Eleven Ways to Love by Gulzar

Author:Gulzar [Gulzar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789387625556
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2018-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

I’m not going to say

our bodies should

make room for our hearts,

only that

there’s already space here,

for one candle to light

another

and another

without extinguishing

its original blaze.

—Sharanya Manivannan

THE ONE BUT NOT THE ONLY

D

‘I am in love with you and I want to marry you.’ It was 2006. I had turned eighteen a few months ago and had recently passed out of school. I was confessing my love to M, my classmate in college. There were around 100 students in our batch, about forty women and sixty men. I had fallen in love with at least twenty women in my class and had been rejected by all of them. My fate at M’s hands was going to be no different. She told me she had come to college to study and not to have ‘affairs’. Besides, she didn’t do anything without her parents’ permission. Her parents had forbidden her from having an ‘affair’ with anyone. She was going to obey them like always.

In 2013, we got married.

By 2017, I had slept with at least ten other women. I did this either with M’s consent or told her that I had done it after I had.

I wanted to marry the first girl I ever fell in love with. Her name was AA. I came back and told my father that I had fallen in love and wanted to marry. We used to live in a small one-bedroom house in Noida. I remember there was a power cut at the time this conversation was happening because we were sleeping in the balcony.

‘I want to ask you something,’ he said. ‘Do you know that girls do potty?’

My first reaction was disbelief. ‘You’re lying. That can’t be true.’

‘It is true. D’s mom, do girls do potty? Yes, they do.’

I forgot all about my love. I was four years old. It was my first day at school. Could it be true? AA was so pretty, did potty really come out of her?

I fell in love with and wanted to marry at least two girls every year. This turned out to be slightly ironic because my own parents divorced when I was fourteen. For about seven years before that, my mother beat me brutally day and night for no reason. My father hit me only once in a year, and once bragged about how one of his punches at me when I was ten was extremely similar to something Sunny Deol had done in some movie.

I chose to stay with him after the divorce. He chose to tell me—repeatedly, even after the divorce—that he had no idea who my real father really was and often expressed suspicion that my loyalties lay with my mother.

We grow up with a default assumption that parents will act like parents. The sales pitch says that they will love and provide. That family will be a safe place. As I grew up, all these assumptions were challenged and demolished. My parents did not behave like the rule book said they would.

My father moved to another country when I was seventeen.

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