At times I was troubled for another reason. I suspected that compared to other young men—for instance Subroto—I wasn’t, well, smart enough, so to speak. I’d get high marks in my exams. I’d read books, all kinds of books. But all those dirty words the other guys could rattle off, all that spicy chatter over a cup of tea that would crack ’em up—I just couldn’t figure out all that stuff. And when, after much effort, they finally hammered it into my head, I’d blush and hide my face in my hands. Even as a fourth-year college student, I didn’t know exactly how intercourse took place between a man and a woman, or by which route a baby came out of its mother’s womb. By patching together things I’d heard during sessions with my peers and from elderly women at home talking among themselves, when I did at last learn the truth, I felt embarrassed to the point of tears. Oh, shame! How dirty! How vulgar! Did everyone have to do that? Shall we all have to, not just with prostitutes, but also with our wives—my mother and father, they too? Oh no! Why couldn’t it be some other way? If only babies could be conceived by a kiss, or by the mixing of breaths, or if a man or woman could give birth on his or her own, as it’s written in the Mahabharata, in the Bible. Wasn’t there some other, any other way at all? It is something so vile, so degrading. How can love possibly be beautiful and pure and sweet when behind all of it is this filth, this disgusting business? Like, if I marry Kusum some day, then would we … ? No, never, it’s inconceivable!
I was studying for my MA when Kusum got married. I felt bad, for now I couldn’t see her whenever I wanted to (her husband was a deputy magistrate, stationed in a small provincial town). But deep down I was almost happy, thinking I’d had an unrequited love just like in a Chekhov story. I said to myself, ‘The love which ends in separation is the deepest love. Kusum remains mine, after all. She lingers as a melody, a fragrance, a dream.’ You can only experience true love without the body, and that which involves the body cannot be love at all—I still had such ideas. But once I had a slightly different experience, and with none other than Kusum.
A few months after her marriage, Kusum came to Calcutta. Her husband went back to Dinajpur following the Easter vacation and she came to our house often. After her marriage she’d become much more outgoing, much more spontaneous and at ease with me. I still thought of her as a ‘lover’, and she was not averse to playing this role. We’d communicate with our eyes. One day, when she was to stay at our house for the night, she came into my room. It was the corner room on the third floor. She sat on my bed telling silly stories for quite some time. Gradually the house grew quiet. Kusum let on that she was feeling tired and was going to lie down for a bit. She put her head on the pillow and said, ‘There’s a lovely moon. Is the light necessary?’ It was spring, the month of Chaitra—the moon shone like glistening water, the southern winds blew in a frenzy. The moonlight fell directly on Kusum’s lips and cheeks, her eyes were darker and deeper. We spent that whole night just kissing, in the way Subroto had described. I didn’t embrace her. My hands lay there doing nothing. I simply opened my lips and sucked in her breath—redolent, wet, foamy, as if inexhaustible, sitting at the head of the bed with my mouth buried in that delicious fountain—just that and no more. Desire and self-restraint, mutual enjoyment and chastity, sensual delight and abstinence—in a strange combination of these that delirious night of wind and moonlight passed. It is strange that no other urges were aroused in me. Nor did Kusum indicate she wanted any more than that. Perhaps she thought this little bit was safe, or perhaps she was disappointed with me. Whatever it was, she never spent a night at our place again after that. Maybe she intentionally avoided coming over, for fear that we might have to go further. Funnily enough, that thought didn’t even enter my head. I hadn’t been dissatisfied in the least. I was still then very naïve, very much the romantic. For several days after that I lived perpetually in a daze, with a new sensation tingling in my nerves, a new fragrance on my breath, as if I’d come closer to my dream and had received positive proof that it was not just something fabricated from books.
On my wedding night, just like today, it rained all night. Like tonight, we had lain there side by side wide awake—but it wasn’t exactly like tonight. After one year of anxious hoping, I finally had Maloti with me, lying beside me on a brand new mattress placed upon the floor. On it was placed a reed mat of the finest texture. An oil lamp burned in one corner of the room. Ours had been a Hindu wedding (I’d had no say in that). A house on Harish Mukherji Road in Bhowanipur had been rented for the ceremony. The auspicious hour was at half-past one in the morning, and who knows how much longer it took to get through the whole affair. And on top of that, Maloti had been made to fast all day. Earlier, I’d thought this business tiresome, bothersome, a sheer waste of time and nothing more. But, as it ended up, I wasn’t even aware of how the hours had passed by. There I was lying on a new mattress on the floor, a little oil lamp on a stand in a corner, shadows all about the room, the smell of jasmine everywhere, and the whispering of her brand new Benarasi-silk sari. I couldn’t see her well, but I could sense her in every drop of my blood. I felt like a huge, ripe custard apple, splitting open, squirting out seeds in all directions. The silence, the impenetrable night, the sound of rain—I kissed her once that night, not exactly a kiss, I touched my lips to hers once, light as a feather. And once I placed my hand on her breast—feathery soft and warm and alive—it seemed her heart was pounding fiercely beneath my hand, that my heart lay in her reclining palm. Simply this, no more, just rain throughout the night, and the sound of that rain. Neither of us slept at all. We merely lay there, side by side, aware of each other. Now we were married, man and wife. We could do what our hearts desired, what our blood demanded. But it seemed to me doing nothing would be the right thing—beautiful, joyous. Now she was mine, and therefore it would be courteous to wait. Tell me, Maloti, did I disappoint you?
I was happy to be married, consciously, completely happy. Shortly after gaining Maloti as my wife, I realized I desired her body. From hair to toenails, she was growing infinitely desirable to me. Yet, this did not sully my dream of love but gave it a new intensity. The fantasies about Kusum that had shocked me appeared attractive when I thought of Maloti in those situations. There was nothing unbeautiful, so to speak, about any of her bodily functions. Why, I think I could actually lick the sweat from her cheek. I doubt if I’d hesitate to eat the food she’d already chewed. My attraction for her increased even more that day I first saw her lying, suffering from her monthly period. She was that woman, the only one whom I could love and possess at the same time. That’s the way it seemed to me then. By being with her the quarrel between my body and my mind had at last been resolved. It was as if I’d been divided into two parts until then, and now the two halves had been joined together. I was able to become a complete human being. This was for me the most amazing and the most beautiful thing about my marriage, about Maloti: my mind had made friends with the animal within. The animal hadn’t weakened, and yet there was a melody running through my head, a sweet scent wafting over me like a gentle breeze. For the first time in my life I thought of myself as a complete person, whole, free, self-possessed, self-reliant.
But even in that, even in that you were childish, Nayonangshu. From the very beginning your marriage was a lie, and that wasn’t because of Maloti. It was yours. Your scorn knew no bounds for those young Bengalis (holders of MA degrees and fashionable jobs!) who regarded marriage as a business deal and who advertised in the papers in the hope of hooking beauty and money and social prestige all in one package, or even those who married ‘for love’ and then whetted their friends’ appetites with ever new stories of nocturnal experiences. But you, a full-blown youth of twenty-five, what kind of lover and husband were you, may I ask? Remember, shortly before the wedding when Maloti and her mother went on holiday to Kalimpong, how Maloti jestingly called all those long letters you wrote to her ‘the weather reports’! Those letters were just fragments of the novel you could never write: a cloudy day, some ne
ws from the day’s papers, a tram ride down Chowringhee on a Chaitra afternoon. You used all these as pretexts to open up your mind to Maloti, as if she were one of your men friends, not a woman, a sweetheart, as if all she wanted to hear from you wasn’t that you missed her very, very much! But no, you’d never say that, even though it was the truth, for to say that would be a blow to your self-respect. That’s too common, that’s being just like ‘everyone else’! Just think about it, for the first few months after marriage you read poetry to her, told her tales of lovers famous in mythology and history. You understood but chose to ignore the simple fact that you were boring her. She wasn’t listening, just holding back yawns. And when the time came to make love, you wasted precious time only talking about it. You didn’t even notice that you weren’t loving your wife enough, nor allowing her enough time to love you. And today—today you can see the reality of that ‘love’ that you thought and talked so much about ever since you were fourteen years old. Jayanto, that coarse, ill-bred, unscrupulous fellow, for him this ripe, brown, Venus-like body, the craft of some student of Tiziano’s, opened up tonight. And you, you lie here thinking, just thinking—as you’ve done all your life. You think too much. You’re incapable of action, Nayonangshu. If that weren’t so, wouldn’t you have paid a little more attention to Aparna?
What do you want me to do? Leave Maloti and marry Aparna? Ridiculous—why do you have to get married? And how much clearer does a woman have to make it that she is willing? After her divorce, Aparna is staying in a flat by herself. She lives on what she earns; no children, no fuss—it’s excellent. She’s attracted to you, and it’s not as though you dislike her. Then why don’t you have your fill of the nectar when the flower has come forward of its own accord? But what if I get involved? What if I begin to love her? Well, so much the better. You could luxuriate in the pain of loving. No, I don’t want to raise a storm. I just want to keep quietly to myself. I can get by without that little nocturnal performance. I’m used to doing without it, thanks to Maloti. You coward, you weakling! You’re afraid of the body, afraid of love. Not of love, perhaps, but those two things are one and the same, Nayonangshu. The body is the main component of love—the beginning, the end, everything’s the body. Why do middle-aged husbands and wives squabble and bicker? Because their bodies are dead. Revenge—retaliation against nature. Love is organic, alive. Love is sexual. Love without the body is nothing. Like electricity, like electrical contact—the physical love between two people. The lights don’t have to be kept burning in a house constantly, but flip the switch and they come on, because there’s electricity in the wires all the time. It’s the same here. There’s an electrical connection when body meets body, so that even when you’re not making love, love is there, constantly flowing through your nerves. That’s why words are sweet, laughter is sweet, nearness is sweet, separation is sweet, quarrelling is sweet, making up after a quarrel even sweeter. It’s all the body. That connection between you and Maloti has been destroyed. The electric current no longer flows, and so no matter how many times you flip the switch or call the electrician, it won’t light up any more. The power source has been exhausted. But electricity is being generated elsewhere, between you and Aparna. Aparna can revitalize your starving body. She can return to you your youth. Wake up, Nayonangshu, make up your mind. Tomorrow take Aparna to dine with you at some Park Street restaurant. Have a lot to drink yourself and offer her a few. Then stop over at her flat. Take her home in a taxi, and she’ll say why don’t you come in and have a cup of coffee. There’s nothing standing in your way but your own cowardice, Nayonangshu. How long is it before you turn forty? When are you going to be a man?
three
It was as if a dam had broken—flood—the flood had swept me away, or perhaps gigantic black clouds had been gathering, since morning, motionless—the day had turned dark, darker, like a hazy blue tunnel, suffocatingly hot and humid. Then in the evening the clouds burst with a sudden rumble, pouring down rain, incessantly—squeezing, consuming, tearing my body apart. You did this to me, Jayanto. For your sake I had become Lotan a hundred times over. Where in the depths of my little body had this huge dark cloud been hiding for so long? Had I not ever loved Nayonangshu, then? No, it’s not that I hadn’t loved him, but I’d never given him all of myself—I can understand that now—I had always kept one part aside, without realizing it. I had been saving that secret, profound, ultimate part of me for you, Jayanto! He is my husband. Night after night, year after year I lay beside him. Bunni is my child by him—but none of that really matters. Can it not be that a child is conceived in a woman’s womb in a matter of minutes, regardless of conscious thought, of true desire, of love? Now I know how a mother of seven can still remain a virgin—wives in countless homes have perhaps lived thirty-odd years of married life in a body that’s deaf and dumb, and they don’t even realize it. And I—would I have known the mystery in me had I not met Jayanto? Angshu was unable—even when we were newly married—to draw me out, overwhelm me, drown me like those clouds in an all-out deluge, endlessly, insatiably.
When do women come to know that they are women, female? It’s probably not the same for everyone. I’d got scared and burst into tears the day I spotted a bloodstain on my frock. I was in school at the time, and we were playing hide-and-seek during the tiffin break. The girls wearing saris laughed when they saw me crying. The headmistress sent me home with the school nurse. I thought I had some terrible disease; maybe I’d die. My mother calmed me down, was very warm and affectionate. From the few things she said, I arrived at a rather hazy realization, somehow understood at twelve years of age, that all women were contemporaries, equal partners in the same mysterious world in which the male of the species has no place but over which he has authority—a world which was in fact made for the man, or was being made for him. I was stunned that the same mystery had found me, this child with swinging braids studying in class six—I was a little proud of it too. Before turning thirteen, I was put on to the sari by my mother—a great initiation in the life of a Bengali girl, the sari—something like the sacred thread ceremony for the sons of old-fashioned Brahmin families. No matter how uncomfortable it seemed at first, or however much of a deterrent it was to such games as skipping rope and hide-andseek, the sari embodied femininity, beauty, prestige. What pathetic attempts I made to cover up the lines of my sprouting breasts—what embarrassment they caused—before going to sleep, I would slip into my sari-envelope, aware that it held a priceless letter, worth lakhs of rupees. One day I happened to notice something that no one else in the house had observed—that there was a small hole in our bathroom door, very small, just a tiny chink that even the tip of my little finger wouldn’t go into. When no one was around I tested it and found that by closing one eye and straining for quite a while one could get a fuzzy picture of the inside through that hole. And from then on I made it a habit to plug the hole with a wad of paper before taking a bath—in case someone nasty were lurking around to catch a glimpse of me—perhaps some cousin of mine or one of my father’s students who frequented our place. In that unassailable privacy, either before or after bathing, I’d sometimes look at myself in the mirror—on a holiday, when there was no rush—at my growing beauty, my slim, naked, frightened, delighted body, the rain-flowers of my first monsoon, my narrow shoulders, my egg-like little belly. I caressed them all gently, and said to myself, ‘You’re nice, you’re mine, you’re another’s also. Have patience.’ By the time I got to college I was no longer ashamed of my body. I had grown taller than my mother. I didn’t look thin any more. In fact, people said I was rather beautiful.
I was happy then in an innocent sort of way—happy because I’d been born female, happy because I could wear saris in such a variety of colours and designs. One day my mother showed me everything in her jewellery box, piece by piece: a half-moon-shaped collar of gold, a necklace with beads like lentil seeds, a tiara, necklace and bracelet with inlaid gems, and many other things that I’d very seldom seen her wear. A
loud I said, ‘How gaudy! Thank goodness it’s no longer the fashion to wear so much jewellery’—but at heart I was fascinated that so much might be required to adorn one single body, or that people could think that all this was necessary. After that, whenever I had to attend a wedding or go to a friend’s birthday party, my mother would put this or that piece of jewellery on me, and I wouldn’t object one bit. In fact, I rather felt that the jewellery allowed me to be what I wanted to be, what I imagined about myself. I got further proof of this from the glances and behaviour of boys, many of whom I considered stupid and crude. But, inevitably, I had a few minor affairs between the ages of fourteen and eighteen—one of these might have developed into something serious, but the boy suddenly went off abroad, and I too forgot about him after shedding some tears. I had quite a reputation when I was studying for my BA—of being a rather sophisticated young woman, attractive, witty, intelligent (I was no dunce when it came to my studies). I was the first to be invited to any social function. When Nayonangshu arrived to teach and I saw how all the girls in the class perked up, I too unconsciously entered the competition. Just for the fun of it I had gone up to him and got myself acquainted, but serious-minded Nayonangshu turned that fun into such a thing that in two or three months’ time I also started to think of our relationship as a life-ordeath affair. And it was just my luck that my parents were not slow in giving their consent, even though my mother had really fancied another boy as groom, the son of one of her childhood friends, and the marriage negotiations had even progressed a bit, I believe. After the wedding, it was as if another person awoke within me overnight. Hearing the word bou from Angshu’s mother and aunts and other relatives was like some sort of a magical incantation—the meaning, the flavour, the melody of this little Bengali word seemed to permeate me, fill me, as if all these days, in spite of the surface glitter, I had been merely an empty shell. I could have spent my entire life this way, had not Angshu—had not Jayanto—no, it was me, I—I caused this to happen.
It Rained All Night Page 4