Shashi Tharoor - Riot

She loves me, she says, and she means it. This is not love as my parents spoke of it, an emotion anchored in family, in a sense of one’s place in the world, in bonds of blood so thick one cannot conceive of snapping them. It is instead love as I have read of it in Western books or seen in Western movies, an individual attraction between a man and a woman, a feeling that is independent of social context or familial connections. I cannot explain to Priscilla that I have been brought up to mistrust this kind of love, because it is so difficult to tell apart from lesser emotions of infatuation or lust. My father spoke to me of this before I went off to the University. “You will face many temptations,” he said, “and sometimes you will find yourself developing feelings for a girl that you might mistake for love. Such feelings are normal, but do not confuse them with real love, which comes only from the commitment of marriage and the experience of sharing life’s challenges together. The West believes that love leads to marriage, which is why so many marriages in the West end when love dies. In India we know that marriage leads to love, which is why divorce is almost unknown here, and love lives on even when the marital partner dies, because it is rooted in something fundamental in our society as well as our psyche. You are going to college to study, to make your future. But if ever you find yourself distracted by other thoughts, remember what I have said to you.”

I never forgot.

I do not know what she sees in me, what the kindred spirit is that ignites such a spark of recognition in her. I believe I know, though, what I see in her. I see it in our trysting place, at our favorite hour, as the twilight seeps into our room and illuminates the colors of our bodies, the spreading crimson of dusk soft upon the black and white of our skin. I see it in her body as we are about to make love, her limbs light with unspoken whispers. I see it in her eyes at night, the moonbeams playing with her hair, the shadows across her hips like a flimsy skirt. In the darkness, I raise her chin in my hand and it is as if a flame has lifted itself onto the crevices of her smile. I let myself into her and my spirit slips into her soul, I feel myself taking her like nothing else I have ever possessed, she moans and my pleasure lies upon her skin like a patina of dewdrops, she is mine and I sense myself buckling in triumph and release, and then she trembles, a tug of her pelvis drawing me into the night. And I know that I love her.

But afterwards, as I lie by her side, our hearts full of fragmentary phrases, I look at the little mirror on the wall and see the darkness encroach like a stain across our love. I love her, but what does it mean once we have arisen? She dreams of holding hands on Broadway and rubbing noses on the honeymooners’ bench at the Taj Mahal. I think of Geetha and her parents and mine, and of little lost Rekha calling bewildered for her Appa, her eyes wet with unwiped tears. There are moments, of course, when I too fantasize about a new life with a new wife, a new honey-blond wife with skin the color of peaches-and-cream and eyes like diamonds dancing in the sunlight, and I forget, momentarily, my responsibilities, the burdens of guilt and obligation that shackle me to the present.

Sometimes I dream, and the dreams are curious ones, of an America I have never seen, even in the movies, wide and open and inviting and definitely America, but strange, populated by fast cars and large women, or perhaps large cars and fast women, I am unsure which when I awake. The dreams are oddly precise, too, in the ways only dreams can be, so that in one Priscilla beckons me — I know it is Priscilla but in the dream she looks like Marilyn Monroe, like pictures of Marilyn Monroe I have seen in old magazines — this Priscilla/Marilyn beckons me into an estate wagon, and I think, clearly precisely, I must get in, this is a very safe car, it is famous for being safe, and my mind’s eye studies the manufacturer’s name on the back of the hatch, and it reads VULVA. Seriously — for in my dream I see nothing odd about this, reading it as another famous Swedish brand name. Or another dream, in which I am teetering at the top of a skyscraper with Geetha and Rekha trying to hold on to me, they are afraid and crying and I am shouting out to them to hold on, but somehow it is I who leans too far off the edge and then I am falling from a great height, falling falling falling with my wife’s and daughter’s wailing in my ears, and I always wake up before I hit the ground. Of course I can never go back to sleep.

I haven’t read much Freud, but it doesn’t take a shrink to interpret this kind of dream. And it gets worse. Once I awake from another dream of falling, except this time I have splashed into a great briny foaming brown sea, and as I rise to the surface, choking and spluttering, I feel the unmistakable taste of Coca-Cola in my nose and mouth. I plunge again, flailing, and choke on the liquid. I am drowning in a sea of Coke! When I surface again I see, just out of my reach, my daughter on a raft, absurdly shaped like an Ambassador car. She is dressed in white, the color of mourning, and her limpid eyes are sadly downcast, seemingly unaware of me drowning just beyond her reach. In my dream I call out to her but find myself sinking again, knowing this plunge is the third and final descent into the depths, that as I go under my lungs will be full of that brown-black liquid and my voice will be stilled. I swear I awake with the taste of Coca-Cola on my tongue.

And Priscilla, I wonder what she dreams. She always says she can never remember a single dream; she awakes refreshed from her slumber, her mind blissfully cleansed of the night’s wanderings. I envy her unencumbered sleep, the happy transience of her memory.

I have acquired her memories now, and they torment me. I think of her previous lovers, the basketball jock first, and imagine his dark hand on her pale thigh, much like mine, and something dies a little in me. I ask her, with studied casualness, about her old boyfriends, and she replies quite unselfconsciously, in as much detail as I want. And I always want more than is good for me. Sometimes I stop myself in time, preventing my mind from acquiring a detail that I know will come back to haunt me, to diminish my sense of my own worth as her lover. But then the most innocuous details have that power. She itemizes her menagerie at my request, and they tumble out in her recounting like an amatory United Nations — an Argentine, a Finn, a Chinese. Am I, I find myself wondering, merely the latest in a long line of exotics who have shared Priscilla’s bed, the beneficiaries of some missionary urge to bring succor to the underprivileged? But then I remember she has been in WASP arms too, and consider her progression from Boston Brahmin to Tamil Brahmin. Perhaps her predilection is for minorities.

Of course I know these are unworthy thoughts, and the hot flashes of jealousy always pass, sooner or later, cooled by the refreshing candor of her love for me. I sometimes defuse my discomfort by recalling Wilde: “I like men who have a future and women who have a past.” So Oscar would have liked us, on both counts. At other times the words of the old song, learned as a callow teenager, come back to me: “Yesterday belongs to someone else, today belongs to me.”

And what about tomorrow? Sometimes we speak of the future as if we have one. As if we have one together. I speculate idly about resigning from the service — are you mad, my mother would certainly ask, to give up the IAS career tens of thousands can only dream about? — to accompany her to her American campus, perhaps to do a doctorate myself, perhaps to write. My mother would disapprove thoroughly of her; my father, were he alive, would disown me. She is innocent of such considerations: she speaks of staying on in India, establishing HELP-US projects wherever I should happen to be posted. I forbear from telling her that the service regulations would almost certainly prohibit an official’s spouse from undertaking any such activity. The conflict of interest… But something always stops me from entering into the practical details. Priscilla is an escape from reality; her magic cannot survive too much realism.