by Poorna Bell
Everyone is excruciatingly sober because of the alcohol ban: it’s unlikely anyone is going to take him up on his offer. He starts playing ‘Ek, Do, Teen’, a classic disco song from when I was a kid, and his stage lights start going crazy in time to the music. He even pops a pair of sunglasses on. Lock up your daughters, folks . . .
Still, no one gets up. Then Mum tugs at Dad’s shirt. ‘Come on, shall we dance?’ she says. It’ll be a cold day in hell before Dad dances without a beer in his hand. I’m the same. I couldn’t fathom getting up in front of all those people.
When Mum realises Dad and I aren’t going to move, she stands up. Where is she going? The toilet?
No, she’s heading for the stage. I am blown away by this: Mum is going to dance, and she doesn’t need a beer. She doesn’t care that everyone is looking, or that she might feel silly – she just goes for it.
As she spins under the lights, she looks so beautiful, so free, you can almost see her spirit and energy curling and uncurling around her. It is the most magnificent thing I have ever seen. She’s saying: I want to dance and life is too damn short to worry about what other people think.
I am so glad I got to witness this, got to see her living in the moment like the Roman candle she is. Slowly I see other people getting up to dance, encouraged by Mum’s little act of bravery. I wonder what it must be like to be Dad, in love with a woman who, at times, lights everything she touches in this dazzling glow.
I always thought any bravery or rebelliousness I had was because I was emboldened by the freedom of the West.
Turns out it was in my blood the entire time.
6
SO THIS IS WHAT CLOUDS TASTE LIKE
We hire a car to take us to the neighbouring state, Meghalaya. I remember reading about it as a child. Its name literally translates in Sanskrit to ‘The Abode of Clouds’, so it always seemed like an ethereal wonderland where castles floated in the air.
It was nicknamed by the British Raj as ‘Scotland of the East’, a name that still lurks around not because the Scottish are holding onto it, but because Indian journalists and Indian tourist boards still persist in using it.
Anytime it gets written about, it’s referred to as Meghalaya, Scotland of the East, because of that lingering colonialist attitude that anything affiliated with the West increases its allure and value.
Meghalaya doesn’t need the help.
It’s not a fairy-tale confection of turrets peeping through the clouds as I imagined as a child, but it is arresting in its beauty. I have never seen anything like it in India, even when I visited the lower Himalayas.
At first, the view from our hotel is pretty enough. Below our feet, the land cuts away to a small valley, stretching in greenery to the water’s edge; lanky trees and dense undergrowth around the edges of a lake. Blue at its heart, with clouds draped across it like a white shawl, half-heartedly contemplating a future of rain.
Meghalaya is home to the rainiest place on earth; it’s like a train station for clouds.
The next day I make the journey to do something I’ve always dreamed of: walk 6,000 steps down and up to see the double-decker root bridge in Cherrapunjee.
It used to be the wettest place on the planet, but apparently Mawsynram, 16km away, now holds that distinction. The people here devised a way of getting from one village to another during monsoon by coaxing living rubber trees into bridges.
The branches are teased into bamboo funnels and it takes about thirty to forty years to grow a bridge. There are about fifty single root bridges but only one double-decker – the top bridge was created after a period when the monsoon was so heavy, it flooded the first bridge.
Dad suggests coming, but this is something I want to do on my own.
I have long since felt that otherworldly places are where I feel Rob the most, and I won’t be able to do that while having conversations about foot fungus and how much beer we’ll need for the evening.
On the way there is a sign that reads:
Meghalaya: Where The Clouds Come To Romance.
The young guy I’ve hired as a driver, Susheel, is playing Justin Bieber, and it is entirely incongruous that this is the soundtrack to what greets me around the corner after we drive up the mountain.
‘Ma’am,’ he says plaintively, stopping the car.
I look up from my phone where I’ve been frantically trying to find music to drown out Bieber, and I see heaven.
Ahead of us is a large, long valley of mountains, each one tightly bound in a dense forest of green. Their shape and lines are moulded by folds of darkness, light teetering on the edge, fusing them together into a flowing river of rock.
They stretch into the distance, until at the very end is a mountain wreathed in mist and clouds. Above their peaks is the bluest sky, and crowning the scene is a blazing sun. The scene looks like every depiction of Eden in a Renaissance painting.
I get out and take a few photos, but there is nothing that can capture this. It is heart-lifting; it is heartbreaking. It perfectly captures the gladness of being alive and the sorrow that some people you love are no longer around to see it.
This is more than an arrangement of mountains, light and leaves – there is something else wound into this landscape. It is relief, it is comfort, it is the earth saying to me, It will be okay. You want everyone to see this, to feel this – your heart almost can’t contain it.
We’re ordered to get back in the car – some jobsworth with a clipboard is barking at Susheel to move on – and then, out of nowhere, we see a cloud heading towards us at the same level as our heads. I gasp as it rolls through me; I taste its dream of rain.
We start driving and then we are in a herd of clouds. Immediately the sky is gobbled up and everything around us is a ghost world. Beyond the outline of the nearest trees and a lone fence dissolving into motes of nothingness, this feels like what the afterlife should look like. There is no beginning and no end; we see a man’s outline as he enters and disappears back into mist, curls of white following him as he leaves.
We sit quietly, feeling as if our existence in the present world is suspended for the time being. It is like floating.
When I think back to how I felt just after Rob died – not belonging to anyone, feeling no reason to stay in our world but neither compelled to follow him – this is that emotion sketched out in landscape.
One minute you are basking in the warmth and love of your parents, and the next, you are held in a field of clouds feeling like every atom in your body is coming apart at the seams.
A big reason for this journey is to figure some shit out, but another reason is also because I don’t have anything to lose. ‘You don’t have dependants,’ a friend said. I know they were being helpful, and they were right. But it also makes me think: Jeez, I don’t have any dependants.
If something happens to Priya, or Mum and Dad, they have another person to sound the alarm pretty soon after. I’ve been so headstrong and misanthropic at times – ‘DON’T freak out if you call me and I don’t answer the phone’ – that in the event something does happen, I have no one to blame but myself. I mean what do I do if a fish bone gets stuck in my throat or I spoon so much peanut butter into my mouth I can’t breathe?
I asked them not to pressure and nag me. I haven’t so much as detached the umbilical cord, I’ve torched it and sent the ashes directly into the sun.
I had a dependant, and I lost him. I lost a 6ft 1 human who had blue eyes and calloused hands. A mallet thumb from an accident he’d had as a child. I lost Sunday lunches with him, choosing linen for our bed, discussions around holidays. I lost someone to bitch with at weddings, someone who made me feel lustful every day I was with him. I lost my best friend. I lost the biggest love I ever had.
I know why I didn’t have dependants. Sure, dependants meant you had someone to nurture and love, but dependants were also people you could lose. When I thought about the idea of losing my niece Leela, my heart became so sharp in my chest I stopped breathing
. Dependants? I barely survived losing Rob – losing anything more would finish me off.
But does that make me a coward? For all that I preach about living a full and ordered life, was I my own enemy by not allowing myself to have anything I could possibly lose? Yes, I had lost almost everything, but when I did have it all, I also fought for and protected it with a strength and capacity I didn’t know I was capable of.
When Rob told me he was a heroin addict, I didn’t feel a moment’s hesitation about helping him and getting him well. A lot of people said, ‘I’m impressed you stayed with him. I don’t know that I would’ve been able to do the same.’ When it came to his safety, I knew exactly what I had to do.
But when the idea of us separating became real, and I realised I’d have to work out what to do with my life without him, I thought, ‘I don’t know where to start.’
I thought about dividing our furniture, our art we bought on holidays, our kitchen utensils. Even the thought of who would take the pasta strainer undid me – I couldn’t fathom having the energy to do it.
Of course, we didn’t have to do it, in the end, because the end was so much worse than figuring out the inventory of our lives together.
Most of the time, I don’t feel broken. But when other people sometimes look at me, I know their eyes are looking for the crack that tells them how and when I was smashed apart, and then put back together.
I know people are horrified on my behalf by my loss, and sometimes, when they are going through something tough, they’ll say, ‘I know it’s nothing compared to what you went through.’
It’s not comparable, I often say. It is impossible to use the currency of my story as an exchange rate as to how you should feel about your own life. Our hearts don’t weigh the same, and we don’t have identical histories.
But sometimes, when I wonder how on earth I am going to approach a sense of normality, or at least appearing normal, I come across a story of someone who has lost so much more. I’m not indulging in misery tourism, but I’ll read about someone who lost multiple family members, or suffered a different but equally bad trauma immediately after one trauma.
One lady was Victoria Milligan, who was enjoying a day out on a speedboat with her husband and four children. They had an accident and the boat overturned with all of them in the water – the kill cord hadn’t been attached, so they floated in the water as the boat came back round for them over and over again. In the end, she lost her husband and eight-year-old daughter, and she lost her left leg as it had been slashed beyond repair by the propellers.
Victoria wrote her personal account of this and her views on resilience when I worked at Huff Post. She said, ‘I have had to adapt to a very different future to the one I thought I would have and one without two very precious people in it.
‘Resilience is something we all need to learn in this increasingly uncertain world; the sooner we are able to get up again and dust ourselves off when something goes wrong, the better able we are to adapt to any new situation.’
I’m not saying that I’m looking at Victoria’s life – or anyone who has experienced severe, multiple trauma – and am thinking, ‘God, it could be so much worse.’
I’m saying that I look at Victoria’s life, and I see the solidified version of the human spirit and its will to survive.
In the midst of all that death, I see hope. I see someone who has overcome remarkable odds and who has earned the right to interpret and experience the world as they want to. Above all, what I see is the hardening of a truth within myself: that it is impossible for other people to know what your heart wants, and what it is capable of.
I’m not always so magnanimous, though. When I heard that Lucy, the wife of Paul Kalanithi – the late surgeon who wrote the bestseller When Breath Becomes Air – met a fellow widower, John Duberstein, whose deceased spouse Nina Riggs also wrote a book about dying from cancer, there was a part of me that was seriously jealous.
Mainly because I struggle with wondering who could possibly love me, and not be put off by what I’ve been through.
Sometimes being in these places of otherness are the only times I feel weightless, unburdened by it all.
I started dating about fourteen months after Rob passed away. Not the beautiful Lucy-and-John kind, more the right-swipe dating app here-today-gone-tomorrow kind.
Work was busy but not overwhelming, and on the weekends I would sequester myself away from the real world in my writing cocoon.
But then I took a proper, serious step back into the real world.
‘It’s not that I need to start dating,’ I said to my friend Martin. ‘I want to go on a date.’
The truth was I was starting to yearn for men. Not because I wanted to get into a relationship. But I missed the physicality of them. The smell of woody cologne and fresh shampoo. The stretch and sinew on their arms, stubble on their face. The feeling of a much bigger arm wrapped around me.
Shortly after I wrote the chapter of Rob’s death in my first book, I needed to do something, anything, that was different to sitting in my room and writing.
When I hesitantly told people I was dating, they sighed happily because it meant – to them – that my heart had thawed and I was ready to love again. I was ready to do no such thing – I just needed some action.
Dating in my thirties was very different from the previous two decades. A lot of this is shaped by what other people think, versus how you may actually feel about it.
In your teenage years, it’s a free-for-all: there are no expectations and you make your choices based on what band a person likes, or whether they’ve gone for the 10-hole Doc Martens over the 8-hole. You have limitless time to make mistakes.
In your twenties, things start to get a bit more intense. You begin with all the gorgeous hedonism of your university years, have a freak-out mid-decade, then spend the latter half trying to find someone to settle down with because if you don’t do it by the time you hit thirty, your nethers will instantly desiccate and you’ll be alone for ever.
Then you turn thirty and you find the world is as it always was, and your genitals haven’t dropped off. You still have wriggle room, however, even if it doesn’t feel like it.
In your mid-thirties and beyond, the assumptions about what you must want from your dating life, whether you are a man or a woman, grow bigger and uglier.
People assume you must want to settle down. For women, there is the extra kicker that they start referring to your biological clock in conversation when it’s none of their business.
A lot is said about women’s health and fertility – in fact, in the dating world, there’s an entrenched, sexist assumption that women must be gagging to have kids because of the baby clock.
‘Men can have kids at any age,’ said a male friend.
‘Well, yes, they can,’ I countered. ‘But so can women. Maria del Carmen Bousada de Lara was sixty-six when she gave birth to twins. It’s sexist to assume that fertility is a woman’s problem. After a certain age, your sperm goes off like a cheese sandwich in the sun, just like our eggs do, pal.’
Considering the fact that men’s sperm counts decrease significantly after the age of forty, and that, for men, the risk of miscarriage is much higher if they father children after forty-five, I wonder why men don’t get the same barrage of questions.
What places me in a unique position to observe what’s going on is that people just don’t know what the fuck to do with me. That’s because, more or less, there are three main clumps to which single people my age belong.
Clump one is usually full of people who have been single for a long period of time, and want to meet a significant other so they can fulfil the ambition of getting married and having kids. Clump two is people who have come out of a divorce or long-term relationship; they may or may not have kids. Clump three is the least common – like an O-negative blood type – and is filled with people like me and Victoria Milligan – widows, widowers, people who have an unusual backstory for why they a
re single.
When you’re re-entering the dating world after a long time, it can naturally be daunting. None of this is helped by hanging out with the clump one types. They are jaded around dating and understandably so.
For years, they’ve had to go to dinner parties, Christmases, weddings and endure the relentless slew of ‘when is it your turn?’ The screw tightens as the years pass, with elderly relatives trying to blackmail them with their mortality: ‘I’d love to see you settled before I die.’ Trust me when I say that when that person’s life flashes before their eyes, your wedding photo is not going to make the final cut of their defining moments.
That’s not even factoring in the actual experience of dating itself. There is so much conflicting advice, from the rules of texting to where to find a partner in the first place.
‘Well, he’s within the three-day rule,’ Mal said when we were talking about a guy I was interested in. This guy would almost never reply to a text on the same day, and would take exactly two days to respond. I was upset and wanted to know if I was justified in being upset.
The three-day rule is that it’s fine for someone to take three days to respond to your text message, but more than three days and it means they definitely don’t like you. According to this rule, this guy’s behaviour was totally fine because it was within the margin, when it was actually totally mad.
‘Really?’ I said. ‘Who made this rule?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean who set this rule? Was it a study of more than 2,000 people, who were a mix of age-appropriate men and women, and they arrived at a mathematical formula that revealed three days was fine? Even though we now live in a day and age where people can send FREE MESSAGES on WhatsApp and there is no excuse for them to take three days to get back to you? Even though this cretin has read-receipts set up on his phone? Or was it a rule made up by a woman who wanted to make herself feel better about some bozo who took three days to text her back?’
