Rosalyn D’Mello’s first book, A Handbook for My Lover (HarperCollins), is the chronicle of a relationship between the writer and a man 30 years her senior. Part kitchen-sink realism, part erotic memoir, this is a brave book that stakes the human body with all the intimacy and longing of a lover’s gaze, looking beyond, to the history of other lovers, and to the idea of the end, which hovers over all love stories, however traditional or untraditional they may be.
Excerpts from an interview:
I’m curious about your beginnings. We only know from the book that you had your heart broken when you were 11.
I call myself a small-town girl from Bombay. I grew up in a very Catholic part of Kurla, in Garden Rose Colony, which encased five buildings and a bungalow. It was only when I set foot in St. Xaviers College, taking the train from Vidyavihar station to VT, that I realised how big the world was and how little I knew of it. As an English literature student, with every book I read, the veil seemed to lift further and the universe of ideas and thoughts was exposed to me.
This book has been called many things — an erotic memoir, a handbook, a love letter. — You call it “an episode of language” via Roland Barthes. Was the shape of this book changing as you wrote it? Were you always cognisant of writing it for a larger audience?
It began as a process of note-taking, documentation, the idea being to record thought. I was overwhelmed by the unusualness of this unorthodox relationship I seemed to have stumbled into, and writing my self was a way of translating, for my convenience, everything that was transpiring between us. It was a way of rendering translucent or accessible what was otherwise opaque. When I finally began transcribing the written words, I assured myself that I could take shelter in nomenclature. I could refer to the exercise as a fictional enterprise, so I allowed myself to take liberties with the truth, I allowed myself to be scathingly honest. I knew midway through that the intended recipient, the lover, would perhaps never read it, because he doesn’t read, which allowed me even more freedom since I didn’t have to fear his critique. The audience always existed as a category inside my head, and the audience is always second-hand reading the book, as if intercepting letters that were not supposed to be read.
You quote Kamala Das: — “Do I want to be a well-loved member of the family? Or do I want to be a good writer? You can’t be both at the same time.” Are these two positions really at odds with one another? Or is it only when a woman puts the body and desire in the centre of her work that things start to get quivery on the family front?
It’s a little bit of both. The writerly impulse is often at odds with the obligations one has as a mother or a daughter or a wife. Women have been socialised to be caretakers, nurturers, and it always amazes me that there have been women across the centuries who have managed to be both writers and well-regarded members of society. An editor friend of mine, who’s also a single mother, when asked how she manages to make time for her career and family, said, “If you want to lose 10 years of your life, have a child.” It was really telling advice because I don’t know too many women who would be so blatantly honest about the resentment one can sometimes feel about having to perform the role of a mother. If, as a woman writer, you choose to embrace your sexuality and afford it centre-stage in your practice, then you are particularly at risk of being misunderstood, disowned, or questioned by the rest of your family. If you go a step further and consciously choose to be in an unconventional relationship with no destination, and in doing so, reject your supposed “calling” as a wife and a mother, then you doubly incur the disapproval of your kin.
I drew a lot of strength from what Das said, because she very clearly outlines two sets of priorities and compels you to pick the one that most urgently calls out to you.
In your prologue, you talk about the striptease: — “To strip you must contend with shame. You must learn to make too much of dust.” Stripping, as an act of revelation but also reclamation. Is writing a similar process?
Definitely! In fact, I increasingly find myself fascinated with the subject of shame and writing as a way of subverting one’s sense of shame. The reclamation can happen only through the revelation, and the revelation can only be facilitated by the urge towards irrepressibility. Being irrepressible means not making allowances for any kind of censorship. Writing becomes an act of seeming self-destruction and subsequent self-healing. I don’t mean to imply this is a therapeutic process.
As writers, the act of writing doesn’t resolve so much as allow you to revel, which is differently empowering.
You said you started as a poet but gave up. That you’ve tried fiction but find found it tiresome to invent characters and plot lines. What is it about non-fiction that gives you the freedom to say what you want to say?
I suppose it has something to do with the freedom within the non-fiction genre to catalogue the everyday and be informed by its intimacies. I feel as though something has to enter me and pass through my body in some sensual way before I can make sense of it through language. It means, therefore, that I must continually allow myself to be open to the many permutable unravellings of any given moment, which means that my practice is immersed in the act of living, is a complete consequence of everything I ingest: books, music, food, laughter. It is embedded in time, but simultaneously seeks to espouse an existence outside of time. There is an immediacy to non-fiction, and thus an intimacy, both real and imagined, between reader and writer.
Your lover, P.B., to whom the book is dedicated, is a photographer, and there seems to be a tussle in this book between the visual and the written word, both trying to capture a sense of the ephemeral, both in a sense mirroring the “gospel of flux” relationship you have with P.B. Now that the book is published, do you feel you’ve won that particular argument?
When I finally finished writing the book, I was so relieved of the pressure to document every little thing that was transpiring between us. I felt unburdened, like we could suddenly just be. It also helped to know that we had survived the scrutiny. I can’t imagine any other man being so amazingly open to being cut open and sutured on a surgical table by such unpractised hands. I think it was telling of a particular grace. I think I have won the argument in a sense because my book now exists as a kind of testimony to the fact of our relationship.
Of course, it is reflective of my perspective and is, in that sense, biased, but it feels like some kind of guarantee against “the vanishing” that all relationships are subject to. Even if our love should someday end, the book could be read as its legacy.
Here is a reading from the book:
