A Handbook For My Lover Read online

  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, pref
erring 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.