A Handbook For My Lover Page 19
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.’
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sp; 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
About the Author
Rosalyn D’Mello is a widely published freelance art writer based in New Delhi and was the editor-in-chief of Blouin Artinfo India. She is a regular contributor to Vogue, Open, Mint Lounge, Art Review and Art Review Asia. Nominated for Forbes’ Best Emerging Art Writer Award in 2014, she was also shortlisted for the inaugural Prudential Eye Art Award for Best Writing on Asian Contemporary Art in 2014. She was associate editor of The Art Critic, a selection of the art writings of Richard Bartholomew from the 1950s to the early 1980s and was a member of the jury of the Prudential Eye Art Award 2015.
A Handbook For My Lover is her first book.
Published in 2016 by Hardie Grant Books, an imprint of Hardie Grant Publishing
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Copyright text © Rosalyn D’Mello 2016
A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the catalogue of the National Library of Australia at www.nla.gov.au
A Handbook For My Lover
eISBN 978 1 74358 458 3
Cover design by Andy Warren
Cover image © Pablo Bartholomew