I haven’t exactly been keeping track. I don’t strike lines against a wall nor do I tally them to study their steady increase. It’s purely incidental how I arrived at this nondescript bit of trivia. I happened to retrace my footsteps and suddenly stumbled upon the last time we happened to fuck. At last count, it was two hundred and forty-six days ago.
I can’t be sure how many of these two hundred and forty-six days you’ve spent away from this city, wanderlusting on account of work, crisscrossing continents to document lives. I cannot even say for sure how many of these nights were spent in the same city and under the same sheets.
What I do know for certain is that there was never any dearth of opportunity.
Like those summer nights when in the agony of heat, in the middle of my sleep, I’d take off my shirt to expose myself to fleeting sighs of wind; sheetless nights when the fan was all whir and no whirl; powerless nights when the air conditioner went off with a whimper; shirtless nights with skin pressed against bare skin, the sudden surprise of my nipples against your shoulder blades; sunburnt mornings emblazoned by light when you’d wake up and take shelter under me as if I were a tall, leaf-filled tree; monsoon nights when it rained so hard we had to seal the windows, and still the scent of wet earth would seep in and enchant us until we fell asleep under its spell and we’d wake up intoxicated with lust. I’d be as wet as a puddle. All you had to do was jump in and swirl. But you wouldn’t and I couldn’t imagine why; winter nights when we’d cling to each other for warmth, your feet entwined within mine, my arms wrapped around you like a shawl. Foggy, frosty mornings when all I wanted was your body, hot and warm and firm inside me.
It was you who initiated me into the pleasures of morning sex. You taught me to anticipate the sun. You steered me into a pattern and soon I learned to dedicate the evening to food and wine and song, and to spend the night in a state of want.
And right on cue, as the sky shed shades, you’d release me from my state of sleephood and enter.
In these eight months you’ve managed to meddle with our carefully crafted script. I no longer know my lines and I’ve forgotten what role I’m expected to play. Am I the seductress or the seduced?
Every morning I wake up hoping you will finally quench this now centuries-old thirst. But you draw me close, kiss my mouth repeatedly and then quietly make your exit from the landscape of the bedroom. And so everyday I nurse this lust. I pet it, soften it, temper it. And yet, every night it grows in size and strength.
I hold you responsible for having aroused in me, through this extended foreplay, something more vital than passion, something elemental and irrepressible; a bottomless hunger that can no longer be fed away. If you were unfeeling and cruel, if you had another lover who consumed your body, if you were no longer chemically attracted to me, I would understand. But each night you bury your face within my breasts, you caress my aching body with the wisdom of a healer, you feel for my heartbeat and you let me study yours when you park your lust right beside mine so I can feel you growing in size and strength.
I could seduce you. I’ve thought about it. I could impose my lips on your body, make you swell with hunger and desire. I could appeal to your mouth. I could parade my nakedness, make you yearn for me.
But I refuse to.
I want you to finish what you started.
Unfurl me like a daydream. Touch my sweet and luscious core. I reek of spring and holy things and I taste like evening.
At 12.30 p.m. this afternoon, I bid you goodbye. You were on your way to the airport. I’d helped you pack, had rid the fridge of all things cursed with a short shelf span, had ironed your Nehru coats so you could wear one at the lecture you were slated to present in the land of our former coloniser. We held hands in the taxi. We snuck our private gesture behind our handbags so the driver wouldn’t be witness to our intimacy.
Eight hours later, I’m slipping into a summer dress, trying to disguise my reluctance. I’m not sure why I agreed to reacquaint myself with L, a man I’d spent one night with sometime last year when you were away. He happens to be in town for a few hours and he’s intent on seeing me again.
I contemplate faking a last-minute illness. I can predict the flow of our conversation and I know he would like it to end with me poised beneath him. I was sure I didn’t want to go there. Not again.
I repress the urge to curse you. I’m still upset about the other night when I was about to collapse into the welcoming arms of sleep. You came to bed later and wound your legs strategically so your feet lay pressed against my cunt.
‘Are you fast asleep?’ you asked.
‘What do you want?’
‘Could you please press the tips of my toes?’
‘Do I have a choice?’
I pressed the little gaps between your toes, then pulled at their tips. When you were satisfied, you turned your back to me and asked me to relieve you of the itch on your back.
I felt sympathy. You are allergic to so many things and this past week the skin on your back had broken into a rash and I couldn’t even begin to imagine how frustrating it must have been for you to not be able to reach the regions that itched most. I scratched your back. You purred like a tomcat.
Then you buried your head in your pillow and were about to break into sleep.
‘That’s what I’ve become,’ I said. ‘Backscratcher and masseuse.’ ‘What do you mean?’ you asked.
‘You see me as a spare set of hands. I have a body too,’ I said.
‘Well, I’ve told you before; consider finding a younger lover, someone who can satisfy you.’
At which point I succumbed to my angry pose and turned against your body, slipped into a corner and threatened to sleep without kissing you goodnight.
But I relented.
‘You deserve to be satisfied,’ you added.
‘It isn’t about satisfaction,’ I replied.
‘Then what is it about?’
‘Touch. It’s about touch. You used to touch me in a certain way and you don’t anymore,’ I said as I uncoiled myself from the fetal position I’d assumed and lay flat on my back, my palms spread against my head.
‘You mean like this?’ and you encased my fingers within your fingers so your pulse could invade my own.
By then, despite the current that passed through me, a tear coursed past my cheek.
I waited for the surge to subside and when I was sure you had passed into sleep, released my fingers from the bondage of your ‘touch’, turned around and tried to negotiate my passage through the underground of sleep.
When I woke up the next morning I could taste the anger on my tongue. As is my style, I said nothing. I answered your every remark with a monosyllabic smile. It took three such instances for you to finally catch on.
‘Are you pissed off?’ you asked at last.
‘No. Not at all,’ I said faking reassurance.
You didn’t pursue the matter, went for a walk instead and asked me to make you a bowl of porridge for breakfast.
When you returned, you noticed my face was still twisted in the shape of a grimace. So you did that corny thing you do where you smile at me patronisingly and expect that like a monkey, I’ll mimic your smile and erase my frown.
It didn’t work.
‘I guess I am pissed at you,’ I revealed, finally.
‘Why? What did I do this time?’ you asked most innocently.
‘It’s okay, fuck it.’
‘No, tell me.’
‘You insulted me last night.’
‘How?’
‘By suggesting I take on a younger lover.’
‘But I’ve said that to you before too, it can’t possibly have come as a surprise.’
‘That’s the thing! After everything we’ve been through, you’re still suggesting I take a lover.’
‘I’m sorry. I’ll take that back.’
‘You should. It’s disrespectful.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s just that before, you used to touch me in a certain way, and I find, increasingly, that you don’t. You want me instead to administer to your aches and itches.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Later, when I was scrubbing the dishes, you snuck up behind me and put your lips to my neck and your fingers against my crotch. I turned to liquid, my body smouldered in the warmth of your breath.
‘Hmmm … Don’t touch me like that,’ I said teasingly.
‘Oh really?’
‘No. Don’t not touch me like that!’
Despite that make-up touch, I’m still pissed off at you for your suggestion, and for having generally reduced me to a Lady-Macbeth-like caricature. Each time I make love to another, I find I wash myself repeatedly until all traces of digression have been shaken off and my body is a blank slate once again, clear and vacant enough for you to write anew upon my skin.
This wouldn’t have happened if you had enforced monogamy. If you had laid down rules and asked me to abide by them. But you don’t care for cuckoldry. You don’t care for possession. You prefer to let me make my own rules, be with whomever I wish.
The ex used to say the same thing, except he’d make too much of a grand gesture out of ‘giving me’ my freedom, ‘Your body doesn’t belong to me,’ he would say. ‘You have every right to be with whomever you want,’ he’d add. ‘Just don’t tell me about it, I don’t think I want to know.’ I was young then, even younger than I am now. And as long as he was around, I never faltered, never indulged in other bodies. But when he left this city of djinns, during my second year of university, things fell apart. I discovered the world of men, and the thrill of conquest.
I assumed the role of picara and made my way through the landscape of lust and desire. I never sought out lovers; they just seemed to find their way into my body. The structure was common to all: first the sighting, then the pursuit, which was almost always literary, followed by contact, followed by words. Yes, men made for good muses. Sometimes I couldn’t tell if my writing depended on adventure, or if the adventure was incumbent in order for me to write.
As I line my eyes with kohl, infuse my body with mild perfume, and examine my face in the mirror, I’m overwhelmed by how much things have changed. The ex is now married and recently had a baby girl. We don’t talk anymore. He couldn’t forgive my many ‘betrayals’. He didn’t really expect I’d make use of the ‘freedom’ he so patronisingly bestowed on me. He was trying to appeal to my feminist sensibilities. He took my infidelities personally. I could separate love and sex, he couldn’t. He knew, also, we would never be equals, that I would always be more easily desired than he, a socially awkward, overweight, boyish economist with a noticeably receding hairline.
I wondered then, as I wonder now, what it was that I sought in past lovers. Was it the lure of a good story, or the thrill of seducing and being seduced, or was it just a phase in my life, a transition I was trying to make from girlhood to womanhood? Or was I searching for fragments of myself?
I know for certain that desire was at the root of this search. I enjoyed being pursued, an indulgence I had never known as young girl. I loved waking up in a bed not my own. I delighted in the power of my body. I revelled in the company of men and found strange comfort in the transience of the moment.
You, too, 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 altered the narrative, you marked your territory on my timeline so that as I look back, I find I can neatly divide my more recent past into two unequal halves: before you and after.
It was a few months into our acquaintance when my body first began to betray me.
I find it ironic, in retrospect, that the lover in question who was privy to this first bodily deceit was a sculptor.
We’d seen each other at a few art openings. At some point he asked for my number and a few days later, invited me to his studio for dinner. He promised me fish curry, Kerala-style, in keeping with his origins. I agreed.
He lived in the other end of the city. I had to take a train. His studio was reasonably spacious, finished paintings leaned against the walls. We talked over several refills of Old Monk. I cannot remember the contents of our dialogue. It must have been inconsequential. Sufficiently high, we decided it was time for dinner.
He led me to his kitchen and let me take in the scent of the fish curry. While I was at it, I deftly surveyed his body. His muscles were firm and taut, his skin supple, impressive for a man past forty. It was the yoga, he told me later. He was a few inches taller than I; still he seemed to tower above me. I wasn’t quite sure why I was there. I have a vague recollection of wanting to prove to myself that I wasn’t attached to you, that I was a free bird whose wings you dared not clip.
The sculptor was now a breath away. I leaned against the kitchen wall and ran my coy fingers through my hair. I may have taken in a long sip of air, may possibly have closed my eyes. When I was done with my sensuous appreciation of the promising curry, I found him pressed against my body, his lips about to make dialogue with mine, until suddenly he had begun to mould me with his fingers. Before I could react, he began to take off my clothes.
He raised me on my toes, swung one arm against the back of my thighs and lifted me to his makeshift bed. He lay upon me and positioned my body strategically so he could steal into me in the darkness. He began to fill my body’s hollow with repeated strokes and showed no signs of ceasing.
‘You’re strong,’ he said.
He fucked me just the way I like being fucked, no delicate twists and turns, no gentle caresses, hard, definite reaching in and out with the certainty of destination.
It was sometime around my fifth little death that I felt the first drop of salt. It had yet to make its way past my lower eyelid, but it foretold an impending flood. It was my first lesson in body dichotomy; the paradox of pleasure coupled with misery. It was my first betrayal in which my body desired to be with a body other than the one it was with.
I pulled myself together and played my move and led the sculptor into well-earned delight. I waited the customary five minutes during which his heart tried hard to relax its furious beating. Then I left him to lie on the belly of the mattress as I made my way to the bathroom.
Once in, I locked the door, looked into the mirror, and wept.
My messages to you that night were pathetic. I cannot remember their contents, but they were despicably melancholic. You were already asleep, but you called the next morning.
‘What was that about?’ you asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Your messages last night, what was that about?’
‘Oh. I was having a bad night. I didn’t mean to bother you.’
‘It obviously came from somewhere. What’s up?’
‘It was just this sudden realisation I had, that if you and I had to fall apart, if I were to leave you, it wouldn’t make any difference to your life.’
‘Well, it’s just not that kind of relationship.’
‘I guess it isn’t. I don’t know why I thought it was.’
It’s 8 p.m. I promised L that I would meet him at 8.30 p.m. for dinner. He wanted to eat at the same place we dined at last year, when we met. I agreed. I confront my bathroom mirror for a final glance and am taken aback by how much I’ve aged since I first met you. I’m not as vulnerable as I was then. There are strands of grey sprouting between my otherwise jet-black locks. I’ve taken to wearing earrings, an accessory I didn’t much care for before. But this is a nice, casual pair; they dangle from my earlobes and almost touch my shoulders.
I have a strange feeling in the pit of my belly, something akin to impending doom, and it makes me rethink my decision to meet L. But it’s too late to cancel. He doesn’t have a phone, and I’m not cruel enough to stand him up. I dab perfume on my wrists and behind my ears, take a deep breath and find my way to the door.
Half an hour later, I spot him walking the streets of Hauz Khas Village. He spots me too and his gait quickens with anticipation. He holds me tight when he sees me and as soon as we get into a darker alley, he pins me against a wall and kisses me with authority, empties a year’s lust into a few stop-motion minutes. I receive his kiss although my mind has already left my body. I’m a mere puppet now, passive against his desire.
I feel unclean.
‘You can do this.’ My vacant brain cells send half-hearted signals to the rest of my body that’s already beginning to resist this onslaught of passion. I break away from his embrace and lead him to the chosen restaurant. He follows obediently, trying hard to disguise the bulge of his hardened flesh.
As we wait for our drinks to arrive, we catch up on a year’s worth of news. He’s doing well, will soon be delivering lectures at Princeton, his stint in Afghanistan continues to bode well, he’s been travelling the world since I last saw him, but he keeps revisiting that one night we spent together.
It was almost exactly a year ago. I met him through a friend at some art do. We’d got along instantly. There was a nakedness to his intent; his desire for me was obvious within the first few minutes of our exchange. We’d headed back to my one-room barsati and decided we’d cook pasta. He was beautiful in the kitchen, he took charge of the inner lives of tomatoes and garlic, boiled the pasta to al dente imperfection, and within minutes we were ready to eat. We talked while we applied finishing touches to our meal. I can’t remember what was said but at some point, while my hand held a knife that dripped tomato blood, he drew my face to his and kissed me on my mouth. We didn’t eat that night. He lured me to my bedroom, undid my clothes and caressed every inch of me. I didn’t resist. You had been away then for such a long time, there was an ache inside of me that he promised to remedy. We fucked. Once was all I could muster. By now I was already trying to resist the impulse to leave the bed and take a shower so I could wash off the indulgence. I finally did. I drenched my body in cold water and soaped each part of me till I felt clean again and then returned tohim, my hair dripping wet. He welcomed me with restless fingers.
‘I need to sleep,’ I said.
‘I understand,’ he said.
‘Tomorrow is a really long day.’
‘I can imagine,’ he said as he speckled my face with soft tiny kisses.
I turned off the lights and tried to bury myself in his embrace, but his body kept betraying him; it wouldn’t soften despite my attempts at sleep. So I lay a few inches aside in the hope that the distance would do him some good. It did, eventually. He fell asleep. I lay awake for hours, my gaze fixed on the whir of the fan.
To be honest, I was afraid. You were always away. And I didn’t know what to do with all my lust. If only there was some way I could have emptied myself, relinquished my connection with you. Sometimes I wondered if all I’d known since I met you was the pain of suffering; the kind of suffering that can only find absolution through indulgence, through the exercise of desire.
So, instead of listening to the moral of my body’s betrayal, I decided to put it to the test. I chose to submit myself to other passions. I willed my mind to quell its hesitations and threw myself headlong into desire. I decided to surrender to the game of seduction in the hope that I would find resolution for my addiction to you. There was every possibility that in the course of my infidelities, I would find someone better than you, younger than you, more suited to my temperament. It had become imperative that I demystify you. It was my only hope for salvation.
There were others I coveted momentarily, and then wished they would leave me alone after the deed was done. I didn’t fancy having to share my bed. I couldn’t sleep when there was company. Not because I was too full of lust but because my body didn’t know how to shapeshift, how to mould itself against their bodies, how to relent and submit to the softness of post-coital drowsiness.
You are responsible for this insatiable hunger. You regularly invite me to feast at your table and when I’m ready to eat, refuse to feed me. Instead, you let me indulge this insatiable hunger, this irredeemable thirst. I suffer in your presence and in your absence. When you return from your journeying I know you will collect all your tiredness and collapse in my arms, unleash the bulk of your accumulated sleep, and the next night and the night after, you will continue to tease my lust without acknowledging it.
L wants me. And although my body doesn’t respond to him instinctively, it yields to his aggressive touch. We’ve ordered our meal and he steals glances at me as he fills me in on his one-year absence. We talk about pre-historic art, eighteenth-century Persian erotica, in between he even recites a Persian poem, which he then translates for me, though I cannot remember what it said. I was worried about how to dodge the midnight kiss, the prelude to the otherwise inevitable. When food was placed on the table, he took care to serve me first, the way you always do. I ate, though I wasn’t hungry. I swallowed multiple glasses of beer. Intoxication, I decided, would be my redemption. As the evening continued and we progressed to dessert, I was reasonably inebriated. I could feel the onslaught of courage coursing through my blood.
‘So must you really go back to work on your book?’ he asked, finally.
‘I really must,’ I said. ‘But even if I didn’t have to, I don’t think we can repeat last year’s adventure.’
‘Why not? It was so beautiful. I’ve thought of you so much.’
‘To be honest, I just find I’m unable to engage with another body. I’m obsessed with my lover’s body, even though he hardly indulges mine.’
‘Maybe it’s because you’re in love with him?’
‘I am, but that had never stopped me in the past. In my first relationship, for instance.’
‘Maybe you’re growing older.’
‘I don’t know. It’s frustrating. He won’t have me and although he says I have every right to be with whomever I want—and he means it—I find myself unable to.’
‘Is it guilt?’
‘No. I don’t feel guilty. I just feel removed … I can lose myself in another, but only for a few seconds, after which my body is completely conscious that this is not the lover’s body, it’s an alien form, and then it all descends into chaos. I finish what I’ve started, but I feel unclean. So I try not to start anything anymore. I think it’s because my lover starves me. Sometimes when he’s fallen asleep, I cover him with a sheet, kiss his forehead to make sure he’s lost in dreams; then I turn to the side and masturbate.’
‘When was the last time you were with somebody other than him?’
‘A few days ago. He was beautiful. After we were done, I felt satisfied but discontent … What if my body is just obsessed with him? What if it’s because he deprives me of sex? What if it’s because I enjoy the slow, steady combustion, because it means I’m perpetually on heat, because it makes me feel so alive and sensuous. What if the Buddha got it all wrong? What if suffering is the root of all desire?’
He smiled at my now-breathless body, slipped his fingers underneath mine and said nothing.
We were the last to leave the restaurant. As we descended the first flight of stairs, he drew me to a corner and ravished my lips and the borders of my collarbone. I indulged him for a few seconds and then drew away. I was on heat but I didn’t want him to quell the flames. He understood. He drew his fingers across my face, tucked loose strands of hair behind my ears, then moved closer so his mouth now hovered over my ear.
‘Whatever you decide, promise me, whatever you do, you don’t lose your passion, that spark you have that makes you you.’
I promised.
Fifteen days later you returned, just like you’d promised. This time your house wasn’t a mess. We met that evening. I came over and cooked dinner. You opened a bottle of bourbon you’d picked up, duty-free. We talked, slipped from one revelation to another. I filled you in on a friend’s messy courtship—she decided to pursue it, despite knowing that the man she loved could hurt her in unimaginable ways.
‘Why doesn’t she leave him? Can’t she see he’s not good enough?’
‘She tried to, but she slipped and they got back together. When I asked her why, she quoted Pascal: Love has reasons of which reason knows naught. I believe her. She loves him. She sees that there’s more to him than he himself is able to fathom. She can’t seem to live with him and can’t seem to do without him either. Besides, once you start to care for someone, it’s hard to suddenly cease. It’s a trap.’
‘Are we trapped too?’
‘What makes you think we are?’ I said.
‘Well, what if that friend of yours is right? Was it she who said you were giving me your best years?’
‘I’m surprised you remember that.’
‘Of course I do. And it’s true, you’re so young, and I’m old. You have so much living left to do whereas I’ve done my fair share. And as much as I can feel your passion everyday, my tired, ageing body with all its aches and pains doesn’t always allow me to respond. And that isn’t fair to you, is it?’
‘This isn’t about sex. It is and it isn’t. And I’ve made my peace with that.’
‘I don’t want you to be making such huge sacrifices for me. I’ve been in relationships where I’ve been the one sacrificing and in others where I’ve been on the receiving end of a sacrifice and it always ends in resentment. That’s the reason why I’ve been telling you to consider taking on a younger lover.’
‘Sometimes it feels as though it’s all or nothing with you. You’re so stubborn, you’re so unwilling to yield.’
‘Sweets, if there is one person in my entire life to whom I have yielded, it is you!’
‘You think I haven’t tried? It’s not so simple,’ I said.
‘I know you’ve been with many men before me. I don’t want to be unfair to you. I am aware of your sexuality. You are so attuned to your body. Like I said, it’s not that I don’t feel your passion, I feel it all the time. I’m just too exhausted to respond.’
‘Well, I’m done with all that. I’ve been hurt by men because I haven’t been willing to give you up. Besides, I’ve had my fair share of lovers. There was a time when it had its thrill. It felt good to be desired by strangers. But I’ve had my fill. I don’t think I can go through with it again. As you grow older, you realise the things that you did in the heat of the moment no longer satisfy. All the old insecurities I had about my body have dissipated. There’s no reason for conquest anymore. Sex is no longer a necessity.’
‘Okay…’
‘Besides, when you come to bed at night and you hold me, kiss me, stroke my back with your fingers, my body becomes a furnace. You arouse me like no other man has, and so consistently. No one has ever had that effect on me. And instead of that feeling diminishing over time, it has only become more fertile. When you touch me I feel like I’m home. And I no longer want. I suffer, but I no longer suffer.’
You nodded and contined looking at me across the table, and I returned your gaze.
That night you performed the usual ritual when you entered the sheets, kissed me on my lips, wrapped your legs within mine as your fingers made long strokes along the length of my back, moving from the depressed curves of my shoulder blades to the base of my torso. My head lay near your chest and I overheard your heart, first keeping time, then pacing furiously, as if longing to be stilled.
I couldn’t resist the impulse. My fingers began to dance over your chest, circling over little moles and soft hairs until, like wild drunks, they toppled over your belly, landing at the seat of your lust.
There they hesitated, unsure whether to proceed with their revellery or return to their senses. You intervened, enabling their insobriety. It was your hand that led mine over your crotch in time to contain the rising of your flesh. I released my body from the clutch of your embrace and, resting on my knees, lowered myself under the cover of your sheets. My mouth was now positioned such that my lips could pout over your foreskin. I feasted on you like an impoverished lover unsure of the timeliness of her next meal, relishing each serving as if attempting to satisfy a delirious, eternal, unfathomable hunger. But you stopped me short seconds before I was about to finish. You beckoned me towards you, your hands grabbing my ass firmly. Then you undressed me. I followed suit and undid your clothes. You held my naked, starving body against your own so I could feel the warmth of your skin invading my own, so I could smell your appetite. You lay me flat on my back and crouched over me, and as you reached for the condom on the cupboard next to the bed, I touched the bits of moonlight trapped within your beard. You knelt over and kissed my knees, causing me to arch my body like a well-feted cat. You raised me higher, the base of your palm elevating my ass. Then you slipped inside me and made up for lost time.