Happy Valentine's, My Love - Thank You for Not Beating me Today!

My lover arrived in the winter of my thirteenth year, though I did not know it then. It came as a shiver that refused to leave, a cold that lived beneath the skin and would not be warmed by blankets or tea or the sun that fell across my bed each morning like a disappointed sigh. The doctors called it stress, after a while they gave it fancy names too. They called it the predictable failure of a woman’s body to keep its house in order. They called it everything except what it was: the first visitation of a god who had chosen me for his temple and his battleground, who would spend the next decade teaching me the terrible intimacy of living with someone who loves you enough to destroy you.

This is not a story of survival. It is a story of marriage.

In the beginning, he was charming. This is how all the best betrayals begin—with small gifts, with attention that feels like devotion. He gave me days so luminous I forgot there had ever been darkness. I would wake and my body would be light, cooperative, almost eager. I could run, could dance, could stay awake past midnight and feel only the sweet fatigue of a life fully spent. On those days, I loved him. I loved the way my legs carried me without argument, the way my hands held pens and cups and the faces of friends without trembling. I loved that I could forget him entirely, which is, I think, the deepest form of love we offer our bodies: the privilege of invisibility, of being so perfectly functional that they cease to exist.

But love, in this house, is not a gentle thing. It is a fever and a chill. It is the hot season that fills you with so much life you think you might burst from it, followed by the cold that comes not from outside but from within, rising up through the bones like groundwater after rain. He is always both. He is the warmth that spreads through my chest on a good morning and the ice that settles in my spine on a bad one. He is the lover who holds me close and the lover who holds me under.

The first betrayal was not the pain. The first betrayal was the not-knowing.

For twenty years, I carried him like a secret I did not yet know the name of. The neurologists were polite and baffled. The rheumatologists were certain and wrong. One man, who smelled of stale coffee and older regrets, told me that my symptoms were the product of a “somatic preoccupation”—a phrase so beautiful in its cruelty that I wrote it down. Another suggested yoga, as if the body could be talked out of its mutiny through breathing and good intentions. A woman with kind eyes and terrible news told me that some people simply have chronic pain with no identifiable cause, and that the task of living is learning to accommodate mystery.

I accommodated mystery. I accommodated uncertainty. I accommodated the slow erosion of trust between myself and the body I had always assumed was mine. He was no longer mine. He was his own country, with his own weather, his own laws, his own calendar of feast and famine. I was merely a resident, a tenant, a wife who had married well and then discovered that her husband was a season.

When they finally named him—multiple sclerosis, the sclerosis of many, the hardening of many places—I felt, against all reason, a kind of relief. He had a name. He could be spoken of, studied, tracked across the sky of my body like a planet in retrograde. But a name is not a cure. A name is not a promise. A name is only the difference between being haunted by a ghost and being haunted by a man whose photograph you keep in a drawer.

And now we live together, he and I, in this body that is both house and hostage. I know his moods. I know the way he gathers himself before a storm—the heaviness in my limbs, the way sound becomes sharp and unbearable, the sense that my head has been packed with wet sand. I know the seizures, which arrive without warning and leave me collapsed on bathroom floors, my body a geography of trembling I no longer recognize as my own. I know the days when every movement is a negotiation, when the simple act of lifting a cup requires a speech to my arm about why these matters, why we must continue, why we cannot simply give up and let the cup fall.

 He does not speak, my lover. He has no voice, no face, no hands. And yet I know him as I have known no other being. I know the weight of him pressing down on my optic nerve until the world goes dark in one eye. I know the way he tightens around my ribs until each breath is borrowed and must be repaid with interest. I know the heat he brings, the strange fever that rises without infection, the body burning itself for no reason, like a house set alight by its own occupant.

How does one live with such a relationship? How does one remain married to a lover who is also a war?

I have thought, of course, about the violent break-up. This is not a confession; it is a fact, as unremarkable as rain. When your body has become a country occupied by an enemy force, you dream of liberation. You imagine what it would be like to simply walk away, to leave him there in the hospital bed or the bathroom floor or the quiet bedroom where you have spent so many hours negotiating surrender. You imagine the silence that would follow, the sudden absence of his weather. You imagine peace.

But peace, like love, is complicated. To leave him is to leave myself. He is not a tenant; he is the house. He is not a guest; he is the marriage. To end this relationship is to end everything that contains me, and I am not yet ready to be uncontained.

So, we continue. We wake together each morning and take inventory: what works today, what does not, what can be coaxed into cooperation and what must be carried. We have learned, over the years, a kind of rhythm. He gives me three good days, and I spend them living twice as fast, cramming weeks into hours, gathering light against the coming dark. He gives me a bad day, and I lie still and let him have his way, because fighting uses energy I will need tomorrow. We are not happy, but we are not always unhappy. We are, I suppose, a marriage.

The prognosis is not kind. They tell me this in careful language, in rooms with soft lighting and boxes of tissues placed within easy reach. They tell me that this is a progressive relationship, that he will not grow gentler with age. They tell me that the lesions on my brain are like scars from old arguments, and that there will be new arguments, new scars, new territories lost. They do not tell me how to live with someone who is, in the most literal sense, destroying me from within.

But I have learned things they do not teach in medical school. I have learned that pain, when it has nowhere else to go, becomes a kind of love. Not the love of greeting cards and weddings, but the love of two beings who have no choice but to share a single life. I have learned that my body is not my enemy, though he is also not my friend. He is my companion, my adversary, my oldest and most intimate acquaintance. He is the one who has been with me from the beginning and will be with me until the end, and whatever that end is, we will meet it together.

My name is word in Sanskrit: Neer. In all of its variations and nicknames- It means water. Some days, I am the water that cannot move, that waits in its basin and watches the sky change and remembers what it was to flow. On those days, my lover sits with me in the stillness. He does not apologize for what he has taken. He does not promise to restore what he has stolen. He simply stays, as he has always stayed, as he will always stay, and together we wait for the season to turn.

And it does turn. This is the cruellest and most beautiful thing about him: he always quiets down and becomes almost loving, and then he always returns. The good days come back, and I forget, for a while, that they are borrowed. I forget that every remission is only an intermission, that the play has not ended but merely paused between acts. I walk in the sun and feel my legs remember how to be light. I laugh without calculating the cost. I make plans for next month, next year, for the distant future when he will be, if not gone, then quieter, more manageable, less himself.

This is how one lives. Not by accepting, not by surrendering, not by fighting or fleeing or transforming pain into wisdom. One lives by forgetting, over and over, what one cannot afford to remember. One lives by believing, against all evidence, that this time the good weather will last. One lives by loving a body that has betrayed you and will betray you again, because the alternative is a divorce from which there is no return.

Someone said ‘love is the opposite of war.’ But I have lived long enough in  this body to know that love can be a war, that the heart can be a battlefield and the bones can be weapons and the softest touch can leave the deepest scar. My lover is not gentle. He does not bring me flowers or write me poems or remember our anniversary. He brings me fatigue that settles in my muscles like concrete. He brings me pain that radiates from my spine to my fingers to the soles of my feet. He brings me days when I cannot remember the word for ‘chair’ or ‘water’ or ‘home’.

And yet. And yet.

On the good days, when I run my hand along my arm and feel only skin, only warmth, only the ordinary miracle of a body doing what bodies are meant to do, I am grateful. Not for the bad days, not for the lessons they have taught me, not for the strength I have supposedly gained from enduring them. I am grateful for this moment, this breath, this small and temporary peace. I am grateful to my lover for granting me another hour of truce.

This is not a happy story. It does not end with healing or wisdom or the triumphant reclaiming of a body that was never fully mine to claim. It ends, as all marriages do, in mortality. One of us will leave first, and the other will have no choice but to follow. We will go together, as we have always gone together, into whatever darkness waits on the other side of this long and difficult union.

How does one live with a toxic relationship with one’s own body? One lives by learning the grammar of pain until it becomes a language. One lives by translating seizures into sentences, fatigue into paragraphs, the slow erosion of mobility into a narrative that can be told and retold until it makes a kind of sense. One lives by refusing the easy metaphors of battle and recovery, by acknowledging that some wars are not won but simply endured, that some loves are not chosen but simply survived.

One lives. One wakes each morning and takes inventory. One thanks the body for what it can still do and mourns, briefly, what it can no longer do, and then one moves on because there is nothing else to do but move. One learns to distinguish between the pain that signals danger and the pain that is simply the background music of a life lived in close quarters with an unpredictable partner. One learns when to fight and when to surrender and when to simply lie still and wait for the season to turn.

One lives by loving, which is to say by staying, which is to say by refusing to leave even when leaving is the only reasonable response. One lives by making peace with the lover who is also a war, by accepting that the body is not a kingdom to be conquered or a temple to be preserved but a marriage to be endured, in all its difficulty and all its grace.

This is not a story of survival. It is a story of marriage. And like all marriages, it is both too long and too short, both unbearable and unbreakable, both the wound and the hand that tends it. I did not choose him. I cannot leave him. I can only wake each morning and take his hand—my hand, our hand—and step together into whatever weather waits.

My lover is not kind. My lover is not gentle. My lover is not the partner I would have chosen if choice had been offered. But he is mine, and I am his, and we are, for better or worse, until death does us part, which it will, which it must, which it already has, a little, every day, for years.

But not yet. Not today. Today, the sun is falling across my bed like a blessing I do not deserve but will accept. Today, my hands are steady, and my vision is clear and my legs remember how to carry me from room to room without argument. Today, my lover is quiet. He is sleeping, perhaps, or simply waiting, as I am waiting, for the weather to change. And in this small window of borrowed time, I am alive. I am alive, and he is with me, and we are, for this moment, at peace.

 Copyright©Neer

Rain - Nandini's Diary 2049

“Ven, cariño,” I call, patting the sofa by the balcony where Madrid folds into itself in terracotta and laundry lines. The rain here is different—cleaner somehow, less perfumed than Pune or Mumbai—but at sixty, I have learned that rain, like memory, changes flavor depending on where one is standing. “Sit with me. I want to tell you about Noop.”

He’s fifteen—too tall for his age, shoulders knotted with the new tension of wanting things you cannot name yet. He carries a notebook everywhere, like a talisman, and his hair cannot decide what it wants to be. Tonight he is trying not to look at his phone, not to check if a certain name lights the screen. He thinks I don’t notice. I notice everything.

“Who was Noop?” he asks, dropping into the corner cushion the way only boys who haven’t learned the art of unraveling gently can.

“My first great almost,” I say. “The person who taught me how silence can be a language.”

He glances at the window. The light over Calle de Atocha pools like honey, the city humming its late-night prayers. Madrid has softened me—a city generous with second chances and wine that forgives. But the story begins in the early 2000s, when I was twenty-three, with a motorbike that coughed like it had secrets and an apartment in Pune that smelled like damp clothes and cumin.

Noop was twenty-one. Raj’s friend. Serious face, soft voice, the kind of boy who looked as though he’d been listening for years before he dared to speak. We were both introverts—back then, people used to mistake quiet for lack, as if those who listened were somehow emptier. We heard the small notes other people missed: the scrape of fork against enamel, the rattle of windowpanes before a storm, the tremble in the throat when someone said “I’m fine” and wasn’t.

I met him in the rain. Of course I did. The chain snapped on my bike, and I was on my knees, hands blackened, cursing the universe in a language it understands—small, stubborn effort—when he appeared. Not arrived—appeared. There are people whose entrances feel like a page turning.

“Do you want help?” he asked, each word placed carefully, as if he were setting them on a mantle.

“I can manage,” I lied.

He crouched anyway, his forearms catching the rain like polished stone. Our fingers touched around the greasy chain, and the monsoon altered its rhythm, the way a band changes tempo when the right bass line drops in. We didn’t say much. We didn’t need to. Some conversations are skin-level.

In those months we rode—the back roads that stitched Pune to Mumbai like a secret seam. Long stretches where we said nothing, and the silence filled with the smell of wet earth, diesel, the metal taste of sky just before a downpour. He would point—there, a banyan with roots like a grandfather’s hands; there, a tea stall with a radio that always played indie songs slightly out of tune. He had a way of noticing that felt like respect. I had a way of wanting that felt like hunger.

“You make him sound like magic,” my grandson says, trying to braid nonchalance into his new, raw curiosity.

“He was a person,” I say. “Which is messier.”

And it was messy. Noop worried about money always; he kept his wallet in his front pocket and touched it when anxious, as if it were a charm against bad luck. He made lists, neat columns in a small notebook—grocery prices, petrol averages, the names of albums he couldn’t afford. He could be stubborn in the way quiet people are—once he settled into a thought, it was like trying to move a mountain with a spoon. I, on the other hand, was ambitious in the way hungry people are. I wanted more—jobs, cities, rooms with better light. I kept promises until they became cages, then ran.

The night he told me he loved me, the sky had dropped low enough to tuck itself into our headphones. We sat on a hill outside the city where the lights looked like scattered sequins, irregular, human. He stared so long I felt a phantom hand turn my face toward him, though he never touched me. “I can’t imagine my world without you,” he said, like a confession, like a challenge, like he’d been practicing the sentence alone on buses.

I didn’t hesitate. “I’ve always felt the same,” I whispered, because I had, the way you know a melody before you remember the lyrics.

“Did you kiss?” my grandson asks, all nerves and heat, his phone buzzing once on the cushion and then again, louder this time.

“Later,” I say, smiling. “In Mumbai.”

Because Mumbai was where things turned mythic. I had moved there for work—two weeks into a job that required a blazer even in the humidity. My apartment was a narrow thing with a kitchen that sighed in the afternoons, but when he walked in, the walls exhaled. You won’t believe this, but the room adjusted, like a theater settling before the opening scene. There are places—apartments, stairwells, alleys—that remember love and bend a little to accommodate it. That night, the air bowed around us.

We cooked—onions first, until sweet; tomatoes next, until surrendered. He teased me about how I over-salted like a sailor. I teased him about how he cut vegetables like someone translating a poem. The light from the streetlamps swung in, mustard-gold, and lay across his cheekbone like a blessing. When our lips met, it felt like a supernova. You don’t hear the sound of it, it just detonates.

“But then?” he asks, too quickly, as if bracing against a future he cannot control—the way his own crush hasn’t answered yet, the way his heart considers the possibility of silence and flinches.

“Then the world did what the world does,” I say. “It moved.”

I took a job in Delhi because I wanted the feeling of a map in my hands and a passport in my pocket, and wanted rooms that didn’t know my name. He got an offer in Bangalore with good hours and a decent cafeteria. We wrote letters. Real ones. I kept them in a shoebox that smelled like cardamom and ink. He underlined phrases and apologized for his handwriting. He signed with his initials like it was a code: N.

We didn’t break up. We unraveled with calendars. Distance is its own animal. It eats steadily, and ravenously.

The rain outside Madrid steadies into a hush. I watch my grandson glance again at his phone. There is a tenderness in me that tilts toward him, an instinctive umbrella. “Is she kind?” I ask, as if discussing the weather.

He startles, then tries a shrug that doesn’t quite fit him yet. “I don’t know,” he says. “She laughs at my jokes. Not all of them.” His ears pinken. “She likes weird bands. She doesn’t… need me to be louder than I am.”

I nod, and for a moment I see the narrow kitchen in Mumbai overlapping the wide Madrid balcony, spices balanced on a window ledge, the city folding like a map until Pune is only a finger-width from Atocha. “Then she might be worth the trouble,” I say. “The right person lets your quiet be a language”

He sits back, thinking with his entire body the way teenagers do. “Do you ever—” he stops, the question too large.

“Think of him?” I finish. “When it rains. When a song from 2003 appears in a café. When I watch someone cut tomatoes like they’re afraid to hurt them, which doesn’t happen often.”

He grins, despite himself. “You’re impossible.”

“Terribly,” I agree. “But listen to me, León.” I don’t say mijo; he is building his own name in his own language now. The language demands recognition beyond endearment. “Love isn’t a straight line through time. It’s a city at night. Some streets lead somewhere. Some return you to where you began so you can see it differently. Some end in a square with a fountain and teenagers pretending not to be waiting for someone.”

He looks at the rain, which has grown serious, European. “What if she doesn’t like me back?” The bravery it takes to ask this could bench-press a building.

“Then the world will perform its smallest, kindest miracle,” I say. “It will keep going. You will keep going. You will discover that your heart is an elastic thing, built to hold contradictions: hope and disappointment, tenderness and pride. You will write about it in that notebook and think you’ve invented sadness. And then one day you will taste something, a peach so ripe it surrenders, a garlic clove in oil, and you’ll realize your body kept some joy for you in a pocket you didn’t know you had.”

He exhales, half-laugh, half-surrender. “And if she does like me back?”

“Then you’ll learn a different miracle.” I glance toward the balcony, where the city has turned its face to the rain. “How a room can make space for two without either person becoming smaller.”

We sit quietly. The apartment does what apartments do when stories are told in them—it hums. A kettle ticks as it cools. Upstairs, someone laughs too loudly at a joke that needed the aid of wine. Down on the street, a scooter cuts through a puddle with a confidence I envy. Madrid, which has no reason to know Pune, breathes in sync for a moment with a hill above Mumbai where a pair of kids believed in forever because they were inside of it and couldn’t see its edges.

“Abuela,” he says finally, his voice careful, “do you regret… not choosing him?”

I think about it, honestly. About the letter I didn’t answer for three weeks. About the airport. About the way I have built a life out of different, unexpected joys—my work, my daughter, this boy beside me who trusts me with his new, fragile heart.

“I regret the pain we caused each other by pretending distance was nothing more than kilometres,” I say. “I do not regret the love. Regret is for things that should not have been. That love should have been.”

He nods like he’s pocketing a stone for later. His phone buzzes again. He looks. His face loosens into something bright and terrified. “She asked if I’m coming to the concert on Friday,” he says, trying for casual and failing beautifully.

“Then you are,” I say, standing, my knees reminding me I am human, not myth. “Wear the shirt that makes your eyes look like they agree with you. And take an umbrella.”

He groans. “That’s so… abuela.”

“Of course.” I kiss his forehead, the way I kissed his mother’s on nights before storms. “Bring her a small thing—nothing grand. A sticker from that bookstore, the one that smells like old paper and ambition. Or a lemon tart. People remember sweetness on difficult days.”

He slips on his shoes. On the threshold, he turns. “Was Noop your first love?”

“My first great almost,” I repeat, smiling. “And sometimes almost is what teaches us how to be ready for yes.”

After he leaves, the apartment returns to itself, but not quite. Rooms remember. They pocket voices and release them again when no one is looking. I stand at the balcony and watch Madrid shine under the rain. Somewhere far away, or very close by—time is funny like that—a girl and a boy ride through a monsoon, laughing too quietly to be heard over the weather. Somewhere else, a kitchen breathes and two people practice cutting tomatoes without hurting them.

I close the window against the damp and the years. On the table sits a small shoebox that once smelled like cardamom and ink. Inside are letters with a single initial. Outside, the city hums, and the rain keeps time.

Copyright©Neer