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Chapter One
A Morning Chill
Love is not the greatest glue between two people. Sex is.
The laws of school physics will tell you it is more diffcult to prise apart two bodies joined at the middle than those connected anywhere near the top or the bottom.
I was still madly in love with her when I left her but the desire had died, and not all the years of sharing and caring and discovering and journeying could keep me from fleeing.
Perhaps I recall it wrong.
Strictly speaking I did not leave. Fizz did.
But the truth is she did—as always—what I wanted her to, what I willed her to. And I did what I did because by then my body had turned against hers; and anyone who has stretched and plumbed both mind and body will tell you the body, with its many nagging needs, is the true engine of life. The mind merely steers a path for it, or consoles it with high-sounding homilies when there is no path to be found.
The ravings of the puritans and the moralists are the anguished cries of those whose bodies have failed to fnd the road to bliss. When I see clergy—Hindu, Muslim, Christian—rail against the instincts of the body, I see men who are lost and angry and frustrated. Unable to locate the glories of the body, unable to locate the path to surpassing joy, they are resolved to confuse all other journeymen. Those who fail to fnd their sexual synapse set our mind and body at war against each other.
I agree there are the truly spiritual, just as there is the one-horned rhino, but they are few and far between and easily identifable. For the rest of us, the body is the temple.
The truth is godhead is tangible.
Smellable. Tasteable. Penetrable.
The morning I woke up and felt no urge to slide down her body and inhale her musk I knew I was in trouble.
As always, we were sleeping in the small room overlooking the Jeolikote valley, on the pinewood beds hammered into being in a day by Bideshi Lal's scrawny young boys. Fading yellow chir planks. Straight lines. Not one flourish. Hard, fundamental, with absolutely no give. After years of sleeping on beds of string and plywood, we loved the sense of solidity these beds exuded. Lying on them, we felt less like urban flakes. Our bed was a single piece—what the carpenters called a kuveen bed, a bed-and-a-half. We would have preferred a king bed, with more space for roll, but the room was tiny and since we always slept close, bodies touching, anything more than a bed was redundant.
As every morning, the yellow curtains were drawn and the evenness of frst light sat gently over the room. Only in the mountains, with all the windows open in the morning's frst hour of sunless light, can you get this condition where the light within and without is exactly the same, and there is the perfect tranquillity of a fsh-bowl when the fsh do not move.
The world is cast in one colour. It is both fluid and frozen.
On the discolouring gnarled oak outside the window, the crested white-cheeked bulbuls were starting to dart about, still low on chatter. I sat half-propped on a broken pillow against the rough stone wall and looked out the bank of big windows at the wavy mountain opposite. A fresh skin of light green was beginning to grow where a landslide had raked an ugly gash two years before. When you looked at it through the heavy Minolta binoculars—focusing tediously with slow turns of the fngers—it had the ugliness of the new.
Ferns, grass, saplings were pushing out their frst shallow claims. No layers, no depth. Like new buildings and new furniture and new clothes and new lovers; waiting for time, history, travail to etch them with worth. But the new skin allowed you to look at the mountain without flinching. Last year the open gash had drawn and repelled the gaze like the exposed wound on a beggar. Two seasons of drumming rain had worked their ministrations.
Without shifting my eyes I could take in the strings of grey woodsmoke curling from the floor of the valley like wiggly lines in a child's drawing of a mountainscape. And by shifting my head only slightly I could see Fizz asleep in her usual foetal position, curled away from me.
She wore only a round-necked T-shirt with a green slogan about saving trees etched in a sharp Helvetica typeface at the back. The image under the type was of a jagged designer tree morphing into a skull. One of those clever graphic things. The slogan declared: Kill a Tree, Kill a Man. Sometimes, when I rode her in slow frenzy and the shirt collapsed around her dipped shoulders, the words would begin to blur until all I could read was Kill Kill. It was an exhortation to run amok, and it added something to the moment.
The shirt was now scrunched up under her breasts, and by raising the thick blue quilt we shared, I could see the generous curve of her body. The wide flaring from the narrow waist, the fullest part of her, always capable of arousing me in an instant.
I looked at it for a long time, tenting up the quilt with my left hand. She did not wake. She was accustomed to me voyeuring on her all hours of the day and night. Like a dog that ceases to hear the footfalls of familiar servants, her skin had ceased to prickle at my staring. In fact there were occasions when I had in the pit of the night engaged with her body in all kinds of ways and she had not woken, not known of it the next morning. It spooked her each time I told her, the knowledge that she had been a participant in something she had no awareness of.
The Alchemy of Desire
Excerpted from The Alchemy of Desire: A Novel by Tarun J. Tejpal
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
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