If only you’d left me your keys …

… we wouldn’t be in this mess. Dust-lined floors, walls featuring dense networks of cobwebs resembling migrant settlements, withered bedcovers, frayed carpets, balconies colonised by pigeons and their prolific droppings. And rats. Four of them scurrying around playing hide-and-seek.

I wish I were exaggerating.

In your defence, not all of this is the consequence of your recent three-month long absence. The ceiling in the front bathroom and the store room has been in a state of near collapse ever since my first visit three years ago, and the decades-old paint has always been peeling off bit by silent bit. With every subsequent visit new splotches of cement have been exposed.

Ever since I can remember, your house has worn an air of ruin.

Though I’m glad to see you, I do not feel any sympathy. In fact, my body is still reeling from yesterday’s chores. I’d stopped by to check on your car. The cover had blown off and was cocooned in muck. It couldn’t be salvaged. The staircase leading to your house was caked in an inch-thick layer of dust, and a dog had left you a present right outside your door.

I bought a broom, borrowed a dustpan from your neighbour and swept each filthy stair. When I was done, I asked for a bucket of water, which I took downstairs so I could wash your car that had been showered with leaves and flowers and dust and bore footprints of the rain that had sputtered all over the hood. Then I walked to the market and bought you a carton full of groceries that weighed at least five kilos. The market was half a kilometre away and my back bore the brunt of the weight.

I didn’t mind. I was too ecstatic about your return. I’d fantasised about it for weeks. I’d be leaning against the glass walls of the arrivals lounge, peering through to catch a glimpse of you before you made your exit, before you could spot me. I’d be wearing a cleavage-revealing white dress; my hair would be left loose. My eyes would be lit up with joy. Finally, you’d see me and move your trolley towards me and pause. I’d fling my arms around your neck and draw you closer and not let go for a few standstill minutes. I imagined it vividly as a shot from a Kar Wai film—the rest of the world in restless motion as the two of us stood still.

Turned out you spotted me first while I was still unaware of you. I continued to peer through the glass door until I sensed your presence and turned to find you walking towards me. I hugged you with the abandon of an orphaned child. You held me for just a few seconds and let me kiss you on your cheek the way you are wont to do in the company of strangers, and then you drew away. ‘Let’s go home,’ you said. As you walked ahead, you lit a cigarette and revelled in your overdue nicotine high.

I knew we’d be walking into a mess. I’d anticipated it and had carried a pair of shabby clothes so I could get down to housework. But I hadn’t imagined the extent of the ruin. We left the luggage by the entrance and surveyed the catastrophe. Scattered grain, bits of broken glass on the kitchen floor, and a trail of footprints bore testimony to the presence of rats. I unlocked the door to the balcony and at least ten pigeons were petrified into flight. The vessels I’d washed three months ago were coated with dust. The fridge, though empty, suffered from stale breath.

I couldn’t believe you’d rather abandon your house to the elements than surrender it to my care.

One hour later, I’m standing in the midst of your mess, at my wit’s end, broom in one hand, dustpan in the other, surgical mask over my nose and mouth, trying hard not to curse you, trying hard to revive my excitement over your return that’s fading with every newly discovered scene of destruction. I find myself muttering under my breath. This wasn’t what I had in mind when we met.

How and when did your mess become my mess?

I wish I had never met you. You’ve been nothing but an inconvenience.

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

I tried to resist you. I attempted an escape the first time I found myself consumed by the weight of gravity. By then you’d already interfered with the rhythm of my heartbeat so that my blood began to thin and my arteries had to work overtime to contain the flood. I confronted you about my strange condition. You said, with the air of a professional, that I was exhibiting an early symptom of that peculiar disease called love. I was confused. Last I checked I’d bulletproofed and bubble-wrapped my heart so that I’d be immune from such infections. I told you flatly that this had to end.

‘You mean you’re scared and you’d rather run away?’ you jeered.

I held you personally responsible for my fall from grace.

You conned me. You were calculating, like a criminal. Stealthily you made inroads into my routine so that steadily, the day was no longer complete until you’d appeared in my thoughts. Before I knew it, you’d made yourself indispensable.

You were an aberration to the narrative of men I’d known. You were older. Grouchier. Celebrated. Indifferent to my beauty or lack thereof. Self-assured to a fault and yet unexpectedly vulnerable. A man with impeccable taste. So unabashedly and unapologetically yourself.

You were nothing but a disruption to my state of being. You awakened in me something more dangerous than hunger, more desperate than fervour, more potent than hatred.

This fit of madness is still at its height. Ovid was right when he was dispensing advice in his handbook, The Cure for Love: ‘It is difficult to stop it mid-career.’ I’ve tried. Religiously I wait for the day when it will all be undone. When the spell is lifted and I’m no longer consumed by you and you’re no longer obsessed with me and we can both return to the way we were before we met—un-entangled, uninhibited by love, committed to no one but ourselves.

There are no other likely endings. This affair of ours refuses to surrender to the trappings of marriage or even the non-committal everydayness of a live-in. You’d drive me up the wall with your apprehensions about space since you can’t seem to trust yourself to leave me your house key.

This was doomed from the beginning.

I transgressed all norms when I chose to associate myself with you. I’ve been punished for my deviance. I’ve no choice but to put up with this exile between your home and mine, forced to live between boundaries, forced to relinquish every possibility of permanence. Your house can at best be a makeshift home for me. In your absence, when you travel the world with your cameras documenting lives in transition, I live in my rented apartment where I learn to temper my longing for you and my absurd nostalgia for a home and a life we can never share.

Like lovers without a destination, we seem fated to seek refuge in the transient.

We tried to address this once, when H seemed to want me.

‘Consider it,’ you said. ‘I’m always away. At least he’s around.’

I thought about it, but my spirit wasn’t willing, neither was my flesh. I wrote to you categorically: ‘Just because you’re always away doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to have someone to come home to,’ I said, digging my own grave, innocently etching my obituary into unforgetting stone—‘Someone he could come home to’, it would read.

I didn’t fathom the extent of the mess I’d inherit through that declaration.

And yet, even in retrospect, I can see how it was inevitable.

I’ve made my peace with the broom. Each room, I’ve figured, ought to be swept at least twice before I proceed to swab the floors. We’ve negotiated a strategy; you’d vacuum the cobwebs while I took care of the surfaces. You’d clean the toilets and the bathtub while I contended with the pigeon poo. All the vessels would have to be washed and baptised in potassium permanganate to vanquish any trace of rat prints. We agreed I’d do the dishes if you’d tackle the bedspreads and the clothes.

As I waged war with dust, I wondered if you were exploiting my youth. If you were taking advantage of my supple muscles and my capacity to care. But then I wondered if I was exploiting you, mining you for material without allowing you the privilege of being a muse.

I rant about your house when in fact I’m in love with every square-foot of it, not because it houses you but because it is such an undeniable extension of you. I love your kingdom of ruins, the looming towers of newspapers stacked upon newspapers, the bottles of single malt, green and gleaming and empty, more than there ought to be for a man with a fatty liver. Six ashtrays—two makeshift, the ruins of old music blaring from your centuries-old speakers, the fossils buried under cartons of photographs, the pen stands filled with pens with rusty nibs and dried up ink, the razor-edges of blunt scissors, the squirrel’s nest by the bathroom window, so fluffy I have to resist the urge to touch it, the stains on your marble floors that have been around for years, the kitchen lined with memories of past loves, past loneliness, your cupboard a collection of clothes you refuse to surrender.

You’re a hoarder in denial.

To the world you’re unattached, but within these walls is all that is precious, all the ghosts from the past you can’t seem to exorcise. And yet, try as I may, I cannot find traces of other women. No abandoned bangles, no hair clip, no loose strands of hair save mine, no bindi stuck against the frame of the mirror.

If an archaeologist were to survey these ruins, he’d have to bring in a collegium of scholars and carbon-dating machines. I wonder if they’d find what I’ve found, remnants of your heart beating wildly with a rhythm that hasn’t yet lost its pace, despite your cynicism, despite your bitterness. A smouldering bit of bloody flesh that refuses to rot, refuses to ash, a thing of terrible beauty, immense and glorious, full of depth and soul. Unbroken still.

Unlike mine.

Perhaps it is love that dictates my dedication. I’ve never quite admitted to being in love with you, nor have you admitted to being in love with me. We’ve left it as something yet to be understood and acknowledged. We haven’t yet made an ideal of it. We haven’t yet made a mess of it. The only evidence we have is encrypted in the language of gestures.

As my body melts into sweat, as sweat mingles with dust, as heat and dust collide, as the floor reveals itself with each stroke of broom and cloth, I’m convinced that love isn’t many-splendoured or virtuous. It is a dirty, beleaguered thing. I wonder if Jimmy Porter, the angry young man in John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, was right when he told his wife Alison, ‘It’s no good fooling about with love, you know. You can’t fall into it like a soft job without dirtying your hands. It takes muscle and guts. If you can’t bear the thought of messing up your nice, tidy soul, you better give up the whole idea of life and become a saint, because you’ll never make it as a human being.’

Day two.

It was evening all afternoon. It was raining and it was about to rain. My back had given way after all the sprucing. I took a pill and fell asleep on the bed while you worked in your study. I woke up and made a pot of Castleton.

‘What else can I do?’ I asked.

‘If you could just wave a magic wand and make all of this go away? Like in the movies, just a single swoosh and everything that was messy is suddenly in order,’ you said.

‘You’re confusing me with Mary Poppins,’ I said and smiled and meant it.

Three hours later, when we reconvened on the marble-top table-for-two for some single malt, you were amazed by the transformation.

‘I see you waved your magic wand,’ you said. ‘Are you working?’ you asked.

‘Yes, I was writing about the rats.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you told me to.’

Last evening two rats had walked into your trap. You’d called me to see for myself. I was afraid if I made conversation with them, I might feel the urge to adopt them.

‘Come on, say hello,’ you said. ‘Maybe you can write about them.’

‘Is that a challenge?’

‘Maybe.’

I watched the two rats. One of them was resigned to his captivity. Maybe that one was your embodiment. He sat idly in a corner and awaited his fate while his companion who, I imagined was my animal counterpart, seemed determined to push herself through the narrow bars and escape.

Later, when we went to release the couple in the wilderness behind your house, I wasn’t surprised when one rat made a quick getaway and pranced out of the cage while the other had to be cajoled into leaving.

‘Come on,’ you urged him.

‘Stockholm syndrome,’ I said.

I thought of Barthes’ definition of catastrophe: violent crisis during which the subject, experiencing the amorous situation as a definitive impasse, a trap from which he can never escape, sees himself doomed to total destruction.

As we sipped the peaty Ardbeg you’d bought, duty-free, I wanted to ask you if you felt the same way about the rats; if, like me, you saw in them a reflection of our catastrophe. But you distracted me.

‘So, if I’d told you not to write about the rats, would you not have written about them?’

‘No. You can’t control what I don’t write just as I can’t control what I write.’

‘Do I figure prominently in what you’re writing?’ you asked.

‘Maybe.’

‘So when you’re done, should I go through it with red ink and cross off the parts that misrepresent me?’

‘You could, but it wouldn’t deter me. Don’t worry; I haven’t revealed your identity. I haven’t used your name. Just your initials, and only once, in the dedication.’

I have my doubts about whether you’ll even read this from start to finish. I debated writing it to begin with, especially since you’re such a reluctant reader. But I took Barthes’ advice. To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love, to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not—this is the beginning of writing.

It’s a peculiar book I’m writing. It isn’t a love letter. It isn’t an ode. It pretends to be an instruction manual, but only succeeds in parts. I prefer to call it a handbook, or a survival kit, or an episode of language. I know I said it was, but it isn’t quite dedicated to you. Rather, it is directed at you.

It was something I started a year ago, after a conversation with you over the phone after midnight, a few months after we first began, long-distance. I was in Bombay, the city of my childhood. You were home in Delhi. I heard my phone ring just as I was about to sleep. It was the ringtone I’d reserved for your calls, Madeleine Peyroux’s version of Cohen’s ‘Dance me to the end of love’. We exchanged details about the day. Mine was charmed as usual. I’d spent hours staring into the sea, as if in search of some epiphany. Your body burned in Delhi’s afternoon heat and the sky sent no breezes to quell you at twilight.

I can’t recall exactly how it came to pass, but the conversation drifted to an old flame of mine (he who could make the violins come). Yes, I had spotted him that morning and he had appeared luminous, as if he had swallowed all of last night’s stars and his skin had begun to gleam. You were confused. Justifiably. Who was this ex-flame? What was his co-ordinate on my map of lost lovers? Did he come before or after you? Did he like my taste? Was he still attuned to my scent? Had I mentioned him before or had I just constructed him out of thin air?

‘How many lovers have you had?’ you asked, your voice carefully disguising each word so that the question mark at the end of your statement would seem like genuine curiosity. Except, it wasn’t really a question. There was a tinge of sarcasm and an unmistakable hint of jealousy.

‘You’re one to talk!’

‘Well, I’m much older than you. It’s only natural that I’ve had a few.’

‘Maybe someday I’ll tell you. When you’ve earned the right to know.’

If you are indeed reading this, it’s too late. You’ve wandered into my trap. You chose to sink your teeth into the apple’s hard flesh. Now you must eat of it until you arrive at its core, until its bitter seeds unravel upon your tongue.