I looked around the grand drawing room and was captivated by the paintings on the walls. I had never seen pictures like these before. Isha explained in an offhand way that her grandfather had created a modernist collection of art around the time he built the house in the 1930s. He used to visit his customers in Europe in those days and one of them had taken him by chance to a gallery near his office in Paris. ‘Modernism was in the air and he gradually became aware of the different schools—Impressionists, Cubists, Symbolists, Expressionists and others,’ she added. I had heard of neither the word ‘modernism’ nor of the different schools that Isha mentioned casually. I was afraid to ask. At first, I found some of the pictures very strange but gradually, I was drawn to them.
Isha left to join her mother to greet someone who had just arrived but Anand noticed my bewilderment as I kept looking at these perplexing pictures. He explained that Isha’s grandfather had begun to buy a few modest works in the 1930s and they were now very valuable. ‘Not everyone likes them, so you shouldn’t worry if you don’t understand them.’ More importantly, he added that her grandfather had passed on his love of visual beauty to his son and his granddaughter, Isha. So began my education in the visual arts and Isha’s house came to be defined in my mind by these extraordinary works of art.
Anand took us to his mother and we sat down beside Geeti Tyagi, who was conversing with a plump woman. She introduced us deferentially to the ‘princess of Chandi, one of the most picturesque hill states in the Himalayas’.
‘It’s been an unusually damp October, hasn’t it? We usually come down to Delhi only after Diwali but my husband had a meeting to attend this year.’ Saying this, the princess leaned over and exposed her bounteous bosom through her low-cut blouse. She paid no heed to the people sitting across the room who were trying to catch her eye. She gave me a smile and said in a confidential tone, ‘I must get to know this handsome boy.’
The women who were trying to catch her eye were the princesses from two other hill states, Samba and Sunet, near Chandi. All three old and proud states had been integrated into the Indian Republic along with 562 others in a process that began in 1947. The Rajput Sens of Bengal had founded Chandi in 1200. The princess told us with pride that the town of Chandi was sometimes called the ‘Varanasi of the Hills’—it had eighty-one temples, Varanasi had only eighty. The old royalties, such as these princesses, did enjoy some distinction soon after Independence, but their feudal prestige had quietly begun to fade in our noisy democracy. To be sure, the local thakurs, zamindars and the old landed gentry held sway in the rural areas but they mattered less where it really counted—in the urban life of the nation.
They were being replaced by a new English-educated, westernized class, men like Dev Tyagi and my father, who were referred to as ‘brown sahibs’ as they gradually stepped into the shoes of the departing British rulers, and cornered the rewards of power in the new republic. This official elite too had a clear sense of hierarchy and privilege, mostly based on rank in the government, as my mother painfully discovered by way of the growing gulf between her and her old friend, Geeta Tyagi.
There was a general stir near the entrance as the Governor and the Cabinet minister arrived. Officious, plain-clothes policemen pushed back the people who had crowded near the entrance. A whisper ran through the gathering. All eyes turned to the entrance, and the crowd divided into two rows, as the important guests came in with their wives. Anand got up to leave but the generously bosomed princess slowed him with her arm. Her eyes were filled with desire. ‘Don’t go away, you rascal!’ She turned to the others and said, ‘He is just about the most irresistible man in Delhi.’
My eyes were roaming nervously and I recognized some of Anand’s friends from the Gymkhana Club. I spotted Isha leaning against the fireplace with her back to us. The ubiquitous Cho Yo was sitting quietly beside her. She turned around as she had sensed that she was being watched. She looked me squarely with her impetuous, dark eyes, and I blushed. She came across the room and began to chat with my parents, explaining who was who in the room. ‘That is General Sahni with his daughter Usha—isn’t she beautiful? They are here briefly. And the young lady sitting in the corner is from the Jaipur royal family. She has the best jewellery in Delhi. Don’t you think she has a glow? That’s because she is expecting. She doesn’t attend big parties and only drops in at small, informal gatherings. Mother is flattered that she came.’
At this point a handsome young industrialist, Bharat, who belonged to the distinguished Mirla clan, interrupted us. ‘Isha, has your mother heard about the new textile policy?’
‘Mother dear, she’s hopeless about these things.’
‘But she must do something! Nehru is either going to nationalize or destroy the textile industry.’
‘Mother believes that Nehru can do no wrong.’
‘Let me go and speak to her.’
The Maliks and the Mirlas belonged to the third pillar of our society: it was based on money—especially, old money—specifically, the business houses that had emerged in the nineteenth century. These houses were founded by the old mercantile castes, initially based on commerce; gradually they discovered opportunities in modern industry, beginning with textiles in Bombay and Ahmedabad in the second half of the nineteenth century, and more broadly after the First World War. They were under constant threat from Nehru’s socialist state. Thus, Indian society in the decades after Independence was based on three pillars: money, feudal connections and power. Isha’s and Bharat Mirla’s families were examples of the first—they were old money. The princely families belonged to the second, although they were in steady and genteel decline. Anand’s and our family represented officialdom, the third bastion. Real political power soon shifted to the politicians, but barring a few families, not many among them enjoyed the respect of society.
My eyes continued to feast on Isha as the earnest young businessman left to find Aditi Malik. I did not follow what was being said. Instead, I felt irrevocably drawn into a strange and magnificent world which was far removed from my everyday life. I tried to make a clever remark to Isha but the conversation did not flow easily. She pretended to be interested but I could tell that she was listening carelessly. I was not amusing her. Her eyes were wandering and soon they came to rest on Anand, who had just walked across the room. She left me suddenly and skipped over to him. Seeing Anand at the centre of attention, I was filled with confused feelings. I admired him and felt insignificant in comparison. There was no getting away from my misgivings about myself—I felt awkward and ungainly. I looked at my hands, and they were thick and broad compared to Anand’s, which were long and fine.
Dinner was served late and it was as brilliant as anything we could have imagined. Soon after the feast we got up to leave, and as I was gathering my coat in the vestibule, Isha came up to me. With her face perilously close to mine, she said, ‘Why don’t you come and play badminton with us one of these evenings?’
‘Badminton?’ I asked.
‘I say, you know that we play in the evenings.’ She smiled conspiratorially. ‘I even know the tree behind which you hide and watch us.’
I was mortified. The world knew about my shame and I wanted to run away.
‘Why do you just stand there?’
‘B . . . b . . . b . . . because I like to watch you,’ I stammered. Instead of being angry, she renewed her invitation. ‘Yes, do come, Amar, we always need a fourth.’ It took a few moments for the stunning news to sink in. All was not lost then. My parents were saying their goodbyes to Geeti and our hostess. I was relieved that no one had overheard Isha and discovered my shame. I looked up at Isha and she was beautiful.
Both my mother and I were in a trance as we left the party. I felt that a new life of pleasure awaited me. My mother said that if I studied hard I might become affluent one day and live this sort of life. My father joked that wealthy people always seemed to impress my mother and he counselled me that it was more important to be good than to be rich. On the way home, we did wha
t everyone does after a party—we gossiped about who was there and who said what to whom. My mother was touched by Anand’s kindness at introducing us to the Maliks.
‘He’s certainly very popular,’ said my mother.
‘He explained that the pictures on the wall were very valuable.’
‘I felt them to be quite strange,’ my mother said.
Neither my father nor mother mentioned that women found Anand astonishingly attractive, which was the real reason for his phenomenal social success.
~
It is more than fifty years since Isha leaned terrifyingly close to me in her damp mirrored vestibule and gave me that conspiratorial smile. Its memory has laid quietly in a musty corner of my mind, and I thought I had forgotten it until now. I have seen many grand houses in my life but none has made the impression on me as 23 Prithviraj Road that Diwali evening. Meeting Isha awakened in me a sense of life and beauty, shaking me out of my dullness. But I have realized, like Marcel, that living in the moment is not easy. Marcel yearned to be noticed by the milk-girl but he missed his chance. The alluring prospect of meeting a beautiful stranger is thrilling, of course. But only a few are lucky enough to stop their daily ‘commitments’ and do something about it. It is easier to stay in one’s comfort zone. I wonder, however, what if there were suddenly no routine or habit in our lives? Wouldn’t life be delightful, particularly if one’s life were continually under the threat of death, which, in a sense, it is for all human beings. You’d think that the fear of death—or as Karna puts it in the Mahabharata, ‘I see it now, the world is swiftly passing’—would get people going.
Ancient Indians were aware of the value of alertness. They believed that a human being was made up of three gunas, ‘attributes’—sattva, rajas and tamas—and one’s character depended on the proportion of each quality. A person high in sattva was likely to be more aware, alert and harmonious; a personality dominated by rajas was inclined to be ambitious, passionate and restless; and where tamas prevailed, such a person had a tendency to be dull, passive and lethargic. The human project they felt was to try and climb the ladder to sattva through right thinking, right actions and right food. The Bhagavad Gita emphasized this, reminding us that the proportion was not a given, and with effort one could change one’s personality.
In my later years I have come to believe that alertness is not all. I value routine and the habitual ways of looking at the world. However much I may prize being alert to the fleeting world, I don’t think exhilaration can sustain me. Excitement can be exhausting. Delightful as it may be to live continually under the threat of death, one might expend all one’s resources in doing so. So, there must be other ways to be deserving of desire than to live only for the moment and for the thrill of happiness that comes from physical and emotional intimacy.
Perhaps we need both: habit, to avoid the kind of suffering that Isha brought me, and awareness, to ensure that our lives are not lived merely as biological organisms according to the inertia of tamas. Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher, would have agreed with me on the value of habit. He thought that habit was essential for building character—only by repeatedly acting in a certain way does a person acquire a certain character. And pleasure results when one acts according to one’s character, he thought. These actions are also the result of one’s earlier karmic deeds, according to the Hindus. Since kama also means pleasure, Aristotle seems to have offered a nice insight into the meaning of both the Sanskrit words, kama and karma.
Both habit and attentiveness have their attendant hazards as well. Marcel returns to the hotel where he traditionally stayed when visiting the seaside village of Balbec. He remembers the first time he entered the hotel, and contrasts the weirdness of that first experience with the relaxed comfort he now feels:
This time, on the contrary, I had felt the almost too soothing pleasure of passing up through a hotel that I knew, where I felt at home . . . Must I now, I had asked myself . . . go always to new hotels where I shall be dining for the first time, where Habit will not yet have killed upon each landing, outside each door, the terrible dragon that seemed to be watching over an enchanted existence . . .
Is Marcel contradicting himself when he makes the dramatic shift from embracing routine to ask if he must now seek out new hotels where habit has not yet had a chance to kill ‘enchanted existence’? I think Proust is saying that we need both. We need the unfamiliar which creates risks and even threatens our lives; we also need the boredom of the tamas-like routine, which is capable of slaying the ‘terrible dragon’ of the unfamiliar. In order to have both, we must be willing to endure the suffering that the Ishas of the world will bring to us.
My parents never did find out quite what my grandmother’s lascivious, ganja-smoking pandit had been up to. But he had given me a symbolic key, and it had opened the door to kama’s secret garden, a rich mythological world quite unlike the prudishness that characterized the daily world of my English missionary school. The Irish Brothers would have been shocked to learn that God had created the world from desire—from His own need—an idea that is so alien to the world of Genesis, where the Almighty has no needs or desires. I learnt many things from the missionaries and they also instilled deep inside me a ‘middle-class morality’, as George Bernard Shaw called it, which instilled in me permanent feelings of guilt and shame when it came to desire.
The Roman Catholic missionaries would have been equally scandalized at the thought that the Creator could feel lonely, split himself, and create a woman in order to be happy. How could God, who was by definition self-sufficient, feel lonely? My Irish schoolteachers could not understand why we, schoolboys, did not feel shame to express our fears and easily confessed to feelings of lonesomeness. When the boy sitting next to me in Class 2 began to cry one day—he missed his mother—our teacher scolded him for being weak and childish. ‘Seven-year-old boys don’t cry like sissies,’ he thundered. I was relieved that I wasn’t the one at the receiving end that day. I was unaware at the time, and so was the good Irish Brother that the Indian answer to transcending loneliness and becoming independent is to achieve self-sufficiency via meditation, with the eventual goal of moksha, ‘liberation’ or transcendence from the flawed human condition.
The pandit came into my life and offered a gentle corrective. He taught us that kama is the ‘delight that the mind and heart experience in enjoying the objects of the natural world of the five senses’. One evening he pointed to a sunset from the window in the class, and said, ‘Enjoy it! To enjoy the sunset is also an act of kama.’ He opened the door to a new world that was filled with the joy of being alive, and he taught me early in life to love the world of the senses and to relish life itself.
Another pandit, a more conventional one, would have insisted on the stories of dharma and duty. He would have focused on Rama, the symbol of the good and dutiful king—certainly more appropriate to mould young minds. He would have told us about Sita, his dutiful wife, who followed her husband into exile where she was abducted from the jungle; and how Rama waged a successful war to reclaim his chaste wife; but when people questioned her chastity on her return, Rama sent her away, sacrificing their conjugal happiness in order to preserve the kingdom’s honour.
Like most Indian boys, I grew up on stories of the gods Rama and Krishna, both avatars of Vishnu. Rama’s is a story of conjugal love in which dharma triumphs over kama. But the pandit preferred Krishna’s tales of illicit love. He told us how Krishna has an open love affair with Radha, a married woman. During raas leela, he dances with thousands of gopis and gives pleasure to each one. Eventually, he becomes the king of Dwarka and marries 16,108 women.
Not surprisingly, I grew up confused between the pure, austere Sita and the fun-loving Radha. While Sita is Rama’s wife, Radha is Krishna’s love; Sita embodies chastity, Radha sensuality; Sita is a queen, Radha is a milkmaid. Sita signifies the legitimacy of marriage, Radha denotes illegitimacy—her lover may be a god but she is a married woman; Sita’s is happy mono
gamy, Radha’s is romantic, illicit love. And so, I came of age admiring Sita but loving Radha. In my ganja pandit’s stories, Radha always got more attention and ever since I have tended to lean towards her.
Alas, the pandit’s classes came to an abrupt end one day. We learnt that he had fallen seriously ill. My grandmother was away at the time and when she returned, she was too tired to argue with my mother or to look for a replacement. But I missed him and his classes terribly. He had gifted to me the world of play. He himself was ever-playful and he wanted us to grow up retaining the spirited quality of leela.
As I grew older, I came to appreciate the idea that the creation of the universe might have been an involuntary act which may have unfolded without a plan. It sat well with my modern, scientific world view and is not inconsistent with the old Indian idea of primordial desire creating the cosmos or the idea of divine leela. It makes sense to me that kama is a creative power, the chief motive behind the flowering of phenomenal life on earth. The split of the cosmic being helped me to understand the Jungian idea that a man carries female traits in his makeup—his ‘inner feminine’—just as a woman has male characteristics. It explains why the seemingly rigid differences between male and female appear to fall away in the union of love. Kama’s blind energy seems to me a natural urge to restore us to the original state of oneness which had been split into male and female. Brahma’s primordial attraction for his daughter, Sandhya, has made me aware of a primal incestuous tendency in human beings. The poet had called her Sandhya, ‘dusk’, which is neither day nor night, but a threshold between the conscious and the unconscious, when man and woman encounter each other for the first time in a moment of confusion in the archetype of seduction. It also seems logical to my scientific mind that where sex is the basis of procreation, the multiplication of species had to be incestuous in the beginning.
Above all, my grandmother’s ganja pandit seeded in me an optimistic attitude towards kama. This happy outlook flourished within the Indian civilization, elevating desire to a purushartha, ‘aim of life’, along with the other goals of dharma (moral well-being), artha (material well-being) and moksha (spiritual well-being). That a sense-intoxicating emotion could be promoted to the status of a lofty deity says something about a culture. So also is the notion of a playful, mischievous god who creates the world for no other reason than the sheer joy of the sport. On hearing Krishna’s flute, the women of Vrindavan would sneak out of their homes into the forest, where they danced the raas leela in a circle with their lover-god through the entire Brahma night which lasted for 4.5 billion years. Krishna multiplied himself so that each believed that they were dancing exclusively with him.
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