I have no pretensions of being a craftsman of letters. Having to meet deadlines did not allow me time to wait for inspiration, indulge in witty turns of phrase or polish up what I had written. Having met deadlines for the last forty years, I have lost the little I knew of writing good, scintillating prose. All said and done, my autobiography will be a child of ageing loins. Do not expect too much from it: some gossip, some titillation, some tearing up of reputations, some amusements. That is the best I can offer. Take it or leave it. It will inevitably be the last book I will write.
How many of my books will be read fifty years after I am gone, I have no idea. And, quite honestly, I would not give a damn.
New Delhi, 1992
Facts of Life
The easiest and the best way of understanding India is to look upon it as a diamond necklace. Its races, religions, languages and cultures are like precious stones strung together; each stone has a brilliance of its own but is also linked to the others by a chain which can best be described as Indianness. As long as the chain remains strong, the necklace will remain intact When someone snaps that chain, its precious stones will fall apart.
Sex in Indian Life
Many winters ago I happened to be travelling by a night train from Delhi to Bhopal. It was a fast express that made only a few halts at major stations. I found myself in a compartment of five berths: three below and two on the sides above. I had a lower berth, as did the other two passengers who were there before me. The upper berths were reserved in the names of a professor and Mrs Saxena. Fifteen minutes before the train was due to leave, a party of men and women escorting a bride decked in an ornate sari drawn discreetly across her face, her arms loaded with ivory bangles stopped by our compartment, read the names on the panel and came in. They were dismayed to see the two berths reserved for them were separated by a fifteen foot chasm of space. One of the party approached me and asked if I could take one of the upper berths to accommodate the newly married couple. I readily agreed and moved my bedding roll. Another passenger who had the middle berth also moved up on the other upper berth so that the bridal couple could be alongside each other. I heard one of the party stop the conductor guard and tell him to wake up the pair at a particular junction where the train was to make a brief three-minute halt at 3 a.m.
As the conductor guard blew his whistle and waved his green flag, the party took leave of the bridal pair with much embracing and sobbing. No sooner had the train cleared the lighted platform, the bride blew her nose and uncovered her face. She was a woman in her mid-twenties: pale-skinned, round-faced and wearing thick-lensed glasses. I couldn’t see much of her figure but could guess that she would be forever fighting a losing battle against fat. Her groom looked a couple of years older than her (‘professor’ being a honorific for a junior lecturer) and, like his bride, was sallow-faced, corpulent and bespectacled. From the snatches of conversation that I could hear (I was only four feet above them) I gathered that they were total strangers and their marriage had been arranged by relatives and through matrimonial columns of The Hindustan Times. They talked of their papajis and mummyjis. Then of their time in college (the halcyon days for most educated Indians) and of their friends: ‘like a brother to me’ or ‘better than my own real sister’. After a while the conversation began to flag; I saw the man’s hand resting on his woman’s on the window.
The lights were switched off leaving only a nightlight which bathed the compartment in blue. I could not see very much except when the train ran past brightly lit platforms of wayside railway stations.
The couple did not bother to use the middle berth vacated for them and decided to make themselves as comfortable as they could on a four-feet-wide wooden plank. They ignored the presence of other passengers in the small compartment and were totally absorbed in getting to know each other. Such was their impatience that they did not find time to change into more comfortable clothes. They drew a quilt over themselves and were lost to the world.
The sari is both a very ornamental as well as a functional dress. Properly draped, it can accentuate the contours of the female form giving a special roundness to the buttocks. A well-cut blouse worn with the sari elevates the bosom, and exposes the belly to below the navel. There is no other form of female attire which can both conceal physical shortcomings of the wearer as well as expose what deserves exposure. A fat woman looks less fat in a sari than she would in a dress and a thin woman looks more filled out. At the same time a sari is very functional. All a woman has to do when she wants to urinate or defecate is to lift it to her waist. When required to engage in a quick sexual intercourse, she needs to do no more than draw it up a little and open up her thighs. Apparently this was what Mrs Saxena was called upon to do. I heard a muffled ‘Hai Ram’ escape her lips and realized that the marriage had been consummated.
The Saxenas did not get up to go to the bathroom to wash themselves but began a repeat performance. This time they were less impatient and seemed to be getting more out of their efforts. More than once the quilt slipped off them and I caught a glimpse of the professor’s heaving buttocks and his bride’s bosom which he had extricated out of her choli. Above the rattle and whish of the speeding train, I heard the girl’s whimper and the man’s exultant grunts. They had a third go at each other before peace descended on our compartment. It was then well past the hour of midnight. Thereafter it was only the wail of the engine tearing through the dark night and the snores of my elderly companions that occasionally disturbed our slumbers.
We were rudely disturbed by someone thumping on the door, slapping the window-panes and yelling ‘Get up, get up. It is Sehore. The train will leave in another minute.’ It was the conductor guard.
I pressed the switch and the compartment was flooded with light. A memorable sight it was! Professor Saxena fast asleep with his buttocks exposed; Mrs Saxena also fast asleep, her mouth wide, breasts bare, lying supine like a battery pinned down on a board. Her hair was scattered on her pillow. Their glasses lay on the floor.
Whatever embarrassment they felt was drowned in the hustle and bustle of getting off the train. We heaved out their beds and suitcases. The professor stumbled out on the cold platform adjusting his fly. She followed him covering her bare bosom with a fold of her sari. As the train began to move, she screamed: one of her earrings was missing. The friendly guard brought the train to a halt. All of us went down on our knees scouring the floor. The errant earring was found wedged in a crevice of the seat. We resumed our journey.
‘It is love,’ remarked one of my travelling companions with great understanding. ‘They are newly married and this was their first night together. All should be forgiven to people in love.’
‘What kind of love?’ I asked in a sarcastic tone. ‘A few hours ago they were complete strangers. They haven’t the patience to wait till they get home and start having sex without as much as exchanging a word of affection. You call that love?’
‘Well,’ he replied pondering over the episode. ‘They may not get another chance for some days. There will be his relatives: his mother, sisters, brothers. And lots of religious ceremonies. Youth is impatient and the body has its own demands. Let us say it is the beginning of love.’
‘It may be the beginning of another family but I don’t see where love comes in,’ I remarked. ‘I can understand illiterate peasants coupling like the cattle they rear but I cannot understand two educated people: a lecturer in a college and a schoolteacher so totally lacking in sophistication or a sense of privacy as to begin copulating in the presence of three strangers.’
‘You have foreign ideas,’ said the third man dismissing me. ‘Anyway, it is 3.30 in the morning. Let’s get some sleep.’ He switched off the light and the argument.
The episode stayed in my mind because it vividly illustrated the pattern of the man-woman relationship that exists among the vast majority of Indians. Love, as the word is understood in the West, is known only to a tiny minority of the very Westernized living in the half a dozen big
cities of India who prefer to speak English rather than Indian languages, read only English books, see only Western movies and even dream in English. For the rest, it is something they read about in poems or see on the screen but it is very rarely a personal experience. Arranged marriages are the accepted norm; ‘love’ marriages a rarity. In arranged marriages the parties first make each other’s acquaintance physically through the naked exploration of each other’s body and it is only after some of the lust has been drained out of their system that they get the chance to discover each other’s mind and personality. It is only after lust begins to lose its potency and there is no clash of temperaments that the alliance may in later years develop bonds of companionship. But the chances of this happening are bleak. In most cases, they suffer each other till the end of their days.
I have no idea what became of the Saxenas whose nuptial consummation I witnessed. It is likely that by now they have produced a small brood of Saxenas. He is probably a full professor teaching romantic poetry and occasionally penning a verse or two to some younger lady professor (‘like a sister to me’) or to some pig-tailed student (like my own daughter’). Mrs Saxena probably tries to retain her husband’s interest by dog-like devotion, prayer and charms brought from ‘holy’ men. On the rare occasions when the professor mounts her, she has to fantasize about one of his younger colleagues (‘exactly like a real brother to me’) before she shudders in the throes of an orgasm with the name of God on her lips: ‘Hai Ram.’
The Saxenas are luckier than most Indian couples because they live away from their families and are assured a certain amount of privacy. To most newly married Indian couples, the concept of privacy is as alien as that of love. They rarely get a room to themselves; the bride-wife sleeps with other women members of her husband’s family; the husband shares his charpai lined alongside his father’s and brothers’. Occasionally, the mother-in-law, anxious to acquire a grandson, will contrive a meeting between her son and his wife. The most common technique is to get her to take a tumbler of milk to the lad when other male members are elsewhere. The lad grabs the chance for the ‘quickie’. Hardly ever do the couple get enough time for a prolonged and satisfying bout of intercourse. Most Indian men are not even aware that women also have orgasms; most Indian women share this ignorance because although they go from one pregnancy to the next, they have no idea that sex can be pleasurable. This is a sad commentary on the people of a country which produced the most widely read treatise on the art of sex, Kama Sutra, and elevated the act of sex to spiritual sublimity by explicit depictions on its temples.
Humour in Indian Life
Do we Indians have a sense of humour? I would answer the question in one word. No. Sense of fun, yes. Laughter, yes. Wit, sometimes. Sarcasm and irony, often. Sense of humour, never. What passes for the Indian sense of humour is no laughing matter. It may occasion a smile. More often it makes you want to spit.
You may well ask, how do you differentiate between laughter, wit, sarcasm, irony on the one side and sense of humour on the other? I will reply, ‘Don’t ask me for definitions because the best I can do is to quote different dictionaries. And that will not get us anywhere’, James Thurber, who was America’s best-known humorist of recent years, defined humour as ‘a kind of emotional chaos told calmly and quietly in retrospect’. Quite frankly, I don’t understand what Thurber was talking about. I much prefer the description of a humorist as ‘a comedian who doesn’t tell dirty stories’. Even this is not really satisfactory as I am often regarded as an Indian humorist but I am no comedian and I tell a lot of dirty stories.
Humour is something very subtle and therefore eludes precise definition. I don’t recall who said that it was like kicking someone so courteously that he is happy about it since he thinks it was the new fellow who got kicked. It is something that makes you laugh at something which would make you mad if it happened to you. The closest anyone can get to labelling a humorist was Hunt who described him as ‘one who shows faults of human nature in such a way that we recognize our failings and smile - and our neighbours’ failings and laugh’. Humour is not hurtful. Humour is not hateful. On the contrary it is an antibiotic against hate. That’s as close as I can get to defining a sense of humour.
Now let me analyse why we as a nation are lacking in it. The first condition, the sine qua non - without which nothing humorous can be created - is our inability to laugh at ourselves. We take ourselves too seriously and are easily offended by those who do not share our self-esteem. Sometime or the other, everyone of us makes an ass of himself. But how rare it is to hear an Indian tell a joke about himself in which he is shown in a poor light! Let me give you a couple of instances of how seriously we take ourselves. This is a true story about a minister of government. You know what most of our ministers are like! No sooner do they become powerful than they lose all sense of proportion and get inflated with self-esteem. Well, this minister I am going to tell you about was an exception to the general rule of arrogance and exaggerated importance. I saw him sitting all by himself in a corner of a restaurant. I went up to him and invited him to join my friends. He graciously agreed to do so. I introduced him and added, ‘My friends were saying that of all the important people in this country, you are the only one who has not lost his head and retains his sense of modesty.’
The minister blushed to the roots of his grey beard and replied: ‘Hanji, everyone says I am very modest. In school and college I never stood second in my class [in case you don’t know, that is an Indianism for saying you were always tops] but I never gave up my modesty. I had the biggest legal practice in my district, but I never gave up my modesty. And now I am the youngest ever man to be made a full minister but I remain as modest as ever.’
With great difficulty I kept myself from breaking out into guffaws of laughter. But I couldn’t retain this gem, illustrative of our national character, in my belly for too long. I narrated the dialogue at many parties and also wrote about it saying that as a nation we were unable to stomach success and even a modest Indian was not happy unless he could prove himself to be the most modest man in the world. Needless to say, all this got back to the minister. He never forgave me for making him out to be a bit of an ass. And once when I went to see him to ask for a favour, he dismissed me very curtly: ‘Aap mera mazaak uratey rahtey hain [You keep making fun of me].’
The other anecdote, also true, is about a young and very bright student who had topped in every exam he took and ended with a scholarship at Oxford University where also he got a first class first. He became a kind of guru and gave sermons on the Vedanta. The main theme of the message he preached was that the source of all evil was hum hain - I am, the ego which inflated into ahamkara - arrogance. And that unless you conquered this ego, you could not hope to better yourself. One day one of his disciples asked him: ‘Sir, I agree with all you say, but how exactly does one conquer one’s ego?’
‘A very good question,’ replied our philosopher. ‘I know something about it, because the problem of conquering the ego because of my many achievements is much tougher for me than for any of you. I recommend that each one of you devise your own formula. What I do is to sit padma asan and repeat to myself every morning and evening, “I am not so-and-so who stood first in every exam I took. I am not so-and-so who broke all examination records of my university. I am not so-and-so who became president of the university union. I am not so-and-so the most brilliant philosopher of the Orient. I am merely a spark of the divine.”’
Needless to say that those of us who spread this story about the formula to conquer the ego came in for some very uncharitable lambaste from this human spark of the divine.
The second reason for our lacking in humour is that we are very touchy about a large number of topics. We must not make jokes about God or religion; we must not make jokes about our elders; we must not make jokes about revered figures of our history except those which have been sanctioned by tradition - like for example those of Akbar and Birbal or about Maharaja Ranjit
Singh and Akali Phula Singh. Try and crack a joke about Chattrapati Shivaji within earshot of a Maharashtrian and you’ll understand what I mean.
We are equally sensitive about community jokes, which form a rich storehouse of humour of other countries. Although we have lots of proverbs of different castes and subcommunities like Julahas, Naees, Jats, Banias, Marwaris and others, we do not think it is right to relate these or jokes based on stereotypes in the presence of members of those subgroups. Perhaps the largest number of jokes current today are what are known as Sardarji jokes. What is surprising about this genre of jokes is that although most of them are made up by Sardarjis themselves, narrated with great gusto by them and arouse guffaws of healthy laughter, heaven help a non-Sardarji who is foolish enough to take the same liberty in the company of Sardarjis. Sardarjis are a unique combination of a people able to laugh at themselves but totally unable to stand other people laughing at them. This phenomenon is in acute contrast to the Jews who have been through somewhat similar experiences of persecution and discrimination in their long history as the Sikhs. Jews not only tell jokes about themselves but heartily participate in jokes other people tell about them.
With so many taboos, what are we left with? Precious little. Turn the pages of any of our magazines. Most of them devote a page or so to what they think is humorous. The most popular form is an item entitled Answers to Your Questions’ where readers’ queries are answered by a hired wit or by the editor himself. When I read them I do not know whether to laugh or cry. The other item usually bears some silly title like ‘Smile Awhile’, ‘Laugh’, ‘Laffs’ or ‘Laughing Matter’. Without exception, all the jokes printed under this heading are taken from some international syndicates or lifted from foreign magazines and occasionally rephrased to make them sound Indian. Almost all the strip-cartoons and comics are likewise taken from foreign sources. I have a sizeable collection of books on humour; I have yet to come across one on Indian humour which is not almost entirely plagiarized.
Sex,Scotch and Scholarship Page 5