the evening. He asks if she is free. To meet. Wherever she likes.

  She smiles in a tired way and he can hear that smile over the phone. She says, ‘Come home.’

  When he arrives, he is surprised to see her smoking. Secretly, he is rather pleased, though he makes a few admonitory noises because he feels he should show some concern for her lungs. He wonders if she has started smoking because she is unhappy. Could she have been missing his presence, the air hanging heavy with smoke? He is about to ask if she missed him, but she has other questions to ask.

  ‘About that case? What’s going on with that riot thing?’

  He tells her. There is enough evidence to nail the MLA’s brother, maybe even to implicate the son, because now the police have started to cast their nets in earnest. A lot of buried gunk is rising to the surface.

  ‘But they will not get him for murder. Even if the charge-sheet is filed, it won’t lead to a conviction. Witnesses will not come forward. It is always like that.’

  She glowers. ‘A man gave up his life to protect those stupid people! Why will they not say the truth?’

  The boyfriend strokes her hair. ‘The dead are dead. The witnesses are still alive and they are afraid of dying.’

  She bites her lips as if she is about to cry. She darkly mutters – something about how certain people deserve to die, and maybe they will die in the next riot, and then they’ll regret it.

  The boyfriend sighs. ‘This is what we suffer – this culture of fear. Dishonesty. Corruption. We deserve it because we won’t change it. People get what they want, after all, if they want it badly enough.’

  She is startled. She looks up at the boyfriend. ‘If they want it badly enough?’ she repeats.

  ‘Yes. I don’t know. I heard it somewhere. It feels like the truth. We’ve been talking to the riot victims. Everyone at the office has been working hard. We are asking them to put up a bit of a fight, join protests, file petitions. This time I just listened without talking back. Sometimes it seems like they just want someone to bitch to. Someone who will stick his neck out for them. They don’t want to stick their own necks out. No wonder the country is like this. Anyone can do what he wants, gets away with murder, and the victims . . .’ he trails off.

  She is silent. This evening, she has noticed that the boyfriend keeps drifting into silence. He has started to hesitate before he makes large, quick statements.

  She has never known him to hesitate. He seemed to think he had the right answer to everything, that it was his duty to speak loud and long. It annoyed her. She had begun to retreat from his talk. Today, he is absent-minded. He touches her hair. She lets him.

  ‘Has something happened?’ she asks.

  He shakes his head. There is another long silence.

  ‘You know what I did?’ he says finally. She waits. He goes on. ‘I went to meet an old cop, retired fellow. He’s the father of this officer who got shot recently.’

  She has stiffened slightly. She watches herself, careful to breathe evenly, look steadily at the boyfriend lest she betray herself. But he is not looking at her.

  ‘I found out that he lives right here, in this city. So I went to meet the old man. Don’t know why I went. I just felt . . . I don’t know. He was an only son. The old man, he’s close to seventy. We got into an argument. About political philosophy. He kept saying that anarchy was a lazy argument made by lazy people who don’t have the strength of their convictions. I argued back. We, the boys at the university, we have been anarchists for years. We all have strong convictions. We even try to do our bit to make the world better. I felt insulted when he said anarchists were lazy. Then this old man pointed out that we were calling for a movement, radical change. I’ve been filing petitions. It was all contradictory. Anarchy is the opposite of a social movement, which is supposed to be organized, planned, coherent. I’m not an anarchist. He made me re-think. Lots of things. We talked a long time. Nice old man. He told me to stick to academics. Forget about people in villages. He said I shouldn’t try to help them. ‘Let them come to you for help, or they will never appreciate your help.’ I keep thinking about what he said.’

  ‘What else did he say?’ she asks.

  ‘He didn’t want to talk about his son or the riot. I tried to express sympathy. Say something appropriate. But he kept changing the subject. He kept talking about politics, police reforms. It was weird. I wanted to listen to him. I also wanted to resist him. Then . . .’ the boyfriend hesitates. His words are stuck. Difficult words perhaps. She waits until he can pick out all the words he needs, ravel them into a neat confession.

  ‘At the end of our talk, I felt like I was being broken up on the inside. Some unseen force. Don’t know how. Maybe because he had lost so much. Or because he’s older than my own dad. It felt like all those things that make me who I am were being ripped out of their places, being rearranged. Like I was turning into a new man. Still the same, but so different. Like something that belongs to the old man has leached into my system. His voice . . . or just the air in the place, you know? You know?’

  She takes a deep breath. He is staring out of the window, blinking gently at the evening. She reaches out to touch his head, but then she changes her mind. Instead, she draws closer and puts her arms around him.

  He is too surprised to react. She has never made the first move before. All touch came from him.

  ‘I have decided,’ she is saying.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I am going to fatten you up. You are too thin. You need to look authoritative and in these villages and small towns, nobody takes you seriously if you look like a starved student. I am going to start right now. Pizza tonight?’

  The boyfriend smiles uncertainly, nods. After she has called the pizza delivery people, she returns to his side.

  He puts his arms around her. ‘It’s not going to work. I walk too much. I will never be fat.’

  She says, ‘Buy a bike. You should have one. I think you would look dashing on a bike. Sunglasses. Jeans. Brown ankle-length boots. What do you think?’

  He teases, ‘But what will you do if I becoming too dashing?’

  She bites her lips. ‘You’ll see what I do then.’

  His hands are restless. He seems to be hesitating. Then suddenly, he reaches into his pocket and brings out a velvet bag that he places in her palm. It is a tiny vial of perfume.

  ‘What? For me?’ She raises her brows. ‘Not books?’

  He has only gifted her books so far and they have usually been bought second-hand. She hasn’t complained, but the joke carries its barb. He swallows hard.

  ‘No more books for you, ever again. You don’t care enough for books.’

  He thinks she might take offence. But she only puts out her tongue at him.

  While they wait for the pizza to arrive, she brings out a nail file and begins to fix his ragged nails. ‘You are a changed man,’ she says. ‘Why don’t we make you a neat one too? In fact, why don’t you take off the beard? Maybe just keep a moustache. It will suit you, I think. Have you ever kept
a moustache before?’

  The boyfriend stares at her bent head. She goes on prattling, jumping from one topic to the other, not expecting him to reply.

  ‘Should I soak rajma? Will you stay the night? Then we can have a brunch of rajma–rice tomorrow. It gets too much to cook so much for just me. Should I show you my thesis? I’m thinking of abandoning it. It doesn’t make sense. But everyone at the university is saying, PhDs never make sense. It is just something you do to become a professor. Maybe I should try to get into a paper or magazine. It takes too many years to become a professor. Why don’t you become a professor? One of us should become a professor. What will you get me for my birthday? It is next month. I won’t let you forget it. And no books, please. I have wanted to tell you forever. Our taste in books is too different. I’ll buy my own. You have to get me a dress. But you won’t know what to buy. You must take me along when you buy it. Do you know what they’ve done to the canteen? Let’s have dinner at the canteen tomorrow. You’ll see.’

  By the time she finishes his nails, he thinks he understands. The distance has been good for them. She must have been missing him.

  ‘Have you been lonely?’ he asks.

  She meets his eyes evenly. Slowly, she shakes her head. She folds his hands into her own.

  ‘When you are in love,’ she says, ‘you are never lonely.’

  LOVE STORY # 12

  (aka The one that tumbled out of the balcony)

  It didn’t change my life. Lives don’t get changed that way.

  Or perhaps they do. Some lives must change on some balconies – the sort of balconies that lace beautiful apartments with wide windows, where the frame isn’t set in cheap metal that rusts in the sea-air. Not the wooden sort that swell up. The sort where kites fall after they start dropping out of the sky. But not all apartments have such balconies.

  I have been in houses where the glass slides smooth as a knife through April butter, where windows fit the panes perfectly so that there is no room for even a millimetre of discontent. In such houses, the afternoon sits tidily like a hundred-gram pat of Amul butter with its white-and-blue paper intact. Unmolested, the day stretches towards large mirrors that throw back a yellowing sky at the horizon.

  In such houses, the doors are aligned with the windows and there is a lot of glass everywhere, so that you not only get cross-ventilated, you also get a sense of ambition and connectedness. A feeling that all things are hooped one within the other, and that the house you live in is all-containing, and everything that is outside is peripheral. Early in the morning, when you make coffee and feel alone because nobody else has woken up yet, even then you feel connected to yourself, because you see bits of yourself bouncing off the glass and polished surfaces. And you feel safer than you really are.

  Those houses are built by fancy architects, the sort of people who might actually live inside such a house. That makes sense, doesn’t it? That a house should be designed by the sort of person who would have to live inside it.

  But our houses aren’t like that. Not in this part of the city. Windows and balconies, especially, let us down. There’s something gritty, grotty, grungy about our railings and grills and barred windows. Around here, home-owners think they are quite posh if they manage to put white marble tiles on the floor and black granite slabs in the kitchen. Now the new fashion is to have walls in different colours – children’s bedrooms are bright purple or neon green, or just one of the walls in the living room is painted a deep ochre or burnt orange. But our balconies can never be posh. People don’t spend much time standing around in balconies, I guess.

  I knew, of course, that life wouldn’t change this way, not through sitting in the balcony all day long. But I did just that. Hours and hours. Fresh air, sunlight, whispering amaltas, starlight balm. This must be good for me, how could it not be? That’s what I told them at home. Him too.

  There was a time when he used to come over often. He liked to sit on the balcony. He smoked, and my flatmate didn’t want anyone smoking inside the house. But even after the flatmate moved out, he preferred to sit outdoors.

  I was not a balcony person until then. Balconies made me nervous, even depressed. They made me think of the bigness of big cities and the smallness of me. Just take a look at that sprawl. Terrace and window, terrace and window, window under window over window next to window. Lights on, lights off, lights dim, curtain, no curtain, baby, servant, no servant, voices. Sometimes utter silence. Sometimes flickering television screens, some of them so large that you could watch the cricket match from across the street, if you just peeked out from your balcony into their living rooms. This whole thing was repeated in the next building – window under window over window next to window, lights on, lights off, lights dim. And then in the building to the right, and to the left, and the buildings further off and so on and on and on. People, people, people. Light, dark, light, silence. It can be depressing, you know.

  Just the thought that there was the same cricket match on the TV in every other house would depress me. Then, sometimes, loud voices would slip out of certain windows. Other loud voices would echo down the street. Every fourth or fifth window would have a head hanging out to see what the fuss was about. Balconies would fill up – the carnival of the congenitally curious. The ones who stayed indoors thought they could accurately guess what the fuss was about. Why bother to poke your head out of the window and into someone else’s business? I resented it all – the ones who came out into the balconies, the ones who didn’t. All of them.

  But after he left me, I started to spend a lot of time in the balcony. I would smoke a cigarette sometimes. Perhaps I was clinging to the ashes of what was gone. Perhaps it was a way of smoking him out of my body.

  My brother would call and ask me what I was doing, and I would tell the truth – nothing. Absolutely nothing. I’m sitting. In the balcony. He would ask what I intended to accomplish by sitting in the balcony. I would say – nothing.

  My not stepping out of the house worried him. My not hoping to accomplish things worried him. My overnight moulting into an aunty-type who lowered baskets on a rope to buy essentials from the vegetable man and the milk-bread-eggs lady and the fried snacks man. The family called up and joked about muscular atrophy.

  I was the only person who wasn’t worried about me. Everything leads to something, right? Even if it’s just muscular atrophy. Something was bound to happen to me soon.

  But I worried the family so much that I began to lie. I said, I took my notebook out into the fresh air. I said, the open sky helped me think.

  They may not have believed me, but they wanted to. So they said alright, good. Write. Get yourself a new way of thinking.

  What they meant was: Don’t think the way you were thinking when you allowed that man into your life. They worried I’d latch onto another unsuitable man. The sort who didn’t want to do anything much, go anywhere much. Just wanted to sit around and smoke cigarettes in the balcony.

  He and I had sat together, poking our heads into business that was none of ours. He would make random remarks about dogs, streets, hollow voices, about the primeval temptation to jump each time you stood in a balcony, several floors above the ground.

  I hadn’t thought about jumping. But once he said it, I couldn’t help thinking about it.

  He never tried to jump, though. He just kept saying it. Perhaps it was a way of hosing down his invisible ghosts, driving them back with small threats. Then we would go inside and forget about what he had said.

  Once, I tried to tell him about the time I jumped off a running train, but his face told me that he didn’t want to hear. He was struggling to pull together some considerate words, something that would acknowledge the fragility of the moment but would also discourage me from saying too much. He didn’t want to know. So I changed the subject.

  But usually, he was hungry for my stories. Like a clever child, he would ask questions that made me launch into stories. He would prod. Then? Then what happened?

&nbs
p; The strange thing was that he didn’t want to live my stories. You can do that if you listen closely to the storyteller. Instead, he seemed to be looking for something with which he could hold me at a distance. Like when someone tells you their kid is bulimic, and then one day you meet the kid, and you wonder how it got to be that way because the kid is so perfect in every way, and the mother confesses that she was bulimic too as a teenager and that she watched each morsel the kid ate. When you listen to her story, you are tempted to shrug, and start off a tangent – say something about media responsibility and bombardment of photoshopped images and how it takes a lot to fight skinny culture – but at the same time you grow angry. You resent that mother. You know you are being asked to suck at some invisible wound. If you did, your mouth would be full of her greed and fear and pain. So you purse your lips, and you refuse to drink up her story. You tell yourself that you now see why you were never quite at ease with her. But you reach across the table and pat her hand, because she is human, and you like to think of yourself as her friend.

  He used to listen to my stories that way. That hand-patting way. When he talked about social conditioning and the struggle to be your own person and the inevitable shattering of the soul, I knew he was distracting me. And detaching himself from me. I felt cheated all the time because this wasn’t how I treated him. When I heard his stories, I sucked at his wounds.

  I wanted all of him, because people don’t come without their wounds. If you want them whole, you have to take their grief into your own blood. So it was alright. But he just wanted a small bite of me. Stories about innocent losses, little deceptions, great-grandfathers. The best ones. He wanted me to laugh easily, because he was trying to please. He needed someone with an ability to listen so he didn’t need to spell everything out. Someone who would know his mind at a glance. I was that person. But people don’t come without their wounds, and so finally, he didn’t want me.

  The pain kept piling up. Knocking on his door caused pain; cooking for him caused pain; eating a meal he had cooked for me caused pain; standing beside him on the balcony caused pain. My threshold for pain grew. In a way, I was even happy.