I Had Forgotten This One Memory
But it was behind my every relationship failure
--
My first girlfriend whom I effectively dated for only two weeks was a bold Sikh who at the very start of our short dating period took me to her bedroom and initiated attempts to kiss me. It was something that I had fantasized about a few times before and anticipated one evening as we walked down the street of her house and entered her palatial home. It was the first time I had stepped into a girl’s room, and both a strange thrill and deep fear gripped me. Her bedroom smelled of pink and of extreme tidiness. Stuffed toys lined every shelf. When I sat on her bed, it sank several inches, swallowing me. With her ample body looming next to me, my heart gonged in my chest, my breath shivering in my throat. I was fifteen then, a bit shy and in that pre-smartphone age, and not too smart about handling such situations.
There was something else too, that was holding me back, something that I wouldn’t figure out until much later in my life, understand how it would play a significant role in all my relationships, and ruin most of them. But on that day it hid on the dark side of my sub-consciousness, lurking to strike at the right moment. And it did.
When my girlfriend scooted towards me on the bed, straddling me with her thighs, pressed her breasts on my chest, and brought her pouted lips towards my face, that dark thing in my sub-consciousness tightened, striking me like an angry snake, making me jolt back. I sprang up from the bed.
“I need to go,” I said as I got down from the bed.
“But why? I’m sorry,” I remember her saying.
I said something vague. Then hastened out of her soft-toys-filled bedroom, hurried across the cavernous living room, pushed out of the big imposing wrought iron gate, hurrying down the empty street, walking briskly — all this while my heart thrashed my chest, my breath bellowing. Only when I had reached the end of the street, I slowed and considered what had happened. I had screwed up. An oceanic regret drowned me. The stupidity of what I had done shone on me like the light of the brightest summer sun. I thought of going back but something held me. The deed was done.
This was my first time running from intimacy. I would repeat the same story many times, though not in this naive, and immature way, or even at such an early stage of a relationship. In my next relationship, I would date a girl for a respectable two months, even manage to not run away the first few times we were intimate. But soon as intimacy grew, and a hint of a deeper relationship started to appear, I started skipping on dates so many times that it began tiring her out until it drained her patience. With the next girl after a period of courting I started making naive reckless comments about our relationship, giving subtle signs that suggested I was not as committed, and when she, too, drifted away, quite expectedly, I thought of myself a tragic hero who got dumped by this heartless girl.
Mind that I never meant to cause my break-ups, or run away from these relationships. Not that I entered into these relationships pre-decided that I would end them. My behavior wasn’t intentional. In fact, I was serious about these girls, even honest when I said I loved them (or didn’t say). But the way a river doesn’t matter how straight its path might seem at one point, always turns with the bank, I, too, after following a straight trajectory in my relationships, suddenly turned, veering off into a whole new direction.
Over time I evolved and my technique of evading deeper meaningful relationships would become sophisticated. It’s not you, it’s me —became my cliche before I knew it was a cliche. With more sticklers, I became a fox prowling for the right opportunity to make sly exits. When my girlfriend at work left the country for a year-long assignment, I exploited the ‘long distance’ excuse as the cause of our breakup. With another girl when all my usual tactics failed and she wouldn’t let me go come what may, I got drunk and flirted with her best friend. Now this kind of thing never fails to discourage even the most patient of girls.
The fear of commitment was so deeply entrenched in my psyche that evading relationships became my default behavior, come what may. It was like some kind of evolutionary ‘fight or flight’ thing. Only in my case, it was only ‘flight and flight’. Every time I destroyed a relationship a small tiny part of me would flinch, and I would feel a new crack in my soul, feel myself descending to a new depth of a dark pit. A small voice would echo within me chiding me to notice the hearts I’m making weep, the poison I’m stirring up in my own life. But that tiny voice was weak, fleeting, barely a whisper against the loud gongs that screamed in my ears, that warned me to stay back, never go beyond that line of no return.
So all my teenage and early tween years this template repeated itself. Despite being the architect of the ruin of my own relationships, I went on as if everything was fine. I invented a story that I’m just unlucky in love and soon the right love would come to me.
It’s funny how we keep on living our lives for years thinking we’re right and then one day the smallest of incidents comes and it flips our perspective about everything and exposes our follies. It can be anything — an unexpected encounter with a stranger, a character in a novel, or sometimes our own memory, now transformed through the lens of years, that forces us to see the truth. Any trivial thing might start a chain of reaction within us, and end up annihilating all our past convictions, making us see the truth we have always ignored.
In my case, it came via a call with my mother, which pushed me down a long-forgotten memory lane. The memory was from so long ago that I had forgotten about it (or perhaps made myself forget it). But after the call, it all rushed in as vividly and vibrantly.
One morning my mother called. I remember it was a weekend because I had a light hangover and I was hoping the call would end soon. The call went on for over forty minutes.
Among the many things she talked about, one that she mentioned (briefly) was the death of Mrs X. When the call ended, the face of Mrs X loomed in my mind. I had not thought about her in two decades! But I remembered her at once. She was the landlady of the big house where we had rented rooms once. I was very young then, six or seven. With her wrinkly face, and a fluttering voice, she had seemed old to me even then. She must have lived a great age. Her face stuck in my mind. Even after the call with Mother ended, and I went to the kitchen for a glass of water, her face kept on flitting in and out of my mind. When I couldn’t shrug her image away, I returned with irritation and went back to my bed, hoping to sleep my way out of the hangover. Soon, I slept and woke up in the afternoon. The day passed as usual. In the evening a friend came over and we watched a movie. That night when I doused the bedroom lights and slipped into bed, thinking about the movie, the memory came suddenly.
What did I remember about the memory?
I remembered I was about seven years old, and She, the landlady’s granddaughter, was — I didn’t recall her exact age but she was much older than me — definitely in her teens. I remembered the bright yellow summer days of my childhood, the touch of the soft cotton shirt on my back and arms, and the cool shaded patio where I would sit and bounce a ball against the wall while the landlady’s granddaughter would sit and lean back on a wall, reading a novel. She had a stack of old comics of her older brother and she would sometimes lend those to me, and I would read with her, sometimes on the patio itself, at others in one of the cool shaded spots in the backyard. I remembered I used to sit close to her, and how her long brown hair felt soft on my hand. I also remembered the gentle pull of her hand on my wrist as she escorted me to the back of the house, across the backyard all the way to its far end, into the storage room where the landlady (her grandmother) stored hay. I remembered the sweet coolness inside that room filled with the rich scent of cut grass. I remembered those moments when the door behind me would shut, and total darkness swallowed the light around me. I remembered the rustle of her clothes in the dark, the grips of her fingers on my wrist, until my fingers touched her warm skin. Of all the things, I remembered her small moaning sounds.
Time is a tricky concept, and time in memory is trickier still. I don’t know how long we would stay in that room. Sometimes I think it was barely five minutes, at others I think it was hours. I don’t remember many details, only fragments of images, hints of smells, sounds, and touches; the outline of her silhouetted shoulders, lithe waist, and legs — all faintly illuminated in that dark room. Her warm flesh, her moans, and the scent of cut grass.
I don’t remember exactly when the visits to the backyard storage room began. I was a pre-schooler when my father moved us into one of the first-floor apartments in that two-floor big house. In my memories, I have lived there from the beginning of my time. I have other fragments of childhood memories from that place — faces of boys with whom I ran, and kicked football — images that come to me in sepia tones, in faded colors. Ensconced in those summer memories are the moments I spent with her in that dark room. One moment I am running on the patio with other little kids, then the very next I’m walking beside her towards that room.
That night in my bedroom when the memories came to me, I forced myself to recall when it all began, how it began, and why I didn’t stop it. But didn’t matter how hard I tried and searched for the beginning, I didn’t remember it. But I did remember how it ended.
Again, a warm summer day in my memories, she and I sitting on the staircase leading to the terrace. My eyes trained on a colorful page of a new comic book she had given me, my mind filled with vibrant imagery. A gentle touch on my wrist and I knew it. I didn’t ask any questions. I just got up. Followed her round the side of the house, all the way to the backyard, into that room.
In that room, the same cool darkness, and sweet scent of grass. The rustle of her clothes. Her milky white skin glowed faintly in the darkness. Then her hand led my hand, my fingers, to the rising and falling contours of her body. Then came her soft moaning. Silence, deep and sweet and eternal, swelling around me. Slowing of time. Sense of nothingness. A great vacuum swallowing me.
Then came the thrashing. Harsh, cacophonous, and deafening. I looked up at the wooden door; it was rattling in its frame. Screams. Open the door! Open it now! came the shouts. She slapped my hand back and shrank as the door shivered, seconds from giving way. The beatings of my heart felt like gongs of a great bell oscillating in a storm. I was scared and confused but also wondering why I was scared. But an ancient instinct in me told me I should be scared, that to be here in this room was wrong. That I had done something sacrilegious. A sin. I felt like a criminal, and I knew I was going to be punished.
I rushed to the door and threw my body against it. But what I was even thinking? The door catch gave up at once. First flooded in the afternoon light, so harsh, discordant that it splintered into my eyes, blinding me. Then a rough hand pushed me back. The landlady’s face loomed over me, contorted like an angry dark cloud. She was screaming at my face. I don’t remember a word she said. Soon she looked past me and rushed inside. I scampered back, slipped, got up, and jumped out the doorway. Outside, I turned and glanced at the sliver of the open door, the flat darkness inside, and the bellowing of the landlady. The next moment I was running, across the backyard towards the front of the house.
On the patio was sitting, with knitting needles in her hand, one of the other women, who rented another set of rooms in that house. She was a good friend of my mother. I sat down beside her. She asked me why I was so breathless. She picked up the needles and began knitting. One minute passed, two minutes. She put the yarn and needles down and said she was going upstairs and if I wanted something to eat. When she left and I was alone the fear again began gathering around me. I stared at the pavement that led to the backyard. One moment it was empty, another moment there appeared the landlady. She was rushing towards me. She stopped right next to me and swung her hand. I saw only a blur. The next moment my cheek burnt. I fell to my side, one hand on my stinging cheek. She said something and then stormed into the house. I sat, trying to stop the flood of tears from forcing out.
The other woman returned, and she patted, “What happened?” she asked gently. I kept trying to hold back my tears, wondering if she had seen what had happened.
As I lay in the bed, teeth clenched, hands balled into fists, remembering all this in vivid detail, an ancient urge to cry walled up within me. Even though I was in the darkness of my bedroom, two decades separating me from that incident, I still felt the warmth of the hot sun on my face, ants of sweat crawling on my back, and that slap on my cheek. Its sting. How it burnt. I got up and sat on the edge of the bed.
In the days after the slapping incident, I lived in constant fear of being discovered, the fear compounding exponentially every time I saw the landlady talking to my mother. Every time my mother’s voice rose in the house, calling me, hair would rise on my neck, a fear of the judgment day gripping me. Surely, the landlady would tell my mother about that afternoon, and that day would be my end. How my mother would scold me, cry in the knowledge of my sins, maybe even disown me for doing such an abhorrent act. In my dreams I was back in that dark room, the wooden door rattling in the frame moments from giving way, flying open, letting in the flood of afternoon sunlight. But in my dreams, it wouldn’t be the landlady staring down at me, it would be my mother.
But my mother, though she called me many times, got angry at me for many other things, but this topic, about what had happened on that summer afternoon — it never came.
That summer melted into the rainy season and then into autumn. In December of that year, my father bought an apartment on the opposite side of the city. On the day we were moving, I stole glances at the landlady as she hugged my mother. She didn’t say anything to me. Moved past me and went on to talk to my father. I noticed that her granddaughter wasn’t there to say goodbye. In the new house, my fears began ebbing, and dreams of that dark room began fading. Now when my mother called I didn’t recoil in fear. Slowly the memory of that day faded until it became a tiny blip in the constantly shifting cityscape of my memories. And I forgot about that girl, that darkroom, and that memory, and that landlady.
Only when my mother called that morning and told me that the landlady had passed away, all of those memories came back. As if an old dusty stone was lifted from a deep recess in my subconsciousness, which allowed this memory to re-surface into my thoughts.
The next few days after I learned of Mrs X’s death, I considered asking my mother for someone’s contact at her house so that I could talk to her granddaughter. But I couldn’t muster enough courage. After a few days, I dropped the idea. Moreover, the memory now had lost its power, and I thought what’s happened is happened. Those incidents were just one of the millions of random things that had happened in my life. It doesn’t matter now. So considering it inconsequential, I let it go.
But it wasn’t inconsequent. I would realize the importance of this memory months later when I would be dating a girl and again trying my hardest to mess things up.
Things were moving so fast with her that I had lost all the avenues of escape. Even flirting with her best friend didn’t budge her. It was in this desperate situation when a part of me was eager to take the next step (marriage) and the other part of me deviously devising a plan to run away — that I made the connection between my fear of my commitment and what used to happen in that dark room.
Yes, after moving to a new home, my fears had ebbed, but those fears hadn’t left me, they had imploded within me, the shrapnels of that implosion reaching deep into the most tender part of my soul, that most primitive center which governed my every action, my identity, my every sub-conscious thought. It was this fear that became the foundation of every relationship I ever got into. A fear that would rear its head the moment I became intimate with everyone.
I am not a psychologist, and can’t make an expert diagnosis. But I know this — from the moment when I made this connection, something gave away within me, years of crusted snow thawed, the firm rock-hard ground shifted, and I saw the root of my fear, naked, and ugly inside me.
Seeing evil is the first step in removing it. Something changed after I made the connection. I saw that my instinct to run away wasn’t rational. It wasn’t something because of a problem in the present, but something that arose from the past. It was a reaction, that I had absorbed and repeated all these years. More importantly, I realized I could change.
The process of learning and changing wasn’t smooth. The habit of running away was so entrenched that I kept on inventing reasons to leave. The girl I was dating supporting me in this process, stayed with me despite my descent into pits of depression, denial, and deep fears about relationships. She stuck with me and battled for me as I learned to change the instinct that was as natural to me as breathing.
And I did change. Slowly and gradually, I overcame my fears and learned the most important lesson of my life — that I am allowed to form an intimacy with others, I will not be scolded for that; no door will fly open and nobody would slap me into shame.
