In trying to understand what lovers feel when they see the boundaries between them melting, he thought that this might suggest a return to an earlier state of oneness in infancy: ‘originally the ”I” includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present I-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive-indeed all-embracing feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the I and the world about it.’ Freud harks back to a state where the infant has not yet acquired a sense of its ’I-ness’ and the two individuals do not yet exist. Recognizing the attraction of adult love for an earlier unity, he wrote, ‘Love desires contact because it strives to make the I and the love object one, to abolish all spatial barriers between them.’
Freud’s ‘womblike state of oneness’ reminds me invariably of my ganja pandit, who introduced us boys to the ‘golden womb’, hiranyagarbha. This enticing metaphor acquired different meanings in later Sanskrit literature as it tried to make sense of the world. Samkhya texts speak about Purusha and Prakriti making up the embryo in the primordial womb from which emerges the world. Puranic texts tell us that the creator god Brahma emerged from the golden womb. In yet another tradition, Brahma himself is the hiranyagarbha. The Upanishad calls it the ‘soul’ of the universe, or brahman, and goes on to tell us that the hiranyagarbha floated around in the emptiness and darkness of non-existence for about a year, and then broke into two halves, which formed swarga, ‘heaven’, and prithvi, ‘earth’.
For Freud, kama evolves in human life from the undifferentiated unity of the womb and of early infancy to establish us as individuals with a distinct sense of ‘I’, distinct from the rest of nature. Ancient Indians also believed that kama was not merely an impersonal tendency in nature but an activity in the human mind. My father once told me a lovely story from the Mahabharata to illustrate this. He said there was a bright young man named Vipul, who was asked to protect Ruchi, his guru’s beautiful wife. Indra, the philandering king of the gods, had long lusted after Ruchi and when the guru left for a trip, Indra saw his chance. He turned himself into a handsome prince and came down to seduce Ruchi. But Vipul knew that kama originates in the mind. Using the psychic powers he had acquired through meditation, he entered Ruchi’s mind and kept it firm and steadfast. She thus did not succumb to Indra’s advances and was deeply grateful to Vipul.
What my father did not tell me was about the remorse that Vipul felt afterwards. Vipul worried that by entering Ruchi’s mind, he might have been guilty of psychic intimacy with his guru’s wife. He believed that he had experienced an intimacy with Ruchi that was far greater than that of the physical act of sex. Because kama is psychic energy in the mind, Vipul agonized for years thinking he might have been guilty of something far more profound than a bodily exchange of fluids.
~
Unlike most of my classmates, I didn’t go anywhere during the winter break. It was unusually cold in Delhi and I felt irritated and restless. I could not get Isha out of my mind. It was a ceaseless hunger. My parents were unhappy with my school report. I had always done reasonably well in school, but my grades had plunged this term. They knew something was wrong but did not say anything to me, at least not directly.
‘The Malik girl has turned his head completely,’ I overheard my mother complain one evening.
‘It’s part of growing up.’ My father shrugged.
My mother began to pace the floor, her face becoming more and more animated. ‘She is toying with him. Is it surprising that he is doing poorly in school?‘
‘He’ll learn.’
‘You must do something!’ she moaned.
My mother was secretly pleased that I was welcome at the home of the lofty Maliks where she thought I would meet the right people. In her eyes, we were middle class and they were upper class; in between there was an undefined ‘upper-middle class’, and this is where she hoped I would end up. After finishing school, she expected me to go to the right university, then enter the right profession, join the right club, and rub shoulders with the elite of the land. She hoped I would make the right match with a girl of her choice and repeat the process with my progeny. This was her dream of the enviable happy life.
Since my father didn’t make enough money, my mother felt that she had missed the chance to send me to an elite boarding school, like Doon or Mayo. She hoped, however, to make up for it by sending me to the right college—she had her eyes on St Stephen’s, where she hoped I would play cricket and tennis, and acquire the basic intellectual equipment, but not become a scholar. She wanted me to be an ‘all-rounder’, a brown sahib.
My father was a quiet man. He loved his work and refused to be drawn into office politics. While at the university in Lahore, he had discovered the theosophists, especially the writings of Jiddu Krishnamurti, a mystically inclined seeker. Instead of becoming a ‘brown sahib’, he developed a lasting passion for the spiritual life. This unfortunately also made him somewhat detached. I sometimes wished we could talk. There were long silences when we were together—silences in which he was comfortable and I was not. Twice a day he would disappear to meditate, and then he was not even physically available. So when I needed to chat, I turned to my mother.
I was surprised therefore when he pulled me out of the house one evening for a ‘father and son talk’. We walked in silence before he got the courage to come to the point. ‘You’re a brahmachari,’ he said gently. ‘You should be devoted to your studies.’ Ever since childhood, I had been hearing the ‘b-word’. It was usually to remind me of the first stage of the Hindu life, when one is a student and requires to be celibate and think only high thoughts. My father said that my thoughts seemed to be running in the low directions these days.
But he did not blame me. The culprit he felt was the ‘high society’ in which I was moving—where people drank and smoked and the women were far too liberated. The second problem was kama. He likened human desire to wild horses. ‘A brahmachari is a charioteer and he learns to restrain these horses.’ It is not an easy thing to do, he admitted shyly. ‘Even the mighty god Shiva succumbed to desire.’ He recounted how the ascetic god had been deep in meditation when a rush of desire for his wife, Parvati, overcame him. He opened his eyes and saw Kamadeva, the god of erotic desire, lurking about with his bow and his flower-tipped arrows. Suspecting him to be the villain, Shiva opened his third eye and with the heat of his gaze, reduced the love-god to ashes. When his wife, Rati, discovered her husband’s body, she wailed:
Where have you run to and left me
whose life rests in you, our love cut off in a moment
as a lotus can be left when
a flood of water breaks through a dam?
She pleaded pathetically before Shiva and her lament was so genuine and deeply moving that Shiva restored the god of love to life on the condition that kama would remain ananga, ‘invisible’.
‘Invisible?’
‘Yes, desire is in the mind and this makes it even more dangerous.’ He said that desire is born in the mind and enters the body invisibly through the senses or memory. Since it is a powerful psychic energy, a brahmachari must be wary of it, not squander it. Only after marriage, in the second stage, grihastha, is one allowed to yield to sexual desire, and that too for the purpose of procreation, not recreation.
As my father talked, I began to understand that kama was the chief obstacle in my father’s spiritual project. Since desire was responsible for enslaving him to the law of karma, he had embarked on a mission to liberate himself. Meditation was his means but like Shiva, he worried that kama interfered with his meditation. He said kama was born of the mind, and like objects of the mind, my love for Isha was unreal. Because it was mental it could die just as quickly. Unlike the pandit who spoke of leela in the context of aestheticizing the world, my father interpreted god’s leela to suggest that our phenomenal world of objects and desires is unreal and that a wise person learns to be detached from it.
‘So, don’t feel too bad, m
y son,’ he said gently.
I was moved by my father’s efforts to alleviate my pain. Initially, I had felt defensive about our ‘father and son talk’. But soon I realized that it was probably a greater struggle for him. While I did not buy into his metaphysics, I was grateful for his concern. I was in love with Isha and she was no ‘mental illusion’.
~
The first day of school after the break was wet and cold. I was cycling home at a fast clip trying to avoid the rain. My heart was heavy. The deputy head had told me off for doing badly in the previous term. Neither was there any hope of seeing Isha—she had made that pretty clear. Full of gloom I did not notice that I had passed the round postbox, the prized signal that her house was around the corner.
Suddenly, Isha stood before me. She was waiting at her gate in a pink raincoat and a pink hat, and black gumboots. Her face was wet from the rain. Cho Yo stood beside her, equally wet. She gave me a big smile and signalled me to stop.
‘I was beastly with you, wasn’t I?’ she said, as we walked to the house. Cho Yo followed us, yelping merrily. She took me to the kitchen where the maid gave me hot cocoa and biscuits.
A painful burden began to lift. I was in disbelief and thankful for every kindness that might come my way. My heart felt lighter but I could think of nothing to say. Isha took me upstairs to her room. There was a log fire in the fireplace, and her face glowed in its reflection. She went across to the window, and I followed her. She pointed to the rain outside. As she did, her wrist and arm brushed mine, and I felt that her body was smoother and softer than anything I had felt. She looked straight and hard into my face as she had done the first day that we had met in the Gymkhana Club. I felt nervous and uneasy. I looked around at the paintings on the wall and I felt a sense of awe.
‘The one behind you is a Klimt; he was an Austrian painter. I like the woman in the gold dress, and Mother allowed me to hang it in my room. Do you want to look at the paintings that my grandfather brought in the old days from his business trips in Europe?’ she asked nonchalantly.
I nodded. She smiled and took my hand and we ran downstairs to the living room. She turned on the lights and pointed to the painting of a girl in a bright dress. ‘This is my favourite—it is by Renoir. Over there is a landscape by Cézanne; and those dancing figures are by Matisse.’ I was puzzled by the geometrical shapes in the abstract picture next to it. ‘It is a Braque. It takes time to love these works but now I adore them—they are my family. The one on the wall behind us is a scene of Paris by the impressionist Pissarro.’ Thus, my education in modern art continued for a short while when just as suddenly, Isha took my hand, and we ran back to her room.
‘I like your curly hair, Amar,’ she said. After a pause, she added, ‘You may kiss me if you want to.’
I was confused.
‘Have you ever kissed a girl before?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Do you know how to kiss? I can show you if you want.’
I nodded nervously.
‘Close your eyes, Amar.’
I felt her draw closer. Her breathing was heavy. I felt her hands on my shoulders and I waited, but nothing happened.
‘Open your eyes—you look so odd with your eyes closed.’
I opened them and stepped back. Her long, brown lashes, and thick braids enveloped her big eyes.
‘Come near. Nearer,’ she whispered. ‘I won’t hurt you.’
She grabbed my shirt and my face became flushed. I looked eager and apprehensive.
‘You may put your arms around me, Amar.’
Obediently, I bent over her and placed my arms clumsily around her neck. My heart beat violently. She raised herself, tossed her hair back with a quick motion of her head and kissed me on the lips. She stopped, and then kissed me again, this time for a very long time. She smiled faintly and slipped away to the other end of the room. My heart beat anxiously as I followed her.
‘You do like me!’
‘Yes,’ I mumbled hoarsely.
She put her arms around my neck again, and her braids fell on my shoulders. She pulled me towards her as though we were wrestling, locked together. I did not resist. Her cheeks were inflamed by the effort. She laughed and said that I was tickling her. She held me gripped between her legs like a pole that she was trying to climb. We rocked back and forth. She was soon out of breath with the strapping exercise and the heat of our bodies. I felt a few drops of sweat wrung from me by the effort. A feeling of great pleasure came over me that I did not understand then.
She turned around and ran downstairs. As I was leaving, she repeated, ‘I like your curly hair.’ Then she added in a matter-of-fact way, ‘We are having some people over on Monday. Some of my friends will also be there. So, be sure to come—but change out of your school uniform.’
When I returned home the rain had stopped. The grass was wet, and there was a strong smell of the earth. A nightingale sang in fitful snatches. I looked up at the partially clear sky. The road from 23 Prithviraj Road to my modest, middle-class home had been transformed into a magical path. I did not think that I deserved such happiness.
~
My grandmother’s cheerful pandit leaned insistently towards kama’s delights and would have approved, I expect, of the pleasure I had experienced from my involuntary ejaculation that wet afternoon. Isha had given me my first romantic kiss and I still feel giddy thinking about it. I check my heartbeat as I recall the pleasure I felt from Isha’s lips pulling on mine, her tongue moving sensuously in my mouth. I detect no stain or shame, which surprises me because boys and girls from good families did not go around kissing each other in my day. Things have changed a bit now; the middle classes are a bit more relaxed about love and sex. But when it comes to marriage, we still prefer ‘arranged’ to ‘love’ marriages. Isha, of course, belonged to a different class and women in the upper classes were always freer and stronger.
The pandit taught us that kama is a primeval force of great power and hence the ancients elevated it to a godlike status. Desire acquired a divine nature when Kamadeva, the god of love, sprang from Brahma’s primal and incestuous desire for Sandhya:
Seeing her and being aroused by her, I pondered over what had happened. As I did so, O Best of Sages, an extremely handsome youth stepped out of my mind.
Brahma’s full-time job is to create beings and his favoured method, the pandit told us, is to ‘think’ beings into existence. Perhaps he is lazy, but it is clearly an efficient technique, and it highlights the mind’s power to create reality. Each of us, the pandit used to say, tends to create an idiosyncratic universe out of our own thoughts. The mental origin of Kama is another reminder that desire is a mental activity. In any event, Brahma was equally surprised to see the well-formed youth, who had
a slender waist and a broad chest, with wide thighs and hips . . . he had a blue lock of hair on his head; beneath restless eyebrows, his eyes threw [coquettish] glances . . . arousing the sentiment, O dear One, of sringara rasa.
Brahma said to Kamadeva:
Go and enter the minds of all living beings in an invisible form and create desire in the hearts of gods and humans and procreate the world.
And he gave the erotic god five arrows of scented flowers and a bow of sugar cane. Each flower-arrow, the pandit explained, had a different flower tip, signifying the five stages of love from its birth to its death. In the first stage is priya, he said, when one sees the object of desire; the second is moda when one acts to acquire the object; pramoda is the third stage when one enjoys the object. Inevitably, that pleasure pales gradually in the fourth stage; the last arrow is maran when love dies. After telling us the names of the different flowers for the various stages of love, the pandit had suggested that we bring a flower each to the following class but the main effect of this, as far as I can remember, was to turn the next class into a shooting gallery of flying flower-missiles.
Unlike my father, the pandit would have diagnosed my obsession with Isha quite differently.
He would have judged me as a victim of Kamadeva’s flower-arrows. I was in the second stage of love, he would have said, having been struck by the second flower, moda, when one is smitten and tries to acquire the object of desire. It didn’t matter that my love was not reciprocated; the god of love was merely doing his job, which was to inflame my desire, not Isha’s.
Before the handsome and youthful love-god emerged sometime in the second century BCE, there was a Vedic demigod called Kama, who basically granted petitions and fulfilled all desires, including the desire to slay rivals.
O Kama, slay those who are my rivals; make them fall down to the blind darknesses; make them all senseless, sapless; let them not live any day at all.
This earlier Kama could also arouse desire in a woman so that she might be more receptive to advances:
The arrow feathered with longing, tipped with desire, necked with resolve, let Kama pierce you in the heart.
This Vedic demigod evolved over the centuries into the charming divine youth with his sugar cane bow and passion-tipped arrows. He came into his own, however, in the later epics and the Puranas, where he troubled the great Shiva and even the creator Brahma became his victim. It needs a degree of kama optimism in a civilization to have the creator become a victim of the god of love and succumb to incestuous feelings for his daughter.
I thus grew up with two different views of kama—an optimistic Hindu notion gifted to me by the pandit and a pessimistic western Christian belief that I acquired from the Irish Brothers at my English school. They traced the origins of erotic lust to Adam and Eve’s disobedience to God’s commands. Procreation, they said, was part of God’s divine plan, but lust and eroticism were the consequences of our own disobedience. In Paradise, we would have been fruitful and multiplied, but the procreative act would have been strictly a matter of will, not of indecent and shameful desires of the flesh. True love, they said, is the spiritual love of God. The person who taught us our Bible class was a ‘puritan’, a word that held no meaning for me at the time, but later I came upon a mischievous quote of the American humorist H.L. Mencken who defined such a person as one ‘who lives with a haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.’
Kama Page 6