Authors: Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla

Tags: #Bollywood, #Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla, #LGBT, #Gay, #Lesbian, #Kenya, #India, #South Asia, #Lata Mangeshkar, #American Book Awards, #The Two Krishnas, #Los Angeles, #Desi, #diaspora, #Africa, #West Hollywood, #Literary Fiction

Ode to Lata (38 page)

BOOK: Ode to Lata

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Just as an amputated arm continues to inflict phantom pain, so too the fading of something as precious as a feeling for another must be marked by a corporeal act of obliteration, no matter how small.

Sometimes this took the shape of something as inconsequential as the breaking of a cocktail glass, seemingly accidental as he poured into it a shot of warm, unpalatable vodka at the end of a bitter night and before climbing into bed without praise or gratitude for a God that had deprived him yet again.

At other times, he cut myself as he was slicing the onion into slivers for his breakfast omelet, and his eyes would brim with tears so that it looked like the rivulet of blood, red enough to paint lips or the parting of a bride’s head, was drowning the whole world in scarlet.

Then there were cruder nights, nights when he would swallow life whole, like a man ravenous for something so specific, that its dearth had driven him into an astounding and insatiable binge for all else, and in the process, suffocate all agonies in the cacophonies of carousal at the bars and nightclubs of West Hollywood where vulnerability guised itself in arrogance and those that were still foolish enough to hope for a different outcome and linger through the changing guard of youthful faces, had learned how to smile and mask any disenchantment with expertise.

At the end of such nights, he found himself kneeling, not repentant in prayer or ready to take another man into his mouth, but over the cold, porcelain rim of a toilet, regurgitating not only the poisons of life but also the toxicity of what he had thought of as love.

A. changed this. On their last night together, A. reminded him that they had a deal, not so much with words but with that magnificent tilt of his head as he touched his mouth and looked into his eyes with so much pain in his own. It was an impotent gesture, one that could rescind nothing but conceal none of the longing he felt.

He wanted A. to stay as much as he wanted to see him go. If an impending disaster cannot be diverted, then it was better that it came to pass so that he could go about the business of rebuilding. The end was near and he grew anxious more than fearful.

So he responded – with the same tacit though awkward jerking of his head, letting his eyes wander from A. while he was still where he could be seen, touched, felt that – Yes, we had a deal and now you must go to that other desert, one filled with palms and mosques and burning resin instead of ours with the concrete snake and smog and me. You must go to a wife waiting to bear you children so that I can be quickly reassigned to a world of bars and new men and freedom.

You will be grounded by your commitments. I will be suffocated by my freedom. You must go. Look – but only ahead – not at me to change your mind.

But if A. stayed, it had to be his decision. Disowned by kin and country, he would never be able to go back. The land of the free would imprison him for good. Love came at a cost. It was not free and it didn’t, contrary to baroque, romantic notions, multiply inherently. It had to be reallocated, detoured, compensated for. No such thing as love without casualties.

He cradled A. into his arms and stayed awake through most of the night, watching him sleep, running his hand over his head, ministering gentle kisses not as a lover would another but as a father would his child. For the last month they had stopped making love, having decided it was better for bodies to be prised apart before the heart would have to follow suite.

Sometime in the night he found himself ensconced by A. and he let himself be sheltered and warmed, terrified of the breadth of the bed, already feeling the space A. would leave behind on it.
Let me know more of this,
he thought.
Hold on to the way we are before I know anything else.

Winter had come early and the sky wept, drenching the parched city with its waters and promising to paralyze the runaway and the winged creature that would take A. away to the ends of the earth. They were rooted in the middle of the terminal, surrounded by so much luggage, by A’s suspecting friends around whom they could not steal the intimacy that had unfurled between them for a year now. And he thought,
How can they not see? We, our emotions, are like an ancient tree in the midst of all this bustle; our roots thick and gnarled like the legs of a giant wooden spider about to be uprooted. Will the ground not shake? Maybe they will, but like us, they too will hold equilibrium, not speak.

As he watched the distance between them grow, first as A. walked through the boarding gate as if entering a portal to the afterlife – a life without him – and then, as the plane surmounted nature’s wrath and pulled A. into the stony sky, he could think only of life’s cruel irony: That somewhere at the end of his lover’s journey was someone waiting breathlessly; that a parting must take place at one end so that a welcoming could take place at another. This must be what Becket meant when he talked about the constant quality of tears, how for each one who begins to weep, somewhere else, another stops.

He entered not just a house that screamed its silence at him, but also a life he thought he had deflected.

Glasses waited to be shattered, knives glinted along serrated edges, memories remained trapped and muffled behind glass frames. But now that the one true love of his life had left, he did nothing because no conceivable act could express the gravity of his grief. Nothing could exorcise it. He could not bleed A. out of him like a humor or cut him out from the marrow of his being.

Every act of love and the cruelty inherent in it would remain like the fingerprints on a mirror, imperceptible to most but always there, reminding him of being touched.

He would observe no ritual this time; do nothing to bring closure. Perhaps the world doesn’t end cataclysmically, it dies with a whimper.

He would throw himself into life once again, yes, and soon, the features that he had started to see as his own would fade into a sea of other faces unless he looked into old pictures; the sound of that voice too would become warbled by new voices, thank God, so that their promises would no longer even echo in the air around him; and although he would always remember how comforted he felt enveloped in A’s arms, surely he would also forget just how warm the skin felt against his own, as if burning from somewhere within.

A
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual person, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

A
was first published in
Love, West Hollywood
(2008) by Alyson.