Kama

by Gurcharan Das

  And what can we infer about a civilization that regards everything as beginning with kama, unlike, for example, the Judaeo-Christian tradition, where in the beginning was light when ‘God said, “Let there be light . . .”’ If the Hindu cosmos is born from kama, I ask myself, what is the significance of the fact that this primal biological energy is at the origin of my civilization? As a child, I asked my grandmother what was there in the void before kama, but she thought I was just being naughty. Kama is a serious subject of inquiry in many great texts—the Vedas, the Brahmanas and the pioneering philosophical mental experiments called the Upanishads—all of them early strivings of human beings to understand the nature of the world and of the self. The epic Mahabharata devotes forty long chapters to grasp kama’s nature. All this earnest questioning happened well before Vatsyayana decided to compile the exquisite Kamasutra. He understood that kama is not merely a natural energy, it is also an art to be cultivated. Kama is used both in sexual and asexual contexts in the ancient texts, and it carries connotations of action, creation and procreation. Early on, it seems, ancient Indians had understood that this ‘divine energy’, also called shakti, is the source of the sexual drive and the force behind the life instinct, and this happened thousands of years before Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

  The Rig Veda says in another creation myth that the gods made a sacrifice of Purusha, ‘the cosmic person’, at the beginning of time. Into a fire altar, fluids, mantras and other offerings were made. Before being offered to Agni, the god of fire, Purusha gave rise to his feminine self, Viraj, out of his own being, and was then sacrificed and ritually dismembered. Through the sacrifice, Purusha became the universe, and his limbs became the sun, the moon, stars, animals, plants and human beings. This was the primordial sexual act that gave rise to the cosmos. The fire ritual linked human beings to the divine and ensured their perpetuation. The Upanishads state that ‘man is made of desire’ and explain that the ritual sacrifice replicates the sexual act as the fluid is offered into the fires of the womb. Thus, kama has the capacity to beget life.

  There are other, more charming Hindu myths of creation but now that I am in my old age, I am especially drawn to the ones related to kama. I feel compelled to make some sort of peace with my restless mind that has troubled me all my life with the vexatious problems of desire. Even today, there are annoyances that refuse to go away and continue to colour insistently the recollections of my early days.

  ~

  My earliest memories of desire are those from Lahore in undivided India. The next thing I remember is our family trying to escape with our lives during the partition of India in 1947. We were fleeing to Delhi amidst talk of death. Partition was a bad deal for everyone but it was the only one feasible. It was the creation of a few privileged men without the consent of the people. In the end, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, ‘the bad boy’, was ‘sent off with a moth-eaten state’, while the Congress got ‘what it wanted, but continued to complain that they were robbed of their cherished dream of a united India’.

  I was curled up against my mother in the train at Lahore station, clinging to her neck, making it wet with my tears. The warm breath from her wheezing chest covered my cheek. She was asthmatic, and her chest heaved in an eruption of coughing. Suddenly, I was separated from her and I was passed to an uncle through the window of the train and taken away from the women’s compartment. I thrashed about on the berth next to my father as the train jerked and then lumbered out of the station. The clackety-clack gathered force, drumming into me the conviction that I was being carried farther and farther away from the safe harbour of her neck and breast. I must have gone to sleep and the next thing I remember is of being deliriously happy when I was reunited with her the following morning when the train pulled into the Old Delhi station.

  My father was a doctor by profession, and since doctors were in demand, he quickly got a job with the government. We had never seen anything quite as grand as Lutyens’ Delhi, and we embraced it with reckless abandon, and this helped us to forget the ones we had lost in Pakistan, including my aunt who had been hacked to death while trying to escape. Initially, we lived in tents like refugees, where I remember my mother crying all day long waiting for news about her family. Soon, however, we shifted to one of the newfangled colonies built by the public works department that came up in South Delhi to house middle-level officials. Our whitewashed flat was situated near India Gate.

  I was put in an English missionary school run by the Christian Brothers, and it taught me early on to deny desire, linking it with guilt and shame. I cried on the first day when my mother left me in the headmaster’s office. He took me to Class 1 where I stood shyly behind the door, refusing to go in. The boys were half asleep when we entered but everyone jumped up when they saw the head. I was shorter than the others and my hair was cut square, parted in the middle like a peasant’s. I was ill at ease in a new shirt that my mother had bought the day before—it pinched under my arms. My ill-fitting khaki shorts braced up tight around my thighs. On my feet were sturdy new Bata shoes, which marked our middle-class status.

  The boys began to go over the lesson. I listened intently sitting at the back, not daring even to cross my legs, ignoring the paper airplanes that flew past and landed periodically at my feet. From my mother’s playful chatter at home, I was familiar by now with the letters and numbers that the boys were reciting. When the bell rang in the afternoon, everyone left. I stayed at my desk, and I think I would have kept sitting there all afternoon had the teacher not returned to pick up her bag. She told me that school was over and I could go home.

  The daily two-mile ride to school on my bicycle framed my new life. In the mornings, I would be rushed and nervous, my hair wet, as I hurriedly rode to school. In the afternoons I would dawdle back, often in the company of other boys. After I reached home, my mother would sit down with me at the dining table with milk and sandwiches, and shower me with questions about the day’s happenings. She would bring out pictures that she had lovingly cut from magazines and tell me animal stories from the Panchatantra. I liked hearing them again and again, and she kept on her lively prattle till my father returned from work. Sometimes, her mood would suddenly turn melancholic as she remembered someone who had been left behind in Pakistan.

  There was nothing striking about my school life. I played during recess, worked in study periods, paid attention in class, enjoyed sports and managed to stay comfortably in the top half of my class. My mother was ambitious and had dreams of greatness for me, wanting me to become a successful man. She especially wanted me to speak and write English well even though our politicians exhorted us daily to shed our unholy attraction to the colonial language. The English that I grew up speaking was a new idiom that was quietly emerging under the bright Indian sun inside our English-medium schools across the country—it was more confident, less imitative than the speech of the earlier generations of Indians.

  My mother had a great and unfulfilled desire to belong to Delhi’s fashionable society. She would go out every evening to Connaught Place, the main shopping arcade of New Delhi. She wandered around ‘CP’, as everyone called it, stopping before the glittering shops. Since she didn’t have the money, she contented herself by looking yearningly at the beautiful displays in the windows from the outside. Her great disappointment was to have an unworldly husband, who was shy and reclusive. She wanted to dress up and go to glamorous parties but he was happy with his own company. He loved his work and was totally absorbed in it. He usually came home tired and preferred to relax in the evenings—take solitary walks, meditate and read spiritual literature.

  The natural answer to my mother’s gregarious disposition would have been to join a club. There were a number of social clubs in Delhi and the most exclusive one was the Delhi Gymkhana Club, the meeting place of the most fashionable and powerful in the nation’s capital. She would sometimes bring up the subject but my father would gently explain to her that it was beyond our means. As a government doctor, he earn
ed a modest salary, and my mother ran the house on a tight budget. Her major expenses were on school fees, uniforms and milk for her growing son. She had worked hard to get me into an English-medium school although it cost more than they could afford. At the end of the month there was little left for anything else. A private clinic soon opened near our home, which offered twice the salary to its doctors than her husband earned. She encouraged my father to join it. They had a number of arguments but my father gently stood his ground, insisting that he was happy where he was. She wished he were more ambitious and kept nagging him about it.

  My mother must have transmitted her anxieties to me, for I grew up with a sense of deprivation. I would compare myself to my classmates who had things that I did not possess; to those who were more attractive to girls than I was; and especially to those who made it to the school cricket team. My father admonished my mother one evening, saying that she was overambitious about me, and this was not healthy. He said children come ‘through’ us, not ‘from’ us, and parents are only a medium by which life expresses its longing for itself. So, our children are not ‘our’ children.

  ‘What a peculiar idea!’ exclaimed my grandmother, who was visiting us at the time.

  Ignoring the interruption, my father went on to explain that a jiva, ‘soul’, before it takes birth, is neither male nor female but is drawn to parents with certain personalities suitable for its own growth. Once it finds such an environment, it chooses to be born there. Children come with their past karmas and destinies to fulfil, he said, and we should not impose our desires on them. They are guests in our home. We should love them but not try and fulfil our dreams and ambitions through our children.

  My father did not convince either my mother or my grandmother and went out for a walk. Both mother and daughter looked at each other with a resigned expression that said, ‘What else did you expect!’ My mother’s mother always thought that my father was a bit cracked.

  ~

  By the time I was sixteen I sometimes accompanied my mother on her evening round of Connaught Place. Everyone in Delhi went to CP no matter what the season. Between six and eight, the thing to do was to get dressed and stroll along the wide, winding Georgian-style colonnade with its glamorous shops and smart cafés. She went there ‘to be seen and to see others’. There was a veritable fashion parade each evening of men and women who vied with each other in the elegance of their attire. Named after the third son of Queen Victoria, the First Duke of Connaught, CP was designed in the form of two concentric circles, creating an inner, middle and outer circle with seven roads radiating from a circular park. Since many Indian princely rulers had their ‘Delhi homes’ nearby, they came to shop here, and my mother thought it a prize to spot one of them.

  One evening, as we were waiting for my father in CP, we heard a familiar voice.

  ‘Gauri Masi!’

  My mother turned around but could not immediately place its owner.

  ‘Anand!’ she said suddenly with a cry of surprise.

  Anand was the son of one of her oldest friends, Geeti, who had been in college with her in Lahore. Geeti had married Dev Tyagi soon after college and my mother was at hand while Anand was growing up in Lahore. Anand mentioned in a matter-of- fact manner that he had just returned after finishing his university studies in England. My mother thought him charming and handsome. He had a fashionable beard and she detected a playful gaiety in his eyes that drew her to him like a magnet.

  ‘What about you and your family? Oh, how I miss Geeti!’ And she plied him with a thousand questions. Anand’s father had become a powerful official in the government. Anand himself did not know what he was going to do next. Before he left, my mother extracted a promise that he would bring his family to our home. When my father joined us on our round, he found my mother a bundle of excitement, thrilled at the prospect of meeting her old friend from college. An ‘England-returned’ son meant that they must be well-to-do. My mother was envious, imagining them living in a big bungalow and giving dazzling parties.

  ‘How can I invite them to our little home?’ she moaned. She wondered how they had the means to send their son to England for an education. ‘They must have inherited the money!’

  A week later, I was wandering aimlessly in CP when Anand spotted me. ‘Come, Amar, come, let me take you to the Gym,’ he said, warmly putting an arm around me.

  ‘Gym?’

  ‘Yes, the Gymkhana Club.’

  I hesitated. ‘That is a very grand place . . . we are not members.’

  ‘But I am. Come and meet my friends.’

  The hall porter greeted us at the desk where Anand signed me in as his guest. I must have looked younger than my sixteen years because the porter asked me my age. Anand was a good five years older. We walked past smoke-filled card rooms to a lounge full of young people and laughter. I looked around me with awe. Bearers in starched white uniforms with green cummerbunds and sashes and tassels were gliding between the tables. ‘So, this is where the smart people meet,’ I thought. As Anand hailed a group of young people to join us, I was intoxicated by my first encounter with an inaccessible and forbidden world—the glamour, the clothes, the sophistication of language and manners. I imagined these people dwelling in big houses, with tall hedges and high gates, leading a life quite unlike my own.

  My eyes seemed to be pulled as though by a lodestone, and they alighted on a girl with brilliant, laughing eyes. She seemed to be the same age as me and vaguely familiar. She was tall, slim and well made. Under a mass of raven hair was an insolent smile. I could not remember where I had seen her. Her friends called her Isha. I kept gazing at her, hoping she would recognize me. But she looked through me as she chatted vivaciously with her friends. I couldn’t make out what they were laughing at. She was utterly beautiful and her daring manner dazzled me.

  ‘Shh, there she is!’ said a slightly older, sultry woman in our group with an ample bosom. There was silence as all eyes turned to look at a woman in a white chiffon sari, her upper lip curving prettily on her oval face. Although no beauty, she had an arresting face with thick black eyelashes that crowned her dark eyes. I stared at her rising bosom. Suddenly, everyone in our group began to gossip about her in hushed tones. I gathered that she was the second wife of one of the seniormost civil servants and had apparently been seen in the company of a younger man in one of the shadier cafés in CP. Someone added another bit of salacious ‘news’ and soon our group was having a nice laugh at what they believed to be a scandal in the making. I was drawn by the immoderate atmosphere of subdued sensuality and continued to watch without fully taking in what was being said.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, he is her cousin and they grew up together. He is visiting them for a few days!’ Anand said, putting a stop to the mischievous tittle-tattle. The scandalmongers felt ashamed.

  ‘Enough!’ Anand said, suddenly getting up. ‘Don’t you have anything better to talk about than spread lies about someone who is not here to defend herself?’

  ‘See, you have driven him away!’ said Isha with a wail, accusing no one in particular. She gave Anand a look of adoration as we left.

  My head was spinning when I returned home. It was my first encounter with a forbidden world and I was thrilled. I tried to recall Isha’s thin face, her shining brown eyes, her long dark hair, and the unusual way she tilted her head. The more I thought about her, the more inaccessible she seemed to become. I lay awake for hours thinking about her.

  A few days later I realized suddenly where I had seen her, and the discovery left me breathless. It was in a grand house in red sandstone, surrounded by a vast garden on Prithviraj Road with the number 23 written prominently on the gate. I bicycled past it every day on my way to school and I had once seen Isha accidentally through the hibiscus hedge when I had got off to fix the chain of my bicycle. What had been an impersonal landmark on my daily journey now acquired a special character, and as the days went by, it became the chief source of pleasure in my life. As soon as the bell ran
g in the afternoon, announcing the end of school, I would hurriedly gather my books, jump on to my bicycle before any of my schoolmates decided to tag along. A red round postbox—a proud symbol of the British days—stood a hundred yards from Isha’s house, and it announced the pleasure that awaited me. When I reached its daunting gate, I would slow down, take a deep breath, and jump off my bike. I would walk past her house slowly with measured steps.

  My heartbeat would quicken as I looked through the wrought-iron gate. It gave a view of the side of the stone house and a winding path leading up to a long, majestic entrance, mellowed by years of Delhi’s weather. I walked along the hedge that circled the house and I could see the lawn indistinctly and tell if they had company. I would observe servants in uniform, moving back and forth on the lawn with the tea service. I became skilled at hiding behind a giant neem tree, watching the goings-on.

  On my lucky days, I was able to spot her. I knew it was she by the dread that seized my heart. A tiny brown dog would follow her everywhere. Sometimes she would be talking to her friends. At other times she would be playing badminton at the side of the house. I saw her up close on one occasion and suddenly everything turned brighter. She was in light blue, sitting on the lawn a few yards away from the hedge. She was speaking with an older man of indeterminate age and her friends were chatting nearby. Her head was unmistakeably tilted as she listened to him. I envied all her friends because of their good fortune: they were able to be close to her, and I yearned to be part of their group.

  Suddenly she looked up and saw me. Her lively eyes seemed to mock at me. A shiver ran through my body and I quickly moved away. A few minutes later I heard a voice. It was the same older man who she had been talking to. He told me that it was not polite to stare at people. I was mortified and quickly retreated. Overwhelmed with terror, I jumped on to my cycle and raced home. When I went inside I burst into tears. For weeks I was depressed and could think only of the contrast of my drab life with the brilliance of her world.