Parasite
Siren between two ships by Jacques Callot, 1628, etching on laid paper, National Gallery of Art
In Bangalore, there were three.
Three agonising loves for those 10 months that I lived there. A maths teacher who was younger than me and too eager for the veracity of life. A software engineer on holiday from the US and too smug for the city. And then there was the guy who broke my heart.
It was straightforward with the first two. I met them via a dating app (my flatmate’s suggestion) on a bored Saturday afternoon post lunch, drowsy and scrolling through pictures after pictures of men who were desperate for that one encounter that they thought would change the course of their lonely lives. A chat request popped up from the maths teacher saying he had already swiped up and was eager to talk, meet, and dance. A few minutes later he sent me a thumbs up modified into a tankard of beer along with a wink emoji: ‘I hope you look as good in person as you do in photos.’ I rolled my eyes and reluctantly gave in, even though changing up my appearance was like patch-working a rug – it took a lot of time and skill, but in the end, it was worth it. My form resisted recognition by myself and by others; every facade was indistinguishable from the one that came before and the ones that came after. I was an extension of myself, an odd configuration of telegraph poles that rose towards the sky, towering over everyone else, alone and alien.
A day later, we found ourselves in my bedroom listening to jazz, talking about Gauss-Codazzi equations and skirting around the topic of sex. Bored out of my wits, I suggested that we smoke a small joint to take the edge off and got up to open the doors to my balcony. When I came back to sit at the edge of the bed, he embraced me in the sloppiest kiss I’ve received to date. ‘Your breasts feel like soft pillows against me,’ he said and broke into a wide grin. The teacher held me close, pulled me in by the waist, and breathed. ‘You’re the most beautiful Gaussian curvature, a hyperboloid. I mean, like an hourglass,’ he stumbled. I cringed – the corset was tugging at my skin and I could hear the rumble of my starving stomach. We kissed and I nibbled on his lips, which were surprisingly sweet, so I pulled back into a questioning glance. ‘Oh, it’s honey lip gloss,’ he remarked. We had sex on the balcony, in the dead of the night on the cold floor, writhing away like two coiled snakes stuck together by an uncontrollable appetite. Afterwards, we smoked the joint, had sex again with me on top and then on all fours, and I never saw him again. I still think about that night sometimes.
I thought about it when I had sex with the software engineer, clinical and rough, which was like rubbing two pieces of burnt toast together and watching the soot shower down on the cutting board. He was vehemently against using a lubricant, but had no problem dousing his toast in butter the next morning. I had offered him oatmeal, toast, and eggs and he picked toast along with some fruits that I sometimes stashed in case any of the men I brought home got peckish. It always worked – they helped themselves to something and I sat across watching them eat, animals fattening up before a slaughter.
I went back on the app and tried to find someone else, a small snack for my bourgeoning hunger. A married man asked me why I was on the app, as if my intention was questionable, and I told him ‘to eat all the married men’. He said I was disgusting, that married men would prefer someone pure and submissive, and ‘not the monster’ that I was. I told him that he was being hormonal and silly and that his profile picture suggested his ass might taste dry and mealy, but it would still do. I was up for it. He blocked me, which meant that I had to join my flatmate for dinner, stuffing slippery aubergines into my mouth and pretending they were succulent organs.
Three agonising loves for those 10 months that I lived there. A maths teacher who was younger than me and too eager for the veracity of life. A software engineer on holiday from the US and too smug for the city. And then there was the guy who broke my heart.
It was straightforward with the first two. I met them via a dating app (my flatmate’s suggestion) on a bored Saturday afternoon post lunch, drowsy and scrolling through pictures after pictures of men who were desperate for that one encounter that they thought would change the course of their lonely lives. A chat request popped up from the maths teacher saying he had already swiped up and was eager to talk, meet, and dance. A few minutes later he sent me a thumbs up modified into a tankard of beer along with a wink emoji: ‘I hope you look as good in person as you do in photos.’ I rolled my eyes and reluctantly gave in, even though changing up my appearance was like patch-working a rug – it took a lot of time and skill, but in the end, it was worth it. My form resisted recognition by myself and by others; every facade was indistinguishable from the one that came before and the ones that came after. I was an extension of myself, an odd configuration of telegraph poles that rose towards the sky, towering over everyone else, alone and alien.
A day later, we found ourselves in my bedroom listening to jazz, talking about Gauss-Codazzi equations and skirting around the topic of sex. Bored out of my wits, I suggested that we smoke a small joint to take the edge off and got up to open the doors to my balcony. When I came back to sit at the edge of the bed, he embraced me in the sloppiest kiss I’ve received to date. ‘Your breasts feel like soft pillows against me,’ he said and broke into a wide grin. The teacher held me close, pulled me in by the waist, and breathed. ‘You’re the most beautiful Gaussian curvature, a hyperboloid. I mean, like an hourglass,’ he stumbled. I cringed – the corset was tugging at my skin and I could hear the rumble of my starving stomach. We kissed and I nibbled on his lips, which were surprisingly sweet, so I pulled back into a questioning glance. ‘Oh, it’s honey lip gloss,’ he remarked. We had sex on the balcony, in the dead of the night on the cold floor, writhing away like two coiled snakes stuck together by an uncontrollable appetite. Afterwards, we smoked the joint, had sex again with me on top and then on all fours, and I never saw him again. I still think about that night sometimes.
I thought about it when I had sex with the software engineer, clinical and rough, which was like rubbing two pieces of burnt toast together and watching the soot shower down on the cutting board. He was vehemently against using a lubricant, but had no problem dousing his toast in butter the next morning. I had offered him oatmeal, toast, and eggs and he picked toast along with some fruits that I sometimes stashed in case any of the men I brought home got peckish. It always worked – they helped themselves to something and I sat across watching them eat, animals fattening up before a slaughter.
I went back on the app and tried to find someone else, a small snack for my bourgeoning hunger. A married man asked me why I was on the app, as if my intention was questionable, and I told him ‘to eat all the married men’. He said I was disgusting, that married men would prefer someone pure and submissive, and ‘not the monster’ that I was. I told him that he was being hormonal and silly and that his profile picture suggested his ass might taste dry and mealy, but it would still do. I was up for it. He blocked me, which meant that I had to join my flatmate for dinner, stuffing slippery aubergines into my mouth and pretending they were succulent organs.
I didn’t start out this way. Once, when I was 15, my grandmother pulled me aside and told me something that her grandmother had told her, that we each have monsters within ourselves: fires that can ravage us, and desires and despair that can consume us whole and regurgitate parts of our inadequacy back to ourselves. The sole remedy to quell this was hunger, she said. I took her words to heart – it tasted like liverwurst, onions, and heavy cream, accompanying me for years to come.
After I left my hometown, I consumed with an aggression, ravenous in the pursuit of pleasure and revelling in the addiction of the amorous and delicious possibilities that lay ahead. Too many people had told me too many times that I was too innocent and diligent and kind for a wild life, for any sort of gratification, for unattainable hunger, for anything monstrous. That I had the cherubic face of a baby shaped out of butter and that I would melt at the sight of anything remotely lukewarm. And that I was grotesque but in a charming, unique way. There was no point in insisting that I was indeed capable of feral and unpredictable acts of passion. I had to prove my hunger.
So I decided to pursue a couple of flings. There was the maths teacher and the software engineer, but also a lawyer with the biggest bookshelf I’d ever seen, an interior designer whose wedding got cancelled after we hooked up, an ngo worker who had a micropenis, a journalist who’d always take his rum at 8pm even if that meant smuggling a hip flask to a child’s birthday party, and a violinist who (unwillingly) played the violin. Our affairs weren’t wild, but they satiated me, my stomach bursting at its seams.
When I abandoned the app for a few months and started coming up white and ghostly, smelling of rot, rust, and lime, my flatmate took pity on me and introduced me to M – the guy who broke my heart. M and I met while he was smoking a joint in his house and I, a stranger, walked over to him and said, ‘Can I have a hit please?’ He smiled and passed it over. I took a whiff, of both the joint and my surroundings – M smelled of sandalwood, ginger, and black pepper, which I later learned was his aftershave.
That cool nonchalance and the heady fragrance were an instant attraction. My flatmate, our mutual friend, who invited me to the party at his house, popped up and said – ‘My friend, remember? She may be Venus in disguise.’ M gave me a smile in a weed-induced haze, his eyelids slanting down and his face into an understanding nod. There was no thumbs up, no smugness. For half an hour, we shared a joint, dragging it back and forth between us, rendering everyone else invisible.
When the joint was over, we both started smoking with gusto: M with his packet of cigarettes that lasted each smoking session and me with my spiced cigarettes that other smokers always shunned, for which I was thankful. Soon, everyone started swaying and jumping to the music, but I was too absorbed by M and his slurry speech, his stubbly face and khaki trousers, and his smooth silken voice enriched by whiskey and honey.
The next day at work, I messaged my flatmate asking about M. She replied with his phone number and a wink – ‘He asked me to pass it on.’ A fairytale start. The whole desk vibrated with alarm. It was my phone with another message from my flatmate: ‘I hope he learns to love his monster,’ it read.
My stomach rumbled; I was hungry again.
A few months into the relationship with M, he adopted a dog with his flatmates – a smelly, flea-infested mongrel that was in desperate need of love and attention. It reminded me too much of myself. Maybe because it saw me for who I was, the dog never warmed up to me, only howling uncontrollably whenever I got near it. S told me to stay away from the dog for a little while, at least until we got used to each other’s presence.
Although it was a shared responsibility, it was M who took care of the dog. He woke up early to take it on walks, would go to the vet between work meetings, hard boil two dozen eggs for the dog, let the dog slobber all over his sheets and cuddle up to him at night. I was visibly jealous. It was moments like these that informed me of the true depth of my heart, falling rapidly into quicksand. And there was that bile rising again. The dog took up more and more of my time with M and he gave into it, even cancelling dates so he could stay home with it. On nights I would stay over at his, the dog would jump in bed in between us, edging me to the end of the mattress. I would get up to smoke near the window, but M wouldn’t have it – I had to step out onto the terrace to smoke. It saddened me that M never accompanied me on those occasions, choosing to smoke alone.
The end of our relationship started with fewer visits to his place. M never questioned this and instead encouraged this opportunity by telling me that ‘we probably need the space’ even though we lived at opposite ends of this strange city with its permanent potholes, dark corners, and sweet-smelling sewers. Plus there was the damned dog to feed, take on walks, and spend time with. We were both stubborn so neither would be the first to reach out. Things were left unsaid and ignored till it burst in our faces, feeling like a heavy rain cloud on an unusually scorching, humid day. We were enslaved in a pattern of our own design that brought forth a premonition of understanding that this was not to be.
I’d like to think it came to a head on my birthday. I had set the time, booked the restaurant (vegetarian even, to appease M and our friends), informed them it was my birthday – things a loving partner should’ve done – but I cut him some slack to keep the peace. He had, after all, baked a cake from scratch and surprised me with it on the day before my birthday. But he also lit his cigarettes on the birthday candles and forbade me from blowing them out, watching me struggle to cut the cake without burning myself. It was a long, excruciating wait at the restaurant for M to show up before my flatmate nudged me and said that her patience was waning, which meant that mine had to, too. ‘How long do you expect this hunger to last,’ she whispered. I could hear my stomach hiss; an octopus had unfurled itself inside, its tentacles reaching out through my skin and enveloping me whole. I excused myself to the bathroom to vomit quietly but I think everyone in the restaurant heard me. There was a subdued silence when I came back to the table – my companions had left. My phone buzzed with a message from M saying he couldn’t make it. The muffled hunger within me took shape, its screams deafening and overpowering me in a crepuscular gloom.
It didn’t take long for M and I to break up after the birthday incident – my flatmate later told me that it caused a collective sense of relief, an easy climb up followed by an exhausting descent for everyone involved. For me, all that starving meant I had to go back home because I fell sick and required constant care. I needed my hunger to be satiated. I became a recluse, hearing my grandmother’s words echoing in my ears: to be separate is to be whole again. Bide your time; find their weaknesses. Feed yourself.
The night before I left, I journeyed back to his house to pick up my things. M was gently pacing about and smoking a joint, like the day I first met him. I’ve always been great at goodbyes, but that day I was tongue-tied and weepy, my body hollowed out and my stomach a stew of sensations. I ended up high and we had sex on his bed with the dog scratching at the door. I remember fixing my stare at his creaky ceiling fan that comforted me with its hypnotising daze. We awkwardly dressed and I lied to M that I’d keep in touch while he called me a cab. He only grasped then that I was latching on, guzzling his blood slowly, and reaching out to pluck his heart while the tendrils of the octopus gently cradled his head. But there was nothing I could do. This is who I am. A monster’s gotta eat.
Bloated with blood, I walked down the stairs of his flat alone in the dark and opened the door to leave his house for the very last time. Just as I climbed into the cab, his dog came rushing towards me, animated and ebullient, licking my hand before circling round and running inside. As the cab started driving away from the house, I opened the same dating app to find his photo smiling at me, his profile announcing that he was single and looking for a relationship. And before I could gloomily swipe left, my phone chimed with the notification of the same married sap, who’d called me a monster, sending me his address and asking me if I was up for it. I directed the taxi to his house, replying, ‘yeah if your ass is up for it.’ My stomach rumbled. Finally, I was on my way to dinner.
So I decided to pursue a couple of flings. There was the maths teacher and the software engineer, but also a lawyer with the biggest bookshelf I’d ever seen, an interior designer whose wedding got cancelled after we hooked up, an ngo worker who had a micropenis, a journalist who’d always take his rum at 8pm even if that meant smuggling a hip flask to a child’s birthday party, and a violinist who (unwillingly) played the violin. Our affairs weren’t wild, but they satiated me, my stomach bursting at its seams.
When I abandoned the app for a few months and started coming up white and ghostly, smelling of rot, rust, and lime, my flatmate took pity on me and introduced me to M – the guy who broke my heart. M and I met while he was smoking a joint in his house and I, a stranger, walked over to him and said, ‘Can I have a hit please?’ He smiled and passed it over. I took a whiff, of both the joint and my surroundings – M smelled of sandalwood, ginger, and black pepper, which I later learned was his aftershave.
That cool nonchalance and the heady fragrance were an instant attraction. My flatmate, our mutual friend, who invited me to the party at his house, popped up and said – ‘My friend, remember? She may be Venus in disguise.’ M gave me a smile in a weed-induced haze, his eyelids slanting down and his face into an understanding nod. There was no thumbs up, no smugness. For half an hour, we shared a joint, dragging it back and forth between us, rendering everyone else invisible.
When the joint was over, we both started smoking with gusto: M with his packet of cigarettes that lasted each smoking session and me with my spiced cigarettes that other smokers always shunned, for which I was thankful. Soon, everyone started swaying and jumping to the music, but I was too absorbed by M and his slurry speech, his stubbly face and khaki trousers, and his smooth silken voice enriched by whiskey and honey.
The next day at work, I messaged my flatmate asking about M. She replied with his phone number and a wink – ‘He asked me to pass it on.’ A fairytale start. The whole desk vibrated with alarm. It was my phone with another message from my flatmate: ‘I hope he learns to love his monster,’ it read.
My stomach rumbled; I was hungry again.
A few months into the relationship with M, he adopted a dog with his flatmates – a smelly, flea-infested mongrel that was in desperate need of love and attention. It reminded me too much of myself. Maybe because it saw me for who I was, the dog never warmed up to me, only howling uncontrollably whenever I got near it. S told me to stay away from the dog for a little while, at least until we got used to each other’s presence.
Although it was a shared responsibility, it was M who took care of the dog. He woke up early to take it on walks, would go to the vet between work meetings, hard boil two dozen eggs for the dog, let the dog slobber all over his sheets and cuddle up to him at night. I was visibly jealous. It was moments like these that informed me of the true depth of my heart, falling rapidly into quicksand. And there was that bile rising again. The dog took up more and more of my time with M and he gave into it, even cancelling dates so he could stay home with it. On nights I would stay over at his, the dog would jump in bed in between us, edging me to the end of the mattress. I would get up to smoke near the window, but M wouldn’t have it – I had to step out onto the terrace to smoke. It saddened me that M never accompanied me on those occasions, choosing to smoke alone.
The end of our relationship started with fewer visits to his place. M never questioned this and instead encouraged this opportunity by telling me that ‘we probably need the space’ even though we lived at opposite ends of this strange city with its permanent potholes, dark corners, and sweet-smelling sewers. Plus there was the damned dog to feed, take on walks, and spend time with. We were both stubborn so neither would be the first to reach out. Things were left unsaid and ignored till it burst in our faces, feeling like a heavy rain cloud on an unusually scorching, humid day. We were enslaved in a pattern of our own design that brought forth a premonition of understanding that this was not to be.
I’d like to think it came to a head on my birthday. I had set the time, booked the restaurant (vegetarian even, to appease M and our friends), informed them it was my birthday – things a loving partner should’ve done – but I cut him some slack to keep the peace. He had, after all, baked a cake from scratch and surprised me with it on the day before my birthday. But he also lit his cigarettes on the birthday candles and forbade me from blowing them out, watching me struggle to cut the cake without burning myself. It was a long, excruciating wait at the restaurant for M to show up before my flatmate nudged me and said that her patience was waning, which meant that mine had to, too. ‘How long do you expect this hunger to last,’ she whispered. I could hear my stomach hiss; an octopus had unfurled itself inside, its tentacles reaching out through my skin and enveloping me whole. I excused myself to the bathroom to vomit quietly but I think everyone in the restaurant heard me. There was a subdued silence when I came back to the table – my companions had left. My phone buzzed with a message from M saying he couldn’t make it. The muffled hunger within me took shape, its screams deafening and overpowering me in a crepuscular gloom.
It didn’t take long for M and I to break up after the birthday incident – my flatmate later told me that it caused a collective sense of relief, an easy climb up followed by an exhausting descent for everyone involved. For me, all that starving meant I had to go back home because I fell sick and required constant care. I needed my hunger to be satiated. I became a recluse, hearing my grandmother’s words echoing in my ears: to be separate is to be whole again. Bide your time; find their weaknesses. Feed yourself.
The night before I left, I journeyed back to his house to pick up my things. M was gently pacing about and smoking a joint, like the day I first met him. I’ve always been great at goodbyes, but that day I was tongue-tied and weepy, my body hollowed out and my stomach a stew of sensations. I ended up high and we had sex on his bed with the dog scratching at the door. I remember fixing my stare at his creaky ceiling fan that comforted me with its hypnotising daze. We awkwardly dressed and I lied to M that I’d keep in touch while he called me a cab. He only grasped then that I was latching on, guzzling his blood slowly, and reaching out to pluck his heart while the tendrils of the octopus gently cradled his head. But there was nothing I could do. This is who I am. A monster’s gotta eat.
Bloated with blood, I walked down the stairs of his flat alone in the dark and opened the door to leave his house for the very last time. Just as I climbed into the cab, his dog came rushing towards me, animated and ebullient, licking my hand before circling round and running inside. As the cab started driving away from the house, I opened the same dating app to find his photo smiling at me, his profile announcing that he was single and looking for a relationship. And before I could gloomily swipe left, my phone chimed with the notification of the same married sap, who’d called me a monster, sending me his address and asking me if I was up for it. I directed the taxi to his house, replying, ‘yeah if your ass is up for it.’ My stomach rumbled. Finally, I was on my way to dinner.