Let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice;
For sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is
comely.
Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines.
For our vineyards are in blossom.
My beloved is mine, and I am his:
He feedeth his flock among the lities.
Until the day breaks, and the shadows flee away,
Turn, my beloved …
By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul
loveth;
I sought him, but I found him not.
However censorious the church was about sex, many of the most god-fearing and upright men of letters wrote about it in explicit detail. John Milton justified it in the following lines:
Whatever hypocrites austerely talk
Of purity, and place, and innocence,
Defaming as impure what God declares
Pure, and commands to some, leaves free to all.
Our Maker bids increase; who bids abstain
But our Destroyer, foe to God and Man?
For sheer abandon to lascivious pleasure, there is nothing to match John Donne:
License my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
Then there was the American, Walt Whitman, who captured the ethereal quality of a perfect maithun (the act of sex):
… love-flesh
Swelling and deliciously aching,
Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous,
Quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious
juice,
Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly
into the prostrate dawn,
Undulating into the willing and yielding day,
Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet flesh’d
day.
Understandably women writers were more reserved in their expression on intimacy. But Judith Wright had no feminine inhibitions:
O move in me, my darling,
For now the sun must rise;
The sun that will draw open
The lids upon your eyes.
O wake in me, my darling.
The knife of day is bright
To cut the thread that binds you
Within the flesh of night.
Love, O Love!
It is indeed a many splendoured thing, which casts its spell on every mortal, of every age, sometime or the other. It is not easy to define love. The closest we can get to it is to describe it as ‘the feeling that you feel you are going to feel that you never felt before.’ This does not sound very helpful. So we look at its earliest symptoms. Its first manifestation is wanting to be in the company of a particular person. Next, the desire to be in the company of that person turns to dependence on them: in their company there is happiness; without them a feeling of emptiness within. The dependant status inevitably reduces the seeker into a position of subservience.
People in love are eager to serve those they love because while love lasts, there is no one in the world like the beloved. Bernard Shaw tersely commented on this as: ‘a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.’ People in love do not give a fig for their dignity nor to reactions of the society in which they live. Love demands a no-holds barred commitment to the other without calculating the risks involved.
Love can come upon a person uninvited and unsought. It can develop in the most unlikely relationships defying barriers of wealth, nationality, religion and differences of age. I am not sure if Marlowe was right when he asked: ‘Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?’ but he was closer to the truth in the opening lines of the same sonnet when he said:
It lies not in our power to love, or hate,
For will in us is over-rul’d by fate.
Why two people are drawn towards each other remains an enigma. ‘What did she find in him?’ is the sort of question people will ask when they hear of an attractive young girl falling for a grey-beard, the age of her father. She may not know the answer herself and will explain it away as seeking for a father-figure or somebody on whom she can off-load her emotional problems. But once the emotion of love has overtaken them, it drives all other considerations out of their minds and they can think of nothing besides each other. Like Browning, all the Latin they can construe is ‘Amo’ – I love. At every ring of the telephone they expect to hear the voice of their beloved. To wit Kathleen Raine:
Waiting for the longed-for voice to speak
through the mute telephone, my body grew weak
with the well-known and mortal death, heartbreak.
Love unexpressed can be like physical pain and is particularly acute among the young. But worse agony than love undeclared is love spurned. It can be a torture. On the other hand, love returned in full measure can be pure ecstasy. Poets have written about both its agonies and its ecstasies providing lovers a vast choice of verse from which to express their feelings.
Persons in love become oblivious of everything and everyone around them except themselves. Hilaire Belloc’s Juliet sums up the situation:
How did the party go in Portman Square?
1 cannot tell you; Juliet was not there.
And how did Lady Caster’s party go?
Juliet was next to me and I do not know.
It is a time when the lovers feel that all they ever wanted of life was each other and there is nothing more they have left to ask for from providence.
An absolute rule of love is implicit faith in the beloved’s words – even when suspicions come in mind they must be cast aside:
When my love swears that she is made of truth
1 do believe her, though I know she lies.
‘The maddening thing about love is that one can never synchronize one’s watches,’ writes July Cooper in The British in Love. She quotes Bernard Shaw: ‘The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.’ It is the unevenness in lovers’ relationships that causes suffering to the one who wants more out of the relationship than the other is willing to give. Joseph Mayne put it wittily when he described love as ‘a mutual admiration society consisting of two members. Of these, the one whose love is less intense will become president.’
The only choice for the less loved is to involve themselves as much as they can in their beloved’s pursuits: ‘The first thing to remember is to get interested in your man’s work,’ Nathaniel Gubbins’ character Mrs Miffins advises: ‘If it’s pigs, get interested in pigs and if it’s leaky taps and cisterns, get interested in leaky taps and cisterns.’
As long as the relationship goes well, God’s in His heaven and all’s right with the world. The sweetheart’s voice is ‘like music on the waters’ – and the lover expresses his emotions with gay abandon.
In one of his sonnets, Edmund Spenser writes of the lover’s preoccupation and his own conceit:
One day I wrote her name upon the strand
But came the waves and washed it away
Again I wrote it with a second hand
But came the tide and made my pains his prey.
Vain man, said she, that does in vain assay,
A mortal thing so to immortalize,
For I myself shall like to this decay.
And eke my name be wiped out likewise.
Not so, quoth I; let baser things devise
To die in dust but you shall live by Fame,.
My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name,
Mere when as death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live and later life renew:
The ultimate aim of love is complete mental and physical union ‘when spirit and body interanimate.’ Platonic love is for the impotent. Often a couple may start by swearing that their affection for each other would not involve sex. That lasts only as long as the man does not know that the gun he carries is loaded.
Love, according to Balzac is ‘the poetry of the senses’.
It is a combination of sex and sentiment. There is a French proverb to the effect that love is blind; that is why it always proceeds by the sense of touch. It is, as Voltaire rightly called it, ‘of all the passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses’.
John Donne put it more bluntly:
Whoever loves, if he does not propose
The right true end of love, he’s one that goes
To sea for nothing but to make him sick.
Being loved is altogether a more exuberant feeling than loving. It makes you feel omnipotent and on top of the world. One of P. G. Wodehouse’s characters being assured of being so loved: ‘He felt devilish fit. He would have liked to run a mile or two and jump a few gates. He felt grand and strong and full of beans. What a tripping thing life was when you came to think of it.’
One great delusion lovers suffer from is that their affection for each other will last all their lifetime. It is ironic that the oath ‘till death do us part’ is taken at marriage – and it is marriage that in most cases destroys that delusion. With or without marriage separation over a period takes its toll and erstwhile lovers begin to cast around for solace elsewhere. ‘To say that you can love one person all your life is just like saying that one candle will continue burning as long as you live,’ wrote Leo Tolstoy.
Love can die many deaths. The least painful is when life slowly ebbs out of it and the lovers of yesterday become friends for the tomorrows to come. But abrupt termination of the relationship by one party can generate hate of an intensity that passes comprehension. Charles Caleb Colton was right in holding that ‘friendship often ends in love, but love in friendship never.’
29
Love in the Age of Innocence
When you have enjoyed affection and intimacy with a person, you have no right to betray that trust and divulge it to the public.
By sheer coincidence I got to read two versions of the same love story, one after the other sometime in 1994. Mircea Eliade’s Bengali Nights was presented to me by Sharda Kaushik in Chandigarh. She had been very moved by it and bought another copy for me. ‘There is a Bengali version of the same story written by the lady concerned. It has been translated into English. You may be able to get it in Delhi,’ she said.
I read Bengali Nights almost non-stop and was charmed by its sensuous, near erotic descriptions of love between the young Romanian author and his 16-year-old Bengali paramour. It was first published in Romania in 1933 and then in France in 1950. Condemned as pornographic, it became a bestseller. Back in Delhi I asked my Bengali neighbours, Ronu and Beeka Karlekar, if they knew of the Bengali lady’s answer to Bengali Nights. The next morning Beeka sent me the translation of Na Hanyate – It Does Not Die – a romance by Maitraye Devi published in 1977.
It was as absorbing an account of the same affair with the exception that while the Romanian maintained that they consummated their relationship, Maitraye Devi flatly denied any sexual intercourse and accused her one-time lover of giving it a pornographic twist in order to make money – which he did.
Just as I finished It Does Not Die, Catherine Clement, author of the bestselling romance between Pandit Nehru and Lady Mountbatten, dropped in to see me.
I asked her if she knew of these two novels: ‘Do I know about them?’ she asked in some temper. ‘We had our fill of this Bengali lady. A French company had come to Calcutta to make a film version of Bengali Nights. Maitraye Devi was up in arms and was ringing up the French embassy everyday to have it stopped.’ (Catherine was then the wife of the French ambassador to India). ‘She had every right to do so,’ I replied. ‘When you have enjoyed affection and intimacy with a person, you have no right to betray that trust and divulge it to the public. Maitraye Devi has a husband, children and grandchildren. Being a respected member of Bengali society, a Tagore scholar and an eminent poetess she is entitled to keep the veil of secrecy over her past. Nobody has any business to tear it apart and cause hurt to her and her family.’
Even today, I am intrigued. Which of the two was telling the truth? At first I was inclined to accept Eliade’s version. He was invited by Maitraye’s father to shift from his Anglo-Indian hostel to live in his large bungalow. He was treated like a son; he misunderstood the affection as a trap to acquire him as a son-in-law. He was not unwilling. It started with their reading poems to each other: he taught her French, she taught him Bengali.
This progressed to playing footsie under the dining table. Maitraye began to visit him in his bedroom exchanging passionate kisses. Between the ages of 15 and 25, sex is explosive and ignores all perils. It is hard to believe that having gone that far, Maitraye could put a stop to it. She argued with herself and him whether what they were doing was sinful. Undoubtedly, the fear of pregnancy must have been an inhibiting factor. And inevitably, they were caught kissing.
The Romanian was ordered out of the house on oath he would never again try to communicate with Maitraye. He went to the Himalayas, took sanyas and returned home. He became a professor of comparative religions and married. He bore the scars of love all his life. He had no children. Maitraye made attempts to establish contact with him. And although she had an arranged marriage and bore children she cherished memories of the first and probably only love of her life. Hence, the original title Na Hanyate – It Does Not Die.
Maitraye Devi was not as disciplined a story-teller as Elaide. She put in extraneous stuff about Tagore, Hindu customs and values not all of which have bearing on the romance. For me this long passage from the novel is enough reason to accept Elaide’s version and reject her’s:
That night was magnificent. The moon beams creating a mosaic of light and shard had turned that street of Calcutta into Indrapuri – a paradise. I am standing on the verandah – the clock strikes one, two, ding-dong. The moon walks across the sky. She does Orion, the Kalpurush. I am standing alone leaning on the railing. I have not braided my hair, so its loose ends are in disarray.
On the wall I see my silhouette. I am watching it. Like Narcissus I remain spellbound by my own shadow. I gaze at the shadow of my slender body wrapped in the magic of the moonlight and I wonder, how is the mind which resides in that body? I am forever in search of it – Mircea says he wants to see my soul. Sankara had said that except for the supreme soul everything was an illusion and that madhabi creeper swinging beside it is also real. This night, with all these together, is a reality, a complete lustrous reality. I once heard the phrase, ‘to float in the ocean of joy’, now I realize what it means. My mind itself has become one with the moonlight, like the somapayees.
I have drunk the intoxicating juice – the essence of the moon. I am floating on akashganga, the sacred Ganga of the sky. In one hand I hold the lamp of stars, on my neck twinkles a necklace of stars – watch that burning Kapala – Brahmahriday, that is the vermillion spot on my forehead. On my feet jingle the bells of stars – tink, tink, tink. No, no! These are not the sound of the bells – this is a piano.
Mircea is playing in his room. I am sure he will sit playing deep into the night – just like me, he won’t be able to sleep. I know what he wants. The curtain is moving slowly and I am getting a glimpse of the unknown mysterious world. I had an unwavering faith in my mother’s words but now I am not so sure – I am certain there is no sin in all this. I would have surely known. Have I not many times recognized attacking vipers?
Whenever I think anything deeply, poetry rushes into my mind and as soon as I think of some poems, I remember the poet. How long since I have not seen him, but I feel no grief over that, isn’t it wrong of me? Am I breaking a promise? Am I going away from truth? Did I some morning – looking up to the sun – take a vow – ‘Let all my love flow towards you, my master. I shall never allow anyone, or anything, to become dearer than you,’ Am I moving away from truth?
Since a few days this question perturbed me intermittently. Today I know the answer. The answer has reac
hed me climbing on the steps of joy. Can anyone fall away from truth? It is truth that supports everything. All that strings of my mind are tuned to his music – he is the player – it is he who is playing this melody in me, it is he who has raised this wave of music in my body and mind. I am entering this wonderland through his songs. Somewhere he has written: ’When I look at this world through your music only then can I know it, everything becomes familiar.” He wrote this about God. I am thinking about a man – I am a little girl – for me God is not necessary – a human being is enough.
30
Aphrodisiac
Bran (Chokhar) does more than keep a young wife on the straight and narrow path of matrimonial fidelity to a papa-aged husband. It can even sink a battleship.
Some years ago a friend in his late sixties acquired a wife half his age. He was a quiet man with a lot of self-assurance. Suddenly, the self-assurance was gone and he became aggressively self-conscious. Although his wife produced two children in quick succession, it did not restore his self-confidence. And the way his friends felicitated him did not help: ‘Congrats! It doesn’t take much to put a young woman with child, does it?’
Since no more children came, he became even more self-conscious. He would veer the conversation round to how sexually well-adjusted he and his wife were. ‘I will let you into the secret’, he whispered in my ear one evening, ‘sexual appetite does not diminish with age provided you are regular in your bowel movements. Clean bowels, good sex. Constipation or loose bowels and you are done for by the time you are forty.’ That made good sense. I recalled Nabokov’s Lolita giving her aged step-father lover ice-cream which produced so much gas in his belly that he could not function. But the recipe my friend prescribed for clean stomach-good sex was new to me: ‘Table-spoon full of bran (Chokhar) with every meal and your lady friend will be singing like a nightingale.’
I now learn that bran does more than keep a young wife on the straight and narrow path of matrimonial fidelity to a papa-aged husband. It can even sink a battleship. Doctor Cleave of the British ship King George V discovered this during World War I. He found that most of his men suffered from constipation and the gunners were incapable of shooting straight. Before taking on the German navy, he put his men on a regimen of bran. He records in his Memoir: ‘ They went to the gents like clockwork’. Thus with their morale boosted hundred per cent, writes the doctor, they took on Kaiser’s Bismark and sent it down to the bottom of the sea.
Khushwant Singh on Women, Sex, Love and Lust Page 11