It happened five years ago. A friend and classmate had broken up with her lover of six years. I believe they were engaged and soon to be married. I had liked her. Though I never told her, I think she must have known. Three months before meeting her at our hometown, a person I was seeing left me. In our four months with each other, she did not want the world to know we were together. 

I was thirty-four then, and she, twenty-six. It seemed complicated from the start. I had not loved in years and any affection seemed to be better than none. I was looking weary, grumpy, and overweight. I hadn’t checked but was sure my sugar and blood pressure levels had soared. I was always tired. No amount of rest was enough. Mirrors frightened me, as did stairs. My face was looking like a part of my thigh. At office, I took the lift to the first floor to get to the mezzanine where I had lunch at the canteen, though it was just ten steps upwards. I was a shadow of my once sportsman self. 

I resembled the ‘Indian uncle’ I had sworn to never become as a younger man. It was sheer luck that made a woman so young — herself having just broken up with a childhood friend who had been her partner since their teens — get attracted to me suddenly, and in the same fashion, months later, leave for someone happier than me — younger to me and a little older than her. (Within a year, my then lover had three relationships, I later thought. She settled in with the third person; they went on to marry and have children. We don’t see each other much. Whenever we do, I’d like to think we are cordial).

 

For months after my break-up, I was in pain. I was missing my ex-lover’s body and getting enraged at the thought of her and her new lover doing things we did together. I was undergoing the much longer, slower, unavoidable prognosis of heartbreak that extends further than the times of love.

 

I wish I had gone for therapy. I didn’t know it might help since I thought I’d be fine as heartbreak had happened to me before. I couldn’t accept that I was in grief and that my heart hurt — I’d pat my chest late at night to lessen the pain and make myself go to sleep. Waves of intimate times with her would wash over me and I’d scream her name early in the mornings or during sleepless nights to the walls of my flat.

 

During this time, I went home, where my classmate lived. We met for drinks. I emptied out my grief to her. Another time, like how we had in college, we went to watch a film. As in the past, this too had a gripping story, but it was the worst one for what was seeming like a ‘date’. She hadn’t told me anything, but I sensed something in her manner.

Some days later, we chatted online, and she said she was no longer with her lover. My sixth sense had been right, but it was close to the end of my trip home. 

When I returned to the town where I worked, I called her and mumbled to consider dating one another, “since we were both single and in pain”. I said I was looking to move home. It was true, since I wanted to leave the distressing environment I was at. She said it was very sweet of me to ask her out, but she wanted to be with herself now. Other men had asked her out, but she was just blocking them as she needed time for herself. I had expected her to say this. But I had wanted to see if I had the courage to convey my liking for a new person. It was important for me to do some things to lift my confidence even if it meant I had to face a ‘no’ anew.

 

It was fine, I said. But I asked her if we could continue to talk. She agreed. The next time I called her some days later, she didn’t pick up the phone. I messaged her and she didn’t respond. I left it there. It was early in the week. She must have been busy with work, I thought. (Her not calling back then has stayed with me; I’ve never called her since).

 

Four months later, I went home again. I messaged her, asking if we could meet. She said yes and we set a time and place. I arrived at our meeting spot minutes before the appointed time. I waited for over an hour and kept checking my phone. We were to do drinks-and-eats today, not yesterday, not tomorrow. I checked, yes, I was at the correct place. Because of my interest in her (yes, she had said ‘no’ to dating earlier), I didn’t want to call or message her. I didn’t want to seem eager or desperate. I left the place and walked for hours in her verdant borough imagining where her home would be. I was a mess; I thought she was a mess, too. It was just a ‘drink or two’ between one person who was interested in the other while the other wasn’t, but to my mind it felt like a date. And so, it felt like I’d been stood up. And I had never been stood up in my life.

 

Some days later, I chatted with her online. I brought up what had happened. She said there had been an emergency with a friend, who needed help shifting house. The meeting had slipped her mind. She said she was sorry. She asked if we could catch up the coming Sunday. I said yes. My wish to see her stalled me from probing further.

 

She was 15 minutes late and looked preoccupied. Either overwork, a night-out or some other unease, made her seem frazzled. We downed a pitcher of beer, stunned at the unease between us, which we couldn’t speak of, but sensed. It was the most awkward ‘date’ or ‘casual meeting’ of my life with someone I had known for long. I thought she must feel the same. 

Half hour into it, she asked me if she could call a friend to join us. I was cool with it. In ten minutes, a lean, bearded guy joined us and sat next to her, facing me. He was her friend from boarding school. Their sitting side by side, brought up images in my head of my ex and her new lover. They looked like they intertwined in bed last night.

 

I finished a beer and said I had work. I paid my share of the bill, said bye, and headed out. Their faces masked their relief. I got to the loo before I left the bar. Its pathway opened out to the main area. Their side profiles were towards me. I sensed their shoulders had relaxed. As I walked out, I felt something was very, very, very, wrong with me, which is why this event had occurred. The universe was telling me something about who I was, and who I needed to become. 

Days later, I blocked my classmate on social media and deleted her phone number. I tried to not remember her as a person and wanted to ink out memories of her as a friend. It was hardest to let go of her kindnesses, like when she let me crash in her living room’s linoleum floor on campus housing when my lease ran out as I job hunted. To erase them, I had to re-live the times we cooked, sometimes sang, or hummed along to songs, drank late into the night, discussed how New York that she had taken out a subscription for, was superior to The New Yorker, as she left to chat with her then lover on Skype.

 

We didn’t stay in touch though we saw each other at college meetups. In the next three years, I made small and big changes to my life. I forced myself to get fit. I changed my wardrobe. I avoided Indian ‘uncle wear’, like the striped T-shirt Indian men of all ages wore, as if they were institutionalised. I discarded many of my checked shirts. Months later, I went out on dates, and even got asked out by a stranger while at a shopping mall — a first in my life. Some brief, beautiful experiences happened.

 

Three years later, I initiated contact with my classmate-friend to catch up. I planned and made notes on what to avoid and what to do. I bought a new shirt for this moment. While we drank and nibbled, I kept things current. I didn’t react the usual guy way when a confident and attractive woman like her said she lived alone and close by. When we shared a cigarette, I ensured I didn’t touch her. Even during the high points of that evening, I kept my distance. The only times we had any contact were when we met and parted.

 

By the end of the meeting, I sensed the iceberg that had existed between us for years had chipped. In a week, we did drinks-and-eats again. This time, at the place where her guy friend joined us. By the end of it, she invited me home.

All seven years of knowing her swam through my mind, forcing tears that interrupted my view as I took in her form, its contours matching the design I had had burned in my brain. 

 

It’s been 23 months, and we haven’t met one-on-one since that night. We’ve seen each other at college gatherings, that happen every few months in our hometown. I’ve sensed her ‘wall’ is up. I’ve tried interacting over phone, but she has seemed standoffish. I’ve made trips home many times since that night, wanting it to happen again. On some occasions, she hasn’t responded to my messages. Other times, we’ve texted on the phone, she has agreed to meet, but it’s been very late, by which time I’ve had to return to my work town. 

Once, she went out of town on work exactly the time I came home. I imagined our flights passing each other mid-air and the planes stopping for us to wave from our aligned window seats. At least twice, she hasn’t bothered to reply to my messages. I’d be stupid to think she’s interested. In between, at a meetup, with a guy pal beside her, a younger batchmate, she has said she wanted to catch up, but when I messaged her, she didn’t reply. I tried to not think they were together. 

All the while, I’ve continued with my life and small passions in my work town. I’ve tried to move on from classmate. I’ve had two brief affairs. One of them could have become a relationship, but my classmate’s memory, face, body, tics, have superimposed themselves in my equations with others. It’s like a huge part of my subconscious mind has kept a memory bank and file folder with her name labelled on it. I’ve been open with the partner (now ex) to share with her about my classmate.

We began with a once-in-ten-days tryst that went on for months. She spoke about her past loves as I did mine, though I was more detailed about it than her. It appeared like she was enjoying this openness. But by the end of it, my talking about my classmate was toxic, she said. She had loved what we had shared so far, she said. She took time to be herself in relationships, she said. In our equation, I had used my (male) privilege to my advantage, she said. If there was any headway with my classmate, I’d leave everything for her, she said. Even casual relationships — if they go on for months, they’re not casual anymore — have their ethics, she said. I didn’t have any, she said. How could you love someone who treated you so badly? she said. Or didn’t bother with closure, she said.  

She was right. We knew we were at the end. It hurt me that I had hurt her. I apologised many times. But I know in my heart, for such matters, there is no apology. That day when things were concluded, for the second time in my life, I deleted classmate’s phone number. It felt like throwing a precious jewel in a river. Three days later, I saved it again. I knew her number by heart.

 

No woman had ever said I was toxic. I took that lens and applied it to the overtures I’d made to my classmate. To some extent, it adhered there, too. Through most of my advances, she must have felt since we’ve once been intimate, I’d want just that from her: To engage with her body, and then, partially, her mind. That I had reduced her: My toxic heart at work. I longed to tell her that was never true. If it were, I wouldn’t be finding a salve for my ache through words. No encounter is ever just that. 

I knew in my mind classmate must have other lovers. Who was I to judge? With most of them, I assumed, she’d be the way she’d been with me: Distant, unpredictable, last-minute; wary of getting into an emotional tangle, yet getting into it and then perhaps, cold-shouldering her way out. A person, due to her past, and her nature, having real problems relating to members of the opposite sex who may like her — in some ways a mirror image of me. But I felt there was something else she wanted to articulate in her attitude to men. She may want to behave with men who desire her, the way many have often been with women: By being instrumental — like archetypal men — but with a light-handedness that was all hers. 

I think she knew she had the persona and skill to overwhelm most men with minimum fuss: To me, her most arresting trait. I’d liked to have met some of her lovers and get their thoughts on her. I’m certain, given her choice, if ever that conversation happened, her lovers would speak of her with respect and affection of her wit and generosity, even as they’d get animated by her decisiveness in bed. They are discerning men who may comprise a cryptic crossword puzzle solver, a senior virologist, an older conservationist widower, a younger classical dance instructor; not one of them a chartered accountant or a banker or, god forbid, a software engineer. A bouncer-cum-bar owner? Yes, please.

 

Her lovers may comment also of her yen for travel, her in-person spontaneity, her out-of-sight-out-of-mind-ness; her capacity for scotch not bourbon, for mutton marrow which she’d suck out with a lot of noise (there’s no other way), her dislike for chicken, and her physical upkeep despite (sometimes) twice-a-week late nights and nightlong binges. She must like outdoorsy sport like frisbeeing or dance forms as Mohini Attam or kathak. She may have been a tomboy through her teens. But now in her mid-30s, she likes like-minded all-girl, all-woman crowds, and only men attuned to their internal feminine selves. One lover thinks, at least once in her life, classmate must have gone the other way and returned with mixed feelings.    

Kajal rings her eyes and directs any observer’s attention straight to them; without it, they can seem lost. Sometimes she heightens their impact by stretching the black to the ends of the eyes that abut her temples. Her kohled eyes are the physical feature that have left the strongest imprint in my mind: How I have regretted not having had the power to slow things down in the night we spent together. Not being able to stare into her eyes and kiss her forehead; my cheeks and chin journeying on the temple-eyebrow-forehead-eyebrow-temple route. Not being able to kiss the pitch-rimmed pools of her eyes with her face in my hands. Or following her coiffure with my fingers, the indexes running from the forehead to behind her ears. How raw were her attacks on my torso, how focused she was on only her pleasure, dozing off after it, and leaving me unsated, and not bothering. (Had I done anything to upset her?) How I wish I could return to slacken her total control over me that night, to make it a meditative act of lovemaking, instead of the accident it now seems. 

Classmate channels her energy into close family, and pets. She has a Golden Retriever. She likes the sound of the word ‘retrieve’; the pet returns her to her joys. She will have chosen a ‘she’. There is nobody who has the authority to disrupt her schedules as her dog. A way to get close to her will be through her pet. Any new person in her life will need barks of validation from her ‘child’; a scrape may precede it. If ever she decides to choose a partner, they would have to be an able pet person. These days it’s her litmus test for suitors. Anyone interested in getting close to her, can do no better than get her high-quality dog food, than tulips, lilies, or wine. Knowing how to conduct a bath for a full-grown canine gets you more points. She goes on dates to places where pets are allowed. She says that first-up to any person holding an interest in her.  

The man will have to equal the qualities of her father. She and her cousins are offspring to nurturing marriages between their respective parents. Her self-will comes from her father, her resilience from her mother. They are a reticent, unflamboyant couple, with enormous professional achievements. You catch them on the street, and you wouldn’t know. Both are thoughtful, measured talkers. While classmate’s cadence doesn’t match theirs, her precision with her body language and thrift with words, does. All this means, a potential suitor ought to have the kernel of her parents’ qualities. Though she doesn’t have to, she doesn’t take big decisions without their views. Her mother must know much about classmate’s private life and her lovers and approve of her choices. Parental disapproval assumes the tone of silence or dispassion. Her self-assurance doesn’t slide into hauteur. To my knowledge, classmate doesn’t deploy the first person singular till it’s necessary in a serious matter or needed for something mundane. During one meeting, two years back after we re-established contact, she wanted to make a point. She struggled and used the ‘I’. I sensed her hesitation and her eyes fell away. 

Maybe, I am way off the mark to think she has lovers, though she may have many male admirers, all of whom she’d resist. Single humans, healthy and willing, can hit a point in their lives, where they may no longer crave another person in bed, and where self-stimulation is sufficient. Sometimes, I feel my classmate may have hit such a point where she is liberated from lust, fulfilled with the love from her pet, family, friends. 

I go further into my subconscious and that one night whose movements have come to harden my image of her as a lover says she must have many lovers. And then it swings to the other end: Exhausted with toxic men, with them hitting on her here-there-everywhere, she must have developed the shield, her ‘wall’, that screams ‘go away’ without her having to twitch a limb or nerve. ‘I am done with you’ the wall says, ‘you owe yourselves a better version of your own self. Till then, till you grow up — for your own good — get out of my sight’. The same imagination, says, right now, she must be with a bona-fide imbecile. Smart, beautiful, women with total jerks. Sounds familiar? 

Yet, these are just my reveries. As you can sense, I must be sounding insane, but I’m hoping I’m not toxic.  

#

Four months ago, I made a trip to the Himalayas with old friends. While they were blanked away in the conifers, I wrote classmate’s name in the snow. It had four syllables; many alphabets got repeated. It’s a visual name evoking the eyes but finds its beauty in sound: They unite the kajal and the payal. I thought of taking a picture and sending it to her but decided otherwise. I thought that may be misread.

Instead, I sent classmate a picture of our cottage beneath a peak and wished her well. Hours later, she said, “Wow”. Days after the trip, I sent her another picture of the Pir Panjal Range with a message, asking her if she’d be interested in a trip to the mountains. I said I wish I could sing and cook and travel with her. Hours later, she said, “All this love [is] very sweet, but it [is] squandered on [me] and that [I] [can] not accept or reciprocate it, sorry.” Such things must be so everyday and vulgar to her, I thought. 

It felt like the final blow, but I was happy I took things to the precipice. With a life filled with many failings and some highs, I’ve lost my fear of defeat, though I still get nervous around women I’m drawn towards. My instinct told me this won’t work. But I was willing to put myself on the crucible; a voice inside me said it was alright if I failed, but it would be worse if I didn’t try. In the matters of the heart, I’ve gone from being Mr. No-I-Can’t to Mr. Sure-I-Will. I never knew I’d reach a point in my life, where a put-down, would reinforce my self-confidence.  

#

I am on long leave home. I haven’t asked her to meet again. I think if I do, it may be considered harassment. I’ve wanted to check that with a lawyer. (What if she goes public? What if I am maligned? What if I lose my job?) I have seen her twice at public events. The first one was at a political march where we saw each other from twenty feet away as people jostled. My eyes tried scoping her out, but she was gone. I was with an artist friend who I lost in the gathering. Somewhere, I’d seen pictures of classmate’s sister. I became part of a crowd where I think I saw her. She resembled my classmate, but was shorter. When I moved to the edge of the crowd, we exchanged a glance that looked laden with recognition. Like classmate, she had a nose ring above her right nostril. I nearly smiled at her. I saw one forming on her face, too. She looked away.  

The second time was at a solo theatre show. The performer and classmate seemed old friends. She was surprised to see me. Spectators had to sit on the floor. She had painted only her big toenails with teal polish. There were other people we both knew when we forced each other to small talk. It was strange for me. I lost control and asked her to meet since I was there. When the words came out of my mouth, her eyes were elsewhere, as were mine.   

#

My classmate is now a Muse to me. It’s the only way I know to cope with my ailment. She, and some others from my past, are the substance of my fountain-pen-driven journaling, essays, stories, poems. In my classmate’s case, prose has come easier than verse. I am almost 65,000 words down on a draft that takes many of the ‘facts’ of our experience and builds on them into a story. It fictionalises the minutest details about our past and re-narrates the same and other events from her and others’ points of view. 

I have a long story where she drives the narrative about how she and I got together; the before, the middle and after. I have another on the guy who she had brought to our second meeting five years back. I have a third on a partner making me aware of my toxicity. I have another that considers if I am triggering to my classmate. This one is a thrilling line of enquiry: I belong to that time of her life which I presume must have been very happy with her then fiancé. My memory-mining of my interactions with her tells me they did long-distance for four years and were at the same place only for one-and-a-half. They may have grown up together to grow out of each other. 

I must be bringing up all those painful associations in her mind. She may not even be liking the actors Farhan Akhtar or Matt Damon she drooled over at the time. The reason she doesn’t want to take it further with me, must be this: I remind her of things she’d want to, or already has, let go. But if that was true, then I ask myself, why did she respond to me and then take things further? 

It was because she wanted to make amends for the past. She, too, must have liked me. She must have felt guilty for having slighted me. She must’ve been drawn to my changed self whose emotions were in check; a person who now had his bearings, looked sprightlier, healed. Someone who had let go of his young ex-lover from years ago. She too must’ve thought about me during moments with herself. In taking me home, she was again letting go, of our past with each other: It wasn’t the beginning of our decade-long stewing romance as I’d like to think, but the end.  

But what about what happened later? I ask myself.

Somewhere, I’m sure in my initiations, thereon, I must have got things wrong. I think back and see that some of my blind spots stopped me from recognising them. One message two months after our night together may have broken whatever was left of our unspoken, unclear, ‘deal’. It was risqué and I am embarrassed to put them in words here. With that one phone message I certified my creepiness to her. It never looked like we had a future; this message must have precipitated the end, exemplified my personality, state of mind and the way I saw women, saw her: “Even when I am intimate with others, I feel I am intimate with you”. She didn’t say anything. I think she must have seethed. All that I can say was I was honest.

I return again and again to some of the feelers and messages I have sent her after that one night we had. In emotion- addled romantic situations, it’s very important for people to talk, even if it may invite conflict, which it often does: No true relation between women and men can exist without a pressing tension. I dithered initiating conversation, as I thought that was what she didn’t want: I thought, that was the premise of what we had and that I wanted to continue. With my bad voice I sent clips of some of my singing. I only wanted to amuse her and make her laugh. There was only one quizzical comment on it once. It hinted that I was making a fool of myself. It also hinted, ‘Do Not Disturb’. My classmate is skilled at multiple messaging.  

Still, it was an error to not pursue small talk with her, without getting mushy. At the back of my mind, I never forgot that she had other passions and may have other people in her life. In the process, the messages that I sent made me look like I was transacting, and not connecting, with her as a human being. I must have come across as only a pleasure-seeker and not as someone who was interested in her as a person: Even if one is interested in only a short affair, one needs to feel and convey a true engagement with the other person — with their life, their mind, their passions. It’s possible without mawkishness. 

I wasn’t arriving at the right pitch, the balanced register to sustain a friendship with her even if we lived in different corners of the country. My behaviour later may have even made her regretful of our intimacy. For in our communications afterwards, I wasn’t aiming for a conversation, but was only implying sex. Or at least, this is what I think she must have felt. One of the enduring contemporary challenges for men like me is to find a new idiom for expressing desire towards women. A new set of gestures that help us remain flirtatious, romantic, even whimsical, but at their core are deeply respectful towards them, and views them as one’s own Self and not the Other. For this, a fresh, healthier Self will have to be invented. Fashioning such a culture shouldn’t mean an individual’s stamp be lost. 

Another blind spot I haven’t accounted for is her busy work life. What must her life as a professional be like? Would her schedules allow her the mental space to sustain an interest in me? Is she happy at work? To what extent does the unrelenting work cycle affect the individual’s inclination for the uncertainties of romance?   

Since I fear calling or messaging her, thinking she may take legal action, I wish some day she calls for a conversation. I wish she came to where I lived, let me host her, take her out for shami kebabs and Moradabadi biryani with salan, settling it with firni and falooda. In another story, I write what a prolonged affair or a trip may mean with her. It’s been the toughest to conceive: What will it look like if my reveries come true? What will happen if they sour?

 

As an incipient male storyteller employing ‘social realism’, writing about women has raised a forbidding challenge, which is, creating a female voice, comprehending female subjectivity. I’m learning through writing, rewriting, reading Amrita Pritam, Toni Morrison, Elena Ferrante, J M Coetzee, Mahasweta Devi and so many other giants to start with, placing the female character at the centre of any action and power them with the active voice. How does my classmate see me? How does she view the world? How does she see her past? What are her memories of childhood? These are questions I’m writing stories to find an answer for. In all this obsessing, one fundamental question perplexes me.

Is it correct for the storyteller to use former lovers’ personalities and smuggle them into art? What if they have become part of the artist-author’s subconscious mind and are not other real people anymore? Ethics is law, but also emotion.

Will my classmate and former partners crucify me for inventing tales that draw heavily on our moments together? How will they feel over graphic descriptions of our passions which are intended not for titillation but to scrutinise the complexity of intimacy? Is it fair to the living person whose identity has been changed and who has been fictionalised? What if they loathe what I have done? Is this exploitation of experience ethical?

I am certain to not get their affections for writing this. I only hope to gain their understanding if possible. If they were to subject me to their withering words or create any manner of portrayal of having me in their lives, I won’t mind. In fact, I wish that happened. It’s their right. As much as parlaying them for my fiction is mine. Without the emotional-ethical perfidy, there is no self-understanding, or art. 

#

Such are my scribblings these days. I take my maroon elastic strapped diary out and uncap my red fountain pen. I post the cap on top of the matte steel body. I inhale the nib and its dots of ink resembling an image of the blue patch of Earth seen from space. I cradle it in the crook of my hand. The texture of the pages takes me back to college. The chair has a writing platform attached to it. 

‘I wish my classmate is healed and happy,’ I write. The page talks back: ‘You will be, too’.  

‘I wish my .....  forgives me’ (ex) I write. The page talks back: ‘You will be, you will be’.

I remember now I had promised to gift classmate a diary made of handmade paper five years ago when I poured my pains to her. I never acted on it. There is a beep and I look up. A helper in white arrives and smiles looking at my white-and-black striped T-shirt. It’s part of the uniform here, which I don’t mind wearing some hours in the day. 

‘Come,’ says the voice, ‘It’s time for self-work.’