We bicycled home quietly, lost in our thoughts. As we approached the final turning off the main road, I tried to avoid an approaching lorry and my bicycle swerved into a hedge on the side of the road. In the process I dropped my pen and then got down to search for it in the hedge.
‘What are you looking for, Amar?’ she asked.
‘My pen, I think it must have fallen here,’ I said.
She joined in the search. After a few minutes, she spotted it beside a bush next to the hedge. She tried to reach down for it. I sprang to her aid and I stretched out my arm. I felt my chest brush against hers and I felt a sensation of nervous pleasure. She got up red in the face and gave me an embarrassed look as she handed me my pen. I noticed her well-developed breasts with tense delight.
By the time we reached home my heart had grown lighter. We got down from our bicycles. As we walked home, I felt a sense of gratitude, the sort of emotion that a patient, who is long sick, feels when he realizes that his recovery has finally begun. I peered into Avanti’s dark eyes, black in the shadow, but a rich brown in broad daylight. They seemed to hold successive layers of colour, darkest at the depths and growing brighter and brighter towards the surface. I saw myself reflected in them in miniature. Thanks to Avanti, I began to create a distance from my painful past, assuaging the more hurtful recollections, and I hoped one day they would get pushed into memory boxes that were less hurtful, more neutral.
~
Sharma-ji’s view of society was a bit like young Marcel’s middle-class aunt in Proust’s novel. He had an insatiable curiosity about the rich and the high-born but disapproved of those who tried to ape their ways. The next time we met, he again brought up the subject of the Maliks for no other reason except idle curiosity, I suspect. Avanti had scrupulously kept my confidences and her parents were oblivious to my connection with Isha. My mother too was determined not to pander to his nosiness. He referred to the Maliks as ‘modern, hi-fi types’ and reiterated that his family had no wish to be like them. ‘We believe in sticking to our place in society,’ he said smugly.
When Sharma-ji realized he was not getting anywhere on the Malik front, he decided to open another one. Picking up on the stray comment about my uncle Ramu, he inquired about him. My mother explained that the colourful son of my maternal grandfather’s brother—everyone called him ‘Ramu Mama’ in our family—had made his fortune in Lahore and now lived an aristocratic life in Bombay, hobnobbing with Parsi dowagers and princely families from Gujarat.
‘Yes, good old Ramu Mama, he is our only real link to what you call modern, hi-fi life,’ said my mother. ‘He always stays at the Imperial Hotel when he visits Delhi.’
‘Why doesn’t he stay at the Gymkhana Club? It would be more economical, and just as prestigious.’
‘But he is not a member.’
‘Not a member?’ echoed Sharma-ji.
‘Yes, he has been making endless efforts to get himself elected to the Gym but someone on the committee consistently blackballs him.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. He finds it hard to understand—he is so well connected and, of course, so eligible—a member of clubs all over the world. He thinks it may be envy—he is an outstanding tennis and bridge player, you see, and the blackballer is afraid that he will show him up.’ Thus, they went on chatting. My mother was happy to talk about Ramu Mama, whom she greatly admired. He was a shy, discreet man and never guilty of dropping a single name. We had been quite ignorant of Ramu Mama’s brilliant social connections until Anand had filled us in about his colourful life during one of his unexpected visits.
‘Sharma-ji is in heaven today.’ His wife suddenly interrupted our conversation. We were at our neighbour’s house for dinner two weeks later. Mrs Sharma had something on her mind. Just as we had arrived, the husband and wife had been having a scene and she could not contain herself. Sharma-ji explained with some self-satisfaction that a marriage proposal had arrived for Avanti from back home in Ujjain and he wanted our opinion. A conservative, old, wealthy Brahmin family that had been in business for almost a hundred years wanted Avanti’s hand for their twenty-five-year-old son.
‘It’s a perfect match.’ Sharma-ji beamed. He elucidated that the boy was just the right age. The nine-year gap with Avantika conformed perfectly to the dictates of the shastras. At serious moments such as these, he referred to his daughter by her formal name. The horoscopes of the two matched. The only defect was the gotra—he would have wished for a higher gotra within the Sharma sub-caste. Other than that, it was ideal.
‘What ideal?’ exclaimed his wife. She didn’t want her daughter marrying into a business family. They were stingy and mean-hearted. ‘Besides, how will we meet their demands for a big dowry?’ To top it, the proposal had come via Sharma-ji’s brother, who was completely unreliable. ‘He always gets swayed by money,’ she said dismissively,
‘But Avantika is not getting any younger,’ countered Sharma-ji.
‘For pity’s sake, she is only sixteen!’ Mrs Sharma protested.
‘That’s old!’ he said. ‘All the girls in my father’s family were married by puberty.’
Mrs Sharma calmly said that she would prefer her daughter to marry someone from a modern, professional background. ‘Someone like him,’ she said, looking at me.
‘What does Avanti think?’ asked my mother, suddenly apprehensive.
‘Avanti thinks the boy is a weakling,’ said Avanti.
‘But you’ve only seen his picture, Avantika,’ her father appealed.
‘He is feeble.’
‘What!’
‘No spine, I can tell. He’ll do his mother’s bidding.’
‘You can tell all this from a studio photo?’ said Sharma-ji. He got up and brought out a large photograph of a reasonably good-looking young man and passed it around proudly.
‘You’re boring our guests, Father,’ moaned Avanti.
There was a knock on the door and Avanti ran to open it. She returned a few minutes later to say that it was a poor, distant female relative of theirs from Ujjain who urgently needed 200 rupees for the medical treatment of her son. Both husband and wife obviously knew her and they looked at each other in irritation. With a scowl, Sharma-ji said, ‘Tell her that we don’t have that kind of money.’
‘Besides, we have guests for dinner, Avanti,’ said his wife. ‘Ask her to come back later.’
‘Come back for what?’ thundered Sharma-ji. ‘She is not going to get a paisa from me.’
‘Why?’ asked Avanti defiantly. She looked at her mother and said, ‘I know there are 200 rupees in your purse.’
‘But that’s for your clothes!’ protested Mrs Sharma.
‘The clothes can wait, not her son.’ Avanti went and took the money out of her mother’s purse and gave it to the woman. The conversation resumed.
Sharma-ji expressed his fears as though he were speaking to himself. He worried that life was changing around him too quickly, especially in the way young people behaved with each other. Avanti would soon be going to college and he didn’t want her to get into the wrong company. Girls of Avanti’s age would attend lectures with boys; they would mix freely with men; and walk with them on the streets. There was always a fashionable set in each college. She would meet other girls who would choose their husbands from among the boys in college. And he suddenly grew silent.
‘What’s wrong in a girl choosing?’ I asked. In the old days, girls from the best families chose their husbands through svayamvara. ‘Didn’t Damayanti choose Nala in this way from a line of suitors?’
‘Look, I don’t know where the world is going. I am a traditional Brahmin,’ said Sharma-ji. ‘I cannot accept a love marriage.’ He reminded us that begetting a son and marrying off a daughter were the chief responsibilities of a father, according to the Dharmashastras. ‘If he fails in these two, he goes to hell,’ he said mournfully.
‘I have no problem with an arranged marriage as long as it’s the right person,’ said Avanti.
>
Mrs Sharma looked around for support.
‘It’s the people who have to get married—they should decide and take responsibility for their lives,’ I said suddenly. My parents were surprised at my announcement.
‘What about your son?’ asked Sharma-ji. ‘Will he have the freedom to decide?
Avanti looked at me.
‘Of course, I will decide,’ I said with bravado.
My mother turned to my father uneasily, and I could tell she was uncomfortable. Intellectually, she had a feminist disposition, but when it came to her family, she believed in the old Indian ‘arranged marriage’ instead of the modern ‘love marriage’. But she diplomatically skirted the issue, saying, ‘I hope he will listen to us.’ My father tried to comfort both his host and his wife, saying that parents worried too much—young people were more sensible than we imagined.
It was easier in the case of a son, felt Sharma-ji. Someone without a daughter could never know the anxieties of a girl’s parents. ‘Will she be safe? Will he treat her with respect?’ he voiced his fears. A boy could effortlessly turn a girl’s head. And how lightly boys took their flirting, unaware they were playing with a girl’s life.
‘I must admit I too worry sometimes,’ confessed Mrs Sharma.
~
I didn’t take Sharma-ji seriously at the time but over the years I have grown to empathize with his deepest anxieties. There is indeed a difference between having a son and having a daughter, and the parents of a daughter seem to be more vulnerable. In Sharma-ji’s case, his fears were more acute because of his conservative Brahmin background. To some extent, his anxieties reflected a worry that fathers everywhere have for their daughters. The world is a dangerous place and he had a niggling fear when Avanti went out, especially at night. However, the solution to this apprehension that the ancient Indian civilization devised was unique and brought about a compromise between the kama optimists and pessimists.
By the middle of the first millennium BCE, the ascetic ideal began to take a mesmerizing hold on ordinary householders, and young men in large numbers thought of adopting the renouncer’s life. Seeing hordes departing for the forest, the established order felt threatened, and it responded decisively and innovatively. The Manusmriti forbade men to renounce kama till they had successfully fulfilled the householder’s duty to produce offspring in the second stage of life. Oddly enough, India was underpopulated at that time, and this might have contributed to elevating kama to one of life’s aims. ‘The secret of Hinduism may be found in the dialogue between the renouncer and the man-in-the-world [grihastha].’ Since kama is needed for perpetuating the human race, the establishment struck a compromise between the kama optimists and pessimists. It did not deny kama but created a clear, well-defined boundary for it to operate. The Dharmashastras affirmed that kama is legitimate as long as it is for procreation in the second ashrama of life.
The obligation to have a family—a son, in particular—came from the novel Vedic ‘doctrine of debts’—to gods, ancestors and seers. Begetting a son achieved the prized goal of immortality.
A debt he pays in him
And immortality he gains
The father who sees the face
Of his son born and alive.
Greater than the delights
That earth, fire and water
Bring to living beings,
Is a father’s delight in his son.
There is a Vedic imperative for populating the earth, and procreative sex becomes obligatory. Lopamudra sums up the Vedic attitude: ‘Men should go to their wives.’ By the time of the Mahabharata, it becomes a formal duty of a man to make love to his wife during her fertile period: ‘By ignoring the fertile period, a man commits a sin which leads him to hell.’
The ashrama system of the stages of life was an elegant historical conciliation of sorts that tried to synthesize the demands of the kama optimists and pessimists. It divided human life into four sensible stages, accompanied by rites of passage at each one, allowing the individual to embrace and renounce desire at appropriate times of his life. It provided security to the family by confining the pleasures of kama to the worldly, second stage of life within the confines of marriage, and denied access to kama in the first stage, decreeing celibacy for the student. On retirement at the third stage, vanaprastha, one was expected to disengage from worldly pursuits, begin to detach from kama, and seek the meaning of life. In the fourth and final stage, sannyasa, one was expected to become totally celibate again, renouncing the world in quest of spiritual release from human bondage.
This also meant that a young man in his first ashrama should not be tempted to pursue the ascetic life, which explained my father’s inhibitions about initiating me too early into his mystical practices. It is also why King Suddhodana advised his famous son Gautama, the future Buddha, to:
Give up this plan, dear child! The time is not right for you . . . [Your] senses are excited easily by sensual pleasures, a young man is incapable of the hardships of ascetic vows . . . and solitude.
The ashrama system was thus a grand historical compromise but it did not satisfy either the kama optimists or the pessimists. The optimist suddenly found that kama’s sphere of operation had been tamed by society and confined to marriage—everything beyond it was ‘illicit love’. The pessimist found that the establishment had converted his ambitious project of renunciation into an institution of old age. The dharma texts, as I mentioned, recorded this compromise between the kama optimists and pessimists. The institution of marriage was the deal. Society everywhere seems to have spontaneously and unconsciously achieved a similar settlement between the erotic and ascetic sides of human nature. In rejecting the perpetual celibacy of the pessimistic renouncer and the libertinism of the optimistic seeker of pleasure, Hindu society brought about a new decorum in sexual relations. The dharma texts legitimized marriage and codified its rules. Thus, there arose a third voice between the renouncer and the voluptuary, the voice of the average householder, who is a person of moderation in most societies. He is generally focused on leading an ethical life with his wife and children in the wholesomeness of a family atmosphere.
The ancients had grasped kama’s threefold nature: it is procreative; capable of ecstatic pleasure; and wildly uncontrollable. They saw in it a potential for great tragedy. A woman, in particular, was more vulnerable because of patriarchal inequality. Kama optimists thus had to be tamed, and marriage was the answer. Kama pessimists presented a different challenge. The sannyasi, ‘renouncer’, was obsessed with the idea that desire was the source of human suffering. He offered the ordinary householder liberation from the human bondage to desire. The price, however, was high—he must renounce sexuality in favour of celibacy.
There has always been lingering anxiety within the Brahminical establishment that kama pessimists might prevail. The renouncer has always been a charismatic figure in India—from Gautama Buddha to Mahatma Gandhi. If he were to persuade large numbers of householders to defect and renounce the world, he might threaten the very survival of the species. If men stopped procreating during the second ashrama of life, it would also undermine marriage, thus endangering the grand synthesis between the kama optimists and pessimists.
Like many renouncers, Gandhi believed that sex entailed frittering away the power of the semen, which was akin to a ‘life force’, and this undermined spiritual progress. He felt the loss of semen led to the dissipation of energy and power, and somewhat like Freud diminished the civilizing power of sublimation. In his autobiography, Gandhi narrates his feelings of guilt that at the moment when his father was dying, he was making love to his wife, Kasturba, and this might also explain his obsession with celibacy. In later life, Gandhi conducted infamous experiments to test himself if he had overcome his sexual urges by sleeping naked with young members of his ashram, Manu, Abha and Sushila. Some members of the ashram were convinced that Gandhi’s body was the ‘body of India’ and they equated celibacy with ensuring that the body remained pure and
deserving of India’s freedom from colonial rule. The violence accompanying the partition of India, in Gandhi’s eyes, meant that Indians had somehow failed in achieving that state of purity. Nehru, of course, dismissed Gandhi’s advocacy of celibacy within marriage as ‘silly and unnatural’.
Unlike animals, people are also motivated by fancy. Desire travels from our senses to our imagination, whence it creates an illusion around a particular person. Society ensures that this human ability is employed for marriage and the stability of society and survival of the species. Marriage has made kama acceptable by converting it into `conjugal sexuality’. Societies everywhere have exploited the human’s charming inclination towards fantasy around a particular individual by instituting monogamy via the institution of marriage. Marriage has made kama acceptable by converting it into ‘conjugal sexuality’. Hence, the Dharmashastras insist that sex is only for procreation. It was a natural follow-up, as I have said, to another arrangement within the Indian civilization—the four-stage ashrama system. The grihastha, or the householder stage, is based on the evolutionary benefits that emerged from the institution of family. When the survival of our species mattered, the family was supremely useful as an economic unit of production and consumption. Monogamy was needed for the family to endure. If individuals did transgress when young, they could redeem themselves through marriage and become respectable.
Not unlike ‘morality’ and the ‘market’, marriage seems to have emerged spontaneously in history. Friedrich Hayek would have called it ‘spontaneous order’. Kinship through marriage and the prohibition of incest are among the first features of human culture, making a major break with our primate ancestors. Early human beings, who lived between five and 1.8 million years ago, had little use for marriage. Like bonobos, they presumably had sex with many partners. They shared food in exchange for sexual favours, including same-gender pairs. Women would collect nuts, fruits, and insects while carrying babies and did not need men to provide for them. There was no advantage in a loyal pair.
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