The High Priestess Never Marries: Stories of Love and Consequence

by Sharanya Manivannan

Praise every landscape that appears before your window;

‘The difficulty of leaving can sometimes be the same thing as the decision to stay.

And her laughter, it would shake the moon.

What a shame I was still in love with you in Paris, settling my sadness on the steps of Sacré-Cœur, all the beauty in the fathomable world before me and not a breath in my body that wasn’t your name.

You can give yourself a city if you love the whole world. You can give yourself the ocean if you take the risk of drowning. You can give yourself the love story you deserve, if you write it yourself, if you let the ink itself become your life.

But he spoke to me mostly in Tamil, and I spoke to him mostly in English, and in bed the two merged: the latter for commands, jokes, smut. The former, always, for tenderness.

What drew me to him was the same thing that has ever drawn me to any man, before or since: a latent brutality, an undisclosed yet evident vulnerability. An instinct for self-preservation, and the willingness to allow its breaching. The ability to deepen my capacity for all of these in equal measure.

‘It will begin, as will all else that will follow it, already tinged with a sadness you won’t know what to do with.’

Sometimes I wondered why my parents had ever left Madras when, decades later, my life was an ’80s Tamil film anyway, all kissing on rooftops and curfews and the way P. Susheela’s voice rose with unhindered clarity from the watchman’s mini-radio downstairs during the scheduled power cuts.

Every sacred space begins as a theatre of grief. Out of trauma comes transformation.

It is astonishing how strong you become, when you’ve spent a lot of time being other people’s weaknesses.

I was always the object of desire, the souvenir, the receptacle of memories of wildness, a parenthesis in their experience of an unexceptional world.

So I began to adore simply, not loudly, and always in the awareness that those like me must live like flowering trees. We are who we are, prosperously or otherwise. And our lives are crowned, now and then, with moments of exaltation – each held and breathed in deeply, and then let go.

You won’t put your arms around me when we part, and I won’t promise you a thing or pretend to know what is true, except that life is long and love is small and selfish and I do love you, I love you, I do.

I like my fights dirty, my vodka neat and my romance anachronistic.

She treaded delicately in the company of other people’s secrets,

‘Sometimes I think of you and wonder if you really happened...’

Who can know the narreme of the cosmos? Why do some of us survive, while others become cautionary tales?

‘She is the calm before the storm.’ ‘And you, Guru,’ I retort, ‘are a tropical depression.’

But this is how I first became aware of the city: because of those long bus rides, the brazenness with which I skipped classes or invented extracurricular events, the exigency with which I rushed home afterwards. One takes for granted the place in which they have spent all their lives. Only a jolt, an uprooting or bereavement, reveals its true nature. For me, exhilarated by my newly electric body, this was how I understood that the city, too, was a sentient creature; by criss-crossing its arteries almost daily, I learnt its heart.

lacunae

that strange period of retreat and revival,

‘Why must you always dichotomize things? I believe in ambiguity.’

to the self-reliance that had come from learning how to drive, I far preferred the insouciance of taking autorickshaws. Not for the first time did I miss the thousands of rides I had spent listening to music, lost in my own thoughts, able to notice everything and yet pay attention to nothing at all. Madras cannot be experienced within a car: one must traverse it unshielded, buffeted by its winds and smells.

She has a certain innate understanding of relationships that only people who have not suffered the disorientation of too many of them can have.

I think I took that bus because it was a mnemonic for a simpler time, a time of elation and self-possession.

The experience meant nothing or it meant everything. The magical is everywhere, as is the surreal, as is the grotesque. These are things I had always inherently believed, but something about that incident stayed with me.

We never considered that there was another way to live, yet here we are: light years between everything we were and everything we have become.

In that one moment I have seen it all, I have surfaced: boundless, uncontainable, a feral thing, a force majeure.

This is how you live, with the knowledge of all you could not keep. You take all the love you intended for only one thing and you spread it out, wherever it can give succour (having so much, you need not take more). You let it thrive. And you live. I tell you – you’ll live.

Sometimes a meal is a psalm. Sometimes it is a code, a consolation, a sense of an unbroken coast in a season of ravages. Always, it is an offering. Always, it is an embrace.

There are crevices in the ways in which we experience the world that cannot always be bridged simply.

Forgetting is neither simple nor without consequence.

I belong to the forest. It is here I came to console myself. It is here I have come in thanksgiving.