Your house has taken to me. Everything is in its place. The trash has been trashed, the clothes I washed have been folded, another set sits in a neat pile atop the machine, waiting to be washed and sun dried. All the ashtrays have been emptied, the de-humidifiers are collecting moisture as we speak, and the floors are so clean I can finally walk barefoot across the surface. I rolled the windows of the front seat of your Gypsy just about an inch so it can breathe, and I’m pleased to report there isn’t an ounce of moisture, in fact, it smells exactly as it does in dry weather, the faint scent of rubber and foam. No walls are leaking, the balcony drain is unclogged and in a state of readiness, should it rain. All the dishes are clean and gleaming. There’s fresh milk in the fridge, and fresh bread, and eggs, and butter, and the ice-trays in the freezer have been refilled with water.

All that’s missing right now is you, and single malt slipped over blocks of ice. And a simple meal spread across the table, and your feet tapping to this luscious music, and my fingers stroking your wrist as you delicately rummage through my palm, feeling the lines it contains, the songs inscribed within their texture and the promise of happiness that they assure.

I’ll think of you at night, when I say my prayers and fade into sleep, and in the morning, when I wake up blissful, despite your absence, and bask in the expanse of your bed. And I’ll wish the same wish I’ve been wishing since I started to house-sit. I’ll wish I lived here too.

Maybe I already do.

It is this sliver of last evening that comes immediately to mind–being cornered by jute bags. I’d pressed the red button with my feet. The jute bags started to inflate around me until it builds into a looming tower and the only open space is the size of hole only a bit larger than the one Alice would have fallen through. I can see a small stretch of the ceiling. I’m unimpressed. The installation hasn’t lived up to its title. It isn’t The Panic Room I imagined it would be. In fact, I feel cocooned and calm and isolated from the glitterati at the opening. I sit down with my glass of wine. There’s a green button I know I’m supposed to press to deflate the jute walls, but I’m not ready yet. I wait a few minutes. The jute bags suddenly deflate themselves and expose me. How ironic that the panic room panicked and overheated itself because I didn’t panic soon enough. I walk away from the crime scene. I know there’s a camera that’s filmed me but I don’t care. I didn’t break it, I’m not buying it.

Last night I slept like a hibernating bear. And for the first time in weeks, on my own bed. I’d forgotten how glorious the mornings usually are in my room. Wind wafting in through the two balconies, grazing over my body, lulling me into a more advanced state of sleephood. I thought I’d call it a lazy sleepy Sunday, thought I’d bask in the afterglow of my dreams. But a call on my phone interrupted the haze. It was your neighbour. She sounds distressed. She tells me your balcony is leaking. I wake up instantly. I tell her I’ll be over as soon as I can.

My breath starts to collapse. My heart announces its fear and beats ferociously. The muscles around my chest start to quiver as I envision disaster. I retrace my steps. Yes, I’d closed all the taps. I’d shut off the washing machine, so this couldn’t possibly be my fault. Why did this have to happen on my watch? It took you three years to trust me with your keys, and now this! I can sense impending doom. I should have slept in your bed last night. I shouldn’t have abandoned the house.

I eat my breakfast mechanically. I wouldn’t have bothered but my flatmate had taken the trouble to whip eggs and lace them with slices of Gouda. She’d even toasted bagels and buttered them for me. I hold the bread to my mouth, my teeth sink into it impulsively. I search for the bits Gouda, but all I can taste is disaster. I try to make conversation, but every sentence is a dead-end and brings me back to the subject of collapse.

Images flash in my head at the speed of half-thoughts. That night when I walked into your bedroom and stepped into a flood, and the astonished look on your face when you discovered the waterfall that had taken over your wall. Minutes later, as if on cue, the ceiling in the store room began to leak. And then a week later, we witnessed the fury of termites as they chomped through the false ceiling of the room on the roof.

Since you’ve returned its been disaster after disaster. And we’ve tackled them elegantly. Built a partnership out of it. But this time you’re not around to help pick up the pieces, to contain the flood. And the fact of your submission, the gesture contained in the keys you handed me, the significance of it frightens me although I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I’d rather you let me house-sit than leave it unsupervised.

I rushed over and scanned the balcony from downstairs. I ran upstairs, negotiated the three locks that kept me from disaster. I walked to the balcony and couldn’t find any water except for the memory of it contained in the large stain in the corner beside the clogged drain. You returned my call and instructed me to unclog the drain. I did. I explained the situation. I tell you it must have rained here last night and since there was nowhere for the water to go, it seeped through the layers in the ground until it found four or five little outlets and then it began the process of catharsis.

I’m trying to contain my hysteria. I know now its completely unwarranted. Everything is fine. I wish I was as calm and relaxed as I was when the jute bags inflated around me in that artificially controlled panic room. I should have had more respect for your time zone. Shouldn’t have called you at that unearthly hour of morning and invaded your sleep. But nothing could have salved me. Your voice was the tonic I needed. “Thank You,” you said over the phone, and I believe you meant it. By then I had begun to leak salt water. Trails of pearls dripped across my cheeks. I tried to say something in between my long, deep breaths, but my malformed thoughts didn’t translate into sound. All I managed was a monosyllabic goodbye after which you disconnected.

There are many things I’d never tasted until I met you. Single Malts, for instance. Or Sour-dough Bread. Marmite. Rage. Sprouts. Jealousy. Gouda. Burnt Garlic. Grilled Tomatoes. Stir-friend French beans. Fear. Paradise. Black Pepper. Love. Today I added Panic to that list. This morning I finally understood its texture, and the post-quake tremors, and the painful feeling of clotted blood and shocked muscles and contracted lungs. And finally, the cathartic aftertaste of salt water that salved my dry, dry tongue.

“I never expected it,” you said in reference to last night’s passionate combustion.

“I find that hard to believe,” I said as I sipped from my mug.

“The last time was a long time ago. In New York. She must have been a few years younger than you,” you said.

“How old was she?” I asked, unable to contain my curiousity.

“About 28, I think.”

“Three weeks ago I turned 23,” I said.

You were mystified. You were so sure I was older.

For a while I debated whether to ask about your age. I tried to decipher from the clues I’d been given. I tried to decide from the grey of your beard and the lines across your brow. But I couldn’t hazard a guess. Perhaps I was afraid.

Fifty-three, I learned. Exactly thirty years older.

“She was too overwhelmed by my age. She let me go,” you said.

I didn’t think much of it then. You were supposed to be a two-night stand, a ten-line poem in my grand anthology of lovers, a bookmark.

Tomorrow I turn 26. For three years you’ve watched me evolve. Sometimes you watched from the sidelines, but more often you interfered with the change. You caused my heart to beat faster than it should, you taught my body to understand age before it could begin its own process of aging. You fed on my youth and gave me spoonfuls of your middle-age in exchange. My muscles feel young and taut, my breasts are still wildly upright like intellectual snobs, my feet are still strong and my hands can do more housework than twenty housewives put together. But somewhere my spirit has aged, and the region around my aorta has had to make space for my heart that is growing too quickly and robustly in size and shape.

There was every chance that I would never be born. My mother was in her forties when she conceived me. She’d recovered from two miscarriages, her two sons had been born at least ten years ago. The doctors convinced her I was high-risk, that one of us could die, either her or me. She was insistent. She wanted a girl. A few months into her pregnancy her doctor predicted the exact date of my birth, the day of the feast of Mt. Carmel. She suggested I be named Carmel, in honour of that miracle. My mother chose Rosalyn instead, after my father’s mother, Rosy. I don’t have her fair skin and greenish-blue eyes and her elegance. What I did inherit from her, though, was her generosity even in times of duress. And what I remember most of her was how she’d sit me on her lap and offer me orange-coloured candy wrapped in orange paper. I called her Dadar-mai instead of Dada-mai, because she lived in Dadar, in the house where my father was born, near the Portuguese Church.

Twenty-six years later I wonder if my mother is disappointed in me. If she’s unhappy about my refusal to adhere to norms of decency, my refusal to find a man and settle down and prepare for grandmotherhood. I tell myself every night that if I wasn’t a writer, if I wasn’t a wanderluster, I would have been a faithful wife, a loyal mother, a “perfect” woman. But I cannot deny my affair with language and my proclivity for experience, my tendency to burn and burn and reduce myself to ashes before I rise again and begin anew the process of self-combustion. I ask myself if I should find another bookmark and let you go. But there are things I cannot consciously decide. My will is no match for my spirit.

I’m too in-love with life, I care too much for hysterical madness and the beauty of the daily. I love my house and the two beautiful women I live with who nourish my everyday. I love this little community of friends I inherited the day I moved to Khirki. I have old friends and new friends and too many strangers who are transitioning into friends. There is always wine, and butter, and bread, and eggs with which to make pancakes to feed anyone who drops by. There  is laughter and forgiveness and the promise of rain and the threat of winter and the memory of summer. So much goddamn life to live for I cannot-will not-shall not settle for anything as mundane as domesticity.

At 26 I’m still afraid of cockroaches. I’m not as scared of authority. I believe more fiercely than ever in rainbows, and I still worship at the irreverent altar of Henry Miller. I love with too much abandon and I strip more nakedly than before. I’ve changed in ways too marvellous to document, too significant to contain. Look, I’m changing as we speak. I have learned to live with vanishings and I’ve learned of emotions more torrential than loss.

There are fruits I have yet to taste, visions I have yet to dream, scents I have yet to experience, lips I have yet to kiss, loves i have yet to bury, lives I have yet to live.

I never thought we’d survive three years. I never conceived you would love me with your simultaneous hearts–lover, father, child, sinner and redeemer.

I never thought I’d watch as you mock your fifties while I embraced my twenties.

I wish you were here tonight. I wish you could watch me blow candles and cut cake and wish for glorious things.

Somebody asked me what I wanted this year for my birthday. I couldn’t quite reply. There are many things I want. A new laptop, a CD of Jaco Pastorius’ Birthday Concert, a funky moleskine, a wooden chair to complement my writing desk, a copy of Jeanette Winterson’s Weight, a DVD of Our Lady of the Flowers, a fantastic book deal, a garland made of hand-picked flowers, potted plants of different herbs, specially basil and mint leaves.

I am full of want and longing for things I’ll never have. But this year, as I turn 26, I’ll celebrate because for the first time in twenty-six years I have all I’ll ever need.

Happy Birthday, Jaco Pastorius

For two days I wondered what I could greet you with. You’re too old and too masculine for flowers. So I decided instead to surprise you at home. I went to your neighbourhood this evening. I cleaned your staircase, swept off dust that had collected in these last three months, and washed your car, something I’ve never quite done before, and I bought you groceries, to get you by tomorrow, so you don’t need to step out once you step in.

They were more than the weight of five kilos and I bought them at the market that’s half a kilometre away from your house and my back bore the brunt of the weight. Some vegetables, some supplies and some fruits, mangoes mostly.

In a few hours I shall greet you at the airport. I’ll wear a beautiful white dress and a fake diamond-studded clip on my hair and my comfortable black shoes. The single malts I got you have been delivered to your neighbour’s house, along with the groceries. Tomorrow evening I hope to finally sample these blends I’d stashed away for months, hoping to unravel them and taste their preciousness with you sitting across from me on a table.

It’s different this time. There is another man who threatens to love me more than you do. Who would make much more out of my gestures than you ever will. And yet I cling to you like I cling to daylight and I hope you won’t give into sunsets.

You must be in the belly of the plane by now. I wouldn’t want to keep you from what promises to be fantastic journey.

And so I’ll end with a humble goodnight and assure you of future plans for debauchery.

There are things I must do before I see you again. Learn an entire cuisine by heart, one that is subtle and wise, the kind you like best, food your father must have feasted on when he walked on foot through mountain passes to get to this city.

I’m learning to knead wheat. It doesn’t come naturally to me. I fret each time the water mingles with the ground wheat. I worry about whether I’ll manage to bring it all together with my fingers, make it whole. And then roll out neat round moon-like bits that will burst into craters on the pan.

I’ve pickled carrots for you. I’ve yet to do the same with raw mangoes, preserve them so you know what you missed while you were away. I’m yet to caramelise peaches so you have some taste of summer on your tongue when you are back.

There’s a bottle of single malt I’ve saved us. To celebrate. Glenmorangie.

There’s a black dress I’m dying to wear to that dinner you’ve promised me. And a pair of black shoes with an elegant bow on each one. There’s a gorgeous pair of earrings I was gifted that fit divinely with the dress. I fantasise each day about how at the end of our feasting you will lead me to your bed and lift the flair of my dress around my head and then dip into my body the way you are want to do. The way I need you to.

Repair 

You’re the only man I know who still drives a Gypsy. You’ve had it for years, I can tell, and like your body, it’s beginning to deteriorate. The lining of the seats are wearing thin, the rear-view mirror on the left of the dashboard has come off and refuses to be reattached, the engine growls when the wheels are in motion like a restless chest-beating rebel, and the carburetor throws more tantrums than a bratty five-year-old boy. It’s not like you can’t afford a brand new car. But you’re too attached to this machine and I can’t blame you, it’s a gorgeous beast with a masculine guile.

Anyone else would have given up by now. It’s exhausting to have to pull over in the afternoon heat or amidst peak hour traffic to open the hood and bang the carburetor with a spanner until it is disciplined into submission so you can be on your way.

“Can’t you replace the carburetor?” I asked one day.

“I could. But I’d rather get it fixed,” you said.

“So why haven’t you got it fixed?” I asked.

“Because no mechanic seems to remember how to,” you mumbled. “That’s the thing about the time we’re living in. We’ve forgotten how to repair things, we  prefer to replace them instead, get new parts in exchange for the old.”

I once had a lover who was too callous with everyday things. His bed was always unmade, his room always seemed like a hurricane had thrown up on the floor. His books were always dusty, his clothes were strewn around, and his kitchen sink was always spilling over with dishes.  He had a penchant for misplacing things. He was so clumsy with his fingers he once ripped a five-hundred-rupee note, accidentally, while fishing it out from his wallet to pay the bill at a restaurant.

He was a writer too. So I forgave him his inadequacies, treated them as quirks, as eccentricities. But I always knew I could never be with him beyond the present tense. It isn’t wise to give your heart to a man with butter fingers.

But you are graceful with your fingers. There’s poetry in the way you stroke your beard while your driving, the way you sign against your prints, the way you hold a knife, the way you adjust your lens and shoot.

You refuse to give up on things, carburetors, water heaters, air conditioners, amplifiers, crusty ceilings and sun-baked walls. As long as there is an ounce of life within these things, or even the promise of resurrection, you refuse to abandon them. You hoard them, instead, preserve them in boxes or in your attic until you have the chance to fix them, renew their lease on life.

Five days since you went silent on me. I tell myself I should move on, relinquish you and the ghost of you that’s so embedded in my being. That perhaps this was our expiry date and the contents of our relationship have gone rancid.

Are we really beyond repair?

Diuretic

My body remains a mystery. For fourteen years I’ve been trying to document its irregularities. The only constant is the monthly spill, the periodic shedding of tissue and blood. The agony of swollen teats and bloated flesh and all kinds of excess.

When I was young what I feared most was staining the cotton of my uniform. Now I dread the spasms along my spine, the stomach cramps, the retention of water that expands my waist line.

I’d taken to informing you each time I began the spill. I can’t say why. Unlike men my age, you always seemed to understand. You’d rub my back and the heat produced through the friction between your palm and my skin would soothe my nerves. You’d urge me to take a paracetamol. There’s no point in needless suffering, you’d say. But the crocin never helped.

I started to bleed on the second day of your silence. Three days before time, in sudden sync with my neighbour and my flatmate. It always amazes me how women who live in close proximity to each other start to co-ordinate their periods. I read somewhere that women in traditional societies with no access to artificial night light, ovulated with the full moon and menstruated with the new moon.  Did you know the word menstruation shares an ancestry with the word moon? Both are derived from the Latin mensis–month, which relates to the Greek mene–moon, and to the roots of the English words month andmoon.

Myth aside, this time around I couldn’t bear the pain.

And since paracetamol doesn’t quite do the trick I tried a new drug. Midol. Guaranteed pain relief. Anti-bloating, anti-cramping. Diuretic. It worked like a charm, except my bladder went on a spree. I watched as my blood flowed out alongside urine. Inside me, my heart was breaking, piece by precious piece, and it seemed like the blood from the ache was flowing out from my uterus through my cervix into my vagina until it stained the manicured cotton of my sanitary napkin. In my mother’s time they used white cotton cloth. Added to the pain of menstruation was the chore of washing off the stains, cleansing the cloth so it could be used again and again until it wore thin.

I wish I could  purge you out from my system the way I do my endometrium, flush you out of my being, the way I do the water I tend to retain so I can prepare my fertile womb for new seed, new yield, new possibilities.

The walls are inlaid with sorrow. The ceiling is speckled with wishy-washy images of objects either stolen, forgotten or lost. The air is afloat with fragments of remembered lives that hang like ghosts. There is no furniture. Just a vacuous kind of nothingness. A vacant space that longs to be occupied.

Not so long ago it resembled a chapel. At any given hour you were sure to overhear echoes of whispered hymns, or beatitudes. There were tables meant for feasting and make-shift kitchens in which bread multiplied along with fish and an underground cellar where water blushed into wine.

What I see now is a large room with no exit and no windows to let in the light. I kneel against the pews of an intimidating wooden structure that was once a confessional. I nurse a curious drink. Each sip contains a swig of numbness, a tint of despair, an ounce of confusion and a garnish made of slices of loss that sit prettily over the salt-rimmed glass. It doesn’t quench my thirst but it sedates my bloodstream.

I talk to myself but my speech is incoherent, the logic between words, fragile. I peel off syllables like dead skin. Obsessively. I look for clues that will help me make sense of your behavior. I churn through memories over and over, replay them inside my head scene by random scene desperate for answers if not revelations. How you could betray me after our three-year-long homage to love? Such ease to your silence. Such skill in your knife.

I cannot say exactly know how I got here. One moment I was cruising through the wild yellow of a mustard field basking in the sun-lit warmth of your love and the next I find myself sun-burnt and bleeding, my heart broken by you.

Imprisoned in this infernal limbo I try to make my peace with this situation. Baffled, I seek solace in words. I play with their texture, squish them with my fingers to see what bursts forth or breaks out. I strip them off their dictionary paint to see what they look like naked, to find the truth they conceal.

(To be continued)

I ate a succulent meal. Smoked chicken with a generous dose of Parmesan and other holy ingredients, like rocket leaves and sun-dried tomatoes. It could have used a drizzle of pepper, but I ate it anyway and enjoyed each bite. And before I got back home from my afternoon lunch, stopped at the liquor shop. I asked for boxes this time, not old monk. They gave me seven and said I could come back for more.

I broke the news to them–that I’m moving houses, shifting from one locality to another.

I told my landlord last night. He was confused. He said I was downgrading. “There’s no comparison,” he said, “Where is Hauz Khas and where is Malviya Nagar?” I explained that had he decided against the 10% increase in rent, I probably would have stayed.

I would have. I love my little casa. My tiny little room with just enough space for a bed, my desk and three wooden bookshelves that fit perfectly underneath the in-built wooden cupboard. I never imagined when I first moved in that I would one day hear its heart beat, hear blood pumping through the walls, watch it sweat in summer’s swelter and shiver in winter’s chill, and get drenched in monsoon’s downpour.

There are things that can be fitted into boxes. All the books I’ve collected in the last twelve months, the diaries and the sheaves of yellow paper that has fragments of my manuscript; the empty bottles of wine consumed over this hallowed ground, pens and stapler pins and crayons and cocktail stirrers, clothes and quilts and sheets; kitchen things–my half-full bottle of Balsamic and Red wine vinegar, the two bottles of palm vinegar, that box of tamarind and red chillies, and all my precious spices that have infused so many dishes; and my recently-purchased mixer and the five-litre pressure cooker that I bought at the army canteen, and my ceramic cutlery from Sarojini Nagar.

There are things that are too amorphous, that cannot be packed into boxes. The nights of debauchery, my drunken forays into the world of words, the memories of starlit nights and sun-less days. The sheer bulk of all the dreams I’ve dreamed within these walls. The agonising dreams, the erotic ones, the nightmarish ones, the spectacular ones, and all the half-dreamed dreams that were interrupted by pigeons making love outside the window, or by rain beating against the glass. And all the dreams I never dared to dream, and all the songs I never cared to write, all the masterpieces I’ve left unfinished.

Some move to keep things whole. Others move to explore new territory, to sow new seeds, to save time and money, to live anew. I’m not sure why I’m moving. Perhaps because I was seduced, lured by the promise of something new and still untainted, freshly-painted walls in a brand-new building … the chance not to start again, but to continue …

And yet, I’m not prepared to let go of this place, this kitchen, this room with visions lined against each wall. I’m not ready to say goodbye to the man who irons my clothes, and his family, though they assure me they will come visit, or to the vegetable seller who scores rocket leaves for me, or the other one who sells me basil for only five rupees, and the liquor store that grants me special privileges for being a woman who knows her poison, or Johnny, the autowalla, who when I met him last, was busy composing his ‘sin list’.

There are people who must remain here, who cannot be urged to move with me. There are connections that I may never make again; all that poetry that makes Hauz Khas what it is—the old fruit seller who, unhappy with my unceasing questions, finally said, in Hindi too beautiful to reproduce, “Madam, I haven’t been inside this papaya, neither have you. So under the circumstances, all we can do is believe that it is indeed ripe”, and it was, it was the ripest papaya I’d ever eaten in Delhi.

My landlord was right. There is no comparison between Hauz Khas Enclave and Malviya Nagar. If one is suburbia, the other is anything but suburbia. The place I intend to live in is somewhere on the cusp between Khirki Extension and Malviya Nagar. It is eclectic, to say the least. If you come visit you’ll know exactly what I mean. There’s a kind of current that runs through each lane which makes it vibrant and rigorous.  There is laughter and music that spills over onto busy streets. There are mad men and lunatics, and artists and writers. It is no ordinary locality.

My flat mate is an architect, she teaches design in a school in Gurgaon. She’s got a butch haircut, a stud on her nose, skin that’s only a few shades lighter than mine. More importantly, she enjoys food, and feasts, both of which we intend to indulge in. I hope you’ll come by, to see my lovely room that’s attached to two narrow balconies from where I can see the sky change colours.

What happened between us was unnecessary, uncalled for, the unavoidable consequence of months spent in denial. In hindsight it was only natural that on that chilly, full-moon night, you would self-destruct inside me.

There is no question of guilt. No comfort in shame. No solace in regret.

There is no returning to the way we were, innocent and blind to passion.

We can no longer be naked with each other. Now we must cover our flesh with fabric, with cloth so thick it hides every contour, disguises our ripe bodies, veils the fervour of our intent, the fever, the madness of exposed skin.

I cannot will not leave my home for you.

You are too fickle with your fingers, too benign with your lust. You may know how to satisfy, but you have yet to learn how to possess, how to consume me like a feast.

You are not worthy of another embrace.