The will to possess

Within the seductive uncurling of her text, two lines circle back anaphorically: "You were supposed to be a one-night stand. A quick fix. A conquest. A ten-line poem in my grand anthology of lovers." Rosalyn D'Mello's A Handbook For My Lover is less a work of fiction, using a nod to the structuralism of Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse, and more a voyeuristic love letter to a partner, coming after six years and the not-always-easy chiselling of a sexual relationship between a younger woman and a man thirty years her senior. It is filled with a lover's pouting grouses, her churlish entreaties, her gasping orgasms and her one-sided memories of fights and fondness.

As complex and detailed as most relationships are, the work is in fact as visual a documentation of her photographer lover, with as brutal a gaze as Seiichi Furuya's intimate exploration of his wife in the photographic discourse 'Portrait'. This is more so because D'Mello, an art writer and a writer of erotica, brings her entire arsenal of art, light, colour and sensuality to the page. "...you walked into bed as if it were the sea. I dived in too..." she writes, and diagnosing herself with 'cartographic dyslexia', rolling metaphors off her tongue as if she, and you the reader with her, were there in the moment where scenes etch themselves in potent imagery. The language is strident and owned, possessive, like the speech of love itself. Its flaws, if any, are that as she writes on, caught in the moments she has to prove her relationship points with, the lessons of the phase, she forgets to dress it up for the reader the way she does her young love; like a couple that has been together long enough, she allows it to let itself go. Or perhaps this is also the function of the book, to draw the voyeur in to the very intricate folds of a couple, from the precisions of their limbs when they mate to how they puke and sleep, bringing them all to a point where depth is the only option and the surface veneer of how coupledom appears is broken. In the deshabillement, a bareness of writing is achieved.

Sex has never flowed so unpretentiously and with such grace in Indian writing. With it, D'Mello challenges notions of not only the straight-laced conventions of relationships into which these lovers do not fit by any stretch of definition, neither in cohabitation, nor in age, nor in financial dependence, and ruled by the vagaries of spontaneity, but also notions of woman, taboos of beauty, parading the darkness of her skin like it didn't matter, the very present mess and pain of menstruation, and extending the range of what togetherness must mean. There is within it an alarming devotion to the truth: the discomfort of potential subjection to abuse, the sharp sting of emotional and physical violence, actively by the father, passively by the lover, and the resultant paralysis of its impact. It is, as she puts it, a work in present tense, a documentation of the ongoing, but it is, eventually, as she documents in her prologue, a striptease in which both partners owe this truth to the relationship. It is as though, in return for the key that never quite comes, and the commitment that is doomed to never quite solidify, and this is a book without an ending, D'Mello has extracted her pound of flesh for contracts never quite signed: absolute nakedness.

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Excerpts
One night, after a petty, meaningless fight, you walked into bed as if it were the sea. I dived in too, but instead of keeping to the other side of the shore as I am prone to do in the aftermath of a hurricane, I swam over and lay beside you. You climbed onto me as if you were shipwrecked and I was the only log of wood in sight for miles.

You were fishing for forgiveness. I had already forgiven you.

You had sprung a leak inside my soul. It was just like you to row me gently and then threaten to have me capsize.

'What the fuck do you see in me anyway?' I said.

'Well, I could ask you the same thing,' was your cocky reply.

You then curled your back against my belly and drew my hand over your chest like the edges of a quilt and fell asleep.

I've spent months mulling over that question. What is it that I see in you? And how different is it from who you really are or seem to be?

***

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 500-rupee note accidentally while fishing it out from his wallet to pay the restaurant bill.

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.

***

This is not to say I don't see your faults. You have many. I haven't put you on a pedestal. But maybe there's a case to be made for the way in which you administer varied doses of hope and despair so that at no point can I rest assured about your feelings towards me. You keep me on my toes. You don't care for stability, certainty.

You only know the gospel of flux, of eternal change. You demand the impossible of me. You are my joy and my suffering; my jury, executioner and judge. You insist on pushing me to the edge of the cliff, even nudging me on occasion. You make me falter with my speech. I feel the ground slipping under my feet, and just as I am about to fall off the precipice, you draw out a rope and pull me into the safety net of your embrace. That's the thing-I can never trust you to rescue me, and yet you do. Unfailingly.

***

I will not be moderate. I want everything from life or nothing at all.

I want everything!

I want my garden of earthly delights with all the seven deadly sins for company.

No, I am not meek or humble, pure in heart or selfl ess. And I don't want paradise with its happy endings and countless beginnings.

I want a feast of sin and flesh. I want this world, not the next.