Before I met sexuality, I knew romance. One demanded my attention, the other called for pursuit. And I think it depends on whether you set your sights on things within reach or if you’d look beyond the comfort of the fireplace to choose one over the other. It’s the thrill of pursuit against relief in gratification, a few strokes away, except the stakes aren’t quite the same. I long in urgency, I write when I’m tired; I know things would be fine if only it were the other way around.
I was fourteen when I discovered masturbation. I was about the same age when I wrote my first poem. One was on a woman, the other was on a girl. But I still could see the line in between, connecting and separating. They’re step-siblings in emotion; like Cinderella against a Princess from ‘the Arabian Nights’ in a toss-in between two counts of fantasy. If one wants you to strive to desire to put an end to the same, the other incites a desire to strive. Love is open-ended, lust seeks closure.
And I found them both, first, in a stroll through streets of celluloid.
I come from a middle-class household. It means we had enough to survive on that we could spend some more on escalation. To Sherman Alexei’s father (as he describes in his essay ‘the Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me’), it was books. To mine, it was cinema. It wasn’t a ritual; it wasn’t his way to stack some shelves with trophies from around the world. My father loved film. He still does. It was his flight to the moon that never quite kicked off and ever since then he’s spent his time trying not to be miserable about it. He vied to be a man of magic, he’s stuck to but one trick now. He’s a banker and a content one, with a failed romance that he had come to terms with.
I was film-illiterate when I started to watch and I watched the movies for the sex scenes they had, in times of urgency and curiosity both. And if there was one thing I learnt in that summer, it was to discern and distinguish between those films that were likely to have good sex in them and those films that were likely to not – an equation of rating, DVD cover and the synopsis on the back. As time went by, I got better and better that I could actually compare. Hollywood had glossy sex with little or no nudity due to constant fear of censorship and sale. There were the occasional sex thrillers and erotic romances that came along to save the day, but besides that there was little else.
Europe, on the other hand, didn’t care – the coming of age movies, in particular, where it wasn’t just ‘women’ that I saw naked but even girls my age. That was just a preference, though; it wasn’t all I watched. I liked them older, I liked them young, I liked them fair, I liked them darker still. I liked them for their perfect bodies, I liked them for their imperfect bodies as well. I liked them for how uninhibited they were when I seemed to work with a restraining order inside my head, where watching these movies in itself was a ritual I had to perform with caution every time I took it up. Discretion was necessary; a step missed or messed up and I lose the game. Father shouldn’t know.
Of course, this doesn’t mean I got away with watching R-rated movies all the time. I’ve faced confrontations, I’ve had locked doors, the keys to which my Father kept and kept with him wherever he went. Those keys opened the door to two of the most important shelves in our house, if I could classify shelves like that. I wasn’t grounded; I’d still be allowed to access the third shelf, that which had less-harmful fare like ‘Indiana Jones’ and Cartoons and such. I did watch them – sometimes to my heart’s content. When I didn’t get lemonade, I drank some water and fancied it tangy. It’s like my frustration knew how to adapt to a world that’s mere Will and Idea.
Sherman Alexie learnt to read through comic books. Through films, I learnt life when I least tried to. The process was more or less the same. I might not have understood these movies, but I unwound with them – much like how he found words in visuals and wrote his own. Film and I were opposites of one Dialectic whole; an argument between my semi-conservative upbringing and the rule-free self that was projected on me as I walked through the streets and lived these scenes. If it’s the birth of questions that marks enlightenment, then asking them is the most one could do. And I directed my questions, not to the carefree Utopias that films synthesized, but to the world around and life as it happened. Film was Romance. Film was source material that I based life upon. Life, thus, became Romance, with people and encounters that I strived to win.
I think this viewpoint of mine arose from my observation that my life had ADD in its relationship with me. There were times when I was in focus, there were times when I simply wasn’t. But I’m my own protagonist all the time in a movie that I write around myself with a thousand other co-writers. The scenes change without control and the most I can do, as I find, is write my lines and then sit and watch and trust my life with this maverick called Circumstance.
I try to live with contentment. I find I cannot.
It’s like straddling idealism in a fast-food nation where frustration has an eternal right-to-return; like fancying free-fall when your earth shatters with the bungee cord that jerks you up to the world that is from the depths of one that you fashioned it to be. Reality, she said, bites from both ends. And the best you can do is trade hickeys and fake some passion.
Film wasn’t forever a mere mistress, though, I should clarify. Lust morphed to fondness, eventually, and affection felt for the one who was always around. It was a relationship I was naturalized into being in. And nothing that has in it the potential to be beautiful can ever be crass. Like Allen made Hemingway say in ‘Midnight in Paris’ – “No Subject is terrible if the story is true and the prose is clean and honest and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.” Film taught me that. And she blushed when I quoted it back to her.
The title of this piece of writing – call it an essay or ramble or a journal entry – comes from a poem recited in Richard Linklater’s ‘Before Sunrise’, if in case you didn’t recognize it. A bum runs into a wandering couple in Vienna and asks them for money in return for a poem he could write that contains any word that they want it to contain. ‘Milkshake’ is what they decide on and they choose it over ‘Worcestershire Bread.’ A few minutes later, he comes up with a ballad that has the word put almost out of context. “I’m a Delusion Angel; I’m a fantasy parade,” are lines that ring in the silence that follows. The Guy, who is American and a sceptic is quick to assert he’s probably just plugged the words in, in an existing poem. The Girl, who is French and borderline spiritual, responds with a glorious smile and a shake of her head.
I think the whole of my life till now has been spent on trying to decide between the Girl and the Guy in ‘Before Sunrise’ on whom I wanted to be – the Romantic or the Cynic. You’d only need to relate to the scene above to come to terms with the fact that you’re a bit of both, inevitably. And that in the term of Romance, sex intervenes; life necessitates it. Ideology and approach are only as significant as the word that he ‘plugged in.’ The poem exists, no matter what. There’s beauty in it. And there’s you in the middle, submerged in beauty.
Except you’d call it chaos, instead.
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