‘Take your shoes off before you go upstairs, how many times!’ my mother would shout.
This was before my mother started teaching adult education classes. That didn’t come till much later. If you looked at my mother in those days you would think that we were always late for something. We never did things quickly enough for her.
‘Hurry up, Rose! Come on, we’re getting late. Can you drag your feet any more than you are, Rilla, for god’s sake? Wash your hands! Clean your teeth! You’re late for bed! You’re so slow, what’s the matter with you girls?’
She was tired. Two demanding young girls with itchy feet must have been exhausting work. Add to that my father who was good at telling us stories but not at helping with our homework, cleaning our school uniforms, shopping for groceries, or any of those things that fell to my mother. I guess there were other reasons as well, but kids aren’t conscious of these things. On top of everything else, an enormous dog had arrived for her to look after. All because my father had wanted a horse for his play, for our play, all because he was a failed actor. And this brings us full circle to the nautanki, our foray into street theatre, Rose’s and mine.
But I’ll have to come back to that later. To say some things, you have to work up the words.
For many minutes, after practically being thrown off the train where I had a panic attack, I sit outside the train station in Lewisham. The florist who has been watching over me says now, ‘You have to take care in these lurching trains, luv!’
I have the impulse to grab his arm and say, ‘Do I look mad to you?’ Not in accusation, but as a real question.
A week ago my life seemed like it was more or less on track. It was true I needed to work harder at my MA, I needed to show more discipline and focus, but I was getting married, moving to a new flat, becoming an adult, putting the past behind me.
Now, merely a few days later, the past seems to be chasing me. The faster I run, the harder it seems to run after me.
The thing is, I don’t want to go back to the past, I don’t even want to unravel it. I’m not pushing for answers that I don’t have the courage to face. All I’m asking for is a version of my life that makes sense, a narrative that people can agree on, or even one that I can agree with myself about. I want to find a few missing pieces of the jigsaw.
Yet, whether I resist or not, the memories are trying to claw their way back up through the canyon now, knocking at the door. And their Gollum neediness is starting to gnaw at my insides.
I thank the florist for his patience with me, I don’t ask him if he thinks I am mad. Instead, I pick up my bag and the water bottle handed to me by a stranger, and slowly through the streets of Lewisham, I start walking back towards my flat.
The Sufi poet Rumi says it isn’t for us to run after love, but instead to look within, to see what is stopping us from loving. He says that our task in life is to find all the obstacles we place around us, the shields we build that keep us from love.
Rilla’s notes
‘A coherent narrative, Rilla,’ my supervisor said a month ago when she gave me the warning about my MA. ‘That is what you need, and that is what you don’t have yet, not after three whole years here.’ Professor Grundy sat behind her desk, looking thoughtfully at me, tapping her fingers. ‘The thing is, I do like you. You’re a good teaching assistant, the students respect you. They like your honest feedback about their work.’
She looked around her like she was searching for something more to say. We were sitting in her office, her walls covered with old invites for conferences, framed certificates, pictures of her receiving awards from important-looking people. On her desk there was a statue of Michel Foucault wearing a turtle-neck and a pair of seventies-style trousers, his head an egg, his lower lip cheeky but sensual, his hands crossed behind his back. She looked at him for many moments before she spoke again.
‘You don’t really like people, do you,’ she said finally.
I flinched. ‘That’s a little harsh.’
‘Oh, it’s not meant to be. I am the same way. To be a philosopher, you have to be a little removed.’
My breath caught in my throat. Not liking people was one thing, but being like Professor Grundy, that was too much. She once made a student wait for six months to hear if he had passed a re-sit of his dissertation. She had known all along that she would pass him; I later saw a dated confirmation of this. But she didn’t tell the student. She made him wait, she made him cry, she turned him into a shadow of his former self. And all because she didn’t like him. ‘He needs to learn respect,’ she said at the time.
And she thought I was like her. This made me die inside.
‘You are making no progress in your work.’ Professor Grundy was caressing Foucault, her thumb slowly stroking his egg-head back and forth.
‘I like this stuff,’ I muttered. ‘I want to make sense of it.’
‘Rilla. Are you going to complete your MA? Can you? Do you even want to?’ She sat back in her chair and looked at me.
I didn’t know what to say.
When I applied for an MA, with Tyra’s encouragement, I wanted to explore the connections between what a culture thinks about love and what it thinks about other things like life, work, and war. I had imagined finding a kernel that was at the heart of a culture, its most basic beliefs around which everything else was organized. I had thought at the time that it was a good, concrete idea, that it was something I could focus on and develop for three years. But recently the idea seems to have evaporated.
The more I read about what other people have said about love, all I can think about is how little I know about it myself. How there is a blankness in my brain where there should be an understanding of love.
Why do we form an attachment to another? Who attracts us? How do we form the bonds of love? And when love is lost, then what happens, how do we go on living?
After three years doing an MA, I am nowhere near answering these questions, and in fact I am further away than I was when I started writing my thesis.
Well, I say writing my thesis, but at the moment I am reading it more than I am writing it. I do a lot of reading and I make a lot of notes. But that’s what you are meant to do, isn’t it? You’re meant to read what everyone else has written on your subject before you can say what you want to say. If there’s nothing else I’ve learned from my father, surely I’ve learned the art and craft of methodical application. Having grown up in a family of artists and academics in Bombay, he should know how it’s done.
The only thing is there is a heck of a lot written on the subject of love. Every poet, philosopher, mathematician, mother, baker of treacle tarts, damaged teenager turned death-row inmate – everyone seems to have said something about love. Until I’ve read it all, how am I supposed to know what my take on it is? How do I know when I’ve learnt enough about love?
Federico says love is the same as breath, that as humans we are programmed to go after it, the same way we have to go on breathing to be alive. ‘And such a basic thing, it is not something one can analyse, is it? Why don’t you do something else?’
Do something else, says Federico-the-fixer. But what else can I do? I have no other skills.
Tyra helped me deal with the aimlessness I felt after university. She didn’t