Building Alone

I’ll take the radiant, radioactive half-life of love over half-love, writes Sharanya Manivannan.

Just before writing this, I read Rosalyn D’Mello’s new book, A Handbook For My Lover, a beautiful epistolary treatise on love and desire. I interrupted my reading for only two things: to attend a literary festival, and to buy lingerie. These were coincidental, yet perfectly synchronistic, forays…D’Mello’s book is a work both of intellectual acumen and of tender intimacy.

There is, after all, no Cartesian divide—only the compartments we create in order to be able to live with ourselves and with others. D’Mello was 23 when she met her eponymous lover, the same age at which I became unequivocally un-partnered. We are both now 30, and the interim years have produced books for both of us about our experiences. In her case, she wrote a memoir about living with another. In mine, I wrote stories about how to live as myself, by myself, in the absence of my other whole.

The stories in The High Priestess Never Marries, which will be published later this year by HarperCollins India, are on the question of whether a hetero-romantic woman can both have love and be free. In some ways, it is the question of the hermit or the seeker: can bondage—even loving, sensual, pleasing bondage—and liberation be possible at once? It is also a perfectly ordinary question, otherwise phrased as: is there a man out there with whom I can be the woman that I am, in absolute, unpunished, fathomed fullness? In the five years over which I wrote the collection, and over which I lived the most critical experiences that informed it, I found only one reliable answer: that in case the answer is no, and continues to be no, one must teach oneself how to live, how to love anyway yet build alone.

The span of a woman’s twenties—not just in urban India, but elsewhere too—is a period in which she can go from being an ingénue playing at power with older men to becoming, herself, a station of strength.

The span of a woman’s twenties—not just in urban India, but elsewhere too—is a period in which she can go from being an ingénue playing at power with older men to becoming, herself, a station of strength. “It is astonishing how strong you become, when you’ve spent a lot of time being other people’s weaknesses,” I write in one story, ‘Corvus’. A weakness—a flaw, a temptation, a mistake. Strength takes shape, invariably, through failure, including the failures of others. It happens, ultimately, through unrequited love, love at the wrong time, love afraid of the sound of its own name.

And so, left to yourself in the absence of other scaffolding, you teach yourself how to build an Ark that you fill one by one by one by one with memory that petrifies into treasure, risk that alchemises into beauty, rupture that raptures into meaning. And then, by yourself, you pull its door closed.

 

Nobody wants to hear this. I have literally lost friendships (that other form of great, non-sanguine love) for making this assertion. People fear aloneness so much that they will deny its existence.

“How can you give up?” they have asked me, as though to build alone means to stop believing in love. When in fact I have only refused to give up—on myself.

“How can you give up?” they have asked me, as though to build alone means to stop believing in love. When in fact I have only refused to give up—on myself. I deserve hot-blooded passion, affinity, illumination, originality, the white magic of romance. And in their absence I demand pages and pages of compensatory art.

My life is light and flowers, low moons and relished victuals, paintbrushes and precious objects, laughter and rigour and pleasure, perfumed pulse points, reflection. Not for me the terms of capitulation, the cowardly socially-sanctioned escape contract; not for me the life I’ve watched some of my ex-lovers yield to, accepting partners beside whom they must surely sleep blindfolded to the truth of what they’ve done to themselves, while their fear of being loved meaningfully keeps its sad eyes on their sorry asses.

Bitter? Sure. Bitter like cocoa, raw material for the sweetest thing on earth. I’ll take the radiant, radioactive half-life of love, to wink at Junot Diaz’s famous phrase, over half-love.

My life is light and flowers, low moons and relished victuals, paintbrushes and precious objects, laughter and rigour and pleasure, perfumed pulse points, reflection. Not for me the terms of capitulation, the cowardly socially-sanctioned escape contract.

“An ex-lover is one who has had the privilege of having once been my lover,” writes D’Mello in her gorgeous memoir. But fiction is fiction. Only one or two—or maybe three—of mine might imagine they see themselves in the pages of The High Priestess Never Marries. Only one or two—or maybe three—of them might (for once) be right.