A Handbook For My Lover Read online

  ‘Oh. I see. I thought I was—’

  ‘Special?’

  ‘No. Different.’

  Your fingers move along the surface of my thighs. So close—

  ‘Wow. That changes everything. I was reading it all wrong.

  So you don’t love me!’

  ‘That’s not what I’m saying.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘It’s not that I’m not certain. I just can’t commit to it the way you do. Are you going to start crying and get all hysterical?’

  ‘No. I’m not. Or I don’t intend to. I am crying. But that’s because I feel—’

  ‘Hurt?’

  ‘Betrayed. I don’t understand. What are you afraid of? I mean, it’s not like if you were to declare it, I would beg you to marry me, or have me move in with you. We both know that isn’t going to happen.’

  ‘But you are secretly looking for some kind of commitment, aren’t you?’

  ‘How can I possibly ask you to commit to me when I am not sure myself about whether I want to commit to you or not, or if I’m even able to in the first place?’

  ‘That’s good to know.’

  ‘So why are you with me then?’ I ask.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It will soon be six years since we met. Why continue this? Why am I here in your bed?’

  ‘Can you pull my hair?’ you ask.

  ‘Sure.’

  I lean towards you and toss my right leg over your legs and draw you closer to my cunt. I run the fingers of my left hand over your hair and start to pull at small bunches. I can hear you purr under your breath. My lips crouch against your neck.

  ‘There are different levels to it,’ you say.

  ‘To what?’

  ‘To us.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘On one level there is the warmth and comfort I feel when I’m around you. You have this feminine touch. Then there’s the intellectual connect. We understand each other. I can talk to you about things and you understand. Then there’s our work relationship. We work well together. You help me out with my work. Then there’s this emotional connection. I care about you very deeply. I have very strong feelings for you. You bring out my good side. No one else has done that before. And then there’s the attraction. I am very attracted to you. The thing is … I just feel that with something like love, it is easier to show it than to talk about it.’

  ‘That’s what I was saying.’

  ‘I may find it difficult to say it to you. But suppose something were to happen to you, I would be the first person, I would go out of my way to be there for you. I know I don’t do, or haven’t done, as much for you as you have for me. But if you were ever in a situation where everyone else abandoned you, I would still be there. I would fight for you.’

  Pause.

  ‘This is all I want,’ I assert.

  ‘And what is this?’

  ‘Home. I want to be home.’

  ‘And where is home?’ you ask.

  ‘This. You. Us. This is home. This is what I want.’

  As we kiss you confront the wetness of my cheeks and the salt of my tears.

  ‘Listen. Don’t get emotional. Don’t take what I’m saying seriously. I’m drunk. I’m just babbling. This is all just a babble. I’m not declaring anything. I’m just babbling.’

  ‘So you don’t mean anything you’re saying?’

  ‘No … I mean I’m babbling. I’ve no control over what I’m saying. So don’t be waking up tomorrow morning complaining that I offended you.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Anyway, this is the kind of conversation we should have when I’m sober,’ you say.

  ‘But we seldom do …’

  ‘Anyway. Listen, in the end everything is maya. Everything is impermanence. We don’t really even exist. This thing between us doesn’t really exist either. It’s all maya. If there’s one Hindu principle I subscribe to, it’s maya.’

  Seconds later, you nod off to sleep. I kiss you, turn sides so that my back is now against yours, and I masturbate.

  Barthes, in A Lover’s Discourse, refers to the utterance of the words ‘I Love You’ as ‘The Love Cry’. Once the first avowal has been made, ‘I love you’ has no meaning whatever, it merely repeats in an enigmatic code—so blank does it appear—the old message (which may not have been transmitted in these words). I repeat it exclusive of any pertinence, it comes out of the language, it divagates—where? he writes.

  Barthes seems to suggest that this love cry is a feverish symptom of the pathological condition of being in love, an unavoidable consequence, an inevitable utterance with all the pathos of a desperate shriek, one that may or may not find resonance with the object of the lover’s desire. It is as though, at the moment of its utterance, language loses its significance and connotes nothing except a longing for the loved one to empathise with the disease that has led to this repeated announcement.

  To love, according to Barthes, is a socially irresponsible word which doesn’t even exist in the infinitive except by a meta linguistic artifice, and the continued avowal of this state of being in love is one without nuance, one that suppresses explanations, an exorbitant paradox of language. To say I love you is to proceed as if there were no theatre of speech, he writes, which relegates it to the level of performance. It is: Not a sentence. It does not transmit a meaning, but fastens onto a limit situation, the one where the subject is suspended in a specular relation to the other. According to him, to try to write love is to confront the muck of language; that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive.

  Mid-way through Essays in Love, Alain de Botton’s narrator finds himself in a quandary. It is his girlfriend Chloe’s birthday, and despite his contentment over the gift he bought her, the red cashmere pullover that she’d been dropping hints about wanting, he realises, while wrapping his present and writing out a card that he had still not told her he loves her, despite being aware that he did. Pullovers may be a sign of love between a man and a woman, but we had yet to translate our feelings into language, he says. It was as though the core of our relationship, configured around the word love, was somehow unmentionable, either too evident or too significant to be uttered.

  The narrator, in the course of the essay titled ‘Speaking Love’, comes close to Barthes’ proposition, that to write love is to confront the muck of language. He compares love to a species of rare, coloured butterfly, often sighted but never conclusively identified. The other problem in declaring love, according to him, is that the very language of love has been corrupted by overuse.

  Words like love or devotion or infatuation were exhausted by the weight of successive love stories, by the layers imposed on them through the uses of others. At the moment when I most wanted language to be original, personal, and completely private, I came up against the irrevocably public nature of emotional communication.

  Finally, when he was on the brink of articulating his love cry in the stereotypical mode, he spots a plate of complimentary marshmallows near Chloe’s elbow and has an epiphany. It suddenly seemed clear that I didn’t love Chloe so much as marshmallow her. What is it about a marshmallow that should suddenly have accorded so perfectly with my feelings towards her I will never know, but the word seemed to capture the essence of my amorous state with an accuracy that the word love, weary with overuse, simply could not aspire to. Even more inexplicably, when I took Chloe’s hand and told her that I had something very important to tell her, that I marshmallowed her, she seemed to understand perfectly, answering it was the sweetest thing anyone had ever told her. From then on, for the couple, the word love became distinguished and personal. It was a sugary, puffy object a few milimetres in diameter that melts deliciously in the mouth.

  My favourite poem by Kamala Das is‘In Love’, from her collection, Summer in Calcutta. With each successive reading of this poem over the many years I have been in love with you, the last six lines increased in resonance. The poem, set
in summer’s heat, in the ‘burning mouth of sun, burning in today’s sky’ mirroring her insatiable thirst for her anonymous lover, speaks of the meaninglessness of the utterance of the love cry.

  Where is room, excuse or even

  Need for love, for, isn’t each

  Embrace a complete thing a finished

  Jigsaw, when mouth on mouth, I lie,

  Ignoring my poor moody mind

  While pleasure, with deliberate gaiety

  Trumpets harshly into the silence of

  The room …

  She brings the poem to its exhilarating climax as she speaks about the moonless nights …

  … while I walk

  The verandah sleepless, a

  Million questions awake in

  Me, and all about him, and

  This skin-communicated

  Thing that I dare not yet in

  His presence call our love.

  There is an element of fear and uncertainty she feels even at the thought of making public the intensity of the passion between her and her lover. The words ‘dare not’ imply a kind of self-imposed directive, a prohibition, and, followed by the chronologically bound ‘yet’, they suggest that the time has not yet arrived for any such affirmation of love. There is even a trace of a threat, as if to admit to such an intense emotion would be to sabotage the affair. I love that she refers to the lover’s ‘presence’, rendering it with philosophical implications such that it isn’t limited to the fact of his being present, but the aura of his presence, as though it is for her a gateway into a private world that is only tangentially attached to the solar system by the existence of the melting sun.

  There is a suggestion that perhaps, in due course, she may make an avowal, but now is not the time. For the moment, his mouth on hers is substance enough. I also enjoy the hint of presumption in the last line. She doesn’t hesitate in believing that the skin-communicated thing between her and her lover goes both ways. All the fear she may feel in ‘not yet daring’ gets undercut with the mention of ‘our love’. There seems to be some kind of implicit understanding on the part of both lovers as to what this ‘love’ embodies and the mystery of it makes it distinctive.

  Das, rather craftily, confronts the muck of language and writes love, but not by any immediate avowal, rather, through différance, by underscoring the non-verbal dialogue between lovers that occurs sensually, where the skin is the receptor and the communicant, and verbal language is best delayed, and by privileging the written almost-avowal or the promise of avowal over the spoken love cry, and by connoting what their love is not by implying what it currently is, while simultaneously proposing, through her use of the word‘yet’ that the future can negatively or positively destabilise her present notion of what their love signifies.

  Speaking of différance, I am tempted to reference this YouTube video in which an interviewer, Amy, asks Derrida, the profound literary theorist, if he could say something about love. The grey-haired, though rather handsome-looking Derrida tries hard to conceal his sense of amazement at the ambiguity of the question. His voice betrays him, though, and he sounds unmistakably annoyed by the myopic expansiveness of the question, which in the original French, was, ‘Ce que vous desirez dire de l’amour’? His first response is confusion, followed by a witty rejoinder, a jeu de mots that serves as an excellent testimony to his entire treatise on différance. He says, ‘L’amour or Le Mort?’ (Love or Death), which, when he enunciates in French, sound alarmingly similar phonetically. The interviewer, whose first language is definitely not French, emphasises she meant l’amour, pas le mort. ‘We’ve heard enough about death,’ she adds. ‘L’amour?’ Derrida asks once again, just to be sure. ‘L’amour,’ she reaffirms. And as he replies, you can see his lips contorting into a slight grin, a consequence of his surprise. ‘I have nothing to say about love,’ he replies assertively in his native French. ‘Nothing …’ he continues somewhat irritably. ‘At least pose a question. I can’t examine “love” just like that,’ he adds, bringing me back to Barthes’ hypothesis that to write love is to confront the muck of language, that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive.

  ‘You need to pose a question. I’m not capable of talking in generalities about love. I’m not capable. Maybe that’s what you want me to say in front of the camera,’ and as he says so, he looks sideways into the lens and laughs. The interviewer now has no option but to actually pose something resembling a legitimate question. ‘Could you explain why this topic has concerned philosophers for centuries? It’s an important philosophical subject, isn’t it?’

  But Derrida is not to be placated. ‘You can’t ask this of me, Amy,’ he says, and then repeats the question so he can hear it aloud once more and comprehend its explosive vastness. Finally, he seems to launch into an answer. ‘That’s how philosophy started,’ he says, but again he stops himself short. ‘No, no. It’s not possible.’ His next statement seems to be made after a lapse, you can tell that there was a cut, a break in the narrative, that the film’s editor left something out. The next frame shows a more apologetic Derrida. ‘I have an empty head on love in general. And as for the reason philosophy has often spoken of love, I either have nothing to say or I’d just be reciting clichés.’

  So Amy has to rephrase her question once more, she has to be more specific. She attempts another round, but her question remains as vague, like she has no real gist of the main arguments made around the subject of love within philosophy. When in doubt, quote Plato, and that’s exactly what she does. ‘Plato often spoke of this, maybe you could just talk about that?’

  By now somewhat irate, Derrida decides to interview himself. ‘One of the first questions you could pose … I’m just searching a bit … is the question of the difference between the who and the what. Is love the love of someone or the love of something? Okay, supposing I loved someone, do I love someone for the absolute singularity of who they are? I love you because you are you (he points his finger towards the camera). Or do I love your qualities, your beauty, your intelligence? Does one love someone, or does one love something about someone? The difference between the who and the what at the heart of love, separates the heart. It is often said that love is the movement of the heart. Does the heart move because I love someone who is an absolute singularity or because I love the way that someone is? Often, love starts with some kind of seduction. One is attracted because the other is like this or like that. Inversely, love is disappointed and dies when one comes to realise the other person doesn’t merit our love. The other person isn’t like this or that. So at the death of love, it appears that one stops loving another not because of who they are but because they are such and such. That is to say, the history of love, the heart of love, is divided between the who and the what. The question of being, to return to philosophy—because the first question of philosophy is What is it “to be”? What is being? The question of being is itself always already divided between who and what. Is “being” someone or something? I speak of it abstractly, but I think that whoever starts to love, is in love, or stops loving, is caught between the division of the who and the what. One wants to be true to someone—singularly, irreplaceably—and one perceives that this someone isn’t x or y. They didn’t have the qualities, properties, the images that I thought I’d loved. So fidelity is threatened by the difference between the who and the what.’

  I was still dying when I met you. I just didn’t know it at the time. I wasn’t wise enough to recognise the symptoms. I couldn’t fathom that the cancerous numbness that had besieged my heart was in fact the consequence of multiple stabs being consistently delivered at the hands of a scorned lover. I was barely seventeen when I first met him. I was so pitifully young, nubile and naïve. He, an economist and armchair philosopher, four years older than me, had aroused my appetite for the intellectual. He found in me facets that I always wished existed; beauty, intelligence, vivacity.

  He had a flair for language, a penchant towards rati
onality, and a tendency towards self-pity. Our initial correspondence was entirely over email, which nourished my hunger for wordplay, and within a week of consistent dialogue, I knew I was in love with him. It took him longer to gauge the depth of his feelings for me. You see, he had just died before he met me. He had been burnt at the hands of a woman who had fallen in and out of love with him before he had the time to even experience limerence. At twenty-one, when I first moved to Delhi, it was to live with him. He had relocated his life from Bombay and had started work with a public policy think-tank. We lived in a less than modest barsati in Green Park, for a full year, until he shifted to Hyderabad to advance his career. That was the second betrayal among many subtle ones that were to follow. The first remains too painful to recount.

  A staunch libertarian, he had envisaged our relationship as a utopic experiment. ‘Your body is yours,’ he would tell me. ‘You can be with whoever you want, just don’t tell me about it.’ At twenty-two, with him away in Hyderabad, with my having set up residence in that tiny quarter in JNU that was allotted to me, tasting, for the first time in my life what it meant to be independent, and sampling, almost virginally, the alluring world of desire, I drank in everything that came my way, I drank so much, so quickly, and so thirstily, that I soon grew intoxicated by the pleasures of pursuit. No more was I the insecure, coy, small-town girl who was oblivious to her own charms. I tumbled dizzily into the world of heat and lust, the land of fuck. I inscribed every man I conquered in the pages of my notebook, and soon, my writing was drenched in the exquisite wetness of desire. The lover remained a constant, I never doubted my feelings for him, but I was able to separate, with calculating precision, the universe of love and the paradise of sex. I had a pattern: I often chose men who were either wanderers or settlers on the verge of departure. I sought men who had no strings to attach, who appreciated the virtue of intellectual foreplay, men who had a peculiar talent for persuasion, men, who, when they finally had you pinned against them, made you wonder if you had been seduced or if this was what you had wanted all along. I revelled in this newfound ecstasy, and each orgasm brought me closer to the world of words. I came against my private landscape of thoughts, it wasn’t blood that would rush to every corner of my brain but whole sentences, syllables gushing through my circulatory system, language seeping through my pores, each sigh a turn of phrase dying to be archived.