Khushwant Singh on Women, Sex, Love and Lust

by Khushwant Singh

  As the 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 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 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 in. 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 cry ‘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 exulting 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 were 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 bared bosom with a flap 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 school teacher so totally lacking in sophistication or 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 others acquaintance physically through the naked exploration of each other’s bodies and it is only after some of the lust has been drained out of their systems that they get the chance to discover each other’s minds and personalities. 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 consummating 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 charpoy 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 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 althou
gh they go from one pregnancy to another, 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.

  No people in the world are more confused in their attitude towards sex than we Indians. Our cherished ideals bear little resemblance with our patterns of sexual behaviour; our fantasies, heavily influenced by our mythology, impinge on our subconscious and add to our confusion because they contradict each other. A land of phallus-yoni worshippers laud the virtues of virginal chastity, renunciation of sex and brahmacharya. As a nation we need to be laid out on the couch of a shrink and subjected to thorough psychiatric analysis. This is precisely what our leading psychiatrist, Sudhir Kakar, did in his brilliant expose, Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality. Kakar started with ‘Scenes from marriages’, using as source material two widely-read novels of recent years, Rajinder Singh Bedi’s Ek Chadar Maili Si (which I have translated into English as I Take This Woman) and Krishna Sobti’s Mitro Marjani. Bedi’s novel revolves round the peasant custom of a younger brother taking the widow of his elder brother under his protection (chaddar andaazee) by a ritual spreading of a sheet over her. In this case it is the 30-year-old Rano, the wife of a tonga driver, Tiloka, often drunk and violent and mother of three children. Her devar (husband’s younger brother) is 20-year-old Mangla, who Rano had breast-fed when he was a child. When Tiloka is killed in a brawl, Mangla is forced to marry Rano who he had looked upon as his mother. Both are initially revolted by the situation but after a violent quarrel consummate their union with equal vigour. Passion for the devar is also the theme of Sobti’s famous novel. Both the man, Sardari, and his wife, Mitro, are highly spirited and are as often fighting each other as they are copulating. When the husband’s sexual prowess begins to wane, a frustrated Mitro finds fulfillment in adulterous intercourse, facilitated by her own mother. Kakar concludes:

  To me Mitro Marjani is one of the more explicit renderings of a muted yet extremely powerful theme in Hindu marriages: the cultural unease, indeed, the fear of the wife as a woman, i.e., as a sexual being. More exactly, it is the age-old yet still persisting cultural splitting of the wife into a mother and a whore which underlies the husband-wife relationship and which explains the often contradictory Hindu view of the Woman.

  The Indian woman as a sexual object is vilely abused. Manu reviled her as lusty, unreliable, unfaithful and with an insatiable appetite for sex. Kakar went on to explore how much of the Indian’s sexual psyche is manifested in the Indian cinema. He selected the two most popular films, Ram Teri Ganga Maili and Karz to establish that their success was largely due to the exploitation of traditional themes to become ‘collective fantasies’ and ‘group daydreams’ for the 15 million people who watch films every day. He rightly observed that ‘the Indian cinema audience … is the real author of the text of Hindi films.’ When kissing is forbidden how is it that rape remains a staple feature of Indian films? It is because a humiliation of the woman is an integral part of the Indian male’s fantasy of love. So we have evolved three kinds of lovers: Majnuns, Krishnas and those like Amitabh Bachchan, who is a ‘good-bad hero neither overtly emotional like Majnun nor boyishly phallic like the Krishna lover. In turn he has bred a new brand of heroine, ‘a masculine-feminine girl’, the Kumari as the tomboy.

  The most revealing of Sudhir Kakar’s exposes is his analysis of Mahatma Gandhi. Apart from material contained in his autobiography, My Experiments with Truth, Kakar has had access to letters written by the Bapu to women close to him and who he used (misused) as guinea-pigs to test his vow of celibacy. Gandhi admits that he was a highly sexual and jealous husband. The first trauma was when his father died while he was engaged in sex in the next room. He narrowly missed adulterous intercourse with a prostitute and later an English girl while studying in England. It was during his long sojourn in South Africa while reading Tolstoy that he thought of becoming celibate. He finally took the vow at the age of 37 without bothering to consult his wife.

  He experimented with brands of vegetarian diet which would lessen the sexual urge and had young girls lie next to him to test the efficacy of his formulae. He subscribed to the traditional Hindu belief that semen was the essence of life; if spilt during intercourse, it was wasted (except when used to fertilize the wife); if channelled upwards (orjas) towards the brain it gave man immense power. As a result, women who willingly participated with him in these experiments became physical and mental wrecks while his Mahatmatic aura gained more splendour.

  Sudhir Kakar’s thesis is sound scholarship of the highest order. It will take many generations to cleanse our minds of accretions of centuries of irrational beliefs in the sexuality of women before we can treat them as equal partners in what remains the ultimate experience of life.

  14

  Sex and Marriage

  ‘Is marriage a male convenience, or a female device for securing free board and lodging, or is it a refuge for both the sexes?

  Rupika has just passed out of college. Her parents are on the look out for a suitable match for her. They invite the family of the prospective son-in-law for tea so that they can have a look at their daughter. They arrive in a swanky Mercedes Benz. While being served tea by Rupika they discuss her plus and minus points in whispers. Rupika hates the entire exercise and treats the visitors with cold disdain. Her parents are displeased with her behaviour and continue negotiations with the boy’s family.

  Rupika writes to her uncles, aunts, and an American girl she had befriended at college, an English girl and a woman wildlife photographer about the indignity suffered by Indian girls in being inspected by prospective husbands and their family members. The letters are passed round and her correspondents write to each other. So we have a lovely correspondence on arranged marriages versus love marriages, the dowry system, which of the two sexes is the stronger sexually and in decision-making and so on.

  While all this exchange of letters is taking place, Rupika gets selected as air-hostess by Air India. During one of her flights she sees a handsome young passenger who also eyes her with approval. As he is about to disembark, he asks Rupika for her telephone number in London. Without thinking of the consequences Rupika gives it to him. Then alone in her hotel room she wonders if the young man will really ring her up. After many hours of suspense for Rupika, he does ring her up from Reykjavik (capital of Iceland). There the story ends.

  This is a story I read many years back. It could have had the makings of a good novel but the author Dr R.W Desai, did not have it in him to write one. So he made it into a compilation of letters – Fraility, Thy Name is Woman – which also had plenty on man-woman relationship to produce lively conversation.

  ‘Is marriage a male convenience, or a female device for securing free board and lodging, or is it a refuge for both the sexes?’ Rupika asks of her uncle Rakesh. The learned uncle replies: ‘The whole institution of marriage is a female arrangement to ensure protection and provision while she rears her offspring. The male of the species is a wanderer, and, of course, he has to be so because on him rests the task of finding food. For the man marriage is a trap, for the woman it’s fulfillment. Here is a joke to cheer you up. Do you know what “virgin” means literally? Man-trap! How? “Vir” in Latin is “man” (from which we have “virile”), and ‘gin’ of course means “trap” – so, man trap!’

  Uncle Rakesh’s letter is passed on to Nargis, the wildlife photographer. She asks for further elucidation. Uncle Rakesh replies: ‘Women are inherently possessive. This springs from the fact that they bear children. The mother carries the child within her own body for nine months; in other words, she possesses the child; the child is a part her, just like her lungs, her kidneys, in fact, more so because human beings aren’t really conscious of their lungs or their kidneys except mentally, whereas the mother is constantly conscious of the child in her womb. Her increasing siz
e, weight, discomfort, the physical, mental and emotional changes she undergoes, all of these are profoundly programmed into her psyche as a woman. In other words, being a woman, not necessarily a mother, means having this possessive strand interwoven with her very nature. The woman is the great possessor, first of her husband, then of her child.

  ‘Possession means a longing for permanence, for an unchanging condition. People who live in rented houses don’t form the same attachment to the house as those who own their own houses. The woman wants the man to love her for ever and ever. She deliberately shuts her eyes to those two terrible enemies — Time and Change. Men are more realistic. They know that all things pass. And yet, it’s precisely out of this tension between the two sexes that civilization has evolved. Had this not been present, man would have become extinct like the many animals who were overtaken by this fate. Why do I say this? Because I see this “push” and “pull” as masculine and feminine principles, respectively, both of which are essential for the survival of the human race.

  ‘Man pushes himself from home and hearth in order to escape the shackles of wedlock. And so we have travellers, wanderers, explorers – all men – like Vasco da Gama, Amerigo Vespucci, Christopher Columbus, Hernan Fernandos Cortes, Sir Walter Raleigh, Francis Drake, Captain Scott, Hillary, Hunt, Tenzing, the list is endless. So also with spiritual explorers: men like Buddha, Zoroaster, Mohammed, all travelled widely before establishing their religions. This spirit of restless departure is perhaps best captured in Tennyson’s famous poem Ulysses where the hero, now an old man, once again sets out on his travels. This sequel is not in Homer; it’s Tennyson’s salute to the spirit of the nineteenth, and the preceding century, during which the British Empire was founded with the gradual acquisition of India by men like Clive and Hastings, of the West Indies, of Canada, of Australia. Without being an explorer himself, Tennyson has nevertheless embodied in this poem, perhaps his best, the very spirit of his age, of his nation. I studied the poem in school, so do forgive me for quoting a few lines – I’m still deeply moved by them: