Kama

by Gurcharan Das

  At night in bed before going to sleep I would imagine Isha, always in grand settings, surrounded by beautiful people. They would be dressed stylishly and laughing all the time. As Anand appeared, they would turn to look at him with rapture. Isha, in particular, gazed at him exultantly. What was there in those deep, dark eyes of his that showed on the surface? It was an unreachable, magical world. Sometimes, I would awaken in the night and wonder what time it was. I could see a ray of light beneath the door of my room that came from a bulb on the landing that my parents had left on. My thoughts ran along various gloomy channels of their own making but they always came to rest at the same dismal destination. I couldn’t get Isha out of my head.

  ~

  My first encounter with Isha, as I think about it, has a significance that goes beyond our chance meeting. It is difficult to explain why my eyes fell on her, and not someone else, on that fateful evening in the Gymkhana lounge and seemed to get glued there. It was not because she was the most beautiful. All the women in the lounge were suffused with some sort of beauty in my eyes. Nor was it her defiant, laughing face. Perhaps, it was something in her eyes—a sort of magical light. I wanted to possess it. It was at this moment that love entered my life.

  And as I ponder some more, I realize that even as a sixteen-year-old, I was becoming a diminished creature of habit. I had been a ‘good boy’, living a predictable life of routine. I would go to school, study for exams, play during recess, and was generally liked by my teachers. The accidental meeting with Isha broke this monotonous routine. It shook me out of a dull and deadening apathy. I became alive and began to live for the first time with the whole of my being, alert to the present and aware of an enchanting quality in a pair of eyes that I wanted to possess.

  In Proust’s novel, Remembrance of Things Past, the young Marcel also discovers much the same thing. He is on a train, going for the first time to Balbec. The train stops at a little station between two mountains, and he spots a tall girl emerging from the station house, carrying a jar of milk. She walks past the windows of the train, offering coffee and milk to the few awake passengers.

  Flushed with the glow of morning, her face was rosier than the sky. I felt on seeing her that desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and of happiness.

  Marcel feels the need to be noticed by the milk carrier. He signals to her and when she fails to see him, he calls out to her. But it’s too late. The doors are closing; the train begins to move; she slips away from him into the distance. Watching her recede on the horizon, he yearns to hang on to his memory and his excitement. He realizes that his life is speeding away from her and his imagination creates a fantasy of returning one day to meet her. In an earlier part of the book, Proust reminds us that ‘the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment’. Perhaps what Marcel is regretting in this elegiac passage, and thus remembering, is not the missed opportunity with this country girl, but rather the passing of a moment made beautiful by an imagined happier world.

  Both Marcel and I had awakened to a renewed sense of life and beauty. Why does this not happen to us more often? Proust thinks it is because of ‘habit’. The routine of our life deadens our sensibility and makes us undeserving of desire. My encounter with Isha interrupted my dull existence, as did Marcel’s on the train, awakening dormant capabilities in both of us. Proust explains:

  But in this again the temporary cessation of Habit played a great part. I was giving the milk-girl the benefit of the fact that it was the whole of my being, fit to taste the keenest joys, which confronted her. As a rule, it is with our being reduced to a minimum that we live; most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services. But [today] my habits were missing, and all my faculties came hurrying to take their place . . .

  Over the years I have come to realize that one has to be deserving of desire. By its nature, kama insists that one live in the moment. Desire exists here and now, not as an abstract concept. It is an emotion directed towards a specific individual and one has to be open, attentive to life, and ready to seize the moment. Marcel woke up too late and lost the moment. It is not easy to be alert. Unless one is attentive it is easy to settle into a dull routine. The present tends to escape us because we are more comfortable living in the past or the future. Only by shaking off the predictable everydayness of our lives do we become worthy of kama. The anxiety that sometimes wakes me at four in the morning also brings with it an alertness that had been so long lost to me that I find it both unnerving and exhilarating.

  ~

  My grandmother used to fret that I was growing up lopsided as a result of my education in the English missionary school. She felt I was losing touch with our Hindu tradition, and she gently suggested one morning that I be shifted to a traditional Indian school. My mother was aghast and refused point-blank. My father was unwilling to interfere. They had many arguments, and since my mother was adamant, they compromised by balancing my English education with lessons in Sanskrit from Hindu texts. So, the following morning, my grandmother put on her best silk sari and marched out with an umbrella and determination. She found a Brahmin pandit from the local Shiva temple in our neighbourhood. He smoked ganja and my parents thought him ‘thoroughly unsuitable’ but they let my grandmother have her way. The pandit added me to his roster of reluctant, unruly pupils who he instructed two evenings a week.

  The pandit’s mind ran decidedly in an erotic direction. In his first class, I recall, he gave us a colourful account of creation. It was also from the Rig Veda, only more flamboyant than my grandmother’s. After the One had removed darkness and created the primordial waters, his seed produced the hiranyagarbha, ‘golden womb’, usually called the ‘golden egg’. One day the egg separated itself into two shells: one became the sky, the other earth, and the yolk became the sun.

  In the beginning arose Hiranyagarbha who was the one lord of creation. He held in place the earth and the sky.

  The pandit explained that the egg was the universal germ from which everything else appeared. It had both female and male aspects—the embryo was female, which was fertilized by the male seed.

  After the cosmic being got a companion, he wanted to copulate with her but the female fled from his embraces, thinking that there was something wrong and incestuous in uniting with her producer. She assumed various disguises. She took the form of a doe; he became a stag and he copulated with her. She turned into a cow; he became a bull. She then changed into a mare; he became a horse, and so on . . . to ants. This was how everything was created, including human beings.

  These charged tales of the pandit did not fail to arouse us and the golden egg became a persistent visitor in my dreams. Eggs were a forbidden delight in our vegetarian home, and this added to their attraction. On some nights, it was Isha that seemed to split from my body, turn into a naked woman, and run away from my embrace. I thus began to live a clandestine life of the imagination that emerged from the pandit’s Vedic account of beginnings, with Isha making it all too real. This rich, nocturnal fantasy world stood in stark contrast to my pessimistic days at the missionary school,

  where Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,

  And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

  I rebelled at the idea of original sin. I could not think of myself as a born sinner, as a result of the fall of man from Adam’s rebellion in Eden when he ate the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge. Unlike the Christian account, which left me with feelings of shame and guilt, the pandit offered a decidedly optimistic view of creation based on kama.

  In the next class, the pandit took us on a tour of our neighbouring Shiva temple, around the corner from where I lived. At the entrance, he pointed to a lingam enclosed within a yoni sculpted in stone. Shiva, he explained, is a god of fire who transforms the heat of desire into tapas, ‘spiritual heat’, through the practice of yoga. Although sexual fluids
normally flow downwards and out, Shiva’s meditation forces them to flow upwards, transforming them into a powerful spiritual force. The pandit then guided us to a platform in the temple that he called a stage for the dance of Shiva, where the god dances his cosmic dance, and playfully brings about the union of male and female, and this, in turn, leads to the birth of consciousness and the creative flowering of a world. We mortals, of course, experience the world as maya, ‘illusion’, of separate and ever-changing forms and objects rather than as an underlying divine unity. The pandit asked us to try and imagine in our minds the dance of Shiva, and referred to the performance as god’s leela, ‘divine play’. By now we were growing restless, and so he let us loose to play football on the temple grounds, watching us from afar with an amused look.

  In the following class, the pandit asked, ‘Why does God act?’ One of us replied, ‘To make things happen in the world.’ Another piped in: ‘He acts to do good.’ A third said, ‘To reward good people and punish the bad ones.’ None of us had got it right. The pandit explained that God is playful. He dances and creates the world in play and thus makes the world sacred. ‘He is naughty like the god Krishna—he steals butter, plays tricks, flirts with pretty, young cowherdesses, and defeats demons . . . all in the spirit of light-hearted sport. He does it all for no other reason but the sheer joy of playing; he plays for its own sake without any grand purpose. This is his leela.’

  God is not like human beings, added the pandit. We act because we desire something that we don’t have. He has everything and doesn’t need anything. So, he acts for the fun of it—he likes it, ‘much like you, playing football on the grounds of the Shiva temple’. He compared the divine pleasure of leela to a great monarch who lacks nothing but goes on to the playing field for the sake of amusing himself. Or a healthy man who wakes up in the morning from deep sleep and breaks into a dance merely to express his own exuberance.

  The following day, I innocently mentioned in the Bible class at school, the pandit’s idea of God creating the world out of a desire for play. Father Antony pounced on me, saying that God has no needs or desires, and he certainly does not play. If he had needs, then he wouldn’t be God. When I mentioned this to my grandmother, she said that the English in India were renowned for their cold-blooded, temperate nature and stiff upper lip. Their passions were restricted to property, propriety and prudishness, and she wondered how they reproduced at all. I later overheard my mother complain to my father that this sort of talk of my grandmother’s was most unsuitable for her son’s ears.

  The high point of the pandit’s ‘lessons’ was a sensual story from the Shiva Purana, in which the creator Brahma sank into the darkness of his interior and created from his vision a female of unequalled beauty, Sandhya. ‘With billows of blue-black hair, she stood before his gaze,’ said the pandit. ‘Neither in the world of humans nor of gods existed a woman of such perfection. So perfect was she that Brahma could not take his eyes off her.’ He wanted to possess her and strange thoughts of desire ran through the god’s mind, as well as in ours.

  In the shifting gusts of confusion, Isha began to return in my nocturnal imagination in the form of the naked body of dusky Sandhya. She would split from my body in my dream. I remember feeling the warmth of her nakedness, as vividly as my mother’s body on that chilly morning in Lahore. Sandhya’s intense heat would permeate my body. I would try to become one with her and I would wake up. My cheek would still be warm from her kiss. To make certain that I was not dreaming, I would pinch myself. I knew that I was awake and conscious. Gradually, she would dissolve in those few seconds and vanish from my mind as I became fully awake, a nocturnal discharge remaining the only evidence of my gratified body.

  Even at that age, I was sceptical of the existence of either the Christian God or the Hindu atman, ‘soul’. But I knew that I preferred the playful, fun-loving Hindu gods to the jealous, wrathful God of the Old Testament. I certainly believed in Isha’s ability to tempt and torment me. The latter distress seems to get mixed up in my memory with the blurry moments of half wakefulness when I would variously imagine ‘the golden egg’ and Brahma’s primordial urge to possess the blue-brown–haired Sandhya.

  ~

  By now the daily bicycle ride to and from school had become the most important feature of my life. Isha means ‘to own’ or ‘possess’ in Sanskrit, and the word seemed to acquire a magical quality in my mind. When someone in school casually uttered it one day, I felt I ‘possessed’ her and it left me with a thrilling sensation. My moods fluctuated. If I spotted Isha I felt ecstatic and life seemed to surge in me. When I looked up at the azure sky, the light flowed right into my soul. Equally, if someone mentioned ‘Malik’, Isha’s last name, an unusual sense of pleasure would fill my world.

  Although my mother had reconnected with Geeti Tyagi, the two friends from Lahore did not resume their earlier intimacy. It was partly because they moved in different circles and her husband was conscious of his superior status in the civil service. But Anand made a habit of dropping in on us. Over tea on our terrace he would recount, much to my mother’s delight, the latest goings-on about town. When he was speaking casually about Isha’s family one day, my mother exclaimed, ‘Aren’t they the same Maliks who used to have cotton mills in Lahore?’

  Anand nodded.

  ‘Their daughter was in college with my uncle’s son, Ramu. In fact, he got to know them well. But, of course, he knew everyone. The Maliks were very wealthy and moved in different circles. It’s too bad, isn’t it, that both father and son died suddenly. It must be lonely for the two women.’

  ‘Yes . . . living all alone, mother and daughter, in a sprawling house with dozens of bedrooms. But they are always giving parties and Isha is growing into a real beauty,’ said Anand.

  I reddened.

  ‘I hear they are among the most fashionable people in Delhi,’ said my mother. ‘I saw them from a distance in CP the other day—the mother was in a beautiful Banaras silk.’

  After Anand left, my father made a perceptive remark. What made Anand attractive, he said, was not his enviable education in England but that he never spoke ill of anyone. I agreed with my father and recounted the incident at the Gymkhana Club where he came to the rescue of the lady in the white chiffon sari whom everyone was happy to gossip about.

  Thanks to Anand, my parents finally got to meet Isha’s family. One morning we received an elegant cream envelope with ‘23 Prithviraj Road’ embossed in gold letters. It was an invitation from Aditi Malik to her party. In an offhand way, Anand had mentioned to us that a Cabinet minister would be coming, as would the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi. My mother was thrilled at the idea of meeting important people whom she read about only in the newspapers. I tried to imagine the brilliance of the approaching party—the brightly lit drawing room, the splendour of the clothes, the lavish food and the important people.

  I was in a state of wild excitement on the day of the party. As I was combing my hair in front of the mirror, I was overcome with despair. I was convinced that I was not good-looking. How could I be, with these long ears and thick lips? When we arrived, I was thrilled to see the brilliant lights blazing from the mansion. A police guard stood at the brightly lit, carpeted entrance. As cars drove away, new ones took their place. From them descended beautifully dressed women. Before I realized, a liveried servant in a mirrored vestibule was helping to take off our coats. I tried to assume a dignified manner appropriate to the occasion. My mother adjusted her hair and her silk sari in the mirror but I could not see myself clearly. I seemed to be a part of one glittering whole. As we reached the door leading to the main drawing room, a continuous sound of voices and glasses and the rustle of silk saris greeted us.

  My mother was happy when she spotted her old friend from Lahore, Geeti Tyagi.

  ‘Gauri, oh Guari!’ exclaimed Anand’s mother. They hugged each other and began to speak at the same time. Anand’s father was stiff as a pole, filled with self-importance. My father, on the other hand
, was relaxed and detached. Anand rushed to introduce us to Isha’s mother, Aditi Malik, who was busy greeting a number of guests standing in a line. My mother reminded Aditi Malik that she had first heard about our hostess from her cousin, Ramu, when they were all studying in Lahore.

  Our hostess grew confused as she looked intently at my mother. Then she slowly remembered, ‘Yes of course, dear Ramu, such a charming man! He used to be a frequent visitor at our house. Doesn’t he now live in Bombay?’

  Isha, standing beside her mother, asked me if I liked fireworks. I was tongue-tied and did not answer. After a pause, I managed to say, ‘Are you having fireworks? When are they going to start?’

  ‘Soon! If the weather holds out.’

  ‘How nice that you could all come!’ her mother said. ‘We must now renew the old friendship that began with dear Ramu in Lahore.’ She put her arm around my shoulder and said, ‘Isha will join you shortly, son.’ I felt a thrill hearing this and believed that a great happiness awaited me that evening. She turned to Anand. ‘I can’t think of a better person to introduce you to my guests. He knows them even better than I do.’

  ‘Meet Cho Yo!’ said Isha with a smile, as she saw me jump from the nip that her dog had surprised me with. ‘He is a Tibetan spaniel . . . quite harmless. His name means “turquoise goddess”. It’s also the name of the sixth highest mountain peak in the world . . . it’s in Nepal.’