Rosalyn D'mello: Love in the time of Section 377

Adulting is about embracing the spirit of learning. Representation Pic

It is unutterable what happened to me in the form of feeling: I quickly need your empathy. Feel with me. It was a supreme happiness." I can't remember when precisely I first underlined these words on page 79 of Clarice Lispector's Agua Viva. Each time I read this slim book I find myself highlighting more passages. There will surely come a time when the whole book will have been cast into focus, because no piece of text will have been spared my hungry gaze. This line, though, is special, because of how it is poised just off the center of page 79; ending the paragraph that follows Lispector's declaration: "Because at five in the morning, today, July 25, I fell into a state of grace."

I returned to Lispector because on Sunday morning, on July 8, I found myself in a state of unutterable sublimity. For a few months I'd been wrestling with decision-making that I reasoned was part of the process we call 'adulting'; do I continue to live in Delhi; do I continue to dedicate myself to the same person I have for ten years; do I continue to freelance as extensively or do I embrace relative poverty so I can write more. After I'd landed at Isha's home in Goa, we happened to speak about this very millennial term. Her conclusion was exquisitely simple. Adulting was about embracing and embodying the spirit of learning. It was something she was able to say with confidence because for the last many years she has found great fulfilment and joy in committing herself to the vocation she has chosen for herself - teaching. I had been carrying this thought with me since then; and when I returned to Delhi and woke up to Mona's nurturing aura, after conversations over coffee and paranthas, realised we'd both arrived together, however separately our journeys had been, on a similar platform of future departure. We had both realised that the trick was really to be rooted in ourselves; to not allow anything other-ly to shatter our confidence in our individual intuitions. When I visited Dharamshala to meet Partho, I felt great validation just seeing myself through his eyes; he revealed to me how much I had grown and transformed as a person.

On the bus back to Delhi, as I composed in my head another treatise about manspreading, I was also, subconsciously, making a decision. I would, henceforth, truly fly solo. I would learn to renounce my great desire and affection for the person who was the subject of my book; my muse. I would let him go so that I could, for a change, live truly for myself; not allow my mental space to be consumed by his needs, his expectations. I would sacrifice and surrender myself to the world and love it and live in it as someone who no longer had any need for love's specificity, because my life and my world has been so wondrously peopled by friends who exhilarate, inspire and intrigue me; who lead me to intimidating cliff points and assure me that I will not fall but fly.

I had already been mourning the end of our relationship; I had been collecting within my bones particles of cellular sadness; manifestations of the grief I was already feeling about learning to let go of the great love of my life so that I could move on and move into my me-ness. How do you lament someone who has been so pivotal to your being, has watched you grow and nourished your transformation with laughter and forgiveness?

You don't. On Sunday morning I woke up feeling luminous; weightless because everything in grace is so light. The night before had been so spectacularly un-eventful. Where we should have met to settle the terms of our separation, we ended up sipping on single malt and slipping into love. And that was that. So, despite the subsequent settling in of dysmenorrhea, I found myself "on the edge of beatitude," as Lispector put it; defining the biblical word as a spasm of the soul. "I knew who I was and who others were," she wrote.

Nothing is more fundamental to existence than the act of loving. We are because we are loved. This is why I have never felt loneliness, because I am ever conscious of how much I am loved, despite my failings, my vulnerabilities, my precious insecurities, and by so many subsets of relationships. It was love that delivered me to that almost mystical feeling.

There is something inherently defiant about love; it dispels darkness, rebelliously nurtures the soul, allowing the spirit room for radiance and transcendence. Only they who have never felt the enormity of its lure preach hatred and criminalise its elemental nature as a human right. As the most significant legal institution in the country decides on the fate of Section 377; an inhuman law that simply must go; please keep in mind the LGBTQ community, whom the constitution inadvertently persecutes. For no form of love between two consenting adults can be against the laws of nature.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com

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