Something tells me I’ll love you for a long time

She stands at the end of the room not taking her eyes off me, while I, head bowed, walk around in a mock trot, stepping only on every alternate tile. I can feel the stare. It’s not cold and scornful, but expectant and anxious. That makes two of us, I feel like telling her but she isn’t in the mood for conversation I suppose. I look up and finally face her.

‘Why the shoes,’ I ask her.

‘Not just the shoes, take off your socks as well. I want to see your feet.’

‘I didn’t take you for a cleanliness freak. My shoes are clean, you know.’

Now she is getting impatient. ‘It has nothing to do with that. I just want to see your feet. I know it sounds weird but it’s hard for me to explain. It’s like your fixation with zombie films.’

Great. I fell in love with a woman who was seated across the table at a business meeting, I got her number citing work reasons, asked her out a week later and now I am in her living room, waiting to get my feet examined. What’s with my feet? She doesn’t look like she is nursing a kinky fetish. Maybe she wants to know if my feet stink or if I’m wearing torn socks, which by extension would imply that I am careless about personal hygiene. I’m not but this makes me uneasy. She seems so anal about this ceremony that I’m worried the stray strands of cat hair on my socks might upset her. Wait, I know what it is. Doesn’t the size of the foot have a positive correlation with the size of the penis? No, actually, that’s the palm, not the foot.

What are the odds of her asking me to get out of her house and not seeing me ever again, because I refused to take my socks off? I don’t want to know. Let me just show her my feet and be done with it. So I take my shoes off, deposit them carefully by her shoe rack. Then the socks come off. I turn around and find her walking towards me.

‘Sit here, the light is brighter here,’ and she leads me by my hand to the centre of the room where there is a bean bag. I have no idea what is happening to me. By this time I have even considered and hastily dismissed the prospects of an ‘Audition’-style torture.

She sits on the floor in front of me and places my feet in her lap. She straightens out my big toe and the long toe. I’m mildly ticklish but I bite down a chuckle. She then examines the other foot, repeating the ritual again with the precision of a cobbler who is about to stitch me a shoe. Then, without a word or a warning, she bends down and kisses my foot. I’m not prepared so I involuntarily withdraw my feet.

‘What was that?’

She is smiling now, what a relief. ‘I’m in love with you,’ she says.

What? No, I didn’t see this coming. ‘Okay…I’m sorry…no what I mean is, all this is a little surreal.’

A bigger smile, ‘I know. But I mean it, which is why it was important that we got this out of the way.’

‘That’s great if we have, but what exactly is that ‘this’?’

‘You won’t get it,’ she says. The smile hasn’t left her face for a moment after that private revelation. 

I’m tempted to just forget the events of the past ten minutes and pull her into a kiss. But I need answers for the trauma I was put through. So I press,

‘Try me. I really want to know.’

Now she gets serious and lets go of my feet.

‘I have been in love thrice. Like, really in love. I’m someone who invests everything she has into a relationship, if she thinks it’s the right one. So I thought I was in the right relationship, thrice. Have you ever really been in love?’

‘Umm, yes. Once.’

‘Okay so you know how it is. The getting-to-know bit, the moving in together, the cooking, shopping, the evening walks, the conversations, the holiday plans and so on. You dream up a future with the promise of the present. And when that promise fades, the inquest begins. It happened to me thrice. It was the same pattern. The loving, caring, sensitive man would start turning slowly, much like your zombies. I would find myself letting go of one dream at a time, one expectation at a time, until their gradual domination of my life was complete. And when I would decide to walk away, I had to also take the blame. ‘You got him used to it,’ ‘why did you let it fester?’ etc. So I would decide to be more careful the next time. And then err again. Has it happened to you?’

‘Well, the specifics may differ but…’

‘O but you’ve been in love only once so you wouldn’t really understand,’ she says without waiting for me to complete. ‘So this once, when I was still smarting from a failed relationship, the third one, this person asked me if my men had a longer long toe than their big toe. He said if the long toe is longer than the big toe, it’s a sign that the man has a dominating streak in him. That’s when it occurred to me. He was right. All the three men had unusually long long-toes. And they were dominating, aggressive, all of that. I decided that moment I would never date such a man again.’

She pauses to study my reaction. I struggle to keep a solemn look.

‘You don’t have anything to say?’

‘It’s kind of different. I don’t think anyone thinks like that.’

‘All my rational, logical reasoning failed me so what’s wrong with this?’

‘True, but were you really going to accept or reject me based on the size of my toe?’

She smiles one of those beatific smiles again, ‘will you accept it as a quirk? I’m a normal girl otherwise, I promise. When one fails at love so many times, having a little hope gives her the courage to try again. It’s just that.’

What I want to do is wrap her with promises of velvet evenings and spring and merry music. But I settle for a long silent hug. Her hair has a familiar shampoo smell. Her breath normalizes on my neck. Her arm on my chest rises and falls to a rhythm. I gently break the silence,

‘So who was the wise man who told you about the toe-theory?’

She stays in my arms, eyes closed, and whispers, ‘I lied. It wasn’t someone I met. It was that babaji on Teleshopping Network.’

You are the verse I read

Here is a confession, I haven’t read the letters and verses you lent to me. Instead, I was reading you. I read, for instance, the note scribbled at the beginning of the book. There is a word struck out at the beginning of line four. Did that make you chuckle like it made me? The writer of the note signed off with his name but got the date wrong, I suppose. ‘Silly, adorable goof,’ did you say between a laugh? I noticed you have dog-eared pages three and five. I read them twice, hoping the words would stun me with the revelations they unraveled to you. Was it the poet’s angst at wanting to walk down a course far removed from what the world had saddled him up for? Or was it the perceptive discourse on what it is that a writer should write about, or should he write at all? Did it reveal an answer you were seeking? Or did the sheer force of the argument make you stop and think?

There is also a page that is torn ever so slightly. Maybe that happened one night when you fell asleep with the book open on your chest, and drugged thoughts of a young poet. Or maybe you mulled over a few lines for so long you didn’t realize you’d been clipping the page with your fingernails all along. On the last page, you’ve scribbled a verse. Is that yours? I spent several minutes looking at it, half amused at the carelessly thrown ellipsis. I agonized for long over the garbled first word of the last line. A lot hinged, and hinges still, on what I think it is. So I hope you won’t ever tell me what it is.

As I get to the end of this book, I realize I might have to revisit it someday to truly appreciate the poet’s work. My apologies, dear poet, for I was reading her in your words. I may have read her all wrong, but I’m just a reader after all.

Displaced

Your feet itch. It’s an itch unlike any you have felt in a month. You’re going home in the morning. You cycle aimlessly, smiling at strangers. Today, there is no ducking for cover when it rains. When it stops, you go out dancing. Your feet itch still and morning hasn’t arrived yet. You spend the night staring at a strange sketch on a door in a strange room you’ve let yourselves in to. In the soft lights, you can’t quite tell what that sketch is but it doesn’t matter. It’s just a point of concentration. It’s one of those nights when you let in thoughts that otherwise unnerve you. Your fears are tempered by the serenity of the face lying asleep next to you. As always, people comfort you the most when they don’t mean to. Tonight, tomorrow looks beautiful, because tomorrow, you’re going home.

When you step off the plane in the morning, you instantly seek out the familiar. The minty breeze. You let it into your cab despite the driver’s protestations that the air-conditioning is on and will need to be paid for. You are unhurried when you arrive at home. You take a walk in the yard, inspecting your plants and picking out weeds before you unlock the door. The room is dirty. The cat has thrown up. It’s not the sight you wanted to come back to but you banish that thought promptly. It starts drizzling a bit but you don’t have much time to revel in it. The power goes out. This means you can’t clean up the mess in the house. There is a day-old pile of dishes in the sink, left behind by your friend who was staying over in your absence. You haven’t slept a wink all night but there is work to do. Laundry. No power. Vacuum. No power. Dishes. You don’t feel up to it. So you decide to make your first cup of adrak chai in a month. But instead of your tea leaves, you find a packet of instant coffee in the dabba. Then you notice the steel dabba in which you’d left laddoos for your friend. They’re still in there, stale and smelly. More work. You notice two new picture frames in the room. You also notice there is more food in the cat’s bowl than is needed. That’s now how they like it. They like small servings, replenished periodically. Meanwhile, the cats themselves aren’t entirely sure about your presence. They tip-toe around you, alert to any sudden movements. You chide yourselves for thinking that they’ve forgotten you.

Exhaustion catches up with you. You want to sleep but you notice new sheets in the bedroom and unfolded blankets. Neither are yours. So you pass out on the couch instead. When you wake up, it’s evening already. You look at the dirty room, the stale laddoos, the dishes in the sink and the cat-food. Afternoon naps have never worked for you and today is no exception. You feel sick. It’s a gloomy day. It starts raining in sheets and you sneeze your first sneeze of the day. The familiar allergy is back. You pore over your phonebook. There isn’t a name in there that you feel like making a call to. So you fix yourselves a drink and get down to work. The floor is scrubbed, the laundry is done, stale food in the refrigerator and the laddoos are emptied into the trash. The cat food is replenished. The dishes are done. Much wiping, much scrubbing, much cleaning. The day has passed. Without one conversation. It’s dark outside. You’re tired. You don’t want to take a stroll outside because the roads are dug up. 

What you want to do is go back to the city you couldn’t wait to escape, a night ago. Home isn't the escape. Home isn't the consolation.  

I live with the shame you leave behind on my bed

Of late I've been wondering if this sex is making me sad.

Does it happen to you too when you sneak in quietly into my lane?

Do you feel everyone who sees you knows why you’re there? Does the lying make you hate us?

Do you wish you didn't have to do this just for an afternoon of being in my arms?

Have you ever wanted us to be naked in the same bazaars that we hurry through,

And make love with the stench of rotten vegetables washing over us?

We could tell the onlookers, “yes we are dirty but you are not to judge.”

Have you felt a slow rise of revulsion from your belly when you’re reading and

Come across a perfectly innocent phrase like, ‘between the sheets?’

Does it all come back to you like a foul guttural smell carried by the wind? One that you can’t wait to cleanse yourself of?

Is that why you’re always in a hurry to leave when we’re done instead of lying in bed and making conversation?

Is that why you wear a fragrance only when you’re leaving?

In my idle dreams, I don’t see you wrapped around me with the curtains drawn.

Instead, I am a husband debating with his wife if bhindi is a good idea for dinner.

When you visit and leave, I change the sheets, let the light in and spend an hour under the shower.

‘I could tell them all about us, I just don’t want to,’ I repeat to myself. It never works.

Do you also stop to chat to people about their kids’ grades and fuel prices,

So you could reassure yourself that you’re no different from them?

Of late I’ve found myself wishing that someone would ask me about you

So I could plead my case and win. Against myself.

Of late I’ve been wondering if everything we claimed we never would be

Is just what we should have ended up being. It’s just happier that way.