(With)Drawing the Curtains

Personal Essay

It’s nine steps from the bedroom to the kitchen. That’s four to five seconds. If I sprint or leap, it’s two seconds. Half a second’s enough for a creep’s camera to catch me, he says, 'Draw the curtains.' I agree.

Blue Boy and I share a room (Blueberry), while Cyberpunk stays by himself in the other room (Cadberry) in our House of the Berries. It’s common knowledge that a twenty-something couple’s room is always closed. But it’s not always for boom boom. Sometimes we cook memories and fights that only we eat with intimate dinners. For friends and guests, we serve custom recipes. Sometimes the smoke from the suttas, lit with faith in the delusion that they’ll be the last, stuffs the spaces inside our clothes. So we strip and stream Mubi, to deflect the incalescence of our choices. Sometimes the air holds the haze of the words we want each other to find, blending with the warmth of abnormal breaths and stale tears, and once the door is opened they’ll scatter and get lost down the wrong ears. Or worse, get lost.

For these reasons and others I leave to your heart’s imagination, we don’t like being watched. But the need for privacy comes with the comprehension that to most, it is a luxury. Our door is often closed. But what do we do when one of us doesn’t want to be watched by the other? In this case, Blue Boy has an advantage over me.

On a fight night, he takes off in his boxers and tank top, earphones plugged, burning sutta in a twitching mouth and hands unrestrained, no bag, no pocketknife, no pepper spray. He walks the night-blue streets—hungry dog mouths in garbage corners, drunk-bearded triples on bikes, beer bottle noise and all—nonchalant, free to mull over his love life.

I sit wrinkled on our mattress and watch the pile of clothes spilling out of the misshapen laundry bin. When the silence starts to speak or when I find no music alleviating enough on Spotify, I open the windows, maybe the door when Cadberry’s locked, and wrestle with the art of breathing.

I don’t think I ever took a breath deep enough to call deep in this city, or any city, come to think of it. I drive every day, through construction dust, barfing exhaust pipes and sutta currents. I developed trust issues with Hyderabad’s air. Air, water, cement, paper, alphabet, paint, eyes, men. ‘Breathe,’ they say, when your nerves are an alarming, tangled nexus, ‘think of a happy place’. We don’t acknowledge the persisting bereavement of this condition, that this happy place is never where you’re currently at.

My mind reflexively invokes the pounding hum of the beefy mountains. I know it sees in them a father figure, an indestructible hulk who wraps his garden-coated biceps, with an uncharacteristic gentleness, around his little daughter and purrs until she falls asleep. The code is in the safe cover of invisibility when dwarfed by a presence so tremendous, and in the self-importance enhanced when nursed by that very presence. You don’t matter enough but matter more than most at the same time.

I suppose home is this state of the heart, that tip-toes and dances in this convergence, this idealistic illusion of balance between being nothing and everything, to this space, this air, this person. Or is it love?

Firefly Boy says I ‘possess the ability to turn anything into an event of love’. I partially agree. When you’re a hopeless optimist or a ‘stubborn custodian of the present’, like he calls me, and when you’re all too familiar with bereavement, you obsessively seize opportunities to re-fill the spaces constantly being vacated while risking forming new spaces in the process. Once you know what a deep breath tastes like, your organs crave more. They demand more, again and again—addicts with withdrawal symptoms assaulting you, the inefficient dealer in debt.

I breathe well on the terrace of my other home in Karimnagar. Especially because nothing with intolerance of altitude follows me there, only that which is brave enough to defy gravity and other earthly laws. My anomalies explode and pulverize liberally, in collective agreement with the shy clouds and proud sparrows. As long as we don’t intrude on each other’s meditations, we can self-destruct as artistically as we please. The fact that none of us specialises in translation facilitates our attached detachment. This mutual respect for otherness is harder to crack with humans, with our annoying anthropocentrism, logocentrism and all.

The terrace is not always secure, though. Sometimes there are invaders. Neighbouring uncles with their bare chests and belly buttons, wrapping flimsy checkered lungis and selfdom around their balls, practising their steps to impress their cardiologists. Me and my unshaved legs in ice-cream printed shorts have to cascade down with south Indian coy and discretion. It is not to save their hearts, I don’t care about impressing their cardiologists. It is to save my mother from having to defend her alien daughter from native wives of lungi uncles.

Speaking of logocentrism, if I could build a portable home with words and carry it with me to cities I move to, so that no matter the welcoming or unwelcoming winds, I’ll have a ventilator to relieve respiratory constrictions, I would. Unfortunately, I’ll always have walls, roads and roommates to personalize.

My side of the triple-sharing hostel room on the Uni campus looks like the inswept after-puke of a Blue monster. The sheets, the bucket, the pillow, the wallpaper, the coffee mug, the laundry bag, and the art I put up are all forced into shades of blue. My subconscious attempt to replicate Blueberry, which I now realize is another act of self-destruction. Where do I go when I don’t want to be watched by anything Blue? How do I appreciate sapphires when they’re wedged up my nostrils?

I see now, the consequence of my aspirations. In attempting to create homes, I excursed and created encampments that provide unsubstantial asylum until I decide to wander again. Perhaps I erred the moment I sought affinity everywhere I went, instead of only where I was from.

‘What’s your favourite spot on the campus?’ Firefly asked me one day. There was a noticeable silence and he said, ‘You don’t have to tell me if it’s a secret.’ It wasn’t a secret, because it didn’t exist. The campus is too small and the people, too large. There is not enough room here for invisibility and no room small enough to matter more than most.

The trees are tall and lovely but too approachable for their own good. The cats and dogs are overfed self-supremacists and the sunbirds are too neglected to trust a new stranger. The abandoned buildings—romantic for some, adventurous for others and horror hubs for lily livers like mine.

Aleksandar Hemon one day, re-shaved his head, got a new pair of glasses, got senti and wrote,

‘Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.’

My man didn’t stop to think, what if you don’t notice that you’re no longer there? Is it Home still? Or what if you notice, but don’t mind?

Another emo dude who took off from his parent’s house because he got sick of the number of crosses on the walls, came back once he ran out of money and quoted another bald dude:

‘No matter the destination, all roads lead home.’

What is it with humanity and our obsession with permanence and certainty?

Perhaps my error wasn’t in my wandering. Perhaps it was in the assumption that I wander in search of a promise and not purely for pleasure; for uninhibited, unapologetic, unwinding pleasure. The error was in the theory that home will always look the same, stay the same, kiss the same, hurt the same, with no possibility of surprise. With no preconceived purpose restricting the way I perceive events in life, perhaps I’ll see things for the way they are. To understand ourselves “as the other of the other”, Gadamer would bang his chest and scream.

Sometimes, I’m convinced stability and security are capitalist concepts employed to arrest us in the grind, to propagate that life is a struggle where we all play variations of Sisyphus.

But all this is ‘mental masturbation’, as Blue Boy would call it.

The room is stuffy again and I’m tired of caution. My fingertips twitch. Do I fight the urge to pull over the T-shirt and get myself juice from the kitchen? Nine steps. If I sprint, I’ll make a round trip in 5 seconds. And when I make it back, I’ll howl into Blue Boy’s head: ‘Next time you take off, take me too!’ I’ll call Mom and tell her not to defend me. This time, I’ll practise my kicks until they realize it’s a threat to their lungis and leave. And I’ll probably text Firefly Boy, ‘my favourite spot is the lawn because that’s where you and I always talk. Actually, I don’t care about the spot as long as you and I talk.’

When I finish, I’ll wrap myself in my Blue blanket and sink into my blue pillow, recalling, the key to understanding is the awareness that we lack understanding. Chanting, the other of the other…the other of the other…the other of the other…the other… knowing all too well that tomorrow I’ll wake up in the interiors of this queer-nerved, blue-eyed Nate Berkus singing,

'Your home should tell the story of who you are and be a collection of what you love.’