The Heart Has No Shape the Hands Can’t Take

In the garden with the weaverbirds’ nests, I watched him stand on a picnic bench and raise the lens of his phone to a drupe of gooseberries. His sweatshirt lifted. I could see his lower belly, whorled with hair and rounded in a way that made my mouth water. I waited for him to notice me watching him. He invited himself over to my table. He was leaving the city in two days. He was surprised I’d been to the place he came from, surprised when I conjured up a scene of noodle broth served on a street corner rife with pirated records and vintage posters. I seduced him with that old capmangoe—disarming the footloose with something from a place that had secretly failed them.

I like to believe the heart has no shape the hands can’t take. Mine did the thing it always does: mistake ache for thirst. I drank him up like a sunset. On the flight back I rubbed the small new rip on my jeans and thought of that travelling boy’s forearms, the scent of vetiver behind his ear. But when the plane hit a cloudbank and the song in my earphones skipped, as did my heartbeat, it was the memory of you I reached for, like you were a tumbled crystal under a pillow, something to wrap my fingers around when they had nothing to hold.

THE LAST TIME that I could lean into solitude and still love myself, I had been on the easternmost point of a vast continent with your name still sewn into my pocket in invisible embroidery, watching humpback whales leaping in the blueness that unfurled to the horizon. They must’ve been singing to their kin, their sonar waves condensing any distance at all. I still knew myself then as something other than the freefall of a stone inside the throat of a well. I was tethered to you, still looped inside the knot of a cord, and this gave me something like a sense of earth beneath my feet. I came back from that continent and I let you leave me, as I’d known you would.

But then, it became like this with you: because I carried you in my heart, you had a way of infusing my memories of places we had never been together, but in which I’d thought of you. (Which is to say, you were everywhere). Even retrospectively. I cannot think of the art in the streets along the river Spree, which I’d walked by a whole year before we met, without feeling like I’d already divined what was to come, had sensed it as invisibly and as palpably as the wind through the gilding linden leaves. Later, much later, I had watched magenta sun-scintillas early in the morning in a rock pool along the Meenachil and considered your ancestry, and of how half of it would’ve been the inheritance of any baby we could have made. Even as my grandmother’s ashes dissolved in the Manikagangai, a part of me still sieved those moments for an answer to the mystery of what had not happened for us. In the garden with the weaverbirds nest, at that café by the Arabian sea, when I had looked at the heartlines on my palms before I filled them with that beautiful boy’s limbs, I saw that they still held your name, barbed. These are among the reasons why, when the taxi brought me home from the airport, I washed the travel out of my hair and slipped my feet into the lucky beaded sandals you had bought me all those years before. I took an autorickshaw to your place of work. I waited where your car was parked, under the rusty shield-bearer tree that always scatters its buttery blooms over it in early summer. You froze in stride the moment you saw me, a hand in your pocket. What passed between us in that moment was more powerful than language. You drew your hand out of your pocket, pressed the button that unlocked the vehicle, and I opened the door of the passenger side and belted myself in without a word.

YOU WEREN’T MARRIED yet when we met, and then, my fate turned on its heel and on me, and you were.

It starts to rain as we turn onto the arterial road. The old tattoo on your wrist peeks out from the edge of your shirtsleeve. I remember other drives, when I would lean over and trace that sigil embedded on your body, in those days of heat and ruin.

And those nights of jasmine and thunder—that’s how an old, old poem begins, at least in this language, re-rendered from its true one. I liked the way the words sounded, and so the verse remains in my memory. You had asked me to read to you, more than once. Re-render. Surrender. In the version of the story I tell myself, the story I still lull myself to sleep with, I would still walk through the rain to meet you, but I wouldn’t have to.

No words between us now, the windshield wipers keeping time as we wait at the traffic signal—for what?

“Do you know where you’re going?” I ask you, finally.

A pause, another arrhythmic moment and then the light turns green and you ask, “So, where were you going? With coming here, I mean.”

“Look, I didn’t know if you still worked here.”

“I see.”

“But I kind of just…”

“It’s been four years.”

“Yeah.”
“A lot has happened in those four years.”

“Not to me.”

You glance at me again. “Really? You look busy.”

I know I blush, even though it was you who’d made the admission. Obviously, I’d seen your name in my story-viewers’ list countless times. Perhaps just as obviously, I’d never stopped scrolling, looking for it. Never stopped cheering inside a little when I saw it. Never stopped visiting your mother’s profile so I could see images of you, and your twin boys, and her. Not your mother, who hadn’t followed me back even when I used to come to your house and sip the too-steeped Earl Grey she’d serve with rusks, all of us pretending that you and I weren’t just waiting to go up to the terrace together (“a cigarette for me, the sunset for her”). No—by “her”, of course I mean your wife, whose profile is private. I know all your birthdays by heart, could win trivia games if the questions were about holidays, apparel, or who you pretended to be.

“Work requires me to travel a lot, and because I work a lot, I can afford to travel otherwise too.”

“Impressive.” Your tone isn’t impressed at all, which makes me feel ashamed. I’d been showing off, yes. I remember why I hated you sometimes.

I keep thinking I remember things as though I haven’t been reliving and reliving them, as though I have ever stepped out of the orbit of our entanglement.

“So I wanted to see you,” I state plainly.

“You could’ve texted.”

“I don’t have your number.”

“Oh, really?”

“Fine, I deleted it. I could find it. Look, I don’t know why I came. Or maybe we both do. You’re the one who sent the flowers.”

You exhale loudly. “That was a mistake.”

“Are you sure? Blue orchids? On my birthday?”

Now your face reddens. You’re thinking of the same thing, and I know it. That resort room, with its vase of dyed petals. The comment you made about the shape of the blooms. That weekend when we’d driven down the coast to the fortress town, and made love with the sounds of waves beyond the windows we left open, carelessly. The staff calling us on the landline to politely ask if anything was wrong; they had heard a woman screaming.

Afterwards: blue orchids became a code.

“You like exotic things,” you say. Then, needlessly: “I wasn’t exciting enough for you, remember?”

“I never said that! You decided that.” Then, churlishly: “I think you and your wife go on more trips than we did, or than I do.”

You grin. You’ve caught me. You’ve always done this. I imagine opening the door mid-traffic and letting myself out, but not a bone in my body wants to.

Then, smoothly: “So. What did you do with the photographs?”

IT DIDN’T BEGIN with blackmail.

My career didn’t begin with training, for that matter. I was just another hobbyist. Just another girl who could afford a DSLR, living with her parents, making a happily disposable income in a low-level corporate job, with lots of time to spare. I went to workshops, applied for exhibitions, started assisting a professional on alternate weekends. Then someone hired me for a job, then another, and I figured out how to make them keep coming—where to look, how to be persistent. I made sure the net was in place before I took the leap. I’m not a gambler, not really.

I still knew myself then as something other than the freefall of a stone inside the throat of a well. I was tethered to you, still looped inside the knot of a cord, and this gave me something like a sense of earth beneath my feet. I came back from that continent and I let you leave me, as I’d known you would

I’m not a cheater, either. Just an accomplice to infidelity. You hated that phrase. I had a little bottle-opener printed with the words, just to tease and spite you. When life gives you sour grapes, you turn to wine. Me, I mean.

Anyway, it didn’t begin with blackmail. It began with you asking me for a favour. Someone had hurt you. Your father had been ailing, and to pay the bills you joined a colleague’s moonlighting scheme. He betrayed you. Your family went into debt. You felt you were in a time of darkness; once, you said that only because of me were there moments of chiaroscuro. You’d come to the playground near my house and we’d walk or sit for hours, talking. You wouldn’t kiss me in public, or come meet my parents, but before leaving you’d hug me, and thank me for my kindness, the space I held for you, my support without which… These were your words and your gestures, not mine. One day, you started telling me about how you’d discovered that the one who had tricked you was involved with a co-worker, against internal policy. He was married on top of that, too. You knew you could have your former company informed, and let him experience what he’d put you through. But that wouldn’t change your situation for the better. He had made you feel powerless, and you wanted to balance the scales. All I had to do was go to a certain restaurant one afternoon, one they frequented together, find the seat that would yield the best angles, and send some photos to you. I didn’t even need my camera, just my phone. Much later, I realized: anyone could’ve done what you had asked me to. You roped me into it, and I was so tangled up in my feelings for you that I didn’t notice. That day, as you inveigled me, I watched the tops of the ashoka trees swirl in the breeze as joggers went before us in circles and circles, and believed I could do something to change your life, which I felt was so tightly entwined with mine. Like roots, not like rope, but I didn’t know better.

It worked: he apologized to you, returned the money, and resigned from the workplace you’d been fired from. You could put the whole thing behind you. I remember how you took my phone off the table between us and deleted the images. I hadn’t liked that you’d done that, but you brushed it off. Then, soon after, and not long after your father died, a marriage proposal came through your caste grapevine. You accepted it. You married that man’s sister, and for reasons that tortured me not to know, he accepted this too. Now, you vacation as a joint family: you and your brother-in-law with your arms around each other and your wives on either side, slim-hipped and sunglassed on some beach, irritatingly good-looking on some mountain range. Back then, you had cried and told me your betrothed was wealthy, that you could rebuild your life. You told me it wasn’t love.

 

 

That isn’t what you posted on social media. I went to Bali during your wedding, sat on a swing over the Blangsinga waterfall and petulantly entertained the thought of flinging myself into its cascade. I came back to the Wi-Fi as soon as possible, to sit with my hair wet in a hotel room and cry like I could’ve done at home, for free. We carry what we can, we hold and we hold on, we handle, we hope – but there are things the heart can’t take.

Look, I didn’t see what I had helped you with as revenge, although it was. I guess I have been an accomplice to more than one thing.

THOSE WERE OBVIOUSLY not the photographs you were asking about.

The first time the blue orchids arrived, afterwards, they came to the tiny apartment I was able to rent when my income had risen and regulated enough. My parents’ place had begun suffocating me, especially after I refused to be pimped out on the arranged marriage market. When a man managed to locate my phone number and also spammed me on every available network—after seeing the profile they’d set up on a matrimonial site—I had my trump card. They grounded their efforts. I flew away.

It should’ve bothered me how you’d found my address, but like I said, a stranger had only recently cyberstalked me. You were no stranger.

We’d broken up a year and a half prior, which meant that you’d been married for a year and four months. For some time—until a sequence of almost imperceptible short circuits made us implode again, quietly, without ceremony or discord—we returned to the peripheries of a life that nearly was.

A friend asked me later, aghast, about whether I’d have chosen differently if I’d known your wife was expecting at the time. How does it matter? That’s how I responded to her then, and that’s what I tell myself even today. You chose. I chose. We did what we were going to do, if not at that opportunity, then another.

One December afternoon, as the light poured in from my large south-facing windows, I had picked up my camera and trained it on you. Shirtless, bespectacled, reading a book on the divan. You looked up. You grinned. I brought my tripod out, set the timer. Unbuttoned myself out of your shirt—of course, I had been wearing it—and stepped into the frame.

You were just in the moment. Me—I capture moments. I knew what I was doing.

SO HERE WE are now, and you can’t take a device out of my hands and erase the evidence of when you came back to me, someone else’s man yet still almost-not-quite mine, any more than you can take my heart out of my consciousness and erase the impact of our entanglement.

I will never tell you, not again, of how loving you reassembled me after a glitched season you never knew about, or how losing you warped the shape of all things, and in so doing, gnarled the way I carry myself in this life.

We are parked now, in a quiet cul-de-sac. There were other afternoons, like and unlike this one. You were always in charge of the playlist. You’d take my right hand with your left and place it on the steering wheel, and we’d cruise. We’d pause for traffic signals and lightning kisses and crossing pedestrians. We’d park, sometimes with cups of hot, milky tea, and stay a while.

Now your face reddens. You’re thinking of the same thing, and I know it. That resort room, with its vase of dyed petals. The comment you made about the shape of the blooms. That weekend when we’d driven down the coast to the fortress town, and made love with the sounds of waves beyond the windows we left open, carelessly

There is a photo negative strip of your life, undeveloped, in which I am not just a dark smudge, a secret. I employ an anachronistic idea because that is what we are: out of order, out of time.

“I never told you this,” you clear your throat and begin. “Before I got married, I slept with my wife a few times. Obviously. Then when I got cold feet, she—” You clear your throat again. “—she said she would tell all the relatives. And that she could file a rape case, on the false promise of marriage…”

My jaw drops, quite literally, and then I remember: you tell stories too.

“Look, I don’t want you to judge my wife. I don’t think it’s fair to hold women in patriarchal societies to the standards of women in more progressive places.”

I snort. “You’ve got to be—”

“This is about me.”

“Hell yeah.”

You reach over to caress my arm, make me look at you. “It’s not too late. You answered the doorbell four years ago. You accepted the flowers two weeks ago. You’re here now.”

I AM A LAWLESS woman, hungry and honest.

When our kiss ends, I ask you: “Can I photograph your kids’ next birthday party?”

“What?”

For years I’ve pored over the scant images of them I’ve found online. I’ve scrutinized the backgrounds of each photo, and the especially rare video. I’ve studied your faces, seethed at your body language, mulled your voices. I’ve even found myself oddly melting at certain visuals of your children. Sweethearts. Marshmallows. I have seen your lives and never, ever stopped wondering.

What if I stepped into the frame? And if I could not: what if I captured it?

“The photographs I have of us are sacred objects. They will neither be destroyed nor shared. What I am asking you is unrelated.”

“You can’t meet my family. That’s absurd.”

“You don’t have to introduce me as anyone but the photographer.”

“My mother will know.”

“Your mother will keep her mouth shut. You think she’s going to        wreck your family? Really?”

“Are you?”

I laugh.

“I hate your games. This was a mistake.”

“Fine,” I say. “Maybe it was.” I unbuckle my seatbelt.

As I step out, I notice a small cluster of dragonflies circulating in the air. More rain will come. I know you ensure I hear your mutter— “crazy bitch”—before you lean over and slam the door shut.

I watch you drive off. Then I take out my phone and call the number I have never deleted, the number your brother-in-law had called me from one morning years ago, saying that his family had “researched” his sister’s fiancée. That she loved that man, so he needed to know if it was over between us. I remember how shock had undone me but fear muted me: I knew he already knew you. It was threat, not enquiry. That was how I had learned of your engagement, but this you did not know. You believed a friend of yours had warned me, which did happen. But that hadn’t been news, merely confirmation. That morning, I had responded: “Now it is”.  Over, that is.

I wait until the day comes, and then I put those lucky beaded sandals on, coil jasmine around my chignon and input the address he had given me into the taxi app.

A beribboned box—containing a pair of brightly-painted wooden trains with working wheels, bought in Madurai and stored in my souvenir drawer—is in my tote. I meander down a cobblestone path, noticing the weaverbirds’ nests hanging alongside fairy lights. I smile, knowing they—like the ones I’d seen at a café on a farther shore, just before I came back to this city that I love only because I loved you in it (and I loved you so)—are just synthetic, imparting the façade of a home while being uninhabitable. Your wife is in the gazebo, in a cottagecore red dress and mommy chic sandals, counting filled paper cups. You stand beside her, your gaze to the distance. Then, I must come into focus, because I see the way you change, the chill that sets into your countenance. I hold my camera, my heart, in my warm palms. But I haven’t come to work. I’ve only come to play.

I hold my hand out to you as though I have never met you before. I smile in a way that is intended to convey: take it. Take my hand. It’s empty, you see. But the look in your eyes, and the slack of your jaw, shows me, at once or perhaps again: the heart contorts and contorts, keeps everything, sieves nothing, even as all we ever lay claim to slips through our palms like seawater, like lore unrecorded, like a glimpse never apprehended, never framed.

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