Kama

by Gurcharan Das

  3

  A SUITABLE MATCH

  Kama optimists and pessimists reach an imperfect compromise

  While talking to one

  She is looking desirously at another

  But thinking of a third.

  Who really is her beloved?

  —Panchatantra I.146–148

  ‘My family was thrown into a panic the day . . . the day I grew up.’

  My mother raised her eyebrows.

  ‘You know what I mean?’

  ‘When you got your period?’

  We had new neighbours. The Sharmas had recently moved into the house next door and their sixteen-year-old daughter, Avanti, had dropped in to introduce herself. Two years had passed; I was now at university.

  ‘Ever since then,’ Avanti continued, ‘my parents have spoken in hushed tones once a week about finding me a suitable Brahmin boy, preferably from the Saryupariya gotra. Earlier this year we performed a puja at the Vishwanath temple in Varanasi, but it obviously hasn’t worked as I am still unmarried. I still fast on Mondays because it will negate the consequences of my misdeeds in previous lives that are delaying my marriage.’

  ‘And what if they don’t find a suitable boy?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, that would be tragic!’ she replied.

  ‘Does he have to be a Brahmin?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course. What a question, you silly boy!’

  Avanti had an oval face, a straight nose, a full mouth and a body that had ripened early. She had good skin and colour on her cheeks that radiated health. She was clearly attractive but the overall effect was quite the opposite of the angular, sinewy Isha. Her earthy physicality was deceptive—there was a peculiar intensity in her eyes, tempered by a bold, smiling sidelong glance.

  After she left, we looked at each other in disbelief. I was disarmed by Avanti’s open, naive charm; my mother was suspicious, thinking her too forward. But yet, she decided to invite her family to tea the following evening.

  ‘It’s the neighbourly thing to do,’ said my mother, who in actual fact wanted to satisfy her curiosity about our new neighbours.

  ‘They are a conservative Brahmin family,’ she told my father, ‘but their daughter speaks confidently to strangers about her periods.’

  Roshan Sharma, Avanti’s father, was a show-off and the dominant presence at tea but we found his wife more charming. She was reticent and smiled a lot. He told us with pride about Ujjain, his home town in Madhya Pradesh, which had been the capital of an ancient kingdom of the legendary princess Avantika and that was how their daughter got her name. Sharma-ji talked about his job in the forest department. My father volunteered helpfully some names in his department but our guest was not impressed as they were not ‘high up’ and did not qualify as ‘contacts’.

  Mrs Sharma giggled nervously and kept downplaying her husband’s bragging. In reply to my mother’s question, she told us how she had met her husband via black-and-white studio photographs exchanged between their families. They had met only once before they got married and that too in a family gathering where everyone was sizing up everyone else.

  ‘We too were married via pictures!’ My mother laughed. ‘Of course, we are not Brahmins like you.’

  Sharma-ji knew this already and I detected a subtle, superior smile on his face. He tried to console us for our inferior status but my mother retorted gently. ‘We have always been more democratic in the Punjab and this is perhaps why Brahmins have never enjoyed a superior status.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ he said, feeling sorry for us. ‘To survive, Hindus had to become Muslim; others became Sikh; still others turned to Arya Samaj. What a mess!’

  ‘Yes, caste is all confused here.’ My mother laughed.

  ‘Of course, you are modern and we are traditional,’ he said, staring boldly at my mother’s bobbed hair, sleeveless blouse and heels. ‘Take the Maliks for example—both mother and daughter smoke, drink and go dancing in the Imperial Hotel. We’re not like that.’

  ‘Ah, you know Aditi Malik?’ asked my mother.

  ‘Oh no, they are “hi-fi society” and we are simple folk.’

  I did not like the direction this conversation was taking. Sharma-ji was snooping, and my mother promptly changed the subject. ‘My cousin, Ramu Mama, is the only one we know who stays at the Imperial!’

  ‘Don’t listen to him!’ said Avanti, dismissing her father. She had a natural grace as she sat at the other end of the room. Though she hadn’t spoken a dozen words, she seemed perfectly at ease and in a curious way appeared to take part in the conversation without opening her mouth.

  Sharma-ji was itching to talk about what was uppermost in his mind. At the first opportunity, he asked if we could suggest a suitable boy for Avanti. Both his wife and daughter were embarrassed but they were resigned to his coarse ways.

  ‘Avanti is still young, what’s the hurry?’ asked my mother.

  With self-important gravity, Sharma-ji rose to his full height, like a doctor proclaiming a diagnosis, and explained that the problem lay in an inherent conflict between the biological and social nature of women. Quoting Manu, he asserted, ‘Every woman desires every man she sees.’ It is not her fault, of course; it is her stri-svabhava, ‘biological nature’, and it has to be tamed and controlled by stri-dharma, her ‘duty to her family and society’. So, she must marry as soon as she attains puberty. An unmarried woman has to be chaste; a married woman has to be faithful and produce sons, according to the dharma texts.

  Avanti was discomfited by this talk; my mother looked at my father sceptically; but I was fascinated. Sharma-ji was not to be stopped. It is not a woman’s fault, he said, if her innate nature makes her fickle and untrustworthy. The men of the house must protect her from her inborn sensuality and ensure that stri-dharma, her paternal heritage, triumphs over her demoniac stri-svabhava, her maternal heritage.

  My mother was not amused. ‘Where is the evidence about women’s “untamed nature”?’ she protested. Both Sharma-ji’s wife and Avanti detected my mother’s discomfort over these remarks. And before Sharma-ji could reply, mother and daughter got up to leave. As they were going out of the door, Mrs Sharma put her arm around me affectionately and called me ‘Amar, the immortal one’. Sharma-ji turned to my father and congratulated him for having successfully discharged his obligation to the gods by producing a son.

  ‘You’ll certainly go to heaven!’ he said.

  After our neighbours were gone, my mother gave a distasteful look. ‘What an uncouth neighbour we have got!’

  ‘Fortunately, his wife and daughter make up for him,’ I said, consoling her gently.

  ~

  When Avanti skipped into our lives, I did not imagine that it would set the stage for the next phase in my kama education. I learnt something about my mother too. Having grown up on a diet of Jane Austen, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and other English novelists at college in Lahore, she had a modern mind and was deeply opposed to patriarchy. She and my father had a relationship of reasonable equality, although she wished secretly that she had continued to work after marriage. What she missed even more was a rich emotional and intellectual life with her husband. This was due, perhaps, to their different temperaments—he was unworldly and she was worldly. Despite her education in English literature, however, I would discover that while she was modern in certain ways, she was not modern enough to believe in what we Indians call ‘love marriage’. But of that, more later.

  Avanti’s father’s obsession to get Avanti married introduced me to the grand compromise in history between the kama pessimists and optimists, creating a legitimate middle ground for desire that is sanctioned by society, religion and law. Sharma-ji’s views about the inequality of men and women initiated me to the deep patriarchal prejudices within our culture and my ‘modern’ mother’s condescending response to Sharma-ji was my first encounter with feminism.

  I grew up believing that men and women were mostly equal. Although my mother and father did not share their inner lives, th
ey seemed to have a relationship of reasonable equality. In fact, my mother was stronger than my father; my grandmother was even tougher. And in my own generation, Isha and Avanti had minds of their own. Come to think of it, many Indian women, beginning with the Vedas, were emancipated in their own way. To begin with, Indrani, the wife of the king of gods, seems to have had a fair degree of autonomy, going by the sexually explicit dialogue between her, Indra and Vrishakapi. The same goes for the women in my favourite epic, the Mahabharata—Draupadi, Kunti, Gandhari, Satyavati were all sturdier than their men. Hence, I wonder if the stereotype of the submissive, long-suffering Indian female—Sita and Savitri—is a myth propagated by the dharma texts in order to keep women in line.

  You can always find an alternative tradition in Hinduism to the orthodox one. A bhakti sect called Radhavallabh Sampradaya in Vrindavan raised Radha above Krishna as the supreme deity. The standard greeting among its devotees is not ‘Jai Krishna’ but ‘Jai Radhe’! Like other Vaishnava sects, they were inspired by Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda of the twelfth century, in which the great god Krishna falls in love with a married woman, Radha, and even implores her to place her feet on his forehead.

  Contrary to this, I gradually became aware that while men and women are biologically unequal, societies around the world have institutionalized this insidiously into an inequality of power—that is, patriarchy. Because women were supposedly weak, they had to be guarded. Since no man could guard a woman all the time, Sharma-ji believed that she had to learn to guard herself by controlling her thoughts, feelings and acts. That is why Brahminical culture created inspiring stories to teach a woman her stri-dharma. One of these was of Sambula, a lovely princess who married the heir apparent of a vast kingdom. Unfortunately, he contracted leprosy and decided to renounce the throne and live as an ascetic in the jungles. Everyone at the court was relieved at this decision, including his parents and his wives, as his open sores had become foul and rotten. Sambula insisted, however, on accompanying her husband and they built a hut by the river.

  Sambula rose each morning, and then bathed her husband’s leprous skin with cool water, and left to gather fruits and vegetables for their lunch. One day deep in the forest she came upon an inviting pool inside a cave and decided to bathe. As she stepped into the water, her radiance lit up the forest. A demon saw her and made advances. Sambula struggled and cried out for help. The ogre threatened to eat her. The god Sakka, however, heard her cries. After rescuing her, he explained that it was not he who had saved her but cosmic dharma—her own accumulated virtuous deeds over many lives.

  When she returned to her leprous husband, he grew suspicious. He did not believe her story and spoke instead about the deceits of women. The desperate Sambula cried, ‘Oh, my husband, how can I convince you of my devotion!’ In the end, she decided to perform an ‘act of truth’. During a religious ritual, she proclaimed, ‘I have never held anyone dearer than my husband. If I speak the truth, his disease will be cured.’ She poured water over his diseased skin, and sure enough, his sores were washed away.

  Cured, the prince returned to his kingdom. Eventually, he became king and his father retired to a life of quietude. Gradually, the young ruler was attracted to other women at the court, some of whom he married. Sambula and her sacrifices were forgotten. When the old king heard of Sambula’s plight, he returned to the palace and reprimanded his son, saying, ‘You have a virtuous wife. Treat her with dharma.’ The son was ashamed, fell at Sambula’s feet in apology, and from that day rendered her the honour she deserved.

  Classical Sanskrit literature is filled with such stories. Manu, the lawmaker, says men of the house must guard their women from their ‘innate’ addiction to sensual enjoyment. Otherwise, they will bring sorrow both to their own and their husband’s family. It is a husband’s responsibility, in particular, as he is vulnerable to the loss of his progeny through the infidelity of his wife.

  Sambula’s tale is a fascinating variant of Sita’s in the Ramayana. Both women accompanied their husbands to the forest; both were objects of lust for demons; both aroused suspicion about their fidelity; in the end, the virtuous character of both women saved them. The dharma texts created a social code and an ideal of stri-dharma that conditioned women to accept a subordinate place in a patriarchal society. These stories helped them to internalize this ideal Hindu womanhood, such that they ‘voluntarily’ aspired to it. It was all very cleverly done, according to the feminists.

  Buddhist narrative literature is also filled with stories of women’s uncontrolled sexuality. My favourite recounts a dialogue between two parrots who were left behind by a travelling Brahmin to watch over his unfaithful wife. Seeing her carrying on with many men, the younger one observed, ‘A woman is not safe even if one carries her in one’s arms.’ The older parrot, however, was more inclined to offer a solution: ‘Only a wife’s love can curb a woman’s lust. Alas, the Brahmin’s wife doesn’t love her husband.’

  I never did buy Manu’s crude, patriarchic party line about the ‘insatiable appetite of women’ and have found its popularity surprising. It seems to me a male fantasy and feminists have a point in viewing it as a tool of patriarchic control. It might have been a way to teach people that promiscuous sex is a waste of physical energy and is the road to ruin. My father, I know, was suspicious of women, although he never aired his feelings openly. In fact, he was invariably shy and courteous with the opposite sex. Of course, there are plenty of stories in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana that are hugely complimentary to women but feminists argue that stories valorizing women were, in fact, a Brahminical conspiracy to ‘brainwash’ them—to condition them to stri-dharma—a rhetorical device to ensure women’s chastity and domination by the male establishment. Sharma-ji’s moral panic over the early marriage of his daughter may also have been the result of misogyny and a fear of varnasamkara, ‘mixing of castes’, which not only Manu but the Gita also expresses eloquently. The custom of niyoga, whereby either the brother of an impotent or dead husband or a revered male from the same caste would sleep with the wife for the sole purpose of procreation—its purpose was to retain male control over female sexuality.

  Sexuality as female animalism is not unique to India. Greek tragedy, especially Aeschylus’s Oresteia, is grounded on this prejudicial premise. Shakespeare’s Othello makes the same point when he cries out:

  O curse of marriage that we can call these delicate creatures ours

  And not their appetites!

  In his sexual anxiety, Othello believes that whilst a man is considered master of the female, there is an element of the female—her capability for sexual pleasure—that is beyond the grasp of man. The concept of the woman as not quite human is embedded here. Desdemona is ‘delicate’ like a dove yet a ravenous beast of ‘appetite’.

  ~

  Avanti came over a few days later to inquire from my mother about a tailor to stitch her clothes. My mother raised her eyebrows, wondering if our visitor had another motive behind her visit. Avanti was lively as ever and happy to sit and chat, and soon my mother’s misgivings were allayed. No mention was made of her father’s awkward conversation. A quarter of an hour later, my mother jumped up—she was late for the doctor. Rushing out, she asked me to give Avanti directions to the tailor’s shop in Khan Market. I said I would do better—I would show her the shop. My mother gave me a look—her apprehensions were clearly aroused.

  It was a sunny winter morning. Avanti brought out her bicycle and I watched her as she pushed it up to the street with an uninhibited swing of her hips. With a hearty laugh she jumped on to the bike and I followed on mine. Without a care in the world, I watched the blue sky. Along the way I showed her India Gate. She stared at it and I felt as if I too was seeing it for the first time. There was little traffic and we talked light-heartedly as we rode. I realized I was seeing ordinary things through her fresh eyes. She chuckled a lot and her eyes sparkled. Soon we were talking like old friends. Yet, there was a distance—I sensed a curious detachment
on her part, as though she was not all there. We bicycled silently until we went past 23 Prithviraj Road. I felt sick suddenly. Avanti jumped off her bike and looked at me with alarm.

  She put her hand on my forehead and I blinked several times in succession. Then the dam burst. I couldn’t stop my tears and in a frenzy I recounted the story of my unrequited love for Isha. Sad memories returned. I pointed from afar where we had played badminton, the vestibule where she had leaned close to me, and her room where we had kissed. I showed her the tree behind which I used to keep vigil after school, watching the goings-on of their house on the off- chance that the door would open and Isha would come out. She listened intently and did not allow the fire of my rage to mute into self-pity. In consoling me she did not make light of my feelings and seemed to understand what a mighty pain it was to love and mightier still to love in vain.

  ‘If you have to love a woman, silly boy, she might as well be good-looking,’ said Avanti with a smile, trying to cheer me up. ‘At least, you will have the memory of a nice face.’

  ‘Oh, that she was—she was good-looking.’

  It was the first time I had spoken about Isha in a year, and a great burden seemed to lift. We bicycled on to Khan Market where Avanti completed her work at the tailor’s while I browsed at Bagir Chand’s bookshop. We made a detour coming back. I took her past the Delhi Gymkhana and showed her the spot outside the gate where I had waited endlessly for Isha to come out. I stared at the lifeless entrance until the doorman came out and gave a welcoming smile to a young couple as they were entering.