I was at a bar. Not drinking. Not really. Just sitting there, existing in that low hum where the world felt like skin I could peel off, head buzzing with Kishore, in my father’s voice, soft and off-key, celluloid, from back when the days didn’t feel like an ambush. And I smiled (I think), wondering if I’d left the geyser on, fuck it, and I thought about my little habit then, the one that makes me feel rotten, of sketching the faces of men I want to ruin. Faces pulled out of the muck; loose-jawed, shifty-eyed, unremarkable assholes who wouldn’t hold my gaze if I stapled their eyelids open. I’d draw them quick, a flash, dirty, fast, mean lines, angles I dreamt of crushing under my thumb, the cartilage popping, wet and satisfying. The lips I’d chew into liquidy rust, blood warm in my mouth, until their teeth went soft under my tongue. The throats I’d drive into piss and prayer. Sometimes, I’d add details the world didn’t offer. A cheek sagging open like split fruit. A jaw hanging dumb and broken. Eyes gone fish-dead, slick but stupid. My sketches. My drafts. My dry run. Not a fantasy. Foreplay. A violence I could fold and carry in my pocket. A thing to take out in bathrooms, and lick to climax. Then flush it; the face the man the mess.
Gone.
On my fifth drink, or maybe the sixth. I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know. But it is nice, the not knowing. And who gives a shit? The blur is part of the charm. Oblivion has a nice curve to it when you’re wearing heels and a grudge. And somewhere between sips, I check his profile. Of the one who said he loved me. Wrote it like a prayer in my inbox, trembling-spilling himself. Weeks later, he was still posting songs about me, all lowercase, all pathetic. I scroll through his scrapbook life: the wife, happy, the dog, the Sunday sunlight on a balcony, curated green; and it makes me feel sharp and alive. It makes me want to throw up.
We had plants too. You remember? You’d been the one who got me excited; insisted, made me pick the pots, and promised you’d water them. You didn’t. You never did. After the first week, they were mine: my duty, my guilt. Every time I’d drag the watering can, I’d stare at the cracked soil and imagine it was the soft spot at the back of a skull; and I’d press down until it gave. Watch the dirt spill, clumped and dry, just to see if I’d feel anything about killing something you promised to keep alive. At times, I wanted them dead. I wanted the slow rot to be deliberate. A lesson.
They’re gone now, the plants. The balcony is bare, a strip of sun, dust and concrete. Sometimes I stand there and draw faces I want to ruin, slack mouths and coward eyes, cutting them open in my head, a red spill, gut and shit, while they’re inside me. And when I come, it’s not about them. It’s not about the fuck or the face or the blood. It’s about me. It’s proof that I am. And I don’t apologise for it any more.
Old Monk, you declared on our first date. You can have as much as you want without worrying about the bill. I laughed at your audacity. Not because it was funny, but because you were already mine, already naked; shameless, like a dog that’s been kicked too many times, and still crawls back when called. And I thought, fuck this boy, I love him I love him I love him the way a cat loves a cornered mouse; tenderly, and with patience. I loved you for your apologetic sadness, the kind that begged permission to exist. I also hated you for it, for how much it reminded me of my own sadness.
Later, we fucked. Of course we did. And I loved it. You were different. Like someone trying to scrub a stain from inside their ribs. Like your cock was a voice, and each thrust a confession, absurd; your moans an apology long overdue. I let you slap me, not hard, not cruel, just enough to see if I’d flinch, enough to know we were both watching. I didn’t flinch. Try harder. You needed that. I needed worse. And then you came like a secret too loaded to carry, and I let you blast it on my face. I wanted to see if you’d say sorry. You didn’t. You never did. And in the silence after, I realised I didn’t want you to.
The love. It hit me like a speeding truck – bang – smacked goddamn bone-first, shattering the part of me that still believed in soft landings. It was the way you poured our drinks, head bowed, hands trembling like a junkie savouring the ritual, treating that dark piss-water with holy reverence, ice cubes clicking like broken teeth, worshipping the glass because it never asked questions, never asked for anything. It was pathetic. It was holy. The ritual meaningless – made meaningful by your devotion to it. I almost laughed. I almost kissed you for it. I should’ve known then. You were a priest. You were an addict. You were a coward too. You made suffering look sacred. And maybe that’s the part I can’t forgive myself for: that I loved you more for it. That I wanted to take your cowardly devotion, and tuck it warm in my cunt, where the soft animal of you could finally stop trembling.
And I searched your face for hints of what festered underneath. The lines dim on your forehead told me more than your words ever did. Beneath your demeanour was calm deception you wore like a mask. Practised and bathroom-rehearsed. That sacred little stage where you’d stare into yourself, palms flat against the sink, as if it were the only thing keeping you from collapse. The mirror?Forgiving. Complicit. It was a calm curated, bullshit – the kind men wear to avoid becoming headlines.
Excerpted with permission from Happily Ever After: A Novel with Images, Kamal Trilok Singh, HarperCollins India.
