‘Don’t you want to learn to dance?’ asked Kamini Masi.
‘Not today,’ I said shyly.
I thanked my uncle. Kamini Masi gave both of us a kiss.
‘Children, now go home safely, your parents will be waiting,’ Ramu Mama said, shaking our hands warmly.
We were in a daze as we came out and did not have to wait long at the bus stop outside the hotel. Since the bus was full we had to stand. On the way we passed Isha’s home. Both of us saw it but ignored it. Suddenly at a blind turn, the bus swerved and we were thrown into each other’s arms. It was an unexpected and pleasurable feeling. We did not rush to separate. Slowly we recovered but avoided looking at each other.
So deep an impression did the evening make on both of us that within minutes of reaching home, we gave our respective families a minute-by-minute account of our visit to paradise, omitting no details. In doing so, neither of us had anticipated the reaction. What we thought was a triumphant adventure, turned into a near tragedy. My mother’s affection and awe of her cousin evaporated and was replaced by middle-class moral judgement. Despite her feminist views, she thought it inappropriate for a bachelor to be carrying on an illicit relationship in public, and that too in the company of adolescents. I defended him, saying that it was my mistake and that I should have just left the package downstairs. She blamed herself for sending me to deliver it. But this was nothing compared to Sharma-ji’s thunderous reaction. He came rushing over and blamed us for defiling his daughter and ruining her future.
‘Who will marry her now!’ he screamed at the top of his lungs.
The unfortunate event soured our neighbourly relations. My mother was not particularly troubled because she felt that the Sharmas were not really ‘our sort of people’. She had a superior air when it came to Avanti and still feared that I might fall for her.
It also cooled my family’s association with Ramu Mama and our link to the high life, at least for a few years. Avanti and I thought it such a pity that two of the most attractive and kindest persons we had ever met were lost to us. Despite our families, Avanti and I remained good friends. The incident proved to me the immense power of the compromise between kama optimists and pessimists. Marriage, I realized, is such a commanding norm in our society that any relationship outside it, between consenting, loving adults becomes illicit and subject to punishment. This is why most societies, including the West until recently, have created myths which forbid people to create attachments outside the bonds of marriage.
~
Our relationship with Ramu Mama was a bit like Marcel’s family’s relationship with Charles Swann. Swann was a faithful friend of the family and a constant dinner guest. Through him we are led, either directly or indirectly, to all the important characters of the book. He is wealthy, intellectual and Jewish, with a great taste in art. I instinctively admired him, as I did Ramu Mama, although I also empathized with young Marcel’s fears that Swann’s visits to dinner got in the way of his mother’s ritual goodnight kiss. For, on those days,
Mamma did not come up to my room. I said good night and went to bed . . . I should have liked not to think of the hours of anguish which I should have to spend, alone in my room, without the possibility of going to sleep . . .
From Marcel’s fears, Proust moves on to inform us of Swann’s secret life as a member of Paris’s famous Jockey Club, which had the same halo around it that the Delhi Gymkhana Club had in my imagination. Swann was a close friend of the Prince of Wales and one of the most sought after men in the aristocratic world of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.
Our utter ignorance of the brilliant part which Swann was playing in the world of fashion was, of course, due in part to his own reserve and discretion, but also to the fact that middle-class people in those days took what was almost a Hindu view of society, which they held to consist of sharply defined castes, so that everyone at his birth found himself called to that station in life which his parents already occupied . . .
It is curious that Marcel refers to his great-aunt as having a ‘Hindu view of society’ but, of course, Sharma-ji also had some of the same misgivings about Ramu Mama’s socializing with the princely families of Gujarat—families who were clearly above what he thought was our uncle’s proper ‘station in life’. Sharma-ji’s views matched Marcel’s great-aunt’s and his obsession with Avanti’s marriage prevented him from seeing the good qualities that Ramu Mama and Kamini Masi possessed. His single-minded preoccupation, verging almost on mania, may seem odd to non-Indians today, especially in the West, but until the late eighteenth century, most societies around the world regarded marriage as an economic and political institution, not to be trusted with the individuals concerned; that one should marry for love was a strange and even dangerous idea.
In premodern Europe, marriages were not based on sexual attraction but economic circumstance. Marriage was a means of organizing agrarian labour among the poor.
Kissing, caressing and other forms of physical affection associated with sex were rare among the peasantry in seventeenth-century France and Germany, although men found opportunities for extramarital liaisons. In the nineteenth century, the idea took hold in the newly emerging middle classes that marriages should be based on romantic love. It coincided more or less with the emergence of the novel. As romantic novels became popular, ‘romancing’ became a synonym for courting. The marital bond got disentangled from wider kinship ties; husbands and wives became collaborators in a joint emotional enterprise and the ‘home’ became distinct from the workplace. And this idea went right down to the working classes. The aristocracy, of course, had always made its own rules—their women were freer, liberated from routine work and reproductive trials, and available to pursue sexual pleasure.
Coupling love with marriage and motherhood held in check the subversive character of romantic love. Adding stability was the idea that true love was forever. Since marriage was effectively forever for most people, the ideal seemed to work in theory. In reality, of course, romantic love did not lead to marriage in most cases and it meant years of unhappiness for couples in a highly repressive society. We forget how repressive it was: in Britain, unmarried girls who became pregnant were sent to reformatories and mental hospitals. The Mental Deficiency Act, passed in 1913 in England, allowed local authorities to certify and detain indefinitely, unmarried pregnant women who were poor, homeless or just ‘immoral’. One woman, born in 1918 in London, recalls that her mother whispered to her every night as she went to sleep that she must not have sex before marriage or she would go insane.
Nevertheless, the institution of the modern ‘love marriage’ has become the norm in the world, supplanting the old ‘arranged marriage’. But when Avanti protested outside the temple that she too had as much a right to romantic love, she was expressing a modern ideal that came into India with the British Raj and flowered in Bollywood cinema. The persistence of ‘arranged marriage’ in India, however, surprises everyone. No one quite knows why it endures. My own guess is that the compromise struck between the kama optimists and pessimists over marriage must have been a profoundly weighty moment in our society’s history; and the dharma texts thereafter went on to perform such an effective job of conditioning young men and women over the centuries that ‘love marriage’ has not made the sort of headway that it has elsewhere.
Ideas create meaning in the world. Romantic love is one of them. It is based on wish fulfilment, and while a part of us knows its limitations, it helps to escape the unpleasantness of ordinary life. When Avanti staked her claim to romantic love, she imagined it to be one of the great goods that human beings rightly cherish and naturally wish to enjoy. Bertrand Russell, the English philosopher, called it the ‘source of the most intense delights that life has to offer . . . something of inestimable value, to be ignorant of which is a great misfortune to any human being’. But unlike some Romantics, Russell denied that this kind of love ought to be the basis of a happy or stable marriage. He thought marriage depended on ‘affe
ctionate intimacy quite unmixed with illusion’.
Although we never spoke about it, Avanti must have known that romantic love contained a glamorous mist that prevented lovers from truly understanding each other’s being—the sort of mist that coloured our afternoon with Ramu Mama at the Imperial Hotel. Modern Indian society, not unlike other societies, also contains a covert emotional history, of stories of men and women like Ramu Mama and Kamini Masi. The difference between the ‘chaste’ sexuality of marriage and the erotic or passionate character of extramarital affairs has existed in all societies, schism of women into pure (marriageable) and impure (courtesans, prostitutes, concubines and actresses). Kamini Masi clearly belonged to the second category. The irony is that Ramu Mama and Kamini Masi had lived together for so long that they were no different from any married couple except that they were probably happier. They just never bothered to get married. Society, however, could not respect this choice.
In the end, there is no logical connection between love, sex and marriage—the three ideas that many believe to be naturally connected. People love each other without marrying, especially gay persons; people certainly have sex with those they do not love, and love others without having sex with them. So, love and sex fall apart theoretically. People also have sex without being married; many marriages are sexless because of boredom. So, sex and marriage are also not logically related. Many couples do not wish to have children and women can get pregnant without having sex; thus, procreation and sex do not always go hand in hand. Equally, childless marriages are common and children are sometimes born out of wedlock. So, procreation and marriage come apart. People love each other without having children or have children when they don’t love each other. Thus, there is no conceptual reason to connect love, sex and marriage.
~
Isha introduced me to sexual modernity, while Ramu Mama and Kamini Masi reinforced a liberal attitude that is inherent in a modern outlook on life. Isha brought great thrill and excitement into my life, but great pain as well. Avanti came along a few years later and helped to heal some of it. My recovery was like a blue haze on a Himalayan mountain—a haze that envelops everything at a blissful time when adolescence is just coming to an end, and with it are gone the limitless possibilities of youth. Who has not had that feeling?
Anything could have happened between Avanti and me. I was vulnerable and hungry for affection after Isha. But Avanti was aloof and her remoteness marked a clear boundary in our relations. She was different from anyone I had ever met. She neither had the upper-class glamour of Isha, nor the prissiness of the new Indian middle class in the making. She was her own person. She was also a seeker, but what she was seeking was unclear to me, and perhaps, even to her.
If Avanti offered intimations of a different way of living, Sharma-ji’s traditional insecurities over marrying off a daughter introduced me to the power of patriarchy embedded in almost all cultures. I couldn’t swallow his and Manu’s notorious idea that ‘every woman desires every man she sees’. It even appears, most amusingly, in the animal tales of the Panchatantra, where a beguiling nymph, Panchachuda, reluctantly discloses the secrets of a woman’s heart in a half-joking, half-serious manner to the mischievously insistent sage Narada. ‘I am a woman; so, how can I malign women?’ she says, before revealing everything in one of the first great exposés of all times—about a woman’s wily and faithless nature:
While talking to one
She is looking desirously at another
But thinking of a third.
Who really is her beloved?
I accept that I am a product of patriarchy as much as the next man but I have always found it difficult to relate to its central notion of hierarchy. Beginning with Isha, I seem to look up to women rather than down on them. What interests me more, however, is the difference between the sexes. Like Othello, I am curious, for example, as to who enjoys sex more—man or woman? This question has intrigued human beings for thousands of years and the Mahabharata offers a charming answer in the story of King Bhangashvana, who had the rare experience of living life first as a man and then as a woman. Because of his exemplary life, he was given a choice of gender towards the end of his life—would he prefer to be born as a male or female in his next birth? To everyone’s surprise, including the god Indra, he chose to be reborn as a woman. Why? Because, he confesses, a ‘woman enjoys sex far more than a man’. The ancient Greeks have a similar story in the life of Tiresias. No doubt, both stories are the product of the male imagination!
I have hypothesized that the institution of marriage was born as an unconscious compromise between the kama optimists and pessimists. Shvetaketu was the first to make the novel suggestion that men should not generally sleep with other men’s wives and he decreed monogamy. Ever since mating and matchmaking have become an art in which men and women and their families ruthlessly pursue the opposite sex in order to achieve their economic and political goals. It is not so different in the evolution of other species. Peahens are partial to peacocks with glittering plumage and dull-feathered males are left behind in the evolutionary dust. Peacocks today possess brilliant plumage because peahens have been attracted to it over the history of evolution.
The grand compromise between the kama optimists and pessimists, if the evolutionary thesis is to be believed, suggests how social pressure for commitment to marriage may have emerged because it conferred reproductive benefits to our survival as a species. But it was an imperfect deal and it entailed costs. It was a ‘civilizing’ institution but it reduced the freedom of both sexes, and far more in a woman’s case. The accompanying ideology of stri-dharma and pativrata restricted a married woman severely and there were severe penalties for those who broke the rules, not to speak of social ostracism.
Time is a healer and with its passing has receded much of the pain of my adolescence. Now, after fifty years, I am able to look back on my early days in Delhi with a knowing and sympathetic smile that old age accords to youth. The ‘knowing’ is an awareness that kama is not just at the root of creation but it is the source of much ‘good’ and ‘bad’. It lurks behind passion, pleasure, creativity, jealousy, anger, violence, and more. But are the two sides linked inextricably? Is it possible to experience pleasure without pain? Can creativity exist without violence? These are not easy questions and they persist even today.
4
IF YOU ARE KISSED, KISS BACK
The self-deceptions of a nagaraka
When a man has become educated, he enters the householder stage of life and begins the lifestyle of a man-about-town . . . He settles down in a city—a capital city, a market town, or wherever he has to stay to make a living. And there he makes his home in a house near the water, with an orchard, separate servant quarters, and two bedrooms.
—Kamasutra I.4.1–2
The hero of the Kamasutra is called nagaraka, a cultivated man about town, which is the image I had of myself when I came to live in Bombay in the 1960s. After completing university, I found a reasonably good job in the big city. Ramu Mama got me into the Bombay Gymkhana Club. Feeling tall in the confidence of my twenty-four years, I embraced Bombay—it was my nagara, ‘city’, and I its nagaraka—before they changed its name to Mumbai. The next thing to do was to find a place to live and to love.
It is hard to imagine that I was the same person who had once been a wary, nervous and introverted adolescent in Delhi. For this I have to mostly thank Avanti, who gave me the confidence that I could even begin to imagine myself as a nagaraka. But Ramu Mama and Kamini Masi also played their part in helping me to lose some of the shyness of my adolescent years. Following Bombay’s custom, I became the ‘paying guest’ of a Gujarati lady who had two spacious rooms with plenty of light on the roof of her two-storey house near the old Colaba post office. It overlooked a mango orchard with a splendid view of the sea. It had a huge open-air terrace that became my living room, except during the monsoons.
I placed a low but large divan at one end of the front room, covered i
t with a handloom print from Gujarat with frolicking elephants, and surrounded it with colourful cushions so that it served as a sitting couch during the day. I lined the room with books and a small painting by Gaitonde that I had acquired on instalments from the Chemould Art Gallery at Kala Ghoda. I placed a birdcage, a wrought iron swing, and a stone chessboard in my open-air living room. I had acquired these from Chor Bazaar and my terrace flat became ideal for parties on the weekends when I adorned it with flowers from the flirtatious phoolwali around the corner.
Without realizing it, I was following the script of the Kamasutra, whose first chapter entitled ‘The Lifestyle of the Man-about-town’ goes like this:
In the outer room there is a bed, low in the middle and very soft with pillows on both sides and a white top sheet, and a couch. At the head of the bed there is a mat and an altar, on which are placed the oils and garlands left over from the night, a pot of beeswax, a vial of perfume, some bark from a lemon tree, and betel. On the floor a spittoon. A lute, hanging from an ivory tusk, a board to draw or paint, and a box of pencils. Some book or other, and a garland of amaranth flowers. On the floor, not too far away, a round bed with a pillow for the head. And a board for dice and gambling. Outside, cages for pet birds. And set aside a place for carpentry or woodworking and other games. In the orchard, a well-padded swing in the shade, and a bench made of baked clay and covered with flowers.
I did not need a spittoon as I had a brand-new sink in my bathroom of the latest design from Hindustan Twyford. Instead of a lute, I had a Harman Kardon music system. In place of a dice board, I had a chessboard. Nor did I need the bark from a lemon tree as I used Colgate toothpaste:
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