Love, Lately

THERE’S AN UNFAIRNESS ABOUT THE word ‘latecomer’, a kind of blaming that will curve into gentle ambiguity if one were to be called a ‘late lover’. It is the nature of love to make the lover feel that they have arrived late—why did I not know you and love you since you were born, why did I meet you only in the third decade of my life? But, as a writer told me about his new partner in almost a whisper once— “It feels awkward to say this, that I can’t leave this continent because I’ve fallen in love in my late forties, and for the third time in my life … ” He couldn’t complete the sentence, he was embarrassed, as an adult might be if they were caught buying dolls and toy kitchen sets for themselves. Love one associ­ates with youth, with flowers, with the intensity of heat and heart. One indulges the allow­ances young lovers make, their life without brakes, their relinquishing of control over their own lives, their indifference to GPS of any other kind except passion and affection. One doesn’t know when one has turned old— or ‘older’—so that love after a certain age seems as ludicrous an idea as asking for candy on the darkest night of the year. It’s idiomatic in the languages I live in: ‘buro boyeshey bhimroti’, madness in old age, ascribed to being a late lover. Like the sight of an older person doing somersaults is bound to confuse us and perhaps also make us laugh, so with love. It doesn’t seem right. Athletes retire, the heart must too.

By the time one learns about cholesterol, as a thing that, in spite of being given a home in one’s body, ungratefully betrays the heart, one also comes to believe that one knows enough to be able to guess the temperature of one’s heart. Being alone has become a fly-swatting habit—the sandbags have started collecting at the perimeter of the heart by then, trying to keep people out. It is as if the few who have managed to get in are enough—as if the heart is a theatre that has put up a ‘Houseful’ sign. When we feel that we know the behaviour of our heart, we perhaps actually mean that we think we know how love acts, whether like snail or earthworm or bird or fish. We know it well enough to know that we don’t need it, that we could do without it. We don’t need to open the window every morning when it’s winter.

It is not that it’s always spring in our heart. We’ve reconciled for it to be a seasonless space. We want to keep it free of pollen and pollination—our heart is allergic. We swing between care and indifference—we want to harden it for a life of neglect, we want to give it the attention that we know it won’t get. The only reason we never want to be young again is because of our heart—it has been a problem child. We were too young to be parents—the heart felt like a prodigious child that might have done better in foster care. We didn’t learn very much from it, or, even if we did, it has sublimated from our memory. We learnt that our heart was like sand—no matter how much it was watered, it didn’t feel enough, it remained loose. Yes, this is probably what we learnt—that loneliness was sandy and love a lump of clay. No, these things we discover much later. We think the first thing we learnt was that there was no measure of love, that it couldn’t be held in a pipette, that only those who had not been able to overcome their childhood fear of arithmetic said ‘so much’ after ‘I love you’, that it wasn’t how much one loved but how one loved that determined everything, including beside whom one woke up every morning.

The heart is a muscle—the awareness of that knowledge might have filled us with a sense of power, that we’d be able to train it like athletes train the muscles in their limbs. Walking, running, jumping— what were the equivalents to train the muscle of the heart? How does one train it for aloneness and for togetherness? There seemed no exercise like love. We had turned our faces away from it. It felt like the scare of school—taking exams every day, a constant process of evaluation. “You’re older now, ” someone would say. In these words were the opposite of what an orthopaedic surgeon might have said, that age had taken away the resilience of bones. What they seemed to imply was that our hearts had had training by now, or that the suffering caused by the flowchart of love had, through repetition, trained our hearts for future calamities. In that sense, love only seemed like a rehearsal of the grief we might encounter were things to go the way we didn’t want them to go. It is possible that the mind learns to become more disciplined as we grow in years, it is possible that the senses begin to feel slightly jaded from an incessant exposure to stimuli, so that nothing surprises the ear and eye and nose, but the heart … The heart remains a child, forever learning to avoid falling. There is no difference between an aged person’s heart and a young adult’s.

And yet the mocking of a mature person’s heart in jokes and idioms, in digs and asides. Old hearts are expected to rest on the old, older relationships, older histories of attachment and enchantment. It is when the aging heart jiggles to a new relationship, a new heart, a heart that one hasn’t met before, that disturbs the social order of expectations. Madness—an immediate ascription. It seems impos­sible to imagine the agility and attendance of the heart when all other organs have begun seeking repair and rest. There is surprise but immediate encouragement when one takes up a new vocation or interest after half of one’s life: playing a musical instrument, even dancing, painting, reading tarot cards, hiking and paragliding. But love? There’s immediate concern, scepticism, wonder, worry, and sometimes just open-mouthed laughter.

That is why late love is lonely. There is little celebra­tion, it has the genetic composition of a secret. It is melt­ing wax waiting to harden. No, it is confused between sitting on a fire and cooling to find form. To be a late lover is to feel alone—one has stopped looking for the lost shoe of a pair. One has stopped being a lost shoe. In one’s youth, where verbs like ‘blooming’ and ‘blos­soming’ trail all actions that are ascribed or imagined as romantic, it is possible to mistake anything as love (and, possibly, love as anything). It is possible that one feels a bit like an urn, waiting to be filled. Anything that fills us, whether air or water, we take to be love. Love we take to be a cure for loneliness, though, in that early youth, we know nothing about either. We might never know—it is perhaps compulsive optimism to expect age to be a good teacher. Age might teach us to make a bed better—but love and aloneness are not beds though we are conditioned to imagine them together, not as companions but as relievers, one relieving the other from duty.

As the years gather and leave, depositing and washing away whatever they are meant to, like a river, one begins to understand that aloneness isn’t empti­ness, and that nothing and no one can fill it. The disappearance of love or the lover causes grief—it is new and violent every single time, like flood or famine feels new to land, in spite of older histories of silting or drying. That optic, of everything dead from waterlessness or overwateredness, has come to define the representation of aloneness to ourselves – a vast empty landscape, unpeopled, uninhabitable, under an indifferent sky. We feel that absence is a habit that takes getting used to. We forget that one needs as much resilience and sap to get used to presence as one does to absence.

Late love is the awakening to that presence. One is getting used to oneself as much as one is to the other person. There’s also something else—one has got so used to one’s aloneness that it sometimes feels that there are three people in the relationship. Loneliness does not demand fidelity, but it takes up space. That space hardens, it becomes furniture, like the image of the flooded or dry plains. One does not necessarily understand oneself better with age—one has just become indiffer­ent to the changing size and shape of one’s shadow. It doesn’t grow fatter when in the company of the loved one; it doesn’t shrink when one is lonely.

We might be deluded to think of loneliness as being without language.

The truth is that the language of loneliness is parasitic—it finds its way into our everyday language, seeking and sucking nourishment from it while adding the weight of its body to it. It’s not the sighs and silences or the sibilants alone—one gets used to not speaking, the voice grows slimy at first, then mossy, like an untrod­den path. Words for social business come out of the throat from time to time, but real language, the language of repair and rehabilitation, is usu­ally a whisper—loneliness infiltrates into these sounds, taking away audibility, turning it into a stichomythic conversation with the selves that live and move inside us. When late love comes, it is at first this language that meets the lover. This language, of talking to oneself, from habit, from compulsion, from acute aloneness, from the certainty of not being misunderstood, one has taken to be the language of love. And so it emerges from the soundlessness of thought bubbles into the ears—a language that has so far had only one user now has two. The source and target, once the same person, are now different. How will this new person, loved as much as they mightbe, understandthisforeignlanguage? And what is love if not understanding? What is love if not the ability to make the other feel less foreign in the world?

The language of aloneness is like the lan­guage of sleep, the language of dreams—it cannot be shared, no matter how much the intimacy with a person’s heart. For saliva can be exchanged but not the colour of one’s tongue.

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