A Handbook For My Lover Read online

You have, by now, learned to heed to Ovid’s advice. You no longer let me carry my tears to bed. Instead, you have become more attuned to the rhythm of my unravelling. When I reach the pinnacle of my sobs, when words have abandoned me altogether, you come towards me and hold me in a stilling embrace that’s fuelled by the violence of your passion. You come at me with the fervour of a blazing fire and then you hold me still in your arms and you kiss my neck as my tears spill over the cotton of your clothes.

  Barthes has a revelation towards the end of his slim chapter in praise of tears in A Lover’s Discourse. I make myself cry in order to prove to myself that my grief is not an illusion: tears are signs, not expressions. By my tears I tell a story, I produce a myth of grief, and henceforth I adjust myself to it. I can live with it, because, by weeping, I can give myself an emphatic interlocutor who receives the ‘truest’ of messages, that of my body, not that of my speech: ‘Words, what are they? One tear will say more than all of them.

  You have yet to learn how to appease my anger, just as I have yet to learn how to be more resilient in the face of your temper. For the moment all I want to hear from you in moments of such despair is a simple, effortless ‘Don’t cry’.

  Only Women Bleed

  I’ve always bled on time. I hold you responsible for this sole inconsistency. You badgered me the whole day about random things that you ought to have let go of. By evening I was prepared to leave your house. I collected all my things—I had clearly failed in my endeavour to not populate your house with my belongings—and I kept them ready near your front door so I could make my exit the next morning. It was too late to leave then.

  You saw me immersed in my gathering and asked what I was up to.

  ‘I’m just collecting my stuff. You’re leaving in two days. It’s best to be prepared,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t need to do this. All I was trying to tell you is you can’t lead two lives. If you’re staying here, be here, don’t make random plans with your friends. If you do, then go back to your place, but if you’re here, be here.’

  ‘I’m just preparing for your departure,’ I lied.

  I had decided that I would spend the night on the divan. I didn’t want to share your bed. It was past midnight. I was tired. I hadn’t eaten enough all day. I was too distressed from all your nagging, I couldn’t manage an appetite, though there was hunger, an aching hunger, and as you were yelling at me I felt faint, like I would collapse at any moment.

  When I was done with my tantrum, I went to pee. When I had emptied my bladder, I tore off a few leaves of toilet paper so I could wipe myself. And that’s when I noticed the crimson clot. I was perplexed. I was still three days due. I hadn’t made preparations. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d bled before my time. I pulled out a couple more leaves of toilet paper and rolled them into a makeshift tampon and stuck it inside me to dam the impending flood.

  You had already moved into the bedroom by then, but I suspect you gathered I was in a fit. So you stood outside the bathroom door, knocked and said you’d prefer I come to bed so we could wake up early the next day. I opened the door and said, ‘I’m sorry, I got my period. I wasn’t due for another three days.’

  ‘I don’t care if you get your periods one week early or one week late. I just want you to come to bed now so we can have an early start tomorrow.’

  So I did. I figured this was your way of reconciling with me. I followed you to the bedroom but I had apprehensions about reclining on the bed.

  ‘I think I should sleep outside, I don’t want to stain the bed.’

  ‘Why don’t you just wear some tissue inside so it collects the flow?’

  ‘I already did that.’

  ‘So then you’ll be fine. It’s your first day, it’s not like it’s the Grand Canyon that’s about to go off.’

  I think you meant to compare me to a volcano. Last I checked the Grand Canyon didn’t explode.

  ‘Fine,’ I said, and occupied the fringe.

  You turned on the air conditioning and, when it kicked in, you said, ‘Isn’t this better than trying to make a martyr of yourself by sleeping outside in the heat?’

  ‘Yes. It’s nice.’

  In the morning you promised to go to the chemist to buy me a pack of sanitary napkins. Except, you were so immersed with your work, you kept asking for extra time.

  ‘Can you hold on for another twenty minutes?’

  ‘I suppose I could.’

  But when I went to the loo I realised that the makeshift tampon I’d assembled just that morning was already soaked with blood.

  So I found the number of a chemist who would deliver and arranged for supplies. I didn’t have the energy to schlep downstairs myself, and as much as I knew you wanted to be useful, I somehow couldn’t imagine fifty-six-year-old you speaking across the counter, asking for a pack of Stayfree Ultrathins.

  I lay flat on the bed until the delivery could be made. My back had started to give way. As I stared at the rotating blades of the fan, I thought about how this monthly spill has been the only constant in my adult life; this periodic shedding of tissue and blood, the agony of swollen teats and bloated flesh and all kinds of excess, this regular reminder that I was defying my maternal destiny.

  When I was younger, what I feared most was staining the cotton of my school uniform. Now I dread the spasms along my spine, the stomach cramps, the retention of water that expands my waistline.

  I’d taken to informing you each time I began the spill. I can’t say why. Unlike men my age, you always seemed to understand.

  You’d rub my back and the heat produced from the friction between your palm and my skin would soothe my nerves. You’d urge me to take a paracetamol tablet. There’s no point in needlessly suffering, you’d say.

  That’s what you’d done last night too; when you heard me moan in pain, you beseeched me to take something to soothe my nerves.

  ‘I’m just so exhausted, I cannot imagine getting up again,’ I said.

  So you got up from the bed, consulted your medical kit and presented me with a painkiller and a bottle of water.

  ‘Please take this,’ you appealed.

  I did.

  ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ you asked.

  ‘Could you rub my back?’

  And you did.

  It occurred to me as I was lying down that I may have been wrong about this being the sole inconsistency. There have been times, when you were away and when I was staying at my place with my two flatmates, when my menstrual cycle went for a toss. I remember researching it and reading somewhere that women in pre-modern times, with no access to artificial night light, ovulated with the full moon and menstruated in conjunction with the new moon. Even the word ‘menstruation’, I learned, shares an ancestry with the word ‘moon’. Both are derived from the Latin ‘mensis’ which shares a relation with the Greek ‘mene’—the root for the English words ‘month’ and ‘moon’.

  I remembered this one particular instance, when I was sure we would never see each other again. You were away in China, for some exhibition of your work. We’d had a terrible fight over the phone. You were bullying me about my not having finished this handbook. I’d taken a Midol for the first time during that especially pain-ridden period. It was supposed to guarantee relief. ‘Anti-bloating, anti-cramping’ were among the remedies it promised. It worked like a charm, except my bladder went on a spree and I watched as, each time, my blood spilled alongside urine. Inside me my heart was breaking, piece by precious piece, and it seemed as though the blood from the ache was flowing out from my uterus through my cervix into my vagina until it finally stained the manicured cotton of my sanitary napkin. In my mother’s time they used white cotton cloth. Added to the pain of menstruation was the chore of washing off the stains, cleansing the cloth so it could be reused until it wore thin.

  For those five days I wished I could have purged you from my system, the way I did my endometrium, flush you out of my being the way I did all the water I ha
d retained, so I could then prepare my fertile womb for new seed, new yield, more promising possibilities.

  As I waited for supplies, I wondered whether you had ever expected that at fifty-six you would have to contend with the vagaries of a menstruating twenty-six-year-old. If you were a woman you would probably have been either on the verge of menopause or on the other side of it. I wondered what it must feel like for you to even have to insist on a condom because I am young and fertile.

  Sometimes I think about all our unborn children who’ve escaped through my womb because we couldn’t risk seeding them, because you’ve grown too old for fatherhood, because you’re too busy for the mechanics of it, too impatient and temperamental to be any good at it. My friends warned me that I may grow resentful of you for denying me the privilege of motherhood. The way I see it, I’ve chosen you over all my children. And if I resent anything, it’s my womanly body that’s constantly reminding me of the passage of time, that’s holding me captive to primitive childbearing instincts, that refuses to stop ovulating and then bleeding, not until I arrive at the age you are now.

  You’ve never been fazed by my monthly spillage. You’ve never let it come between us during the act of sex. In fact, I find it a bit bizarre how we tend to fuck more when I’m bleeding. From the first time we had sex up to the most recent instance. All you ask is for the extent of the flow so you can prepare by spreading a spare sheet that can absorb the leak. The last time we fucked the condom had turned red and as you drew it out of me where it had somehow got lodged, specks of blood spurted over and settled on you. I was afraid you’d be repulsed by it, but you weren’t. You let me recover from the heights of our ecstasy and after enough time had lapsed, you went to the bathroom and brought back a bunch of tissues, then you wiped the stray pools of blood that had formed over parts of me. I walked to the bathroom door and left a crimson trail in my tracks.

  ‘I feel like I just lost my virginity,’ I said when I returned to bed. ‘Like you broke me in.’

  There was one time, just once, when you felt the condom slip. When we were done, you asked me casually how I was placed in my cycle. I was fourteen days in, at my most fertile. You said it was probably okay. For the next fourteen days I lived through the agony of anticipation. I oscillated between moments of hope when I wondered if perhaps your seed had taken root, and moments of despair when I knew it hadn’t, that we had been safe. And on the twenty-eighth day, when I felt the first trickle, I mourned for the daughter we had unintentionally lost. It was a futile, hypocritical exercise because I know I felt relief that you hadn’t impregnated my womb. I mourned not just for her, but for all the sons and daughters you and I may never have because our circumstances do not permit it.

  ‘The womb is not a clock, nor a bell tolling,’ Anne Sexton wrote in her poem ‘Menstruation at Forty’. I know there is time enough for sowing and for reaping, for harvesting and for celebrating the spoils. What I don’t know is whether I want to bear any fruit that doesn’t grow from your seed. You have robbed me of my maternity but I do not resent you.

  I have chosen you over posterity.

  Housesitting Blues

  The leak in your bathroom ceiling was an act of providence.

  It was I who first detected it. I’d spent the day in your house and early evening I decided to take a shower. I entered your bedroom and as I took a few steps in, realised my feet were submerged in water. I called out to you and asked if you were somehow responsible for this. You seemed as surprised as me. I traced the source of the water to the wall adjoining the bathroom that faced the bed. Something had gone wrong because within seconds the wall was host to a waterfall. I rushed to the living room and grabbed a few sets of newspapers, which I then spread across the floor. I brought a dry cloth and a bucket and started to collect water so we could undo the mess. You rushed off to the neighbour’s flat upstairs and managed to have the water supply turned off; it took at least half an hour before the spill could subside.

  In three days you’d have to leave on an assignment. We were justifiably unsure of what the next move should be. Things were slowly falling apart. Stretches of the ceiling were threatening to dislodge themselves. The walls of what used to be your darkroom had turned damp too and we had to move all the things you’d stored there so you wouldn’t lose them to the flood. It was a strenuous exercise for both of us.

  One day before you were to leave, you told me casually that your downstairs neighbour was concerned about the situation. We got lucky this time because we were at home. Rather, I was at home with you. If you were alone, I’m certain you wouldn’t have noticed the deluge until midnight, when you would have finally left your study to head to bed. But if the leakage were to resume in your absence, nothing could be done. We’d have to break down the door to get in. You’d have lost everything.

  ‘Can I give you my keys while I’m gone?’ you asked.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, trying hard to disguise my utter happiness at finally having possession of those few milligrams of metal I’d been lusting after for so long.

  ‘Will you promise to call me should anything go wrong?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  So you submitted your house to my care. You didn’t exactly have a choice. You couldn’t cancel your trip. It was the perfect solution.

  Those seven days you were away were gruelling, to say the least. Each day a new calamity unfolded. One day it was the ceiling in the storage room, the next it was the geyser in the front bathroom that randomly began to squirt water at an enormous pressure.

  And then there was the errant balcony drain.

  One evening during that tiresome week, I went to an art opening. There was an installation that called itself ‘The Panic Room’. It was meant to be interactive, so I stepped inside the square set of jute bags that lay on the floor and pressed the red button with my feet as instructed. The bags inflated around me and the square boundary transformed into a looming tower, entrapping me. All I could see beyond the four jute walls was a stretch of ceiling. I was unimpressed. I didn’t feel any panic, in fact, I felt cocooned and calm and isolated from the pretentious faces that had surrounded me all evening. I sat down with my glass of wine. I was told to press the green button when I needed to deflate the walls, when I began to feel claustrophobic, which I learned later was the point of the installation. But I didn’t feel ready yet to leave this jute shell. Suddenly, the jute bags began to deflate themselves, leaving me exposed. Apparently the panic room overheated itself because I didn’t panic soon enough.

  I went back to my place that night because I had a ride. I woke up to the sound of my phone ringing. It was your neighbour. She sounded distressed. She told me your balcony was leaking. I woke up instantly and told her I’d be over as soon as I could.

  My breath started to collapse. My heart announced its fear and beat ferociously. The muscles around my chest started to quiver as I envisioned disaster. I retraced my steps. Yes, I’d definitely closed all the taps. I’d shut off the washing machine too, so this couldn’t possibly be my fault. Why did this have to happen on my watch? It took you three years to trust me with your keys! I could sense impending doom. I should have slept in your bed last night. I shouldn’t have abandoned your house for mine.

  I ate my breakfast mechanically. I wouldn’t have bothered but my flatmate had taken the trouble to whip eggs into an omelette and lace it with slices of Gouda. She’d even toasted bagels and had buttered them so they were ready to eat. I held the bread in my mouth and searched for the bits of Gouda but all I could taste was disaster. I tried to make conversation but every sentence was a dead-end that took me back to the subject of probable collapse.

  Images flashed in my head at the speed of half-thoughts. As long as you were around we were partners in disaster. Still, I’d rather you let me house-sit than leave your home unsupervised.

  I rushed over to your house and scanned the balcony from downstairs. Then I sprinted towards your door, negotiated the three locks that kept me f
rom the scene of disaster. I headed to the balcony and felt confused. I couldn’t find any water there except for the memory of it that was contained in the large stain in the corner beside the clogged drain. You returned my panic call and instructed me to simply unclog the drain. I did. I explained the situation. I told you it must have rained last night and since there was nowhere for the water to go, it seeped through the layers in the ground until it found four or five little outlets and then it began the process of catharsis.

  I wished I was as calm and relaxed as I had been when the jute bags inflated around me in that artificially controlled panic room. I should have had more respect for the time zone you were in. I shouldn’t have called you at that unearthly hour of morning and invaded your sleep. But nothing could have salved me. Your voice was the tonic I needed. ‘Thank you,’ you said over the phone and I knew you meant it. By then I had begun to leak salt water, little pearls had started to drip across my cheeks. I tried to say something in between my long, deep breaths but my malformed thoughts couldn’t translate into sound. All I managed was a monosyllabic goodbye, after which you disconnected.

  We know now that your upstairs neighbour was the one at fault. He had been renovating his house and quite obviously, your house had to bear the brunt of it. As a reward, though, you began to leave your house in my care more often than before. And even when you returned from your voyaging, you would let me keep one set of keys so I could ‘be more independent’.

  I relish staying in your house while you’re away. I find the intensity of my yearning for you is less stifling when I sleep in the comfort of your bed. Although it takes me a while to fall asleep, I wake up rested, sunlight gleaming upon my face. I enjoy being able to maintain the same routine I’d have if you were here; making myself a pot of tea, opening the windows in the living room to let in the air and the sun, and spending the day working, the evening with a glass of single malt and writing my way into the night. The only glitch is my inability to eat alone. I hate having to cook for one, and while I don’t mind eating alone elsewhere, I find it particularly difficult in your house. I’ve grown too accustomed to having you sit across from me, indulging me in conversation over dinner, drinks and cigarettes.