The Sound of the Kiss

by Pingali Suranna

  “Narada didn’t say you’d make love to Nalakubara. His words came true. I’m the one you wanted, the one you were in love with before. It’s not so unusual to have to repress a wish like that, under the pressure of fear. Such things happen in the world.”

  Originally, of course, Kalabhashini understood this in terms of her superficial desire for Nalakubara. Only later does the true meaning become clear. Notice also that Kalabhashini was supposedly trying to persuade Narada to give her this boon—of assuming another form—in order to gain access to Krishna’s inner palace, where she could overhear Krishna’s wives talking among themselves about Narada’s musical talents. For his own reasons, Narada agrees:

  Narada thought to himself, “Some excuse! What she really wants is to become Rambha and make love to Nalakubara. But this fits my plan, too [madīya kāryânukūlama kadā].” So he looked at her and said, “Fine. I give you that capability. Take the form of whatever woman you want and go find out what Krishna’s wives are really thinking.” And he went away. [2.46]

  The critical word is kāryânukulama—the suggestion that this strategem “fits my plan, too.” At first reading, it seems to relate to Narada’s scheme to humble Rambha. Upon reflection, we can see that the underlying kārya—the deeper plan—is to bring Kalabhashini to the realization that the man she really wants is not Nalakubara but Manikandhara. She can achieve this only by actually getting Nalakubara—or, more precisely, his lookalike. She makes love to the Nalakubara she holds in her mind.

  It seems that the fullness of loving (krithârthata)9 may emerge out of the conflation of these two levels—the illusion, externally and consciously lived out, and the true, internal, at best half-conscious wish. The recognition comes later, when the two levels merge in the mind. The shortest course to release from illusion is straight through the illusion. Experiencing the depth of delusion is necessary but not sufficient. Motivation is usually skewed. Kalabhashini asks the Siddha to take her to the forest where Manikandhara is busy with Rambha—ostensibly, because Nalakubara was there, alone and available. This is what she thinks she wants. But she has also just been told that Manikandhara was unsatisfied, in fact insulted, by Rambha when the latter called out to her usual lover in the midst of their embrace. Kalabhashini’s “real” wish centers on this opportunity. Manikandhara is, on the surface, truly infatuated with Rambha and thinks he can reach the fullness of loving with her only if he has the form of Nalakubara. Kalabhashini, perhaps obscurely sensing the true passion within her, follows a necessary and convoluted path of impersonation: she has to become Rambha, become jealous of Rambha, and fall in love with Nalakubara, even make love to Nalakubara—who is actually Manikandhara in disguise—and all this in order to realize the true object of her desire. All of this happens in the mind that is constantly reworking the sensations of body, feeling, fantasy, disappointment, hope.

  Manikandhara goes through a very similar course of development with reference to his apparent wish to achieve perfect mastery of music and to sing to God all the time. With considerable pride he says to Narada, quoting a proverb, “People say one becomes great by reaching a great person” (tann’ andinavāru tanantalu, 2.104). Narada at once gives him a prescription for religious discipline that should allow him to achieve his desire. But at the first opportunity, Manikandhara surrenders everything and falls for Rambha—apparently a more immediate and realistic wish that eventually leads him to the understanding that he is more a lover than a Yogi, and that the woman he truly wants is Kalabhashini. Narada has brought him to this realization by giving him his literal, conscious wish.

  This way of reading the complexities of the Manikandhara-Kalabhashini relationship is sustained by the story Suranna tells us, through the words of Manikandhara himself, about Salina and Sugatri. This story is explicitly classified as an illustration of the experience shared by Manikandhara and Kalabhashini. Here is what Manikandhara tells Kalabhashini as a preface to the story he is about to narrate:

  “I’m the one you wanted, the one you were in love with before. It’s not so unusual to have to repress a wish like that, under the pressure of a deep fear of being cursed by a powerful sage. Such things happen in the world. It’s also no surprise that Nalakubara made such an impression on your mind that you showed no interest in anybody else. He glows with Rambha’s presence and is enlivened by her attention. It even happens to men sometimes. I’ll tell you a story to prove that. It’s a good story—that also washes away your sins. Listen carefully. I’ll begin at the beginning.”

  Manikandhara, we should recall, himself had a similar fear of being cursed; hence his empathic remark. He goes on to tell the charming, complex story of the shy husband, Salina, married to the voluptuous Sugatri whom he refuses to touch so long as she is fully dressed and ornamented, in his bedroom at night; he makes love to her only during the day when she is dressed in her work clothes and toiling beside him in the heat of the garden. After narrating this tale with its intriguing ending, leading directly to the gender inversion that produces Kalapurna, Manikandhara draws the moral:

  “Now listen, Kalabhashini. Your mind worked just like in Salina’s story. He was obsessed by rustic beauty and repelled by anything that smacked of ornament or fancy clothes. He rejected his finely decorated wife but was impressed by her plain loveliness when she was working in the garden—so impressed, in fact, that he forgot everything else. His story is a variation on yours.” (4.144)

  But how are we to understand the parallel that is being drawn for us? In what ways is Sugatri’s story a variation on Kalabhashini’s? The problem, not surprisingly, is one of penetrating a surface image fixed in the mind. Salina has a problem with ornaments and is “obsessed by rustic beauty.” In effect, this is his curse. He has to find his way to his own wife through seeing her in another form—unadorned, disheveled, covered with sweat in the garden beside him. In this case, the lack of ornament is itself a veil. Eventually, Salina manages to bring the two images of this single woman together in his mind, thereby realizing his love. Kalabhashini’s course takes her through her own fear of a curse—the mental association of Manikandhara with Manigriva, who had been cursed by Narada—into an all-too-similar situation, where she finds Manikandhara in a veiled form, as Nalakubara. Penetrating the veil ultimately brings her to the insight that allows her to combine the fantasy lover with the actual person. In both cases, the entire progression uses misperception or delusion, lived out fully, to expose illusion and bring about self-knowledge. The stories, not immediately similar on the surface level, actually constitute a deep thematic repetiton.

  And there is one more suggestive level to this parallel. Kalabhashini’s experience is compared to Salina’s—the woman’s to the man’s. But Salina, this appropriately named “shy man,” will soon become a woman, while his now beloved wife turns into a man. This exchange of gender seems to be foreshadowed by the cross-gendered comparison set up by the two stories. Here, too, lies an implicit statement about the convoluted workings of desire.

  [ 4 ]

  Pingali Suranna is a penetrating psychologist, deeply aware of the complex forces at work in his characters’ minds. He masterfully shows the effects of shifting perspectives and the interlocking energies and fantasies of many individuals. But he is also keenly attuned to the odd displacements that continuously come into play in the interval between the consciously held wish in the mind and the more deeply felt psychic reality. In a certain sense, Narada assumes the author’s role and voice in this respect. We have already shown how, while ostensibly teaching Rambha a lesson, he is actually bringing Kalabhashini and Manikandhara to a place of self-understanding. There is, however, a still richer and more intricate level to the process Narada sets in motion.

  Let us briefly revisit the moment of Kalabhashini’s anagnorisis, when she explains the nature of her choices to Manikandhara during their reunion at the temple of the Lion-Riding Goddess.

  “You know what else? Once when I saw you, the name Manigriva came to my mind. I
t’s very much like your name. There’s that story about how Narada cursed him and his older brother to become huge trees. I kept thinking about that. As a result of that scare, my desire to enjoy your body completely disappeared, as if I’d sworn an oath. From that time on, my mind turned toward Nalakubara. He resembles you to some extent. It was some terribly inauspicious moment that I set my eyes on him. I was focused only on the external form. I thought I was making love to Nalakubara, but actually it was you. I was incredibly lucky. It was like being pushed off the roof and landing on a bed of flowers.”

  In this strange account of omissions, anxieties, and displacements, one truly significant slip should be noticed. The story Kalabhashini refers to is about Narada’s curse against Manigriva and his unnamed “older brother.” What happened is the following: one day Narada came across these two brothers, sons of Kubera, playing water-games with a group of apsaras courtesans from heaven; all were naked. When the sage appeared, the courtesans quickly covered themselves in shame, but the two brothers remained defiantly naked—and for that reason were cursed to become two huge trees. (Much later the baby Krishna will crawl between these two trees while dragging a mortar tied to his waist; under pressure of the mortar, the two trees collapse, and the brothers are released from the curse and regain their true form.10) But what Kalahabhashini conveniently forgets is that the elder brother in this story is none other than Nalakubara, her fantasy lover. This critical detail has slipped her mind.

  What sense can we make of this? Why should Kalabhashini have opted to abandon her love for Manikandhara out of a fear rooted in a curse that was directed against someone whose name recalled his, but then choose for her lover someone who had himself suffered precisely this same curse? Has Suranna made a mistake?

  Hardly. There is, perhaps, a contextual explanation of Kalabhashini’s behavior. Her love for Manikandhara was born in the period that both she and Manikandhara were studying music from Narada. There was reason to fear that he would not approve of any erotic tie between his students. After all, Narada had shown how hostile he could be to the open expression of erotic love; the Manigriva story provided the prime example. The confusion between the two names—Manigriva and Manikandhara—feeds directly into Kalabhashini’s fear of the curse. But her choice of Nalakubara and her attempt to seduce him transpire in Narada’s absence. Kalabhashini had no reason to fear the sage’s intervention at this point.11 One displacement is more than enough.

  But if we look a little more deeply, there is more here than simple displacement. We could even go so far as to suggest that Kalabhashini had to fall in love with Nalakubara, whose name and fate she has somehow suppressed, for her own internal reasons—precisely because he suffered the same curse as Manigriva/Manikandhara. The latter two figures are, we must recall, identified in her mind. In this case, displacement is actually, as so often, a replacement. Nalakubara duplicates more than he displaces. He has a double necessity for Kalabhashini, for he combines Manikandhara’s external form with Manigriva’s curse. In this sense, it is almost as if Kalabhashini needs the curse in order to achieve the secretive fulfillment of her desire. There is no way she can go straight to the “true” object of her love. That path is blocked; even the telltale name, which reveals the necessary zigzag in consciousness, has been obliterated in her telling of the story. Fear rules her conscious choice, even as the passionate wish fastens unerringly on the one logical surrogate, whose fate reproduces both the original object and the danger attached to it. Forgetting is perhaps the most persuasive form of remembering. Kalabhashini’s whole history shows us with shocking lucidity how desire works through the mind that denies it.12

  Similar insights emerge regularly as Suranna tells his stories. In fact, the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu as a whole is a ramified exploration of the multiple modes of desire, or of sexuality, fantasized and enacted in various, sometimes outlandish forms. Each of the erotic relationships described in the book reveals a particular, inner complexity; each seems to interest Suranna for its own sake and to elicit an individualized portrait. In effect, these stories function like small, self-contained novellas or short stories growing out of the central narrative. Incidentally, many of them are entirely outside the frame of Brahma’s master-narrative and thus independent of his intent.

  We can list a few of these branch-stories. We have already discussed Sugatri and Salina, who provide a key, or analogue, to Kalabhashini’s experience with Manikandhara. Ultimately, this story moves toward the moment of gender exchange that allows the male fantasy of female sexuality, as well as the male envy of the woman’s pregnancy and generativity, to be tried out in laboratory conditions. Suranna offers us an extended, searching essay on these matters. Then there is the slightly ludicrous but touching demon Salyasura, hopelessly in love with Abhinavakaumudi, whom he alternately badgers and cajoles. Even when he discovers that she has tricked him and is certain she cannot love him, he still takes care to protect her from destruction. Abhinavakaumudi, however, devoid of any affection for this awkward would-be lover, has no qualms whatsoever about getting him killed. In Salyasura’s case, love turns out to be a fatal weakness. Who among the male readers of the Kaḷāpūrṇodayamu will fail to identify with this doomed and lovable figure?

  Or take Sugraha, alias Satvadatma, who rejects all the inviting brides that are offered to him because he is afraid of giving offense to any of them. Wandering alone, inconceivably alone, he seems to feel the first stirrings of passion at the sight of a carved stone image of a beautiful woman. Almost as if his desire could only be expressed by someone else, a Brahmin Yogi happens along and actually embraces, with utmost passion, the same stone image. Is it any wonder that the upshot is the curse of forgetfulness mingled with the promise of regaining memory when the story comes to be known? This apparently simple story reveals the rather desperate psychology of Sugraha, so deeply inhibited that he is not able even to embrace a stone. Only through a surrogate, or alter ego, can the desire he truly feels come to the surface. Not surprisingly, Satvadatma-Sugraha is the one major character in the novel who seems to have no wife or lover. He falls in love with a woman who is actually a man—Manistambha in Sumukhasastti’s form—and even that love cannot find fulfillment. Moreover, the condition for his falling in love, in this case, is that he forget his name and his entire past. In that state, and only in that state, does he rid himself of his shyness and allow himself a fearless, if barren, courtship. Satvadatma must ultimately remain content with serving Kalapurna, the man he has crowned king.

  No less intriguing a specimen is the winsome and pivotal character Alaghuvrata, originally Yajnasarma. For once, we begin with a story of a happy marriage. Yajnasarma adores his four loving wives. Alas, this harmonious affection does not prevent him from selling all four into slavery, although the treacherous husband regrets his action almost before the slave ship sets sail. As for the wives, they come to inhabit a bordello in the Godavari Delta after surviving a surrealistic journey with yet another peculiar couple drunk on wine and dice. Chastity and faithfulness are, in this case, ingredients in a dreamlike drama that brings these qualities into the same space as an exuberant, voluptuous eroticism. No wonder the children born from these mothers speak the language of śleṣa paronomasia, embracing two meanings in the same words.

  And so on. Each example has its own integrity and expressive focus relating to some deeply held human desire. Even what looks like the most conventional and straightforward of relationships, that between Kalapurna and his young bride, Madhuralalasa, has its own twists. Remember that Madhuralalasa is a courtesan reborn. Remember that she was once a parrot. At the time of her first death as Kalabhashini at the temple of the Lion-Rider Goddess, she asks to be blessed with “ultimate faithfulness to a husband” (pātivratyamu), a virtue that even “the most wayward of women” can attain (4.183). When she is cursed as a parrot by Sarasvati, Brahma mitigates the severity of the curse by promising that she will live, on earth, “a life of incomparable wealth and joy with natural, in
born faithfulness” (sahajamb’aina parama pātivratyambu) to her husband (5.59). As Madhuralalasa, she apparently achieves this state. But the progression she undergoes is itself important. Perhaps only the courtesan, who has lived out a life of uninhibited desire, can become the faithful wife. Yet there is still more to this sequence. Faithfulness is not all. In particular, even intimate loving still leaves open the existential problem of doubt. Is the love fully and symmetrically mutual? Does the person I love, love me equally? This is the eternal shadow of any love experience, which at some level may also reflect doubt about the depths or ambivalence of one’s own love. Issues of transparency and symmetry—or, more concretely, the problems inherent in the intricate business of interweaving the fantasy lover with some tangible and present person—arise regularly throughout the novel. Even assuming that Madhuralalasa and Kalapurna are an ideal pair, fully ripe for loving and whole in heart, the doubt about symmetry can still emerge.

  And Suranna addresses this doubt. At the very moment of the wedding in chapter 7, the new bride is distraught with doubts as to the fullness of her husband’s love for her. Will he even come to be with her that night? Perhaps he loves Abhinavakaumudi, the apsaras woman who is his first wife, more than anyone else? Why should he leave her? And why should Abhinavakaumudi, who has the most handsome man in the world for her husband, let him go to another woman? These thoughts go on and on, as they must in any serious love. Suranna’s innovation is in articulating this doubt, understood as normative, and in producing an unconventional means of resolving it—the maṇihāra necklace that allows omniscience to its bearer at the moment the central jewel touches his or her heart. With the aid of the maṇihāra, the agony of loving is put to rest; the always hidden shadow is removed. Kalapurna and Madhuralalasa make love with the jewel strategically placed between their hearts: