I can see the perfect couple: freudian insights into personal film history

A few years ago I had in woeful writerly ambition written into existence what for me was the ultimate couple. They were about two or three chapters old, Indian and differing shades of brown, and unfortunately (for them) bestowed with a daughter who was keenly observing them with the intimate knowledge of a child and an adult's knowledge of relationships. She watches her mother drive herself to almost suicide and sickness, the isolation of her parents in their own universe and ofcourse water shortage in the house. I am in that sense a child of 80s cinema (yeh tera ghar yeh mera ghar) not really able to buy into the neo-liberal look of love today where wealth plays such an important role. (and to be frightfully honest I look at my ex-lover's continuous griping about money all through a time when he was supposedly having two affairs and his current other's desire to buy a house in a posh part of town, and I see my 80s ka pyar with candle on pastry duboing like a kagaaz ki kashti)

There were very few explanations for the perfidies of the couple that I had written, no back story except that they seemed like two people I didn't know too well, but who seemed intelligent, the man in love with a creative beautiful woman (because there were some signs she was a writer), and they were for reasons beyond their control (even the male protagonist’s control) trapped in marriage. Maybe if I had written further I would have unraveled the mystery and discovered - it is the fault of patriarchy embodied in the man, all his fault, off with his head. Or - she's a weak, sniveling idiot, she stopped writing/creating, off with her head. Or - heteronormativity, off with that moron's head.

Either way I don't know, But visually I saw the couple a week ago. On the Ugly Pant steps in Bangalore, two friends of mine walked up and looked like what I had once long ago imagined into existence. Perfect, down to details, her stylishly draped sari (my character too wore only saris), her curvy delicious body, his kurta, the lean, serious face and the straight lines that set her off. It was a tableau, a mise-en-scene (ugh.. the demon of film theory in my head) that was perfect.

And then they spoke. She blasted all lingering abstractions of angst I had momentarily attached to her skin, by her snarky wit and beautiful ability to simultaneously shrug at life and live it. And he by being so gay, so caught up in his impending fuck date. Attached to each other, but not in that way, my beautiful couple came crashing down, my incomplete unread novel (thankgod!!) smiled like a sweet but momentary lover who tucks you in and turns the other way to go to sleep.

What can seem so real, can sometimes be so completely far from the truth. So was it me that I had written about, me idealized as a short curvy woman, instead of a tall gangly one. My lover idealized as Indian and same, not separated by markers of culture and identity. And in that simplified universe, I lived out my real problem for 2 or 3 chapters. She was not seen. He was not capable of more than comforting her for not being seen. She atleast was getting that comfort.

All my adult life, I have avoided somehow, with self deprecating wit, some amount of active interest in everyone's life but my own, to so-to-speak not be self-involved, almost narcissistic like I've seen so many women be. Precisely those women who have been the other women in the guy's life... this was how I was not like them. I didn't and wasn't only talking about my own life. The nightmare of this compulsion pursued me into various other relationships, where honestly looking back now I wish I had just said... What I'm feeling right now is just me, excuse me, but thats true. I don't have the space for you.

Today in an almost forced condition to consider myself and only myself, I have to say.. I wasn't seen. Not just my new found kinks (spank bdsm anal), obsessions with other lovers, newly found friends, books that had suddenly become a part of me, movies that emerged re-explained in my head, and those huge number of things that I had discarded as no longer part of me. But even beyond these things, that might to some extent atleast have been glimpsed. For the longest time, I wasn't really seen by a lover more intent on comforting and mothering the invisible pain of not really being loved for what you are, but for some wonderfully benign abstraction of yourself in his head.