All of this highfalutin theory about nudity was distilled hypocrisy. I knew how much my husband controlled my clothes, something I made the mistake of reporting to my mother. Love is in the little things, she said on the phone. Wear what pleases him. Don’t stand your ground or sweat yourself on the small stuff. Men are insecure about beauty. They will want to hide it in you, and then, they will take their crippled minds to town and eye-fuck every girl they see.
I’m sorry, mother dear, but I disagree. Clothes shouldn’t be a battleground. They shouldn’t be about control and mortification. To me, they are about the way men undress themselves – always the joy of watching a lover’s awkwardness when he hurriedly removes his shirt, first the left sleeve and then the rest of it pulled up from the neck. It is the easy way women dress and undress in front of each other, our clothes made for the hands of our friends, the zip that runs along the length of the dress, the bra hook, the sari pleats at the back, as if we become complete only when we take part in dressing each other. From me, you will only hear about clothes as things that we wanted to shed, clothes that remind us of the time we were lovers. The scarf you bought for me from your visit to the Middle East which I did not ask you to show me for fear that it would mean I cared about what you felt for me, that I did not take from you for fear that it would force you to feel bad later on, the scarf an evidence of love and at once a false hope of commitment. The wine-red halter-neck I left behind in your apartment, with its little balcony and a bedroom with a cobalt blue bedspread and white curtains, as if by leaving something behind, I hoped I would have to come to you again, and then, this scarf would lie in wait for me, and we would dissolve our nights in poetry and politics and all the worst jokes in the world.
* *
LETTER TO A LOVER
I write this letter to you knowing that you will be deeply upset when you encounter Derrida’s name. You will call him a wanker – the most British insult you can find in that French accent of yours. To prove to me that you can do a better job of obscurantism, you will put pen to paper and send up seven sentences that cannot be deciphered by the best minds in the world. No, we are not setting the stage for that. This is not a trap of any kind. This is about another writer, Derrida calls her the best writer in the French language, and for that reason alone, it must interest you.
I read Hyperdream by Hélène Cixous. There is a sentence that I hear forever, a sentence that wraps itself around an action, a sentence that travels around the life of a woman and her contemplation of pain and survival even as this woman is applying a balm of some sort to her mother’s skin, and I know this is how the words sink in, in circles, smoothly cajoled into the body, into the sore spots, into the bloodstream itself. This I can write an analysis of for forty-five pages; this one winding sentence can help me put forward an example of the feminine sentence; this can help me present a paper in some conference; but most of all, this sentence has altered me already, made me look at my mother’s dark skin in a new light. I imagine this skin you see, so written about, as a rose-tinted white with a hint of straw.
In Cixous’s novel, there is a skin problem. In my world, skin is the problem. No Jacques Derrida would ever be blurbing me, not for all the telephone intimacy, not for all the woman on woman action in the world. Our skin doesn’t let in light, there is no translucence of reflected glory, and dark women like me have a hard time bursting into intellectual, feminist scenes. Unless we turn into the soft-spoken token women hand-picked to entertain all-white audiences waiting to be bedazzled. I cannot compete with her, not now, not yet, not ever.
I love Cixous, almost want to call her Hélène on a first-name basis in my fantasy thesis, but I become dismissive of this novel, this hyperdream. The French, which has seeped into the translation, is perhaps the saving grace. Those italicized words in this language, of a power that did not colonize my land even as it ravaged others, perhaps hold the key. If given a chance, it is those French words – unambiguous, unlike, say, the adverb encore – that must explain and contain my howling rage at language, at literature, at everything that is flawed and twisted.
And then, after an endless number of pages, I find something.
Dieu n’a pas d’yeux.
God has no eyes.
That line is a kick to the gut. Indeed, God has not seen the smile on a little girl’s face the first time her palms eclipse the sun, nor has he seen the tears of a battered wife as she thinks of her unborn children.
* *
LETTER TO A LOVER
This is the letter that I have been writing to you for days. Living in Mangalore, where rain trespasses into every private sphere, how do I reduce the rain for you?
The abandoned clothes pegs are getting wet, holding ear-lobes of water. Fuchsia. Aquamarine. Fuchsia. Aquamarine. Fuchsia again. I loved them as a child, clipping one clothes peg to the ear of another, until they were long enough to trail after me through the house, a caravan of clothes pegs, and to adorn me, a daisy-chain garland of gem clips, with precise colour repetitions. In a marriage, there’s no such room to fool around. Everything has form and function. Everything belongs in its place. The peg on the clothesline, the gem clips on the table, the coat-hanger in the closet, the woman in the kitchen, the submissive between the sheets.
I open the doors to step outside and watch the unending ropes of rain. It is the relief and the respite that I seek from the sultriness of staying locked in. It is this rain that comes to me carrying the scent of long-ago lovers. In rain, I hide my memories of happier days. In rain, I chant the names of men I want. In rain, my body responds to me, loses its restraint, forgets the decorum required of good women. In rain, I hide the shame of the unexplained wetness between my legs. In rain, I drown out the silence in my blood. In rain, I absolve myself of guilt: I am wife, I am chained to this fate, I have made peace with life. It is this rain that tells me to run away in every way it can, rain that comprehends my misery, rain that fills me with sadness and longing, rain that sows the seeds of discord, rain that sends me into irrevocable silences, rain that informs this letter I write.
* *
Each of my letters, I delete after I have finished typing them. Every line I have written to you is a thought-crime, a crime that does not leave a trail of evidence, a crime that is not even a crime. If my husband was to ever ask me about this, I plan to use his own line of reasoning: There is no material basis here, so what do you want me to do?
VII
Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings. Then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines.
MARGARET ATWOOD, CAT’S EYE
There is always a clumsy first time, which is often forgotten for the purposes of history, but remembered in the service of nostalgia, and recounted under duress from demanding husbands.
This happened long ago. This happened before I was aware of things like remembering and forgetting. This happened in circumstances where I could not talk about it though I was in the centre of it.
* *
I am twenty-something, he is approaching forty. I am a student, a migrant, with nothing to call my own here. I speak a smattering of Malayalam, in every word I utter my native Tamil peeks through; the vernacular media in Kerala calls him the greatest orator of his generation. He is the most charismatic politician in the state, the grandson of a revolutionary, the darling of the regional press, the lone crusader, the insider who is dismantling a corrupt system, the dedicated young man who will change the country.
This man is all the men I had been looking for.
* *
We almost always met in secret.
The happiness at seeing each other, overshadowed by our sadness at having to meet in this manner. Time, cupped in the palms of our hands, as if to prevent its spillage. Afraid to let go, afraid to rush through. Afraid that a little less impatience in the beginning, a little hurry towards the end, would be the beginning
of the end. Breathless with anticipation. Breathing heavily, burdened by the heaviness of our secret, by the years that separate us in the eyes of the world. And any void in conversation, filled in by reciting the half-remembered, half-forgotten lines of poems. Laughing at each other’s jokes. Speaking in elaborate riddle. Embattled love, reckless embraces, coupled with the shamelessness of perfect strangers.
Some days, the awkwardness of expressing our physical hungers.
Some nights, intimacies dished out with the freshness of first love.
In the backdrop, the many incessant trademarks of a lover’s quarrel.
Fighting about who loved whom more.
Fighting about our fighting.
Giving each other names.
Fucking, without giving a fuck.
There was a lot of kissing. There was the blood and bones, the smell of sex and aftershave, the beauty that kept us going. There was, what could only be called, love.
* *
Things move quickly. Before I realize it, I am doing little things for him. One moment, I’m coordinating his interview with a foreign journalist, another, I’m proofreading the draft of a press release he has hurriedly emailed me. A week later, I’m researching for a speech he has to make at a university in another state. An inaugural keynote address on the role of the state machinery during communal riots. I walk around with Omar Khalidi’s slim new book, download numerous PDFs, cut out newspaper editorials, find reports of Police Commissions that indict the force for its non-neutrality. I try to put together a speech knowing that he would not read it aloud, that he would probably speak extempore, that his gift of the gab would be better than any words I write for him.
Knowing him, he would be talking a great deal about the Beemapalli police shootings, as the police had no right to enter that tiny seaside town and shoot down five Muslim men. It is a story of the state making the minorities an easy prey for its own excesses. The mainstream media and the civil society have looked the other way, but my man is one of the few who has raised his voice to break the silence. His press conferences, his media interviews, his memorandums, his demonstrations have all revolved around this issue for the last three months. I do the research because he asked for it, despite knowing that he has an army of people at his command to do this sort of thing: retired professors, ex-classmates, upcoming journalists, young men with documentation jobs in NGOs, young women in academia with political science degrees, the standard-issue types of people who would be happy to jump at a chance to help, happy to throw themselves at his service. Sometimes, it appears to me as if I am doing all this work to keep the competition out. I have no role, no position, no connection to his party. All of my engagement stems from the fact that I’m in love with him. Lost in romance, I savour these errands that come my way.
To myself, I reason that these tasks are his way of finding a chance to spend time with me: text messages, long phone calls, an unannounced secret visit to my office. I know that this work is beyond work, it is beyond politics, beyond the deadline and the word-count. When I am assigned to do something for him I think that this is how our love renews itself, constantly seeking to be on the same page, sharing common ground. It is like the way in which he says at the end of every call: ‘I will talk to you later’, ‘I will talk to you tonight’, ‘I will call you first thing in the morning’ as if we were engaged in one unceasing conversation, and when we find ourselves interrupted, we simply pause, ready and waiting to pick it up again right from where we had left off.
* *
Some nights, our phone conversations become an endless catalogue of his health problems. It crushes me that I am not with him; that I cannot do anything to comfort him. On the phone with him, all I have is the night sky that carries his thousand eyes. And there, the moon with a bellyache, the moon with a back pain, the moon with a bleeding heart, the moon in which I see all his moods.
All this travel has given me a constant backache.
Eating hotel food, eating out-of-hours, not eating at all – everything is aggravating my ulcer.
My forehead was burning hot this afternoon, and now I am wrapped in a blanket to stop the chills; I think Kochi’s mosquitoes have given me malaria again. Yes, I will see a doctor tomorrow.
My feet are swollen, my big toe is numb, could it mean a serious nervous problem? The MRI scan this January did not show anything out of the ordinary. Maybe I need a second opinion?
I have lost my voice, this is what the campaign trail does to you. It is three days since I slept; unscheduled events are killing me. I no longer have a life that functions according to plan.
The boy who does the massage did not turn up this week.
I am thinking about a full-body-health check-up.
The ‘glass of green tea every hour’ idea is good, but it ruins my appetite.
It is the stress, nothing else.
I am worlds removed from medicine, but I listen. He is not a hypochondriac, but he seems to have more health problems than my mother and her friends combined. The talk about illness becomes so central to his everyday, that now, almost out of habit, I work it into our conversations; I inquire about his state of health every time we call each other. I do not know how or why it has come to this. I think, in one of my fanciful theories that seeks to explain and preserve everything around me, that this is one of the ways in which he shows his trust in me, exposing himself at his weakest, divulging his frailties, sharing with me the sorrows of his unforgiving flesh, perhaps warning me that life with an older man comes with complications, perhaps preparing me for a lifetime with him.
He might be a strong, invincible man to the world outside, but to me, he is someone in need of tenderness. I sometimes read this as a plea for sympathy: as if pitying him would make me love him more, and by extension, my fierce love would protect him from the torment of tiredness and routine illness.
Maybe he does not harbour the same romantic illusions. For him, this is an intimacy he can easily afford – an intimacy that does not promise commitment, an intimacy that will not be judged.
Health complications might just be the other, unglamorous, matter-of-fact side of his life – getting off at a random railway station, meeting the first doctor around the corner, baring his buttocks to a shy nurse for a shot of diclofenac, downing a cocktail of medicines to keep himself going, to turn up in small towns to address meetings on promised dates.
* *
In love, I inhabit an imaginary underground; I simultaneously exist and do not exist. I’m summoned into being when my lover needs me; I’m dismissed, like a genie sent back to its bottle, when he is done with me.
I have made a temporary peace with this arrangement, as the world does not know of our untitled, unclaimed love.
Some know that I am his friend, but no one knows for sure whether I am his lover. They tell me salacious stories about him and then watch intently for my reaction. A twitch. A blush. A tell-tale sign. I remain impassive. I restrain the urge to feed their curiosity.
Those moments that I share with him, I keep them to myself. But the stories I hear, I do not always manage to throw to the wind. They stick with me, they stalk me. These stories sow the seeds of doubt. I begin to live in them. I look for evidence to believe them. When it becomes difficult to dismiss them as groundless gossip, I confront him. It is unpleasant and painful. Like cutting into my own flesh with a blade. Like taking someone captive. It breaks the languid charm of our relationship – that space without fights, that absence of raised voices, that snuggle-area we have fashioned for ourselves, where hurt does not enter, or exist.
It leaves us in a zone of discomfort. When doubt raises its multiple heads, the elements of love falter. To ask a man if a rumour about him is true comes with its own consequences: ‘You are suspicious. You do not trust me. Where there is no trust, there is no love.’
I disclose to him that I heard of his dalliance with an actress. I report back to him, in excruciating detail, after a journalist calls me up to inform me tha
t my lover’s stopover in Singapore had something more to it. One of my friends says he is supporting an upcoming academic because they share a bed as well as political passion, and the day I run into her in his office, I freeze, I cannot find words, I cannot smile, I cannot stay in her presence. I do not believe every story that comes my way, I know that some of it is dubious. But I cannot always contain myself, I bring it up despite my best efforts. These rumours that are passed on to me hunker down in the trenches of my mind, ready to charge when I feel neglected. It does not unsettle him. He dismisses it as the handiwork of his detractors – the occupational hazard of being a politician.
I believe him. I bring myself to believe that there can be smoke without fire, even if that smoke blinds me and makes my eyes stream with tears.
In truth, it is a simple story.
I had set out to love a man who loved people. Instead, I found myself with a man who loved women.
* *
Advice to young women who are into hero-worship: the world is full of women in love with the men who you are in love with.
Learn to live with that.
* *
Whenever I visit his office, whether I go there with a journalist or student or with a woman whose rape complaint has been ignored by the police, or a construction worker hunted by the local loan shark, or just because I want to steal a look at him, a hush settles on the men around him. There is a forced cordiality that masks their discomfort. They enact a fake amiability – greet me, ask about my health, how work is going and if I have found a job. The cocky ones among them inevitably tease me – joking that I plan to run for an MLA election in the future, that I am gunning for the post of the party’s media secretary, or the women’s wing, or the students’ wing, or whatever comes to their mind at that moment. Sized up, measured, put down: this is the fate that befalls those of us who are not political heirs.
When I Hit You Page 7
