Anjali came into the world fighting. Her first, raucous breaths were met with immediate distaste by her parents, who looked at the baby with a shock that constituted a sudden and outright disparagement, a disappointment. Screaming, red-faced, Anjali was held by her mother who brought the baby close to her chest in the hopes that the ancient maternal comfort of the breast, that ephemeral organ, would soothe the young child, its cries deafening, as the doctors looked at this new, terrible being with concern. Her father, a dejected investment banker with a penchant for brief, passionless affairs and Johnny Walker, gazed at the child with a blank face and furrowed brow, a look of complete and utter unfeeling. His lip curled upwards toward his mustache, as if reaching, fruitlessly, for that furry nether, forever clambering toward it, impressing that it was the forebearer of dialogue, the hearth from which thought transfixes itself into speech. He did not look at the mother, Safina, his wife, the women he had vowed some ten years ago to protect and nurture, the woman he had continuously and consciously betrayed, the woman whom he had long since hated for her very existence, for the simple reminder that he was tethered to this world, that there were people that depended on him and that, in essence, in his morose and twisted view, he was enslaved. These past few weeks he had pondered how this new child, this new girl to be specific, would impact the dynamic through which he made his way in the world — what would it be like to be a father? Would being a father somehow diffuse the very sins that constituted his life? His namesake, Mohammed the veiled prophet of Mecca, would likely be disappointed at this man who shared his name, at this greedy, gluttonous man. He exhaled violently, causing the nearest nurse to glance at him, enough time that he could see her disapproval of his disgruntled bedside manner. Never mind, he thought. It doesn’t matter what she thinks.
She grew up knowing she was, in some indistinct, almost unfathomable way, unloved. It is prescient to consider the ways in which she knew this, for to figure out you are lacking something you have to, in some way, know what it is to possess that which you are without. It is said, now, that the girl had a natural instinct for love, and that was the way in which she knew she was lacking something in her life, something that all children deserve to know at least for a little while so that they can stave off the feeling that temporarily plagues all, that they are somehow unworthy of the life they have been given. By the time I knew Anjali, she was giving her love to anyone who would take it. Yet when I first met her, in the spring of my senior year, she took one look at me and with a doe-eyed grin said that we were going to be great friends. I didn’t know what that meant. I do wish I had been a better friend to her. I wish I hadn’t betrayed her in that way, but all my regrets won’t bring her back.
We were just about to graduate college, and I had found myself at a loss for what to do next after I had finished, after I departed from the cradle of boyhood and set out to become a man. I knew of Anjali all those four years, but despite our college’s small student body, I had never actually interacted with her. She existed though, in my mind, all those four years as an achillean myth, some splendid possibility that seemed to represent all the promise of life, a promise that extended beyond her carnal potential and signified something more resolute and astonishing than I could have imagined. She possessed an exalted position within the college, owing to her intelligence and beauty — a position that fortified her as even more desirable to the boys of the college, who could be seen in their silk, collared shirts and Joe-College haircuts surrounding her, trying to strike up a conversation.
She did entertain a select few of them — the lacrosse captain, the editor of the newspaper, the head of the literary society — but she never fully gave herself to them; that is to say that she never allowed them to possess her in the way that they were all so desperate to. She loved them all from a distance.
In my last semester at college, I found myself sitting next to her in a Literature of South Asia seminar. This happening was the culmination of all of my deepest desires, my most residual longings, and so I was elated at the opportunity that God, or whatever nebulous force that exists in the universe, appeared to have granted me. Limber-footed, curly-haired, seeing her up close like that she managed, somehow, to meet all of my grandest expectations and delusions — Anjali, who was perfect in all the most perfect ways. In retrospect, it was that first initial meeting that would start off the chain reaction that would lead to the state of melancholy that would take hold of me, the state which I would never manage to rip off the beating of my young heart. I would imagine her, then, as some phantom, and she would appear as if a ghost — ethereal, untouchable, she was, in many ways, the basis of my belief in the divine, my belief that there existed some kind of meaning in the world, the idea that we are not particles, rootless, crashing into one another, transferring energy and heartbreak, that there is some kind of reason to the ways in which events unfold, and that, even in the most wretched moments, there is a kind of faith that whatever is meant to be will be. In the past, I have considered myself to be the victim of God, the bearer of his beatings. Yes, I have loved, and yes I have been disappointed — odiously, I have had my heart broken, first when I was a boy and then when I was older, so much so that my friends at boarding school dubbed me “That Sad Young Man” in recollection of Fitzgerald, the best of us Romantics, the great chronicler of that horrible, horrible, thing we call unrequited love. I have looked to God in search of meaning, clambered up to his great house with my bloodied, asymmetrical face, asked him why, why I have looked into the eyes of girl after girl and felt that familiar sheer unworthiness in the dilation of their pupils, and I hear, even in their laughter that same sentiment that I am but a sad clown. God has given me no answers, so in his absence I have looked to the world in search of faith. I looked at Anjali and in her I found belief.
We were both looking for love, Anjali and I, and for that reason, perhaps, we were doomed from the very beginning. She was looking for the love her father and mother never gave her, and near the end of our time together, near the end of the collision of our two particles, she would look at me with watered, crystalline eyes and ask me if the feeling that persisted inside of her, the feeling that grew more resolute with each passing day, that she was unloved in this world, would ever go away, and I would hold her in my arms and tell her — lie to her — that it would and she would look at me, Anjali, and would say that I would find love too, just not with her, because for her to love me would be to kill me, because she knew that she would have to leave eventually, and she didn’t want to hurt me like that, didn’t want to break my heart any more. But I knew when she first sat down next to me that I would love her forever, and so I was fated, always, to long for something that would never be mine. I could hold her, yes, but I could never have her. She was searching for the sun, while I remained on Earth reaching for her, fruitlessly, in the stars.
By that time I was indolent, neglecting my schoolwork and taking to long, romantic nights of drinking and smoking with my best friend Kolu, who would bear witness to my hopeless obsession and tell me in his measured voice that what I was doing was idiotic at best, dangerous at worst. “Love is a drug that can kill you,” he said when I returned to the dorm after my first class with Anjali, after I had returned and with a rueful look in my eye declared my undying passion. I threw the tattered copy of Midnight’s Children we had been assigned to read down on the couch and looked at Kolu, at his pleasant, angled face and began to think for a moment, about Anjali, about love. “I want her and it’s that simple,” I said as I felt the rough of my beard with my forefinger. “But it’s not,” Kolu began. He passed me the bottle of scotch he had been nursing and smiled beautifully. I took a drag and pointed my noise at the ceiling, figuring, wondering about her. Outside, the sun was setting, emitting a last glow across our faces, turning brown into orange, darkness into lightness. The air was thick with the possibility of love. I turned away from Kolu and walked to my bedroom, shut the door, and fell asleep, dreaming of naked goddesses and all those sanctified tales of lost love.
I was fully in at that point, and I hadn’t even spoken a word to her, yet still had postulated, endlessly, about the details of our (in my mind) soon blossoming romance. The next morning I went to the seminar and watched as she sat next to me, as her curly black hair ran down the length of her shoulders. The professor, some erudite old Bombayite with a tendency for long, droning sentences and great exclamations of gaiety at the turns of Rushdie’s sophisticated prose, was going on about post-colonialism, about Gayitri Spivak and the oppression of the global south. I had lately not been concerned with whether the subaltern could speak but with the mascara on Anjali’s eyelashes, the green of her Kashmiri eyes. When she turned to me to speak, when her eyes met mine, I felt a crescent emerge in my throat as her soft voice worked lubriciously on me, her voice coming onto me, then, like a sweet song sung by a pretty bird.
“Hello,” she said, the sunlight getting caught in the emerald of her eyes. “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Anjali.” She extended her hand toward me. I took it in my own.
“Vishnu,” I said. “I’ve seen you around before.”
“You have?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of you. You probably don’t know me, though.”
She laughed, revealing her perfect, white teeth. “Well now I do,” she said. She looked at me seriously. “I have a feeling we’re going to get along.” I looked into her and I knew. I was in love.
That first initial meeting, I recall, was inevitable, one of those things that I could not control — the same way that water cuts through mountains, producing canyons. Anjali and I were destined to meet and too we were destined to hurt one another so that we would never be whole again. Now that I am older, I try my best not to think of her, but still she appears in my dreams like some fictitious being, diaphanous, untouchable. In my dreams, I extend my trembling hand out to her, to hold her once more, but she remains elusive. She does not let me touch her, and I realize then that I never really had her, Anjali, that she always was somewhere else, that she existed beyond my understanding and grasp. It is in these moments when I grieve the most. It is one thing to be saddened at having lost someone, it is another to realize that you never had them in the first place. This, I find, is the root of my deepest sorrow.
She gave me her number that day, though I am not really sure why. I suppose in some unbeknownst way she felt an attraction toward me, but unfortunately, and to my utmost disappointment, it was not the same kind of attraction I felt toward her. Later, she would tell me that when she first spoke to me she got the feeling that I had something important to teach her, that we were destined to interact in some way before we pass on to the next person, before we forget each other. The problem is that I do not want to forget Anjali, and in fact, I do not want to forget anyone at all. Truthfully, I am drawn ceaselessly into the past, into Anjali, because I never learned how to forget, and maybe she was supposed to teach me how but then she left and I was left alone, full of anger and regret.
I saw her again, a few days later in the evening. She texted me to go over that class’s reading because apparently there were things she didn’t grasp, plot points she didn't understand. By that time we had gotten to The Satanic Verses and I was overjoyed at the opportunity to speak to her one-on-one, though in honesty I hadn’t been reading the book, having gotten bored with Rushdie’s meandering sentences and endless self-mythologizing. In preparation, I read the Wikipedia page for the novel and wrote down a few off-beat opinions on the major plot progressions that I was confident would impress that I had actually read the book.
I was sitting in the student lounge waiting for her, thinking, figuring. When she did come, wearing a sundress, I stood up and gave her a half-a-hug, my arms reaching toward her as our bodies joined for that brief, fleeting moment, coming and then going in rhythm with the skipping of my heart. She smelled like roses.
“Vishnu,” she said, her sweet voice coming toward me, intoxicating. “It’s so nice to see you.”
“You as well,” I replied.
And so it began — my horrible, one-sided love. My late reverie, my betrayal of that platonic ideal — how it sings to me, the tragedy of my life! We all know heartbreak, we who are old enough to hate ourselves, hate life, hate the way that things always pan out, never in our favor. Question: Why do others get what we want? Why do others get what we deserve? Are we like rats, scurrying, pointlessly, to constructed goals that will never be ours? Is beauty the true evil in this world because it represents the goodness of life that we, the ugly, will never possess? I do not pose such cynicisms for no reason — forgive me, for I am just a man with a broken, broken, heart and no way to fix it. Of course there are proposed solutions to those of us who bear, wholeheartedly, the ugliness of life. There is Jesus, Marx, Buddhism, Stoicism, Chanting, Hanuman, Meditation, Mindfulness, Allah, Truth, Nature… the list can go on. So in the midst of heartbreak, do we turn to those who claim to offer the Answer… who claim that their God, their practice, will heal all of these ailments that so often afflict us Sensitive Young Men! Is God going to save us, or is he like his creations going to rear his big, brutish head at us and turn away?
So Angali and I began to just talk and talk and talk. It’s all very perfect, the whole thing, Anjali and I. I begin to feel this feeling in my chest, let’s call it love. One time she looks up from her book and the sun gets caught in the curls of her hair so they shine, golden, and I am struck completely with this feeling of complete and utter awe, caught in this mausoleum of hope and desire.
We begin to see each other regularly, after class, going over readings but most of the time just talking about our lives and such. We talked a lot about the future, I recall now, and I had to lie and make up grand ambitions that I had. I told her that I was applying to the scholarships at Oxford and Cambridge, and she looked at me with an awe that only made me feel guilty for deluding her with all these resplendent plans for the future that I never really had. It seemed that I had spent the last four years looking and I had at long last found what I was looking for. After I met her, everything became more uncertain. I had to figure out a way to have her, figure out a way to keep her for myself.
It was during one of those evenings where we found ourselves in the company of one another that she told me about her parents, how they never loved her. She explained to me over a bottle of whiskey that she too was looking for something, that she was still looking for something, even then. I had to hide my disappointment that I was apparently not what she was looking for all this time. Everything seemed warm and the world seemed to cave in on itself in milky froth. I was drunk, of love or alcohol I don’t know. She was there and then there was the light, yellow, reflecting across her brown skin. I put my hand up to her face and held her. She let me touch her, let me bring my hands to her neck and hold her. She began to cry, and it only made her look more beautiful, only made me want her more. We were together and then we were kissing, but it didn’t last long before she broke away, pushed me backward. “I can't,” she said. Then she was gone.
That night I went back to the dorm and cursed the world until Kolu came in and asked me what’s wrong. “Everything” I said. “Everything is fucked up.”
“Don’t be so cynical,” he began. I explained what happened. He was silent for some time.
“Maybe she’s not ready,” he said.
“But with all the other guys she was,” I said, my voice angry. “She had no problem giving herself to them. It was only me she didn’t want.”
“She has issues, Vishnu. It’s not that black and white.”
I heard his words but didn’t make sense of them. I walked out of the dorm and into the night. Years later, I recall this moment with the utmost regret. I wish I had walked back to the room because I would have seen her come back — I would have gotten to say goodbye. I should have gone back. I should have picked up her call. I should have, I should have, I should have…. But now she’s gone and there’s no going back. ◼