The night of 13 February I returned from Kumbh Mela with Sou, and I had wanted a peaceful 14 February morning and day with him. Hotels were crazy overbooked in Varanasi and I had not been able to find a room, and I asked Nadya if she could share a room with her cameraman so that Sou and I would have a place to which to return. She can be completely oblivious to daily affairs and she, for whatever reason, decided not to do this and to not inform me either.
Sou and I were exhausted and when we returned to her room she was sleeping in it. I asked her to leave on the basis of her committing to do so, and it being past midnight, and Sou and I wanting a peaceful Valentine’s Day. She was upset and then she left.
Sou and I had been staying awake for most of every night that he had been here. I felt deeply connected to him; I suppose we made love and I suppose we had sex, but the intensity of the experience with him was looking into his eyes and holding his body and having the most grilling uncomfortable conversations. This really happened every night I was with him – I was blissed out in love, crying on his body over the cruelty of the universe for putting barriers between lovers, laughing at all the fun we had been having, and completely exhausted by the confrontational conversations we were both wanting to have. Through all the conversations I was horny as anything and Sou is a lover of otherworldly presence. For a lot of reasons including his intuition, the control he has over his body, his understanding of the nature of love and lovemaking, some uncommon experience in love that he has had, his education in poetry and literature, his artistic nature, and his being physically attractive enough to have been getting a lot of unsolicited attention for a long time, some part of his spirit sourcing the romantic love in him has made him either a sex angel or sex demon. I am still thinking about him and he has been making me reconsider a lot of what I ever thought about sex and love. He gives me the feeling of him being a surgeon who serves my wellbeing, but who has decided that it would not harm me if he removed all my guts and placed them before me so that we could discuss them together. I was entirely shocked by some of the insight he had on me but at the same time was disoriented as someone who is being shown their own liver by a doctor’s latexed hand and asked what they thought of it. Sou strikes me as someone with a lot of ability to examine a person’s parts and consider their character but also still in innocence because of the questions he asked me – I wondered how he could be so naïve and yet be so perceptive, and it makes me think that he is only immature. I would like very much to see what he will become when he actualizes himself.
During that day we met his flatmate from Mumbai, who was visiting Varanasi as it was his hometown. We also met some other Benarasi people all of whom were connected to local manufacturing industry. I could describe that – it was strange to meet people so connected to export to the Western world and yet who knew nothing culturally whatsoever about the kind of people who were buying their products.
Valentine’s Day night we got a room in a hotel. It was the same as any other night except more intense, and he really pushed my limits. It was to be our last night together and we talked about race, cultural divides, dreams in life, career, the arts, family, friends, work and play, sex and love, fear, danger, and whatever else. We both consented to every part of the conversation and I had the feeling that it was climatic to my trying to understand him. I was dizzy and he said that he was also underrested also, because at this point we had each only slept a few hours at most per night for the last week. We talked another 8 hours at least without a break in conversation. At some point he told me to sleep because he wanted to pack his bags peacefully, and I did.
Soon after we met in Kolkata he suggested that he and I had a special connection, and I told him that I also felt it and that I felt it strongly. He progressed a bit further and asked me what I thought of him, and I pushed more told him that he seemed like an ideal partner to me. He suggested that we get married by Hindu religious tradition and I told him that seemed reasonable to me, if he was sure. He considered it and said that he was, so we had been talking about how to do this.
With not enough time to spare before he absolutely had to go to the airport and only just after he had packed his bags, we went through a Hindu wedding ritual. We did it in Varanasi, so Shiv was there, and I had a picture of Baby Krishna, so he was there, and then we had a candle, so Agni was there. We put on new clothes. We walked around the fire seven times. We exchanged mala seven times. I repeated some Sanskrit mantra that he said. We offered Kumbh Mela water. He put sindoor on me – I was taking a wife role, and I am not sure how I feel about being a wife because I rather like being male in every way and dislike female things, but I went with it.
I am not sure what this marriage means. I am as serious about this as he is for sure, but I see no way for us to practically live together at this time because he is planning school and our relationship will be much more likely to be successful if I go on in my career. I really do love him – a lot, he really really does it for me – but I acknowledge that this whole relationship is highly unusual, and it takes more than love to make a happy house and family.