The lover, who in the evening, sucks
a stick of lemon bark, smeared with honey,
is not plagued by foul breath
when he is caught in the net of his woman’s arms.
Happily, I did not suffer from bad breath, as some of the women in my life have reassured me. I followed the Kamasutra’s advice to have a book of poetry on the table to read aloud at the right moment to the right person, and I did furnish the room with a special couch for sleeping after sex.
The lover makes love with his beloved
wherever he happens to be,
but a wise man, a pure man,
does not sleep there on that polluted bed.
I had discovered the Kamasutra at university. After returning from class one afternoon, I stumbled on a banner on the window of a bookshop that announced: ‘The first legal translation of the sex classic, the Kamasutra’. The ancient Indian text had finally come out of the closet after almost a century of clandestine, pirated editions as a result of the victory in a London court of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1961. I quickly bought a copy on instalments and it opened up a whole new world of desire.
So began my education in ars amoris. I discovered to my delight that the Kamasutra is not a sex manual but a charming, surprisingly modern guide to the art of living. Addressed to both men and women, it teaches good manners:
The best alliance plays the game
so that both sides taste one another’s happiness
and treat one another
as unique individuals.
It initiated me into the enviably happy life of a civilized nagaraka and I began to keep a copy of the book on my coffee table, a hint to my friends that I was a sophisticated sensualist. Having a superior sex handbook also meant the promise of secret pleasure.
‘Don’t be hurtful or barbaric!’ says the Kamasutra. It tells the man to satisfy a woman first and measures success in bed by how much the two enjoy each other in equal measure; be gentle with a virgin and first remove her fears and inhibitions; don’t approach your wife sexually on the first three nights after the wedding; instead, use this time to understand her feelings, win her trust and arouse her love. Indeed, the Kamasutra is a great leap forward in the history of kama in India by introducing the notion of love in sex.
The Kamasutra describes extravagant soirées where women are decked in lavish jewellery with elaborate hairdos that they hold in place with delicate, ornamental hairpins. There were twenty-two such exquisite hairstyles that I counted personally in the miraculously preserved paintings in the caves at Ajanta. The characters in them give picnic parties in gardens at the edge of the city where everyone comes smartly dressed. I could easily have been one of the guests at these picnics, who exclaims:
Behold the splendour of the park!
The trees resplendent in their fruit and bloom
Protected by the king’s keen guard from doom
And by the creeper vines closely embraced
Like men with their women interlaced.
Who would not be attracted to the nagaraka’s sophisticated and hedonistic lifestyle? On a typical day, he has his limbs massaged with oil, teaches parrots to speak and engages in a whirlwind social life of games, music, and salons on art and literature, ending in a night of pleasure. Since I spent a third of my day at work, I wondered how the nagaraka made a living, or if he was wealthy, when did he manage his investments? But I did not dwell on these details and was content to be seduced by kama’s optimism. The premise of the Kama Shastra tradition—of which the Kamasutra is the most famous text—is that kama is one of the legitimate aims of life and sexual pleasure exists for its own sake and not just as a means of procreation. Towards the end of the book it offers the best advice I have ever received.
If you are kissed,
kiss back.
I did not have to wait long before I got a chance to test its counsel.
~
I thought I heard an unmistakable voice call out my name. I looked around and it was Isha. She was sitting on a cane sofa on the veranda of the Bombay Gymkhana Club. With her hands folded in her lap, she was facing the vast playing field with Victorian buildings on the horizon against the evening sky. I felt a thrill.
‘I had heard you were living here, Amar,’ she said.
‘It feels like a lifetime since I saw you! What about you? What brings you to the big city?’ I asked.
She opened her empty hands in her lap in a gesture of futility, and looked up slowly. ‘Nothing—hoping to find a job, hoping to escape from myself.’
‘Can one ever escape from oneself?’
Her lips curled into a smile. ‘You’ve changed,’ she said. ‘So much confidence . . . not the frightened, tongue-tied Amar I remember on the bicycle in Delhi.’
Yes, I had changed and she was the right person to notice it. I wanted to tell her about everything that had happened since we parted: how the scars from the wounds she left behind had finally healed; how the healing began the day after Avanti moved next door; how Ramu Mama and Kamini Masi had helped settle me in Bombay, and more importantly, had cultivated in me a self-assured, optimistic attitude to life. Their love for fine clothes, ornaments, salons and beautiful people had reaffirmed my attraction for the nagaraka’s life. For me, ‘the way of kama’ was not to live life in a fleeting or idle manner but to invest every action in one’s life with passion. I wanted to tell her so many things. Instead, I merely said, ‘Everyone changes, don’t you think?’
‘Most people don’t,’ she said, tilting her head in the characteristic way that I remembered so well.
I noticed that Isha’s face and body had filled up a bit to her advantage. She was no longer quite as angular but she was still strikingly beautiful, I thought with a twinge. She was in a plain cotton sari with a sleeveless blouse that drew attention to her handsome neck and shoulders. In the late afternoon sun, her ‘cotton look’ emphasized a newer, friendlier and mellower disposition than the one I had known.
‘Stay awhile if you are not pressed,’ she said in an insistent voice.
I sat down beside her.
‘What will you have?’ I asked as I rang a shiny brass bell.
‘What does one have in this remnant of the British Raj?’
‘Fresh lime soda?’
She nodded. I signed for two fresh lime sodas. As we waited for the drinks, the memories of our days together in Delhi came racing back. I found it difficult to believe that this disenchanted woman was the same person who had brought me to my knees. As for her, she had obviously lived a life but its disappointments seemed to have left her even more beautiful.
‘So, what are you doing here?’ I asked.
‘I am waiting for my husband. I seem to be only waiting these days.’
The bearer returned with two bottles of soda, a bucket of ice, a jug of sugar syrup, a container of salt and two glasses containing fresh lime juice. She added both sugar and salt, as well as ice to her drink. I drank mine without anything.
The mention of her husband made me mildly jealous. I wish I could have reciprocated her confidence and given her some token of acceptance. I was not very good at small talk and the conversation faltered. I pointed in the distance the splendid municipal corporation with its extravagant domes and minarets, and the St Xavier’s College nearby. Behind it was the JJ School of Art, where Rudyard Kipling was born, hundred years ago when his father ran the school. ‘Victorian Bombay at its exuberant best!’ I exclaimed. ‘And if you go back another hundred years, all you had here were coconut and palm trees swaying in the breeze from the Arabian Sea.’
‘I always liked your curly hair, Amar,’ she said, looking at me intently. ‘So, you like the big city?’
‘Yes. It’s a fine place where a lot goes on, and there is a chance for everyone. Delhi feels like a village after this. I love the energy here—you can almost smell money in the bazaars. I can put up with the overcrowding for the sake of being a part of it.’
; ‘You have become wiser in the ways of the world. Tougher too.’
‘You’re gentler,’ I said.
‘. . . and more patient,’ she added.
And sadder, I thought. I had heard that she and Anand had broken up and her mother had died soon after. She told me slowly and deliberately that her family’s fortune had collapsed and the shock had killed her mother. Their grand house in Delhi was now in shabby disrepair. Occasionally, there was disappointment on her face as she spoke about the people we knew. She was bitter that most of her mother’s friends had let them down when they had needed help.
‘You wouldn’t have done that, would you?’ She looked up with a smile, her dark eyes sparkling. ‘You are a good person.’
I smiled and wondered where this was going. ‘Do women like men for their goodness?’ I asked.
‘Depends. What do you think attracts women?’
‘Power? Position? Wealth?’
‘You have become a man of the world.’
Both of us laughed. We talked lightly and easily. Isha did not speak about her husband even though I gave her several opportunities. She must be twenty-four now, I thought. There had hardly been a difference in our ages. What had been different was her family’s status and wealth. What had seemed terribly important then had ceased to matter today. In the breeze of the early evening, we watched the buildings in the distance suffused with the glow from the setting sun. Long strips of mellow orange light fell on the playing field and on the rows of commuters in the distance as they crossed the maidan along a narrow track that connected the Western Railway at Churchgate to the Central Railway line at Victoria Terminus. The rich, long shadows touched the great buildings at the back.
‘I say, I am dining with my uncle, Ramu Mama. Why don’t the two of you join us? He has a great cook. I can call Kamini Masi from the club.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Why don’t you check with your husband? They will be happy to see you. Ramu Mama knew your mother well in Lahore.’
‘I’ve promised Neena. You remember her, don’t you?’
‘Oh, she’s here? After a pause, I added, ‘She never liked me.’
‘She will like you now. Your smile . . . it fills your whole face. You’ve got it from your father, haven’t you?
Isha’s husband arrived finally, accompanied by several friends from work. ‘Vikram Suri,’ he introduced himself. We shook hands.
Suddenly, I recognized him. ‘So, you are the wizard of Dalal Street!’
‘You’ve heard of me?’
‘Who hasn’t? Your picture was in the Economic Times last week.’
I turned to Isha. ‘You didn’t tell me.’
‘I didn’t know he was in the papers. Honestly, I have no idea what he does.’
As I got up to leave, Isha took my hand. She walked with me towards the club entrance and there gave me a sensual kiss dangerously close to my lips, whispering that we would meet again ‘very soon’. Without a thought, I kissed her back. Suddenly embarrassed, I turned to see if anyone was looking.
~
The pleasurable sensation of Isha’s kiss lingered for the next few days. The physical action of a kiss involves the mere rubbing of an area of nerve endings against the soft, fleshy, moist skin tissue of the other person. However, the hopes it engenders goes beyond the carnal sensation. I was swept by a forbidden, adulterous thought that Isha’s attitude to me might have changed—perhaps she did care for me. The kiss inspired in me the promise of pleasure and hope. My imagination sought to hold and savour not just her mouth but her entire person.
Proust expresses the opposite viewpoint. He feels that a kiss might produce a pleasurable physical tingle but it does not often deliver the beloved person. His narrator, Marcel, is attracted to Albertine, on a holiday while walking along the Normandy Coast one brilliant summer’s day. He is attracted to her rosy cheeks, her black hair, her beauty spot, her impudent manner, and she evokes in him the smell of youth and the sea in summer. However, she is reserved with him at the seaside. Marcel returns to Paris at the end of summer, where Albertine pays a visit to his apartment. In contrast to her aloofness by the sea, she now kisses him ardently.
She lies close to him on the bed and embraces him. It’s a promising moment. But it doesn’t have the intended effect. The kiss does not evoke the magical past of her attractive and confident manner beside the summer sea. Because of the awkward kissing position, he feels squashed that he can hardly breathe. It is a particularly inept kiss, and it is a disappointment. The mistake, Proust points out, is our tendency to believe that a kiss or some form of physical contact might in fact put us directly in touch with the object of our love. Disappointed with the kiss, he wonders if there was ever any truth to his romantic attachment to Albertine.
I had instinctively invited Isha to Ramu Mama’s flat because it was my second home in Bombay. It was where I had lived when I arrived in the city on a wet monsoon evening. The black-and-yellow taxi drove me to his flat on Malabar Hill, carelessly bouncing over the puddles. The street lights glistened on the moist asphalt. Bombay in the 1960s was urbs prima in Indis, ‘India’s first city’. It was an open-hearted, hopeful place that offered jobs to everyone even though it did not offer them a home. Its streets were lined with peepul, raintree and acacia, and they were washed daily with chlorinated water.
The Portuguese princess Catharine of Braganza had gifted Bombay to Charles II, king of England, as dowry on their marriage in June 1661. More than a hundred years later, the original seven islets were still a dreary settlement resembling the backwaters that flowed into it. But then it rose, and spectacularly in the troubled conditions of the eighteenth century, and displaced Surat, the premier Mughal port of India. Bombay offered a great natural harbour with miles upon miles of deep, sheltered water, perfect for big ships. It had a vigorous naval police to safeguard vessels on the high seas from pirates. As a result, Parsi ship and dock builders, legendary Gujarati men of trade, Jain shroffs, Marwari bankers, Konkani Muslim traders, Baghdadi Jews and European free traders came in droves. And so, the city became a melting pot of communities and acquired its cosmopolitan character.
It was Bombay’s diverse, tolerant, welcoming personality that attracted Ramu Mama after the Partition in 1947. As a man of wealth, leisure and considerable charm, Ramu Mama quickly found his way into the highest rungs of the society. What really fascinated him was its cinema world. He came at the high point of black-and-white neorealistic cinema which brought masterpieces by Bimal Roy, Guru Dutt, Mehboob Khan, Dev Anand, and pre-eminently, Raj Kapoor, who along with his magical co-star, Nargis, charmed the newly independent nation with Barsaat (1949) and Awara (1952).
It was not unusual for Ramu Mama to be dining with a Parsi baronet on one night or a cricketer from a royal family of Saurashtra on another. On a different evening, he found himself with a coveted courtesan of the city, who had once been an aspiring ‘B-grade’ actress, and she turned out to be Kamini Masi. They fell in love at first sight but he was not the marrying kind, nor was she. They never bothered to marry for years but she did not have to sleep again with a producer to get a part in a film.
Why would an elegant, wealthy man of the world, who was in demand in Bombay’s highest circles, want to be publicly in love with an actress-courtesan? Clearly, his social sphere diminished as a result—he could not take Kamini Masi to some of the grand homes for dinner. Some said that a courtesan had trapped him but then they didn’t know Kamini Masi. She was one of the most beautiful and talented women in the city; not only was she an accomplished actress with a significant fan following, she was a genuinely good person and it was this quality—her generosity of soul—that had struck Avanti and me when we first met her at the Imperial Hotel in Delhi. At that time, they were unmarried but eventually, they did marry because it was more convenient that way.
Ramu Mama became my model of the nagaraka, the urbane man of culture in search of pleasure. He took me under his wing and opened many doors into Bombay
’s society. He also gifted me a special ‘kama attitude’ to life, thus continuing where the ganja priest had left off. But it was not he who taught me the significance of the Kamasutra. For this I have to thank Raj Desai, the celebrated writer, who casually mentioned one evening: ‘There is another way to live one’s life, and that is to live for the sake of pleasure—this is the essential message of the Kamasutra.’
Everyone called him Raj and it was through Ramu Mama that I met Doli Sihari, his trusted assistant at Marg, a respected journal of the visual arts. She took me to the éminence grise one day. I felt a wave of excitement as I entered Raj’s artistic home on Cuffe Parade lined with books and paintings. I was surprised to see an elegant man in his sixties moving about gracefully in an embroidered kurta in his comfortable and scholarly flat, so far removed from the relentless oppression and poverty of his fiction. But he was also an aesthete, and a serious student and critic of Indian art. In his younger days, he had moved in the artistic and socialist circles in London, including the famous Bloomsbury Group. On his table lay the Kamasutra.
‘Do you know it?’ he asked. ‘It’s a new, scholarly translation.’
Raj went on to narrate the exciting tale of how the first English translation had been published illegally in Victorian England in the 1880s by Richard Burton and R.A. Athburth. To escape jail, they had created a fictional Kama Shastra Society and published the book ‘privately—only for the society’s members’. This was at the height of ‘Victorian morality’ when the English middle classes believed that ‘a sensible woman did not experience sexual desire’. Burton had hoped that the Kamasutra could become a weapon to wage a clandestine war of sexual independence in the nineteenth-century western world.
The Kamasutra must have led a similar ‘war of freedom’ 1500 years earlier in order to rescue pleasure from three powerful adversaries: a Brahminical establishment that pronounced in the dharma texts that sex was only for reproduction, not for recreation; from the renouncers of desire—Buddhists, Jains and yogis, who regarded desire as an enemy of spiritual progress, and equated Kama, the god of love, with Mara, ‘the god of death’; and a third, uncultivated but pervasive view among ordinary people that desire was a straightforward matter of physical gratification, a belief that pervades even in the Mahabharata, despite the romantic stories of Nala and Damayanti, Shantanu and Satyavati, and Arjuna and Subhadra.
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