Falible Gods

By Madhavi Rao

She struggled to open her eyes. It was the sprout of dawn. The room was starting to light up in its blue parenthetical glow. They got in late last night. There wasn’t much to be said after the unusually familial greetings. They spoke about the aesthetics of the place and compared how they are in contrast to its minimalistic approach. Sharing the bath while changing their clothes, their backs facing each other, was the only way it could have been done despite it never having occurred before. There was no desire in them to look at each other while they stripped and covered themselves like a shared memory they had both been seeing from the same vantage point. They had lived it, they had known its emulation radiating on them much before it had happened. They did not speak after that, they figured out their sides of the bed in absolute silence and without discussing that they would be sharing the blanket, they slid in and lay there for some time, which felt like having slowed down to acknowledge their physical presence. They fell asleep a little while after, both facing the other at a distance in embryonic postures. When he had finally closed his eyes, he was on his back, staring at the fall ceiling. The side of his body exposed to her under the blanket was aware of a warmth it had memorised. It had become an acclimatised ache under a few layers of his skin. It did not occur to him to touch her, he was still absorbing their presence in a shared equivocal time and space. He turned towards her with his eyes closed to let his whole body sleep in that ache’s agility. It brought in him a sense of tranquillity, that his body had lived with a memory of her, as if he was grateful for it, for the dormant ache.

When she opened her eyes to the early light, her palm facing her in a stillness. She curled up her arms around the blanket and saw him, still in a lull. She thought of touching his face with only the tip of her index finger. She wanted to whisper to him - “I do, I do remember everything- every stroke, every curve, every slide across my skin and the circumference of my being in it’s nonchalance. You were processing and capturing my presence for the sole purpose of your memory, like a chore- to not arouse but to only, simply- remember it. And I remember feeling like autumn. I remember feeling like life was arriving somewhere, apologetically late. I remember tasting the time slipping by and I remember feeling betrayed by it. I remember being so inexplicably sad at the arrival of my longing.” She watched the dawn becoming sunrise in a descending diagonal line from under his eye lashes to the tip of his nose. The blanket still covered most of his torso, his shoulders had accumulated a slight hunch like curve and he had lost some weight since she saw him the first time. His physicality hadn’t changed much since the last time she saw him. That evening when he had suddenly arrived and they were sitting in this old food joint he used to go to, wearing a white round neck, jetlagged and ragged hair. He snapped her out of her train of thought and asked “what are you looking at me like that for?” She had been thinking- you must see what ‘time’ looks like when it has passed; on someone and you have bore witness to it passively. Its cruelty, its kindness; in their eyes, on their limbs, in the texture of their half smiles and lingering looks. The dents that have been on their body: invisible, known only to those who would have cared to look and carve them out with attention. It does in fact carve the same shapes on you too, for you stood there, not because of love but because you stood there to witness out of desire. She thought experiencing a space in time even in an abstract, deranged togetherness binds you in a mutually overcome hurt before you can see it on yourselves. Time, much like pain, demands to be acknowledged. It demands it so ferociously that it will, without exception, make its voice heard in the picture it paints for your eyes. She was humbled by it then, her own fallibility. It absolved her of her arrogance in control, it gave her a portion of her innocence as a gift in the embodiment of what was once a naive goodness she had chosen to accept.

At last, she reached out her hand and touched his hair. He woke up slowly and held her hand in his, eyes still lingering with sleep, he said, we don’t know what we like for breakfast,do we?

She exhaled a laugh and said, It's because we have never spent a night together. But I remember you don't like eggs.

Yeah! I don't, he says.

You want me to go check the kitchen if there is anything else?

Are you hungry?, he asked.

No, not really. Maybe in a while.

You would like eggs?

Yes!

Okay ! I will just have coffee. He knew she found his coffee a little too sour for her taste.

Must I still suffer after all this time?, she inquired with a laugh under her tone

It's an acquired taste.

Sure.

There was a moment of silence before he turned on his back again without letting go of her hand. His palms were starting to get sweaty and she could feel a slight shiver on the tips of his fingers. Will you not ask me ‘why now?’, he said. She slid across to his side and got her body close to his, leaving only a space for tension to breathe between them, her face was right over him and she looked at him directly for the first time since they came in and said, Did you know it is why people who love me appreciate me?

which is?, he whispered.

Because I never ask certain questions and you, for one, have been grateful for it. She said, coolly, without flinching.

He wanted to turn his gaze away from her, it made him diabolically uncomfortable to know that she saw him. Without breaking his gaze he softened his eyes and said, but you sure talk about those things.

She was examining the shape of his brows, thinking if she had ever taken notice of them so closely. Why else have we been hurtling back to each other if not for the conversations about the world which have really always been about us?, she stated a fact.

Is that what we have been doing? Hurtling back?, he asked with superfluous curiosity.

Why else then?, she asks.

We have burnt down everything tangible in our lives in its wake and sometimes when I look back on it, I feel we have held on to a memory that wasn’t supposed to be held on to, he says. He turned his body to her and sat, positioning himself in front of her and continued, like it feels this way because it never really was. We gave each other something and have lived in this knowing that we are never going to find that again, but if we had tried and I know I did, we could have. He paused, absorbing the exorbitant factuality of his inner life before he turned away from her and said, It is easier to replace people in more ways than we think it is not. You will be surprised to know how knowable and alike we all are. He was staring out the window with slightly squinched eyes while he said this in a tone of opaque defeat. He knew what he was doing, he was trying to escape regret.

She did not say anything, a turn in her stomach, her limbs were still limp and she felt she would disappear into the hollow of the mattress if she did not move. She reached for him to put her head into his lap.

Would you stroke my hair please?, she asked him softly.

He kept his hand on her forehead, resting it there for a few seconds before stroking her hair.

I used to ask my grandmother to do that for me when I used to live with her. I would wake up in the middle of the night and go to her bed and she wouldn’t ask me anything and would let me lie next to her, stroking my hair to sleep. I sometimes think about those nights when I am sleeping alone in my bed at the centre of it with all the extra pillows, she told him. It was when she died that I sort of realised that childhood is coming to end, if not now, soon. Though she did not understand why she was sharing this with him like a confession of her loneliness but was relieved he couldn’t see her face. He sat there stroking her hair, occasionally grazing his thumb on her eyelids and imagined her sleeping in her bed. He wondered in all of those nights which ones were those when she would have thought of him even as an afterthought. She had never withheld the fact that she does think about him and every time it was said in words, her detachment in stating it like a fact acted as an assurance for him. For her it was meant as a display of her invulnerability to her own feelings, that she had somehow dehumanised herself by exposing a part which could destroy her so easily but for him it meant that a part of him that he considered somewhat innocent and worth living on, lived in her. As long as he is being imagined, that part will live on. Though aware of his own selfishness in that, he never truly wished otherwise. He would be happy for her if she would be free of him but that she was not, tied them into the one thing they could continue being illiterate about.

They were at the kitchen bar, it was late morning, she lit a cigarette and he was making a list of things in the pantry to see if they would need anything. It had been decided after breakfast that they would just do an early dinner and spend their time drinking the wine he got for them. They had never gotten drunk together and it seemed like an exciting idea when they spoke about it on the phone while planning this.

I could open a bottle to go with your cigarette, he said.

Ummm, she replied.

He poured her a glass and sat on the bar stool next to her.

Watching her savour her smoke he said, it’s the ritual of it for you, isn't it ?

She exhaled the smoke through her nose while looking at him and said, Yes! You could say that. It's something that gives me a sense of ‘doing’ when I don't know how to get through time in its minuteness, you know?

He slid the wine to himself and took a sip, paused, continued looking at the glass and said, There are times when I am caught up in this frenzy of the tangible reality of my life, just making my way through the city, unaware of its aesthetic beauty or anything larger in context, just really involved in the banality of the day. Then in my peripheral vision, I would take notice of a cafe or a beautifully lit diner sparsely populated with people sitting alone, in couples or groups of friends. He said. Took another sip of the wine, slid it back and turned his gaze to her. I would wonder if one of them could be you, reading a book in a corner with a coffee gone cold or maybe talking to a stranger enthusiastically about something that must have happened the other day. And I continue walking with this until something distracts me and this scenery, even in my peripheral vision starts to disappear and before I have realised it I have come back to my life, he said in a pace which allowed him to chew on the taste of his own imagined memory.

She grazed the back of his hand that was on the table and asked him to come hold her. He got down from his bar stool, went around her back and enveloped his arms around her, still keeping his body to himself. She asked him to come closer and he went in to rest his face on her left shoulder and sighed his body into a relief of limpness on her. The blackhole whirling inside her slowing down. She wondered if two people who haven't been part of each other’s lives in any way that could be validated as real could feel this close. She touched his forearms, hooked her hands on them and said, It happened to me too. I would be at work or just really busy doing a house chore or sometimes at a party and I would look at the time and imagine you walking in long purposeful strides across the city, in a hurry to get somewhere or get something done, unaware of having manifested in my imagination like this. It felt so real at the time that now when I think of it, it feels like an actual memory of something that happened, that I could see you. But it was all inside my head. She was almost whispering and wanted to turn to him into a full embrace but did not and said, it stopped after a while and I felt the loss of it. My life was becoming real and I had to inhabit it. I missed imagining you.

He stood there listening to her, kissed her shoulder and mumbled- There is part of me, a small empty room, that always misses you and I do not know why. He wasn’t sure if he was being entirely honest about it because missing her also felt like betraying everything that happened after, a guilt that he would carry with him every time he stumbled upon joy. He was partly saying this because he thought it was what she wanted to hear but it wasn’t entirely a lie either. She felt petite under his weight, her spine was starting to release the tension from the night before and as he swerved his face in her hair, he knew, just like that, just with that much, with this tiny acknowledgement that he had just given her, had her soiled wet like clay on a pottery disk, waiting to be shaped into whatever he wanted to. He could do to her what he wished and she would let him. He could debase and degrade her or eviscerate her with a word or a touch and she would let him, even forgive him for it too.

It was mid afternoon now, they were sitting on the couch facing each other, his legs on her lap.

You know what’s really interesting!, she says. I feel that after a point ‘love’ in its romantic sense stops being a priority.

That's like saying you are absolved of your need to be loved, he said.

No! That is not what I mean. I am saying, in the last few years, after everything that transpired. With you, with him and everyone after, I sort of lost interest in this love story that I wanted and chased so tirelessly. She leaned towards him and furrowed her brows before going on. It isn’t important to me anymore, to love someone or be loved like that, as it maybe once was. She explained.

She was doing that thing again, which she did to evade feeling disappointed and hurt. It irritated him. That's just you licking your wounds by taking on a moral high ground about how life has been so unfair to you, how horrible people have been to you instead of blaming them or whining about it and risking being flawed and human, he said with an unwavering surety which was mean to her ears. You choose to put yourself on a pedestal of sainthood and devise these narratives and go as far as convincing yourself of them as your belief system. He retorted. She shifted his feet from her lap onto the couch gently and turned towards the glass windows, staring blankly at the shrubs outside. The white chairs on the porch in their plastic-y shine were hot under the sun. It was very still outside, almost stagnant while they were pregnant with sentences which were cross pollinating inside them. She got up and went to the kitchen bar to get another cigarette. She walked back to the couch aware of his gaze following her with a shallow exasperation in his anticipation of what she was going to say. She stood across from him behind the coffee table, lit her cigarette and in a stoic tone, said, You have always felt this need to analyse me to be able to understand me and it is belittling to any emotional intelligence I possess. It is like saying, ‘oh! You are dumb because you are not angry enough with what has happened to you.’ she said smoking another puff and sat on the couch opposite to him.

A pause. Unwelcome.

He saw her cigarette shaking slightly between her fingers as she smoked shallow puffs of it and said, you are pissed off, aren’t you? I have pissed you off. She looked at him then. You want me to believe this thing about your romantic idea of solitude and how you have conquered your need to be loved, he said. There were hints of frustration building in his voice. And yet! Here you are. He paused for a smirk, mimicking sadness before continuing. Sitting here, smoking away and making statements coldly as a way of displaying how special I must be for you that despite this dissipation of your need, you came. He wasn’t mimicking the sadness anymore. You want me to be grateful for it rather than just saying you are here because you wanted to be, because despite everything you wanted to see me, he finished and looked away, resting his back on the couch. She broke her tranced stare from his physical being and stubbed the cigarette in the circular glass ashtray on the coffee table and lay on her back on the couch where she was sitting. She breathed a few deep breaths from her mouth as if in acknowledgment of her defeat and said, You expect me to give you my whole so you don’t have to say a word of reciprocation. He knew what she was pointing at. He was praying she would spare him once again, his silence, like she always did. But they were here. She did not move and continued, Its like you want me to crack open my spine so you can have my vulnerability which makes up for the lack of your own with me. You want to be rewarded for this one gesture of affection against all the retraction of love you have exhibited all these years, which more often than not felt like indifference.Her voice was starting to break. She paused and closed her eyes to contain the tears that had welled up. Though aware that he was at a three feet distance from her, an image of him conjured in her mind, the one which she had remembered him by. She opened her eyes and let the tears trickle down the sides of her face and said, Is it really that hard for you to believe that I may have accepted my personal defeat to be able to have a perspective which allows me to live my life without having any resentment for people who have failed to love me enough to be with me? She waited for him to say something and when he didn’t, she got up and looked at him. Look at me, she says. He does. When you could not even kiss me without restraint and carried her on your skin into my bed pretending like you were not soaked wet in her, it felt like contempt. It felt like you pitied me and did not want to touch me. But all you were doing was saying goodbye, letting me go and then you left me to figure that out on my own, she said calmly in contradiction to her dried up tears as she once again hid behind the acute exposure of her feelings to take shelter in being weak. So yeah! I do not for a second think I am taking any moral high ground here and fooling myself. It’s okay if you don't believe me but do not act like you are the wounded party here, she said. And turned to walk to the door opening into the porch, went outside and disappeared from the diameter of his sight.

He sat there looking at the stubbed cigarette tinted with her lip balm, thinking of the softness of her mouth against his tongue and how it felt to be inside her. She was in love with someone else then, someone he knew she would never stop loving from the moment she first spoke of him. It was what he had admired in her then, her ability to love without form and vessel. She never had the need to contain the people she loved in fortified compartments to validate the discourse of their presence in her life. He would later find himself living in the trusting freedom of it when she gave that to him. He had loved her for that. It was that which allowed him to open up to her about things no one living on this planet had known about him. She was his privacy untethered. Over time her transparency in expressing her love for another became something of a threat to the totality of his space in her. He could not long for a person so dangerously naked, he could not bear being the one who longed. It was November, they were happy. He had warned her of his helplessness and how their borrowed time was culminating towards an end. He had told her then, in one of the video calls- “You are real but not real, it's like you are here but not here.” She could hear the knock of the inevitable on their door and realised he could not go on any longer. To her this moment of truth between them also felt like drowning so close to the shore. As to what that shore would have been, remained unclear to her. He eventually got up and looked for his phone when she did not come back. He found his phone in the bedroom and texted her.

“I will be in the bath.”

She saw his text light up her phone screen but did not open it. She was sitting alongside unkempt shrubs in the backyard thinking about the family who must have lived here. If there were any childhoods that have passed through this backyard, maybe not. It looked like a pretty new construction from its architecture, like one of those summer homes rich people buy in the countryside and never use. It was empty of a past. It felt devoid of character in that sense. There were no personal items inside the house either. It was built and staged for people in passing. She was a person deeply attached to her memory and past, though you couldn’t say she lived in it but it was a part of her DNA to collect, to memorise, to absorb, so she could live it a little longer in its aftertaste. There are people like that who consume memories and their past like fodder because of the beautified effect nostalgia has on everything. She called it a forward moving longing which constructed her present and helped her cope with a world which she hadn’t been able to adjust to. She always felt like a semi-person, not real enough. It was this part of her which was so attracted to him when they met. He was a person well adjusted to the world and had learned to cope with the structures and patterns it functioned on. He had a self assuredness about himself which intimidated her. A quality of being in this state of calmness, like he was always watching his own life play out as a third person. While he appreciated everything cerebral and even lived in abstracts, he was aware of when he had to let go. He had made peace with pragmatic facts which affect a life, however painful. It seemed to her that he had figured out a segue between consuming a life necessary for one’s well being and a life that is built on impulse and beauty and the discourse it has on shaping one’s perspective. She envied him for that. The sun was starting to come down and she was famished. She went around the house one more time and went back inside to the kitchen. There were some pancakes they had made in the afternoon. She sat on one of the bar stools and ate while reading an article on Peruvian political climate over the last decade and let it spill into her mindlessly, knowing this accumulation of information has no use for her. Apart from a meaningless mention in a geopolitical debate in a social scenario where everyone would be drunk enough to think their bourgeoisie education has given them an intellectual upper hand over lived experiences of the people they were talking about. After she finished eating, she went to the bedroom and could hear the shower running in the bathroom. She got into her side of the bed and thought of his naked body. She thought of all the people he must have slept with and things he would have done to them, places he would have touched and kissed. The shower stopped and there was silence in the room. She turned towards the bathroom door and curled up inside the blanket, a laze had taken over her body after eating, she felt spent.

There you are. He said, relieved, as he got out looking moist and fresh. His body filled the room with the fragrance of his bath mist. He was neatly dressed in a comfortable pair of house shorts and was rummaging through his luggage for a tee. She did not turn to look at him and replied in a welcoming “hmm..” taking in the sight of his softened skin. He gave up a minute later and got into bed, maintaining a distance from her. Did you eat the pancakes?, he asked casually as if the previous conversation hadn’t happened at all. Which did not help him, it fueled her anger when he did that but she was too tired to be angry. She replied in a yes and cut the conversation off. He laid there awkwardly for a few minutes and it felt as though language had at last failed them, despite their ability to communicate in a vocabulary they had crafted, developed and practised over the geographical lines that hung between them. They had a language of separateness. Togetherness of this kind did not come to them naturally and the vocabulary of it, they were oblivious to. He turned and slid across to her and in a mundanely atypical fashion, went in to spoon her. Her body, alien to this sort of touch, froze for a second before it gave in and adjusted its physicality to his. She closed her eyes in relief and let her spine adjust to his torso, filling in the gaps. This closeness was washing them over with grief of longing and desire for the parts of each other which were forever lost in the distances they had sustained between them. I know I have hurt you, he whispered to her, I am sorry. Her chest was starting to churn up the sadness into her eyes. She broke from their embrace and turned to him, he let her and slid back enough to see her face. He could see the tears brimming in her eyes, just about to trickle down, her nose was red as she meekly said, All I wanted when we met the last time was for you to hold me and tell me you had missed me. She paused for a breath. Even when you texted me after all that time, that was all I wanted. Why didn't you? He wasn’t looking at her then. He ran his hands across her fragile waist and said, Ofcourse I had missed you! I guess I had these anxieties about being vulnerable with you and what it might have led to. He softened his voice and continued, I understand now that it was stupid but I did ask what you wanted and when you didn’t give me a straight answer, I recoiled. She remembered then how impossible it felt in that moment when he had asked her. There were goodbyes in the waiting as their hours together were coming to an end. She had lacked the courage to say something both of them wanted to hear. I am sorry too, she said. I was afraid, it all seemed so impossible. I just thought that there would always be an airport with a flight waiting for one of us to board it. What could we have done anyway?

He was mapping out her inner thighs while listening to her, feeling her muscles tense up. He turned his eyes to her and said, We have made our mistakes, let me make up? Looking straight at him, she guided his hands up her thighs and let him feel her wetness. He held her by the back of her neck, gently pulling her close and asked, What do you want? Her back started to arch and she opened her mouth a little to let out a moan and said, I will need you closer to me. He took the small opening of her mouth and kissed her. She put her arms across his shoulders on his back and clung to him, feeling it getting tense under her fingers as he went inside her. He was on top of her now, his weight resting on his left leg helping her cling to him. He leaned in closer into her chest as she opened up for him. She curved her neck slightly to make space for his face next to her, he took a minute to look at her like that. Curling and twitching beneath his touch, under his weight, surrendering to him like he was in control. All the while, it was she, who had all the power now to make him do to her what she pleased and he would. He ran his fingers across the veins on her curved neck and kissed her exactly where he had the first time. Though they were inside the blankets and she could feel tiny droplets of sweat building on his forehead at the verge of dripping as he came nose to nose to her, they were both shivering. She held his face to help him and turned him on his back and got on top of him. He held her hand then and put his other hand on her waist to help her stabilise. There it was, their vocabulary of hands, of touch. These languages, these conversations were what made the fallible gods of their relationship a little more real before they crumbled, sometimes, at the feet of their childhoods.

She was smoking a cigarette lying down and he had his head on her belly. His face turned to hers, their bodies lit greasily under the warm lights of the room, it was dark outside now. It must have been late evening. He asked her for a puff and she said, We don’t wanna get too intimate here, do we?. They chuckled. No, we are just going to repress all of that and be toxic, he says. He took the cigarette from her and smoked a few puffs. She closed her eyes in a sort of contentment she couldn’t deny her body at the moment. They lay there like that till they finished smoking in silence.

It's the genesis of all love, isn't it?, she says.

Conversation, you mean?, he asks.

Yes! It's been true for us anyway. She said, running her fingers through his hair.

He kissed her belly tenderly before he rested on it again and said, It feels absurd to be happy like this. She knew what he was talking about. She had felt it once, for him. The absurdity of happiness and the end of a longing make you dizzy; it seeks a usual culmination of the senses. One which you have known, the form you are familiar with as humans. But as life has it, anything that ever means anything doesn’t take the shape of anything familiar. When the dizziness subsides and your loneliness envelopes you in it again. When the other disappears, once again, you can see- That in the most unusual ways love gives you its goodness, becoming its only signifier. The worthiness you felt devoid of is given once again to you like a dream. That in the most mundane of life you come face to face with its miracle. In the absence of syntactical beginnings and endings.

After a while, she said, The end of missing someone only signifies another beginning of itself in another form. She paused for a breath. An abstraction of yourself now intertwined with the other, you carry on once again but only inwards. He was listening to her with his eyes closed, on the verge of falling into a lull.

I am never lonely when I am with you, he almost whispered.

Now you know why I didn’t ask you ‘why now?’, she says.

He opened his eyes and smiled at her. He had always loved her, maybe even before she did and in a way, she knew that.

You think we will be okay?, he asked.

She looked at him, memorising this moment as if preparing for something once again and said, Haven’t we always!

By Madhavi Rao