Perhaps I didn’t want to completely exterminate the lice. I plucked the rest out without killing them. And then I returned them to my hair. My days passed in anticipation. Somewhere on a distant roof, a mouth organ sounded deep into the night, to comfort some living being.

5

She was writing a letter. To whom? She was writing to time. She would put the letter in a bottle, seal its mouth, and throw it into the sea. Because she was planning to visit the seaside soon. In the letter she wrote, ‘I don’t know why I went there. Why I used to go back again and again. Or why I even thought of it in the first place. Why did I consider Shwetaketu and Babhravya wrong on matters of sexual choice? Why did I think Vatsyayana was ignorant? Why did I believe that the identity of an object should be sought in its insecurities? Why was I convinced that an object blooms by virtue of its own uncertainties? Why did I tell the man to take my internal clock into account? Why did I ask him to stop at those moments … to stop … to stop …’

I didn’t have the answer to any of these questions. All I knew was that no matter what I sought in life, all I got were ‘relationships’.

22

Taking off her clothes, she called out to you. You shook your head no. You said, ‘I want you on top this time.’ There was something unfamiliar in your words that brought her up short. She was conflicted, unable to figure out what exactly you were after. That was when you repeated, ‘Get on top of me. Get on top the way a man mounts a woman, and establish yourself. Find out for yourself how your masculinity is aroused in your being. See if you can discover the woman within the man lying beneath you.’ You had already identified each of the insecurities that made her a ‘woman’. Which was why you said, ‘The set conditions for sex or for a relationship are not the same for men and women.’ You said, ‘Come out of your­self for once and take a man as a man.’

She mounted you then, conducting herself like a rider on a horse. Every time she leaned towards you she discovered the man hidden within herself – her hands on your chest tried to cup a pair of non-existent breasts, your lips appeared as pleasurable as a woman’s. Weeping, she held you in her arms.

At that moment, all the doors and windows of a repressed sexuality were flung open. She became aware of the wind and the sunlight. She regarded your erect penis with deep affection. She felt tears welling up again, and allowed them to fall one by one into the lips of your penis, like individual strands of pubic hair. And she began to torment it. It trembled, made you tremble too, and an introspective, penetrating stream spurted from it. Which she had never observed as closely as she did now. Never looked at, never touched, never sniffed, never tasted. Her consciousness accepted this liquid. She drank the sperm.