Loved. (Part 1)

Writing this is going to take a lot out of me. An image comes to mind—that of a giant, disembodied arm, reaching into my subconscious through my throat, excavating a mountain of memories that have been layered with locks. I don’t know if this is good for me, but I have been excited about it ever since the idea took seed in my mind—to write of you, on you, on us; to say what has never been clearer in my mind:

I loved you.

*

Do you remember the time we went to that Baul concert? We hadn’t met for months, we’d barely spoken. I’d called you, you were surprised I did and didn’t hide it—a trifling detail that, nevertheless, made shutterbugs flash in my lower-abdomen. Sleep coloured your speech, stultified your vocabulary. You once told me you thought you sounded cute when you were sleepy; I never told you this, but you sound extremely sensuous, like a fingernail trailing my back.

Before the concert, we were shooed into this hall by a volunteer who seemed to suffer from verbal diarrhea (Do you remember him? Stout, unibrowed, excited: I was, and remain, convinced it was your presence that made him jittery); it was filled with paintings from old Bombay. We’d gone for a talk on those paintings before—it’s remarkable how much of the talk came back to us, as we repeated lines from a year ago verbatim, flitting from painting to painting, like frenzied butterflies.

At some point, I remember standing a few inches behind you, as you stared at a painting of a perplexing three-headed man; your hair was bunched up, your bare neck—slender, delicate—was against my chest, your hands behind your back; for a brief second, I thought your hands were beckoning my own, and, instinctively, I made to link my fingers in yours, but better sense prevailed. I don’t remember much of the painting, even though we both agreed later on that that was the painting of the exhibition. How could I? The line of your neck— one I had traced with fingers and tongue, teeth and toes, a line I had clasped in my palm and caressed with my cheek—all that stood between that line and I was a still but crackling four inches of space and a line we couldn’t cross.

Did you feel it too, our presences mingling in the air between us, as you stared at that strange painting? Perhaps not, because, afterwards, you seemed to have so much to say about the three-headed man, peeling off layers of subtext like flakes of paint. Wasn’t that the evening we had a mild disagreement? Gone are the days, I remember thinking, when we had full-fledged fights, for even our disagreements are but mild.

But, I got to you that evening, didn’t I? I knew where you’d hurt and I was gentle and blunt: I called you the quintessential theorist, incapable of producing any true art, but adept at reading meaning into another’s. Someone else would have taken that as a compliment, but, for you, it was always a sore point: can’t draw, can’t write, can’t produce music.

*

Vexing.

Under the stars, your hair acquires a life of its own. You know it, just like you know when I am aroused by you. It’s a pity our night-skies in the city were usually coated by a thick sheet of white-grey—let alone the stars, even the pale moon merely marked attendance.

Which is why that night on the hills of Himachal was special. You must remember the guest-house we stayed at, overlooking the valley. It was perched right on top of the hill; the balcony we sat in afforded a priceless view of the skies. The stars twinkled—‘like a thousand Dumbledores’, I remember declaring—and you smiled. I must have gone on for a while about the stars on that moonless night, because, you seemed to drift into some sort of an uneasy equilibrium. ‘What is it?’, I asked. You shook your head, nothing.

I kissed your hair and asked again, softly: ‘What happened?’

You turned to look at me and said: ‘this is all so vexing’. I hadn’t heard anyone say ‘vexing’ in a conversation, so it took me a fraction longer to register the word.

‘I think the lights in the valley are more alluring than the stars—I am listening to you, but I keep looking at the wrong set of lights’, you explained, ‘and I don’t like it; for one, they are town-lights—street-lamps, tube-lights, head-lights—all man-made, artificial; and what’s more, you don’t even seem to notice them. Why don’t we see the same thing?’

And that’s when I looked down, at the valley: it seemed like someone had held a giant, psychedelic, dynamic mirror to the skies: unlike the lights above, these lights seemed to imbue the darkness with a wider palette—red, yellow, orange, even green dotted the valley of black; some lights even moved, streaking across the darkness like shooting stars; it was just as spectacular, perhaps even better than the stars above.

Later that night, as I hugged you tight and stared into the darkness beyond our thrown-open French windows, I remembered thinking of those lights. You were right, from where we sat, the town-lights outdid the stars and I hadn’t paid them the slightest attention.  I had always prided myself as being aesthetically aware, of being really drawn into my element by nature’s magic; but, clearly, my own understanding and appreciation of beauty was clouded, guided by what was conventionally needed to be seen than what was inherently pleasing. And, for you, beauty was immediate, profound. This realization didn’t hurt me as much as see you in a new, haloed light.

I love you, I whispered into your sleeping ears, stroking your hair. I love you.             

*

I know what it is to wait for a phone to flicker. I know what it is to share that sense—of twin phones beeping in the darkness, strings of lifeless alphabets communicating a gamut of emotions, reveling in a shared sense of breathlessness.  Equally, I know what it is to no longer share that sense, when I hoped to breathe life into a phone by simply staring at it for hours together.  

I wept. I hadn’t heard myself sob in years: it felt pathetic, hearing my sobs echo in the stillness. Remember ‘sound of your voice?’—our mock code-word for shut up? Remember the quirky tune we designed, the way our decibel levels rose, from the pale whisper of ‘sound’ to the shrill, shriek-y ‘voice’? Well, that night, when grief manifested itself in a discrete stream of broken sobs, I desperately wanted to stop, to not hear my pitiable self. And my mind, ever alert, chose your voice to issue the order in: sound of your VOICE.

I couldn’t get away from you even if I willed—for you had conquered my words, my silences.    

*

When did I know? Remember, you’d asked me the same? Us, snuggled like snails on the sofa, my hand in yours, your voice—sprinkled with charming innocence, fresh like coffee beans (amongst the few things that remained the same about you)—whispering to the darkness: ‘When did you know?’

I drew a line on the bridge of your nose with a finger and bought time. ‘When’, I said more to myself than you and pretended to be deep in thought: in truth, my mind drew a blank, not because I didn’t know, but because I was lost in the bubble we’d fashioned for ourselves. In those early days—of whose every tiny detail I can recollect like verses rote-learned in childhood—I spent many a night lost in love; hours sped without notice, my mind filled with a blissful, all-encompassing emptiness.       

I then picked out the party at Rishabh’s, when you danced like life was a big, wide tub of ice-cream; you looked perfectly happy, arriving at my state of inner emptiness in a manner that was the inverse of how I seemed to achieve it—while I needed quiet, darkness and the sense of your breathing self by me, you thrived on what, to my novice eyes, was staged chaos: loud music, frantic, semi-synchronized body-contorting and some beer.

At some point in the night, I remembered looking for you under the jazzy party-lights (I was away from the dance ‘scene’—sprawled out on a comfortable bean-bag in the corner of the room). I found you jumping by yourself, rising and falling on your feet lightly, slowly; I watched until all I knew was your body, the absence of gravity and a sense of space-less-ness; you seemed to function in a universe of your own: the song was yours, the stage was yours, the world was yours. ‘I knew then’, I told you as we lay on our sofa, ‘I knew then that this was it’.

It was a good story, possessing just the right dash of drama. Like all good lies.

In fact, I only really knew, I can now say with little doubt, many days after that party. I lied when you asked that night, because, as I explained, I wasn’t thinking. And, to pinpoint a specific instance in a fuzzy world—where the leap from not knowing to knowing can encompass a fraction of a moment— requires considerable reflection.

This is how I knew.

I was lunching at the Dhabha with my three newspapers in tow, having neatly made my way through two Paranthas and two sets of opinion pieces.  In between newspapers, I paused to look up: it was a clear winter day, the leaves on the peepal trees glistened like they were photoshopped, the skies were painted by someone who didn’t believe in subtlety—they were blue, as blue as blue could be and more; and the steam rose from the chai-cups, fingers reaching out to the sky’s bosom.

And, acquiring a mind of their own, my legs kicked my chair away. I stood up. And walked out of the dhabha, out of my hostel, and into the gully that led to the main road; I passed the back-gate of the hostel next-door, the small kirana shop with its grumpy owner who never had change. On reaching the main road, impulsively, my legs turned right, gathering pace—I was now trotting, overtaking cycle-rickshaws pulled by men twice my age; soon, I began to run, for no reason at all, hopping across gaps in the pavement; the ridge on my left was a green-blur, the odd passer-by turned to look at me or let me ahead.

I ran till my knees cracked, till my head spun, till my heart pounded against my chest.

I ran till my initial surprise at my own behavior gave way to a sense of calm.

That winter afternoon, in the middle of a nondescript University road, as a Sardarji Uncle with a blue turban spluttered past me on an old Chetak, my arms on my knees and gasping for breath, I realized that this was it: this dizzy sprint, this tranquility, this world with its idiosyncrasies. For that was how it was with love—a spell of rushed madness, a womb-like web of security and background noise.

I knew.

*

Do you remember the first time we kissed?

I don’t.

*

(To continue)