A Handbook For My Lover Read online

  ‘Times of India or Indian Express,’ you ask.

  ‘Times of India. Thicker paper. Dispensable.’

  You lay a few centre spreads across the expensive linen that lines the bed and proceed to fuck me.

  You come inside me and refuse to leave. You release the weight of your body upon mine. After the final thrust, after the last blow, you gasp and then crash into sleep in my arms as my fingers trail along the warm, pulse-stricken expanse of your skin. Our hearts tap away, loud and quick, gasping with relief.

  Outside, clouds begin to weep, lightning strikes, followed by the ominous clamour of thunder.

  I cajole you out of your post-coital slumber. It’s beyond late. I have to leave.

  You waltz around the room and look for your displaced trousers, fish for your wallet and hand me a few notes.

  ‘I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but cabs are expensive.’

  I’m too broke to refuse your offer.

  You wrap a crisp white towel across your waist, escort me to the elevator and bid me goodbye with a kiss.

  ‘Can I see you again before I leave?’ you ask.

  ‘Maybe.’

  We moved from body to being.

  One day later.

  Muggy evening. Intermittent drizzles. Our second encounter. Café Mondegar. Bombay.

  Your feet graze against mine under the table. The glutinous jukebox makes music out of coins. The waiter places a six-glass pitcher of beer between us. You pour a glass each and move the pitcher aside. You spread regions of your life across the mug-ringed table. Your fingers serve as a compass, guiding me through twists and turns.

  Until you reach an intersection that brings us back to the night before.

  ‘I was surprised. I didn’t expect it to lead to where it did,’ you say.

  ‘I find that hard to believe,’ I reply in between sips of beer.

  ‘Well, I’m not the young buck I used to be.’

  ‘When was the last time you were spontaneous like that?’

  ‘A while ago. I was in New York. She must have been a few years younger than you.’

  ‘How old would that make her?’

  ‘She must have been about twenty-eight, I guess.’

  ‘I turned twenty-three three weeks ago.’

  Pause.

  For a while I debated whether to ask about your age. I tried to decipher from the clues I’d been given; the salt-and-pepper of your beard and your hair, the lines across your brow, but I couldn’t hazard a guess. Perhaps it was better not to know.

  ‘I’m fifty-three,’ you say.

  ‘So what happened with the girl in New York? Why didn’t it work out?’

  ‘She couldn’t get over the difference in age. She let me go.’

  Pause.

  The waiter sets a plate of beef chilly fry on the table, followed by a plate of stuffed mushrooms.

  ‘It’s good to be in a place where not too many people know me,’ you say.

  (I’m flummoxed by that little piece of dialogue. I didn’t know then who you were. Later I’d understand. Then I just saw you as exceedingly interesting and eminently fuckable. I didn’t know of your fame. I knew you had talent. I’d seen your exhibition months ago in Delhi. Those stunning black-and-white photographs you’d taken when you were even younger than I am now. That self-portrait in a room you’d once called home, your eyes all droopy from a trippy, purple-hazed night. The cupboard behind you is unlocked, but your body is open and inviting. You’re looking into the lens inside-out and outside-in. I remember looking for you in each image but you seemed elusive. Evasive. Nomadic. Wanderlusting between spaces, observing, living on the fringe between the world of the living and the realm of the bystander, peeping through a hole, as it were, with wonder and surprise, and capturing in perfect compositions the miracle of the familiar, the ordinary.)

  We finish our beer. It’s time to leave. We hail a cab. I should have taken one myself, and headed to my home at the other end of the city, but I step into your cab instinctively. It doesn’t strike you as odd. We sit in silence, smothered by the monsoon breeze. You light a cigarette. I reach for your left hand.

  Sparks.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ I ask, expecting some romantic retort.

  ‘I’m thinking about how I need to take a piss!’

  We’re now in your room. You take your much-awaited piss. I sit on the edge of that beautiful, four-poster bed and await your next move. You walk past me, take off your shirt and dive into bed. I’m in media res. I’d slipped my sandals off and was about to lie down beside you when I heard your half-order, half-plea.

  ‘Massage.’

  With that single word you tow the line between one-night stand and lover. It’s more than I’m looking to provide.

  Fucking is fucking, there’s something definite about it; the certainty of destination. Fucking depends on the emergency of lust. A massage, on the other hand, demands a profound understanding of the body. You want more than a quick run-through of the connections between limb and torso and muscle and bone. You want more than precision. You seek the kind of touch that can brand itself permanently in some way. The sort of touch your muscles will remember.

  I am not prepared for this.

  I fake ignorance.

  ‘It isn’t my forte,’ I lie.

  ‘I’ll instruct you.’

  You direct every tiny move like a backseat driver. You tell me where to pause, where to punctuate, and how; where to stress and where to glide over; where to linger and where to stay, and for how long.

  I follow each instruction. As I knead your flesh, I am inspired by it. Your back is smooth and clear, the skin soft yet taut, betraying your age. With each fresh contact I find myself growing moist. I want to focus on the pathways, which, if pressed precisely, will relax, but I’m distracted by the rush of blood coursing through your body, inflecting the undercurrents of my bloodstream.

  You drift into a genre of half-baked sleep.

  I take liberties with your body. Lips replace fingers. I kiss all your delicate by-lanes, your short cuts, the highway that is your spine, and the nape of your neck. I peck at your ear lobe and lick the edges with the softness I otherwise reserve for wild strawberries.

  You stir. Turn over. I press my lips against your lips and return to your ear lobe. I’m crouched over your body. I can feel the stir of your flesh rising to greet me.

  ‘I have to go. It’s late. I shouldn’t even be here,’ I say.

  ‘You can’t get me all turned on like this and then threaten to leave.’

  So I stay until I’ve satisfied myself. Until you’ve ravished me with the bulk of your lust.

  ‘Spend the night with me,’ you say.

  ‘I wish I could. But you leave tomorrow. I’d rather we don’t get attached.’

  ‘Let me drop you half-way then.’

  You do, until the Peddar Road junction. You ask the cabbie how much the fare would be and pay him in advance.

  Five days later.

  Delhi Airport. Baggage claim. Failed attempts to quieten my brain.

  Why am I here? Is there any wisdom to this trip? What sense in prolonging a goodbye, delaying it, deferring it?

  You were supposed to be a one-night stand. A bookmark. A ten-line poem in my grand anthology of lovers.

  But you had more sinister designs.

  I had every intention of relegating you to memory. In fact, just before what should have been our final kiss in that black-and-yellow taxi in Mumbai, I’d looked you in the eyes, smiled and asked if you’d remember me after the spell had been lifted.

  I cannot remember your reply. But I suppose I’m implicated too for I messaged you the next day, on an impulse, saying, ‘I remember you already.’

  You responded with a phone call.

  ‘Come to Delhi!’ you said.

  ‘I will, when I find the time. I have other loose ends I need to tie up there in any case.’

  ‘So why not come now?’

  ‘
I’m not exactly good on funds at the moment. First job. First month. Still to receive my first cheque.’

  Pause.

  ‘Won’t you be back in Bombay for a day or two in another two weeks? Some opening or the other?’ I say.

  ‘Yes, but that’ll be too touch and go. We won’t have the luxury of time.’

  Pause.

  ‘What if I subsidise your fare?’ you petition.

  ‘I wouldn’t be comfortable with that. Once bitten twice shy, like they say.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, my ex once paid for a ticket for me to visit him, and after we broke up, he wanted his money back.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do such a thing.’

  ‘That’s what they all say.’

  ‘Maybe you can do something in exchange. Maybe you can write about my work.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘You said you like it, maybe you can write to me and tell me why.’

  ‘That seems doable.’

  ‘How soon can you get here?’

  ‘This weekend? I can leave the office early on Friday and take a flight.’

  ‘Let me speak to my agent.’

  Your next message contained a PNR.

  Absurd. Flying out to see someone I’d only fucked twice.

  ‘Do you remember anything about our first night?’ I asked in reply to your email.

  ‘It’s all a blur. Maybe that’s why I’m asking you to come.’

  Delhi Airport. Baggage in hand, I stand along the edge of the road, waiting for you to pick me up. I feel like one of Bukowski’s women. Fortunately, you’re much better looking and not half as alcoholic.

  You swing by in your Gypsy. You’re dressed in a dark blue cotton shirt. You look gorgeous, the salt and pepper of your beard contrasts against the deep hue. I dump my bag in the backseat and get in. You hit the accelerator and we’re in motion. It’s an old car. You’ve had it forever, I can tell. It makes a grumpy sound now and then, but is steady nonetheless. I cannot imagine you in any other kind of car. I notice for the first time this habit you have of occasionally stroking your beard when you’re driving.

  ‘Welcome to Delhi,’ you say when we reach the first red light and you follow it with a quick kiss. My body blushes.

  I remember why I came.

  A year later.

  Foggy evening. My third visit. Single malt.

  The details escape me. I was inebriated. But at some point you tell me about your relationships with other women, your travel companions with whom you shared a bed without feeling the urge to indulge. It suddenly strikes me that I’m a complete aberration to your narrative of lovers past.

  ‘Why was it different with me? You slept with me the first night we met,’ I reminded you.

  ‘I was very attracted to you. Maybe I shouldn’t have,’ you said.

  ‘You mean you regret it?’

  ‘I didn’t say I regret it. Just that it was probably not the right thing to do.’

  You were supposed to be a one-night stand, a bookmark, a ten-line poem in my grand anthology of lovers.

  But you refused to play the part. You weren’t interested in temporary delights. You took charge and steered us into unchartered waters. Despite the distance between us, despite our separate lives, despite our individual penchant for solitude, we stumbled into this black hole, this point of no return, this movement from lust to love, from body to being.

  I moved.

  For selfish reasons.

  One: I found I was allergic to distances. My body began to break out periodically into bouts of longing, my blood began to thicken with the constant weight of your absence, my heart started to suffer for lack of permanence, and my fingers grew weary for want of your pulse throbbing over its tips.

  Two: In the course of my research it became imperative that I be closer to you, my muse. So I found myself a source of employment and moved from my city-by-the-sea to your city-of-djinns.

  You must have been petrified. For weeks you were in denial; you weren’t convinced I’d actually go through with it. When you gathered I was intent on moving, you tried to dissuade me. You said I ought to focus on finishing my book instead of wasting time meeting with brokers, negotiating the rent, building a new life. ‘Man does not live on words alone,’ I tried to explain. Besides, I was steadily going broke. You then offered to support me financially on the condition that I would stay put and finish what I’d started. I couldn’t decide whether you were being instinctively generous or plain cowardly.

  So I took a risk and moved; collected all my things, my books, my clothes, scraps of cash that I’d earned from here and there and comprised my meagre bank account, and set up base in a one-room barsati overlooking the Hauz Khas tombs. A few weeks into my move, you sought revenge, you started to harass me about the book. You’d wield your tongue like a whip and castigate me for my lack of pace and discipline, my bohemian lifestyle and my wayward friends, none of which, you decided, were a good influence.

  I began to negotiate with you for more time. ‘It’s only just getting interesting,’ I told you. In truth, I was repelled by the initial draft of my first chapter. It was induced by the most belligerent bout of longing I’d ever experienced, around the beginning of our second year together, when you’d spent at least six months away in Paris, photographing Indian émigrés. Every now and then, a few lines from that draft return to haunt me, and I cringe when I think about the pathos of lines like: ‘These pages make love to you. If you were here I’d tease you with my tongue. I’d mouth your name and listen as each syllable turns to song, and I’d roll each note along the edge of your ear … You live in the ground floor of all my songs.’ Too desperate for my own good.

  It wasn’t something I could change overnight. The problem was not so much the quality of the lines but the attitude they reflected. I came across as a female Cyrano, doomed to unrequited love, which wasn’t the case. What was required was a shift in the way I processed your absence. The original blueprint demanded that I submit myself unabashedly to the intensity of my passion for you while also salvaging my dignity. It demanded a confession that I was unwilling to make. It’s so much easier to add a missable ‘love you’ at the end of a phone conversation. I was not prepared to make such a declaration face-to-face, or even within the expanse of these pages.

  The book demanded a massive leap of faith, a crossing over that went beyond mere movement from my city to yours. It entailed that I come to terms with our fate, and trust, nonetheless, in the merit of the ephemeral—just because we knew we had no shot at a future didn’t mean we weren’t entitled to a present and a past.

  Moreover, we hadn’t fathomed the extent of our involvement. Until I moved I was just a voice over the phone you’d grown accustomed to, and a body you would reacquaint yourself with on occasion.

  You weren’t prepared for the ordinariness of everyday love.

  Neither was I.

  Two years later I could say for certain that the move was the best twist I could have ever conceived for this book. I’ve found, in the course of my research, that you have disabused me of every notion I ever had of a permanent home. I’ve realised that all I did when I adopted your city was exchange one form of exile for another.

  At any given moment, I roam the city with two bags. The smaller one has my phone, my wallet, my cigarettes, my moleskines and some loose change. The bigger knapsack has my laptop and charger, my hard disk, my phone charger, three different books, a change of clothes, a pouch with tiny bottles of shampoo, conditioner and moisturiser; a kajol pencil and sharpener, lingerie, and accessories. It’s my overnight bag that I carry at all times because I never know for certain when you’ll ask me to come over and spend the night.

  In the beginning we had a plan. We’d decide well in advance when I was to come over. There was a comfortable rhythm to our evenings together. I’d return to you after a long day of work, we’d share a glass or two of single malt over a dinner I cooked, and we’d eventually mediate the t
erritory of your bedroom.

  Over weeks, the frequency of our meetings increased. We’d find excuses to spend the night together. I’d abandon all prior engagements and run to you, vegetables in tow, and we’d revel in each other’s company. By now you’d made peace with my move. You had enough exposure to the convenience of having me around to recognise it was a good thing.

  Until work intervened and demanded you travel, often for between two weeks to a month. I began to lead two lives; one when you were out of town, and one when you returned.

  When you were away, I’d work hard on disengaging from you. I’d hack away at the roots that entwined us. I’d attempt an escape. I’d sample other men, other tongues, other lives, and I’d convince myself that I was cured, that I had finally outgrown my lust for you, that I could indeed survive, hell, thrive in your absence. The tone of my writing changed for the better. It finally had that tinge of self-respect that it lacked before.

  Then you’d return and I’d regress into love again. We’d revive our little rituals and, as your skin renewed contact with mine, we’d renew our lust.

  You held all the cards. You made all the rules. I could only meet you if I was willing to schedule you as priority, which meant I had to place on hold the life I’d invented for myself in your absence and, once again, ensure that my plans revolved around you. I had to show up at your door latest by eight, else you’d claim ‘it didn’t make sense’. I had to choose between you and the ten million other things that the city regularly hosts. At some point my early morning work schedule got to you, so you decided we should reserve our meetings for the weekend instead. We tried it for a few weeks until we lapsed and everything went haywire all over again. A few months later, I quit my job. It seemed to come in the way of my novelistic pursuit.

  If only you could leave me your keys!

  A year passed. By now, we’d evolved our own systems. By now, I’d colonised your kitchen. By now, you’d already tricked me into believing I shared your house when, in fact, I was and remain a frequently visiting guest. Your only houseguest.