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.’
It is this declaration that makes Elizabeth one of the most powerful literary figures I’ve encountered. It is her rebellious resolution to act in the interest of her own happiness that sets her apart from her many fictional counterparts. It is from her that I draw the strength to continue to be with you despite rational opposition that insistently reminds me of the difference in our ages that makes you so unsuitable.
One evening, when we were sufficiently intoxicated with fine wine and sumptuous food, I dared to ask you, rhetorically, what you would have done without me. It was a reaction to some incident where I had come to your rescue, to either remind you of something you had forgotten or to retrieve something you had possibly misplaced.
‘What would you do without me?’
‘I would have continued as before,’ you answered. ‘I wouldn’t have known otherwise.’
Like Darcy, you too cannot ‘fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation’ of your love for me. ‘I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun,’ Darcy tells Lizzie when she later, playfully, asks him to recount the chronology of his affection for her.
I doubted you from the beginning. I mistook your regard for me as a passing fancy, as a temporary occurrence that would eventually grow faint. I cannot remember when I surrendered to you. I have acknowledged earlier my resistance to pursuing whatever was evolving between us because I was afraid it would turn out to be one-sided. You wouldn’t have it. You challenged me at every turn, you made it seem as if for me to step away would be an act of cowardice.
‘Where is this heading?’ I asked you once, somewhere around the third or fourth month of our relationship.
‘Let’s just take it one day at a time and see where it goes?’ you said.
And here we are, on the brink of our seventh year together. Here we are, still with no destination in sight.
While our circumstances remain the same, what has changed is the fact of our faith. We no longer doubt how strongly we feel for each other. We do not indulge in daily utterances of the love cry. There is no longer any trace of angst that would otherwiseimpel us to make such professions. It is not the knowledge of the other’s passion that inflects our certainty. It is faith.
And yet, there are moments when I fear that we too shall pass. My age does not permit me to dream of a future with you. I hesitate to. I am told by friends that turning thirty changes you. I am a year and a half away from that milestone; you have two years left before you turn sixty. Our cultural contexts do not allow us to believe in happy endings. I fear that one day in the near future I may either have a sudden epiphany of the futility of our relationship or might meet a more suitable partner, someone from my generation with whom I can envisage a more settled situation, even while I convince myself that I, in my conceited independence, am not interested in conforming to the dictates of marriage.
Perhaps there will come a day when I come before you, not to indulge in your company, but resolved to seek finality.
‘Is this how it ends?’ you will ask.
I will have no answer. I will shrink into my new relationship with all the enthusiasm I can muster and begin the process of forgetting you, of placing you in past tense, of converting you into an old flame and finally, of instituting you within my expanded encyclopedia of ex-lovers.
Love’s fatal flaw is that it comes with no warranty. There is always the threat of expiration. There is always the danger of falling out of it, or no longer seeing in the loved one all the qualities that singled him out in the first place, that made him so alarmingly unique. There is the fear that one day, affection may turn into resentment, love may be replaced by contempt. The only certainty there is in the world as we know it is that the sun will continue to rise and set and rise and set again the next day and the day after until one day, some billion years later, it too will quietly combust and self-destruct, shedding all illusions of permanence.
Should we come to pass, is it possible somehow to ensure resonance? Our love will have had its fair share of witnesses, but what of its testimony? Can it withstand the natural process of erasure that is forgetting? Stephen Dunn in his melancholic poem, ‘The Vanishings’, prophesies that ‘Every other truth in the world, out of respect, / slides over, makes room for its superior.’
One day there’ll be almost nothing
Except what you’ve written down,
then only what you’ve written down well,
then little of that.
…
It’s vanishing as you speak, the soul-grit,
the story-fodder,
everything you retrieve is your past,
everything you let go
goes to memory’s out-box, open on all sides,
in cahoots with thin air.
Sometime after ‘If We Were to Part’, I retreated from this handbook. It was not a conscious decision. It was not an act of surrender. It was inescapable in hindsight, involuntary. I stepped back. I withdrew. I stopped documenting our every conversation. I stopped dissecting you on my writing table. I ceased to fill my moleskine with my momentary insights. For the first time since I had met you and known you, I indulged in the gesture of being. I engaged with the presentness of our time together. Our private moments were no longer fodder for my imagination.
I used to be afraid that you were more muse than lover. I used to fear that my love for you wouldn’t outlive your function as a character within these pages. Ever so often I would find myself apprehensive about my motives. Was I with you because I loved you? Or was I with you because you were my subject? Was I in love with you because you were a perfect muse? If so, then would I continue to be in love with you after I had committed you to writing? These were not permanent misgivings but passing afflictions, lapses in passion that I would only articulate to myself in the quiet hours of night when I was home alone or struggling with sleep.
While this handbook became, without our knowing it, a document of our trajectory, one day it may serve as a relic. It has already evolved into an archive of lived moments. When I read you excerpts, I find I am more astonished than you, about all that passed between us, about everything that has already morphed into the past.
During my stay at the retreat I found myself forgetting details. I had become inattentive. I was present, always, but I had managed to quell the voice inside my head that is otherwise constantly translating the moment and inscribing it in words. I had let go. I had learned to resist the urge to document. I now knew how to repress the impulse to archive.
I’m able to trace the beginnings of this new tendency to the time we first achieved equanimity, or homeostasis, to use a medical term. It was during the end of our fifth year together and the start of our sixth. I was to turn twenty-eight. I urged you to spare a week to go away with me to Goa, the land of my origins. I documented nothing of those five glorious days. They were perfect and windswept and redolent of monsoon’s wetness and fertility and the scent of your breath hovering over my nakedness and the mind-altering ecstasy of a grand, long-overdue fuck. We let ourselves go. We yielded to each other.
You gifted me three books by Orhan Pamuk and a bottle of Russian Standard. I started on the thickest one immediately. I remember lying on the four-post double bed amidst the trill of pouring rain. You were busy working, and that’s why we had chosen to be in Goa, because we had each been there so many times before, there would be no pressure to explore, and so we could simply be, without the urgency of having to discover anything except each other, while continuing to attend to our daily routines. It was on my birthday that I embarked on the 728-page book that would lead to my undoing.
I do not need to recount for you the plot of The Museum of Innocence. You passively read the novel with me. It was rather wonderful, the newfound obligation I had been entrusted with, of recapping for you the story as it unfolded. Each time I’d put the book down to take a break or continue with other engagements, you’d ask if anything new had transpired. It isn’t the kind of book featuring spine-chilling twists at every alternate chapter. It’s a slow-paced novel. Kemal doesn’t love Fusun, he fetishises her, he is fixated, and when he realises he cannot have her because of his own stupidity, he starts to collect any and every object he can find that has been animated by her touch or that relates to his memories of her. He becomes, over time, the anthropologist of his own experience, and finally, when he outlives her, converts her parents’ house where he spent 409 weeks, visiting them for supper 1,593 times, into a museum filled with all the objects he had collected as a consequence of his obsession with her: I had only to see them once and I could remember the past Fusun and I had shared, the evenings we had spent together at the dinner table. I had associated each and every object with a particular moment, and as the years passed, it seemed as if these remembered moments expanded and merged into perpetuity.
Pamuk threw me off my game with his meticulous eye for detail. My handbook seemed almost futile in its scope and intention after I was done with his novel. And then, as if to further mock me, Pamuk actually opened a Museum of Innocence, breathing life into his fiction, so that the ticket printed on page 713 of my copy can now actually be used to gain entry.
I paused. The handbook came to a standstill. I felt no great compulsion to record our moments, or your gestures, or things you would say in passing that you’d think nothing of, but which I would have otherwise stopped to collect for future reference. For a while I even questioned if what I felt for you was love or if you were merely a victim of my obsession.
Then one day in September, I found myself rummaging through my bag in search of my moleskine. The impulse had returned.
Just that morning, around 10 a.m., when we were stirring out of our sleep, you turned towards me.
‘You were so drunk last night!’ you said.
There was no denying it. It was the first time I’d ever thrown up after getting back home.
‘I’m really sorry,’ I said. ‘The thing is, I didn’t feel drunk. It’s that Afghani food we ate before we drank.’
‘It’s okay, baby. It’s okay to get drunk once in a while.’
‘Weirdly enough, I feel so good today! I feel like I’ve got everything out of my system.’
‘Well, we brought back some takeaway last night so you can put it back in your system at lunchtime.’
Laughter.
Pause.
‘You were so drunk you were yapping away in the car on our way back!’ you said to my mortification.
‘More than usual?’
‘Yes! Do you not remember any of it?’
‘Of course I do!’
I lied. I didn’t. I remembered fragments. As we were having breakfast, you decided to quiz me about what I could recall. I knew it was a jibe, you had noticed lately that I was beginning to forget many little things, small tasks and little promises. When I’d confess that it was not always possible to remember everything all the time, you said I was wrong. ‘Just don’t forget!’ you advised, as if it were really that simple.
‘So what do you remember?’
‘I remember telling you that you ought to gift me a print of one of your photographs. I argued that if you took the bulk of all the many little assignments I’ve done for you, like writing your proposals, editing your bios, helping you with your catalogues, and if you measured it in terms of billable hours, it would exceed the worth of a single print. In other words, you should gift me a print. You challenged me and told me to make a spreadsheet listing these assignments and then we’d talk.’
‘Do you know what else you said?’ you intervened. ‘You said [mimicking me], “This book will immortalise you!” Do you remember?’
‘Of course!’ I said, though honestly it was only when you reminded me that I felt the full import of my audacity.
That afternoon the voice inside my head started speaking to me once again. I wrote ‘Artful’, I added ‘Feast’, and in a few days, sent the manuscript to X and waited.
I was nervous. I wasn’t sure if he would like what I had written. For two days there was silence. On the third day, I had a strange dream. I was lying on a surgical table. Two doctors, one male, the other female, were gazing at my vagina, examining it with their expert eyes. They seemed confused. They called in a third expert, a man who seemed like an unconventional medical professional. He peered at my vagina and was astonished. I had this out-of-body experience where I felt I could, in my technicoloured dream, see the glowing pink flesh that he was looking at. ‘It’s the most beautiful vagina I’ve ever seen,’ he said.
That evening, X replied. ‘Extremely well written, almost French in tone somehow and wholly original. Really, I see it as a love letter to PB.’
‘How does it end?’ you asked when I shared with you the news of X’s reception of the manuscript.
‘With a bunch of telegrams, the ones I sent you just before India shut down its telegraph division. I thought it fitting that a book that is written in the epistolary tradition should end with a dated means of long-distance communication. I managed to get the department to transmit such scandalous things. If only they knew.’
‘Remember Me.’ These two words were my first text to you the night after we first met. It was meant as both an intercession and an inquisition.
‘I remember you already,’ that was my fourth text to you, after you had returned to Delhi, and it prompted this reply:
‘Sweetie, you are my dearest. xxP’
Even now I remain obsessed with memory. It’s like some symptom of a pathological fear of forgetting and of being forgotten. As if our relationship will have had no significance if it is somehow not remembered or if it passes callously into oblivion.
‘Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders,’ Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, a line that found utterance in Michel Gondry’s 2004 film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. As Joel’s subconscious goes into battle mode when it realises his memories of Clementine are being erased, he lets out this plea: ‘Please let me keep this memory, just this one.’
Perhaps my fixation with the subject of memory stems from my fear of your proclivity towards forgetting; a consequence of your having lived thirty years more than I; of having, in the course of these years, experienced more than you are able to consciously process. My pathological fear of your forgetting is what led me to write this handbook. And yet I find that while the act of writing may have resulted in an archive for the reader, for me, it has entailed a process of erasure. So much has transpired between us that when I return to this book and re-read its contents, I find myself amazed by all that these pages have recorded, so much of which I no longer remember as conveniently.
This memoir of our love is being forgotten even as it is being written.
‘How does it end?’
‘I don’t remember.’
All my friends who are members of my generation are suddenly either married or betrothed. It occurs to me that I am alone in my reticence against the social institution. When Partho indulged me over the phone with details of his impending proposal to his longtime girlfriend (he was to pop the question while the two were sailing on a yacht), I saw my future as the sole unmarried one in all my immediate friend circles. It occurred to me in that moment that you and I have been involved with each other much longer than most of these now-married couples. Our relationship predates almost all of theirs. And yet, given our reluctance to conform to any such social pressure, our relationship is beginning to seem illegitimate.
‘It’s just a matter of form,’ Partho said when we were trying to understand the rationale behind the concept of marriage in contemporary times.
While the Supreme Court of India recently expanded its vocabulary to include live-in relationships within the purview of its legislation, our arrangement doesn’t satisfy any of its norms. Though we may be members of the opposite sex and therefore are not victims of its unimaginative and regressive stand on Article 377, we do not cohabit the same space, preferring instead to continue with our separate residences. We also have no joint bank account or proof of shared finances. The law was meant to protect women, and strangely, the summary in one of the newspapers says this: ‘Entrusting the responsibility, especially on the woman to run the home, do the household activities like cleaning, cooking, maintaining or upkeeping the house, etc., is an indication of a relationship in the nature of marriage.’ Perhaps that’s the only logical way we could be construed to be akin to man and wife. I look after your house in your presence and absence.
However, my excuse for taking upon myself the responsibility of your mess, I’ve come to realise, is utterly selfish. For some absurd reason, it is when I am slaving away with your dishes or your floors that I find myself most attuned to my inner self. Thoughts gleam like sparkling soapsuds. Insights rush through me like wild water gushing through your rusty faucets. With each sweep of the mop, with each erasure of grime off your marble floors, I find myself transported from the monotony of the everyday into a more transcendental space. I feel as if something were communicating through me, like I was the medium and some more divine force was dictating the words, many of which formed the script of this handbook.
It was sometime in October that it dawned on me that part of the reason for my involuntary retreat from writing was the unintended consequence of my having employed a maid. She was wonderful and efficient and had consented not only to administer to my household chores but to also take care of yours. I no longer needed to cook and clean. She handled everything. Over the few months I had the privilege of having her, I lost my touch with food along with the contact I had always enjoyed with my private thoughts; not the stream of consciousness kind that is always going on in one’s head, but the more reflective kind that converts experience into language, when light bulbs go off in the brain like a chain reaction. Like Henry Miller once said: After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I’d say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you’re walking or shaving or playing a game, or whatever, or even talking to someone you’re not vitally interested in.
My writing is entrenched in the domesticity of our passion. This handbook is inspired by the kind of kitchen-sink realism that is at the crux of our love.
Had you not left me your keys, had I not entrusted you with a spare copy of mine, we would never have survived.
We occupy separate habitats that are located within a convenient three-minute space, affording us the perfect amount of proximity and the right amount of distance. Both are home enough for us.
We have, in the span of seventeen months, established a routine. When we are both in Delhi, we convene every evening over red wine or single malt at your house. I either transfuse your kitchen with dinner I cooked in mine, or I start from scratch, at your house. We revel in each other’s company and finally dissolve into sleep, arms and legs entangled like creepers. When we wake up to freshly brewed tea, I preside over the breakfast ritual, we read the news on our tablets, exchange details of our individual schedules for the day I do the dishes, change into whatever I was wearing the previous evening when I’d come over, and take my leave. I come up to you in your office and tell you I’m off. You walk me to the door and kiss me on my mouth. After several warm hugs, we part ways. I return home, make myself a second cup of tea and begin my day, knowing that in a matter of hours, after the sun has set, we will be in each other’s presence once again.
Home is a question of form. Our arrangement, though unusual, is not unique. When I visited the Montparnasse cemetery during my stay in Paris, I found it rather endearing that Sartre and Simone perhaps only began living together after they were no longer alive. They occupy the same six feet of earth and their names and timelines have been etched on the same tombstone. During their fifty-year-long relationship, they kept their individual residences. In fact, Sartre lived in a high-rise on Boulevard Raspail that overlooked the very cemetery where he would eventually be buried. Simone lived in the immediate vicinity. There’s a clip from a 1967 documentary on Sartre where he stands in the balcony of his apartment and points her to where his friends lived. ‘There, in that house, lives my mother. And there lives Castor in the white house.’ Castor was Simone’s nickname. The voiceover reveals to the audience their routine for the last thirty-six years: ‘Every morning they work separately.’
When I left Delhi to meet my family for Christmas, I missed our home more than ever. I felt displaced. I knew I would have to deny you, yet again. I would have to, for the sake of maintaining the Yuletide spirit, repress any mention of you that would either arouse their curiousity or incite them into lecturing me, all the time telling me that their intentions stemmed from their concern about the interests of my happiness. ‘Your parents love you so much,’ my sister-in-law whispered in my ears when I was leaving to go to Kerala to attend a close friend’s wedding. ‘Don’t break their hearts.’ It was a melancholic moment for me, that departure, given that I have finally accepted the fact of my parent’s mortality. We had managed to spend yet another Christmas together, the whole family, and somehow, when I was leaving, I felt as though I was breaking free from my family’s hold over me; I was stepping away from the power of their influence over my life’s decisions. Later, I remembered something my professor at university once said to me, ‘If you’re going to worry about family and about what they’re going to think, you have no business writing.’ I was more emotional than I had imagined I’d be. I hugged each one with a sense of finality, as if I would never again return to them. I held my mother and father like a bride would on the eve of her wedding, knowing that she could never again return to the home of her childhood, fully aware that this home would now only exist in her memory, and that she had to conceive a new one; for that is where the notion of home truly exists, not in a physical structure but in the boundless confines of the individual imagination.
When I was about to board my flight to Kerala to attend a friend’s wedding, you were still unsure where you would be on New Year’s Eve. Not a big fan of this particular festivity, I kept my own plans unfixed. I told myself that what I wanted most at the cusp of the new year was to be home, which would be rendered impossible if you were going to be away. Just minutes before I could be bussed to my flight, you messaged saying it turned out you would be in Delhi after all. The next morning, when I finally arrived at my destination; a guest-house overlooking the Payamballam beach, you called and we discussed return flights. After some research conducted purely from your end, you messaged to tell me you’d booked me a flight and had even confirmed my seat.
On the morning of the 31st, I took the 7 a.m. train from Kannur to Kozhikode. When I arrived, an hour and a half later, I took a cab to the Calicut airport and waited to catch my 1.30 p.m. flight, which was delayed by an hour. You called to ask what time I’d reach Delhi. It turned out the Air India flight would first land in Coimbatore, then Mumbai, finally landing in the capital at 8.30 p.m. You apologised. You didn’t know I would have to endure such such a long-winded itinerary. I told you I didn’t care how long it took, as long as you were on the other side of my journey.
I arrived in Delhi and took a cab to my house. You were still in your office in Noida and couldn’t be there in time to welcome me. I switched on the lights (Home is where you can find the light switch unerringly in the dark, wrote Iriwin Allan Sealy in Red), I tuned in to a bossa nova radio station, put on the geyser, strolled in my suitcase, and took a shower. Half an hour later, the doorbell rang. I opened the door to find you and within seconds we were both home.
You fixed us a drink. Laphroaig. We sat in the living room in the midst of the music. I gave you the late birthday gift you wanted – two kilos of parmesan cheese. We cut off a small chunk from the larger whole and relished the specks of rock salt we encountered with each bite.
‘I need to go back to my place, it’s a mess,’ you said.
‘What kind of mess? Does it have to be dealt with today?’
‘I had to move things around. I was looking for something.’
‘Let’s finish our drink and then leave. I’ll come with you.’
‘Are you sure you don’t want to go to your friend’s party?’
‘I’m too exhausted to make small talk with strangers. Besides, there’s no other place I’d rather be tonight.’
We left soon enough. Three minutes later we were in your kitchen discussing our dinner options. We had decided upon pasta as we fixed ourselves another round of Laphroaig.
Within an hour we were sitting across from each other on the marble-top round table with our pasta and our single malt and slivers of Parmesan. In the middle of our meal you got up, enticed me to get up too, and when I was standing, you put your arms around me and held me tight.
‘Happy New Year, babes.’
‘Happy New Year, love.’
And just like that, we ventured into 2014.
This morning, after a week of hurried Skype calls that were always interrupted because of faulty networks, we managed a full-length conversation over the phone. We were finally in the same time zone. You were back from China, except you were now in Chennai. Yesterday you made the presentation on your photojournalistic work that you were asked to do when you had been invited for the literature festival there.
‘I met X last night. I think he came for my talk, too.’
‘That’s sweet of him.’
‘I told him that you had expressly asked that I should give him your regards.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said, “Just tell her to finish the book”.’
We laughed.
‘Tell him I’m almost done. I’m struggling with the ending. I know how it ends, but I’m still leading up to it. Just another 500 words to go, I think. The thing is, I can’t force it. I cannot sit at my desk and command the universe to let the words become flesh. I’ll try again today. Maybe it’ll happen.’
‘Okay.’
‘Tell him I may just send it to him today.’
‘Don’t worry, I’m sure he’s too busy to look at it right now.’
My neighbour lured me upstairs soon after our conversation.
‘There’s lovely sun today. Let’s sit on the terrace and have breakfast. I’ll make some eggs. You bring the coffee and your French press.’
I couldn’t resist her invitation. We lounged in the winter sunlight and spoke of many things. An hour later I managed to stop myself from daydreaming and returned home. I decided to use what I call the Miller technique in the hope that it would help induce labour. This seven-year-old strategy has been my salvation in many such moments when the words refuse to flow through my being. It involves picking up any book by Henry Miller and reading a page at random. Miller’s writing is so eternally alive, inspired, and infectious that it incites pathways in my brain and makes my fingers itch for the thrumming of the keyboard. This is the passage I serendipitously chanced upon on page thirty-two of my worn-out copy of Plexus:
If I were reading a book and happened to strike a wonderful passage I would close the book then and there and go for a walk. I hated the thought of coming to the end of a good book. I would tease it along, delay the inevitable as long as possible. But always, when I hit a great passage, I would stop reading immediately. Out I would go, rain, hail, snow or ice, and chew the cud. One can become so full with the spirit of another being as to be literally afraid of bursting. Everyone I presume, has had the experience. This ‘other being’, let me observe, is always a sort of alter ego. It isn’t a mere matter of recognising a kindred soul, it is a matter of recognising yourself. To come suddenly face to face with yourself! What a moment! Closing the book you continue the act of creation. And this procedure, this ritual, I should say, is always the same: a communication on all fronts at once. No more barriers. More alone than ever, you are nevertheless glued to the world as never before. Incorporated in it. Suddenly it becomes clear to you, that when God made the world He did not abandon it to sit in contemplation—somewhere in limbo. God made the world and He entered into it: that is the meaning of creation.
Miller ends Plexus by foreshadowing the events that will come to pass in Nexus, the last book of his autobiographical Rosy Crucifixion trilogy.
In the days to come, when it will seem as if I were entombed, when the very firmament threatens to come crashing down upon my head, I shall be forced to abandon everything except what these spirits implanted in me. I shall be crushed, debased, humiliated. I shall be frustrated in every fibre of my being. I shall even take to howling like a dog. But I shall not be utterly lost! Eventually a day is to dawn when, glancing over my life as though it were a story or history, I can detect in it a form, a pattern, a meaning. From then on the word defeat becomes meaningless. It will be impossible ever to relapse.
For on that day I become and I remain one with my creation.
He refers to the act of writing his story as one of opening up a wound. At the heart of his trilogy is the act of suffering, which he knows to be unnecessary, yet crucial. At the last desperate moment—when once can suffer no more!—something happens which is in the nature of a miracle. The great open wound which was draining the blood of life closes up, the organism blossoms like a rose. One is ‘free’ at last, and not ‘with a yearning for Russia’, but with a yearning for ever more freedom, ever more bliss. The tree of life is kept alive not by tears but the knowledge that freedom is real and everlasting.
While these six years spent with you inscribed under my skin do not constitute suffering, they can, in retrospect, be looked at as a terminal condition. You disrupted my state of being. You awakened in me something more dangerous than hunger, more desperate than fervour, more potent than hatred, and the fit of madness that set in when we first began shows no sign of abating. It is still mid-career. When I began this handbook, I stated in clear ink that I was religiously awaiting the day when it would 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.’ But I know now that it is not to be. We continue to be lovers without destination, fated to seek refuge in the transient.
What has changed in the course of this handbook is not the fact that the world will not allow us the privilege of a future but our knowledge of the freedom we have found in the present.
If the Book of Genesis is to be believed, the first act in the seven-day sequence of creation was the separation of the heavens and the earth. ‘Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.’ Crucial to the narrative was the issue of illumination without which God couldn’t imaginatively proceed. And so He said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. ‘God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day”, and the darkness he called “night”. And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.’ It was this newborn light that would allow for life.
A few seconds after midnight on the eve of your last birthday, I came to you and wished you happy birthday. I leaned over the chair upon which you were seated and put my mouth over yours. Your lips parted so that your breath now passed from your being into mine. With your tongue you outlined, ever so slightly, the lining of my lips, all the time enlivening my body with your breath.
We retreated into sleep, our bodies interlocked.
We awoke to sunlight gleaming upon our faces. The quilts that we had tucked over ourselves insulated us from the December chill. I leaned over and kissed you on your mouth.
‘I’ve decided to celebrate your fifty-eighth with fifty-eight kisses,’ I announced.
I kissed your eyelids, my fingers traced the light wrinkles on either side. I kissed your forehead, the nape of your neck, your ears, my breath sliding in like whispers. I returned to your lips.
‘So will you spread them out during the day?’ you asked.
‘It’ll be hard to keep track,’ I said. ‘I’d rather indulge you in one go.’
I moved my body so that I was parallel to you. I poised myself so that my knees supported my weight. I pulled the sheet over me to shelter us from the chill. Then I administered to you the forty-eight kisses that were still due, rationing each one across the length of your body, silently engulfing you with my lust, each kiss sufficiently soft, silent, wanting.
After we made love, you rested your face between my breasts. Strong streaks of sunshine invaded the bedroom, illuminating the floor beside the bed.
In that marvellous luminous room laden with the scent of our satiated lust I no longer craved the premise of an ending.
As long as there was this daily promise of light, as long as we continued through our art to chase and archive everything touched by its life-affirming presence, as long as we sustained our pursuit of the act of creation, as long as we persevered in drawing our happiness from the present, our love would retain the purity it had acquired through its disregard for destiny.
‘How does it end?’
‘It doesn’t.’
5 John 20:27, King James version