She tasted of wine and the kind of pompousness that arrives only in people who have decided, somewhere early and irrevocably, that the world owes them its full attention. This was by the Thames at Hays, the promenade beneath us throwing its reflections into the black river that stank, for it was a night of low tide, the city doing what cities do at night when the offices have emptied and the streets belonging now only to people with nowhere better to be. We had been there long enough that the cold had moved from the air into our clothes and from our clothes into us and neither of us mentioned it because mentioning it would have required acknowledging that we were cold, and we were not ready to acknowledge anything that was not each other, nor the departure that was imminent.
A couple walked past, British, seventy perhaps, the husband’s arm looped through the wife’s with the ease of a thing done so many times it becomes symbiotic. The woman looked at us, at A’s head in the cavity of my shoulder, at the bottle resting behind us on the ledge, unlikely at my cock that A had in her boney palm, and she touched her husband’s arm and said, oh, the joys of young love, and he made a sound of agreement that was also a laugh, and they walked on into the dark with their accumulated decades, and A watched them go with an expression I could not read, which was most of her expressions, and then turned back to the river and said nothing.
By the end of it, A had my drawer, my fleece, and a stone I had carried from the bed of the Tiber in Rome, and I had, in exchange, a line from Batalvi that she had scribbled on my white shirt. Main duniya nu pyar karda haan, a repetition about worldly love that consumes life like sugarcane, extracting the sweetness and discarding the pulp.
Her name began with A. I will not give it the rest. She was from Amritsar, twenty-four, and she had come to London not through the ordinary channels of ambition or privilege but through death, which is not metaphor. Before London there was Hatay, where the earthquake had taken her into four days of pulling people from rubble in a neighbourhood she did not know, and before Hatay there was Ramallah, three months, reasons she described as research. In Ramallah she had learned the calculus of checkpoints, the papers, the cold, and once, pulled aside into a corrugated room that smelled of cheap cigarettes, she had stood for two hours while a boy younger than her decided, a boy who has been given a gun, whether she could continue. She continued. She did not speak of that room except once, and only to say that she had counted the rust spots on the ceiling fan and reached fifty before they let her go. Before Ramallah there was Ludhiana, and a maami who had grown bougainvilleas along the boundary wall of a house that was no longer in the family, who in her last weeks could not rise from the bed and so A clipped her nails for her, and A had done it, the nails of an old woman who had tended flowers with those kind hands for forty years, and she had kept the clippings in a twist of paper tucked away inside an old sindook.
What she had seen in all these places she did not describe in full, but rather in the middle of other conversations, a child’s shoe in the dust, a particular afternoon light over concrete, the sound a building makes in the moment before it decides to collapse, the sinking of ash emergent from the human body packed inside a white plastic bag.
There was one thing she described fully, and only once, from childhood, from a room with a terrazzo floor that shone grey and white in the darkness of night and a fish tank against the wall, and she had been perhaps seven, crouched with her face at the glass counting the fish, which kept moving and had to be recounted, and at some point between one count and the next her chest had closed the way it sometimes did then, before the inhaler that could come later, she did not call out and instead she sat on the terrazzo floor with her back against the fish tank and she listened to the trains, the Amritsar station was close enough that on late nights you heard them, their jangling on the train tracks.
She had arrived in Hackney into my flat that was modern in the way of flats built to be photographed rather than lived, clean white tiles and cold walls and heating that was more aspiration than fact, and she dealt with this cold by the gradual annexation of my warmth, which began with the green fleece.
The fleece disappeared the third week. I saw it first in her flat, then on her at the Broadway Market, then it ceased to exist in my wardrobe and existed only on her body and I understood that the transfer had been completed and that retrieval would require a conversation whose costs I could not meet. What followed the fleece was the drawer, which had been mine, which became hers through a slow colonisation of myself. First a lip balm and a diary, then her grains in their small cloth bags, the tupperware containing jaggery she kept refilling from a larger pot in her own kitchen. Then, occupying its own third of the drawer’s volume, the stone.
I had fetched the stone from the bed of the Tiber in Rome.
She had instructed for it, to prove what could only be called love and what she called devotion, which is to say once, casually, looking elsewhere, as though it were a passing thought rather than a test she was administering. We had been looking at photographs she had taken in Rome before Hatay, a bend in the Tiber where the light came through poplars and turned the water a colour that has no adequate name. She said, there is a stone I wanted from that bend. Flat. About this size. She showed me with her fingers, that still smelt of her moistness.
I went to that bend in the Tiber. I took off my shoes and waded in waters that remained frigid despite the heat of the Roman sun. The current was cold and moved faster than it looked and I stood in it long enough that my feet went numb, turning stones over with my toes, selecting and discarding, until I found one that answered what her hands had described. I brought it back and put it on the kitchen table without comment. She picked it up and turned it once in her hands. Then she put it in the drawer, and she never mentioned it again, and the not mentioning was the highest acknowledgement available to her.
She had urged for the chrysanthemums herself, the third time she came to my flat, purple ones, bought from the market on Columbia Road, and she held them out at the door and said, I know they’re not the correct shade I would have liked. She said. I bought them anyway. She said, some things are for the dead and the living both. I put them in a jar on the wine cabinet and they were still there six weeks later, long past the point at which flowers should be kept, their petals browning at the edges and then dropping one by one onto the wired wine cabinet, covering over the dust that had begun to settle over it.
The only thing she had ever told me about herself deliberately, as an act of self-mythologising rather than revelation, was the tattoo. Scissors, on her left tricep, a tailoring scissor, the two blades open at a wide angle. I saw them first when she reached across me in the dark for her water glass, her arm extending over me, and I did not ask then because the dark was not the right room for that question. I asked later, in daylight, and she said, they keep telling me my tongue is sharper than scissors.
She had been told she was fucked up, by enough people in enough different registers that the information had become structural, load-bearing. The man whose scarf she had taken, a dark green wool one that hung on my door, taken because he was not paying attention and because, she said, some people put their things out for the taking without knowing they do. She still had it. I saw it every time I entered our flat and never asked.
She told me this once, to the ceiling, in the dark, not to me but in my presence, I want to be in love, she said. Actually, in love. I have never been with someone the way you are supposed to be. I want to know if I can and the endless reminders of how she was fucked up. She paused. I want you to be the one to take that from me, she said. Not because I haven’t been touched but because I have never let it mean anything and I want to know if I can let it mean something and I want you to be the person I find that out with. She said this still looking at the ceiling. She said, that is what I am asking. I said, you can.
She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, the stakes are too high and how I will never understand that. She described her school romance at a hill school in the Himalayas, pine trees, assembly in the cold mist, a view of something vast when she read her volume of poetry in the library. A had been the head girl, which she mentioned with a great solitude of achievement. The other girl had been two years younger and had loved her like someone who has found the thing they want and does not yet know that wanting with that clarity is not the same as being able to keep what you want, and so they resorted to eating each other out in the secrecy of the head girl’s dorm. Then, often at an old cinema hall in the hills, raked upholstery, the backstage smell of thrice fried samosas and cheap popcorn. She said, she invited her to fuck her raw on the seat when no one was watching, and that was that. She closed the fridge. She went back to bed.
When A left for London, the girl had called from a bathroom in her parents’ house at two in the morning, and A had refused to talk to her till she found after that call the girl had hanged herself in that same bathroom. A told me this on a Tuesday in November, stirring the cezve on the hob, her face turned toward the balcony where the cranes of Canary Wharf stood against a sky that had done something unrepeatable with the last of the light. She kept interrupting herself. Oh, she said, in the middle of a sentence, oh look at that, and then, this is the best sunset. Then she crossed the kitchen and bit my lower lip, till it bled, and went back to the cezve and continued as though none of it had happened. I stood in the kitchen doorway and did not know how to occupy my own body. I said her name. She said, haan, and kept stirring.
I served the food. She sat down and she ate and I sat across from her and understood that this was the thing the world had called her fucked up for, this composure, this refusal to perform the expected shape of grief.
She said, before she picked up her fork, the problem with being told your whole life that you are fucked up is that eventually you have to decide whether to agree. She looked at me. She said, I have not agreed. She said, that is what this year is.
She ate almost nothing, grains soaked overnight in the steel pots she had brought from Amritsar wrapped in a small dhurri, feta taken straight from the block standing at the open fridge at midnight, and sweet potatoes roasted until the skin blackened and split, which she ate with her hands, the flesh pulled apart with a patience she brought to almost nothing else. Once she held one up and examined it with seriousness before beginning to laugh, and said it was shaped like a lund. She said moreover it was girthier than mine and more impressive in the matter of overall architecture of cocks, and she delivered this assessment with the detachment of someone reporting findings in which they had no personal investment, and I said something in protest and she said, haan, sure, and went back to her sweet potato, and I loved her in that moment with a totality I had no adequate response to.
She oiled herself before bed, coconut oil worked slowly into her skin with her own hands, her arms, her collarbone, her stomach, the backs of her knees. The smell of it filled the flat. I came to know her approach before she arrived by that smell, the way I knew her by her kadaa, the clink of metal against the wooden table in the dark telling me she had come in without waking me, had showered, had oiled herself in the bathroom and was now standing at the edge of the room in her striped pyjamas, considering the bed.
She would slide in beside me and I would come to consciousness through her body rather than my own, reaching for her in the dark, the warmth and precision of her, every angle that thinness had made articulate. Her nipples would be taut with anticipation and tasted of coconut, the skin still warm from the shower, and she let me take my time with them, her hands in my hair or absent entirely, already elsewhere, her face turned upward in the way she faced the setting sun when she cooked, receiving something that was hers rather than mine to give. Below her ribs on the left side of her skeletal abdomen, the skin pulled close over the bone, there was a mole she touched sometimes with her own fingers and spoke about her body the way she spoke about everything that had been a site of contest, directly, without cushioning. She said once that she had a complicated relationship with the space between her legs, that it tightened against her, that she had learned to negotiate with it and the negotiation exhausted her and she was tired of people who took the tightening personally. She said, I am telling you this so you know. Not so you fix it but I want you to ram it and take me to be your heer and deprive it of its virginity. She turned and looked at me and asked me to make her bleed. I said, haan.
She looked at me a moment longer to confirm I had understood, then turned back to the ceiling, satisfied, or as close to satisfied as she allowed herself to appear.
The running started in December.
I would wake and she would be gone, the warm displacement in the bed already cooling, the kadaa not on the table. No message. I had not yet learned that a message required a stability of intention she could not always locate. I would wait. Sometimes she came back within hours, electric, talking fast, her sentences running into each other without pause. Sometimes she did not come back for days and when she did, she had been somewhere she could not fully account for, a friend’s floor in Lewisham, a night bus to somewhere, a bench in Victoria Park at four in the morning watching the foxes.
The screaming came later. She screamed and I shouted back and the neighbours below turned up their television and we stood in the kitchen in Hackney screaming at each other, very fluent in each other’s wounds and have chosen, in this moment, to stab the same wound repeatedly. Afterward she would cry in bed, turned away, her body curved into itself, and I would lie behind her not touching, because touching was not yet permitted, waiting for the permission that came eventually, always, in the form of her hand reaching back and finding my cock in the dark.
The phone. She went through it twice. The second time methodically, in rage conducting a necessary audit, sitting cross-legged on the bed in the blue light of the screen, going back months. I stood in the doorway and said nothing. There was nothing to find and this did not seem to matter. The looking was the thing. I made tea. There was a night in December that I have told no one about.
We had been fighting for three hours, the kind of fighting that is not about what it is about, that locates in the immediate grievance all the accumulated unspoken material of two people who have gotten close enough to damage each other with great tenderness. She said things I will not repeat because they were true and the truth of them was the weapon, not the saying. I said things I am not proud of. The flat was very small and the fighting filled it entirely, there was nowhere in the flat that was not inside the fighting. Then suddenly she became very quiet.
She looked at me from across the kitchen with an expression of absolute and cold resolve, and she crossed the kitchen in two steps and her hands were at my throat before I understood they were moving. Not the hands of a woman in rage. That would have been easier. Her hands were at my throat and her lips were at my cheek and neither required explanation. The world did not go dark. It went very bright and very particular. I was aware of the tiles behind her head, the single chrysanthemum petal on the sill, the smell of coconut in the room, the scissors on her tricep pressing against the air beside my face. I was aware of my own hands coming up and finding her wrists and the wrists being thin enough that my fingers went all the way around them, and I was aware that I was not pulling them away and that this pause, this terrible second in which neither of us moved, was the most honest moment we had ever shared, because in it there was no performance possible, there was only what was true, which was that she was capable of this and I had known it and had come here anyway.
Then I pulled her hands away. She let them be pulled. She stepped back and looked at her own hands and was deciding whether to agree with the decision. Then she went to bed. She did not apologise. In the morning she made chai and brought it to me and set it beside me, and I drank it, and neither of us mentioned it again.
She suggested Lucknow in March, three months after she had decided to leave London forever. She had run from home three weeks before, from Amritsar, from a conversation with her father she described only as the one we were always going to have eventually, and she had been at a farm outside Lucknow belonging to a distant relative for ten days already when she called and said, come. The farm was her family’s that survived partition, not through intention but through the tenacity of land, which does not follow people when they cross borders and therefore remains to anchor whatever thread still runs between those who left and those who stayed. She met me at the station wearing a kameez borrowed from someone at the farm, her bag from Amritsar over one shoulder, and she looked at me the way she had looked at the stone from the Tiber when I first put it on the table, assessing whether I had understood what was being asked of me. I had not entirely. But I was there, which she accepted as sufficient.
A courtyard, a pipal, a charpoy in the main room where she wanted love to be made to her even though she remained dry, walls built when walls were built to outlast everything expected to happen inside them. Her relative, a woman in her sixties who asked nothing, left food at the door and disappeared. She was fine for two days.
The third night she did not sleep. I woke at two to find the room empty and her in the courtyard, standing very still, her face turned up toward a point above the pipal that held nothing visible. I watched from the doorway and did not go out. She stood for a long time. When she came back in her eyes were somewhere she had collected them from at a distance, and she lay down beside me without speaking and the silence she brought back filled the room in a way her silences usually did not, as if collected from somewhere deeper.
In the morning she was very calm. She talked for an hour. About the year she had given herself. About the girl from the school in the Himalayas, the boy whose scarf still hung by her door in Hackney. About the letters, which I had not known about until that morning.
She said, I have been writing letters since I was nineteen. From everywhere I have been. From Casablanca, forty letters. From Damascus, sixty, maybe more, I lost count. She paused. She said, I wrote them to someone who did not exist yet. To you, she said, and meant precisely me, and also every decade that would pass before we met again on some train platform she had already imagined, the decades of letters still to be written, the fatality of a love that must now be measured with what that costs.
She picked up my phone from the charpoy where it was charging and looked at it for a moment, the screen lit in her hands, and then she brought it down on the stone floor with a force that was not rage but calculation, the precise force of someone who has determined an amount and applied exactly it.
I stood. She was very still. And then the door, which I had not known had a key on the outside, which she must have taken from the woman at the farm at some point I was not watching, turned. The bolt. Her footsteps across the courtyard, unhurried. The pipal dropping its leaves in the warm March air, indifferent, continuous. Her voice came through the door entirely her own, entirely level.
The juttis, she said. You remember what I told you. Either foot. No insistence on a particular direction. From Casablanca I wrote you forty letters, she said. From Damascus sixty. Before you existed. That was the problem. I had to build you and then I had to know if what I built could hold what I needed it to hold. She paused. The scissors are there so I can see them, she said. Not so anyone else can. Not so anyone else decides what they mean. Her footsteps continued. Under the pipal. Through the gate. Into the lane beyond, where the March morning was completing its descent into heat.
I did not shout. I sat on the terrazzo floor of that room and the door was locked from the outside and the broken phone lay where it had landed and the sky through the single high window was white and absolute. The stone from the Tiber in the drawer that had been mine in the flat that had been mine. My throat. Her wrists inside my hands. The chrysanthemum petal on the sill.
Outside, in the lane, a girl was walking in juttis that fit either foot, equally, without the indignity of any particular direction, wearing a green fleece against the March morning that was not hers, carrying in a bag she had taken from Amritsar forty letters addressed to a man she had constructed for the purpose of this year, this devotion, of love, of sacrifice it required, as she had always said it did.
So I hummed, do pal behi ja kol ve, mere dilan deya meharma.
Pulkit Bajpai is a writer and photographer born in Lucknow, now based in New York, where he researches climate change across South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Pacific Islands. His work, across fiction, image, and mixed methods, concerns postcolonial spatial erasure and its legacy.