Kama

by Gurcharan Das

  ~

  On a lazy Sunday afternoon during a break in the monsoons, I caught an unexpected glimpse of Isha walking idly on the street below my flat. It was eighteen months now since we became lovers. She wore a thin, white, almost gossamer, sari with white sandals. The pale, lengthening rays of the afternoon sun fell on the curves of her body, heightening them in the waning light. I watched her from my terrace but she did not look up. A black-and-yellow Fiat taxi went by, carrying a saffron-robed Brahmin with a familiar mark on his forehead and she gazed darkly at him. As she walked past, she smiled as if from some private satisfaction. It was a sad, quick smile, one which I had seen only rarely. There was something touching and pliantly feminine about it. Soon, she had disappeared into the tired streets of Colaba and I was left wondering what had really been on her mind.

  Isha wanted to work, not because she needed the money, but because it was the fashionable thing to do. She was unwilling, however, to put in the hard work of finding a job. During those days of Nehruvian socialism, the private economy was tiny, nor was it expanding and jobs were scarce. In the end, Isha found one through one of her husband’s contacts, whose advertising agency needed a copywriter. It was a glamorous job for someone in her position and gave her a chance to get out of the house and tell her friends that she was ‘busy’. She had a superior attitude towards the people she worked with which didn’t make her any friends. Neither did it make her less moody and she remained restless as ever.

  My doorbell rang half an hour later. I opened the door and there she stood on the landing of the staircase, her light cotton sari disguising inadequately the roundness of her hips that were surprisingly large for her slim figure. She gave me a look of terrifying directness and fatigue. I inhaled the warm afternoon smell of her skin as she stepped in. Taking off her sandals, she washed her feet under the tap in the bathroom and came and sat down on the cool floor of red terracotta tiles.

  ‘What’s bothering you?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing, I am just tired.’

  ‘Is there something on your mind?’

  ‘It’s nothing. I am just weary of the world.’

  She seemed a lost soul as unattainable as ever. In the peculiar light of the monsoon afternoon, she had the same melancholic expression that I remembered from our meeting on the veranda of the Bombay Gymkhana. She talked listlessly and I listened leaning on an elbow, taking an odd pleasure in entering her world of small vanities. There were long silences. She was much concerned with the opinion of servants and shopkeepers; she showed no interest in money, nor any responsibility in managing it; she avoided having to face anything unpleasant, and willingly accepted every superstition that came along her way. I took her confessions as a propitious omen of a deepening relationship. Her words were fresh but later when I tried to recall our conversation I remembered only the patterns, not the substance. She seemed prematurely exhausted by experience.

  ‘Come, take me for a drive in the rain!’ she announced suddenly. Before I could protest, she had rushed downstairs and sprang like a puppy into a black-and-yellow taxi. She felt like a puppy in the way she began to lick and caress me in the cab. We drove from Colaba to Marine Drive and stopped for coconut water at Chowpatty beach. A few people had the same idea and they peered into our taxi but they could scarcely see us. I paid and handed back the empty coconut shells and we drove off to continue our lovers’ existence. She seemed unable to endure the space between us and pressed her legs against mine; then brought her face closer to mine, her cheeks pallid and warm. It was a delight to feel her leaning against me and it reminded me of countless scenes in Hindi cinema of couples in love seated side by side in a taxi going nowhere in particular.

  It began to drizzle and Isha wanted to walk on the beach. So, we turned around and headed back to Chowpatty, where everyone was running for cover. We were the only ones going in the opposite direction towards the sea. The sky had grown dark and she moved into my arms, and I felt the same feminine suppleness pressed against my body. We kissed to the roar of the monsoon sea. I looked around for fear of being spotted. We kissed again, a long, lingering kiss, as the drizzle turned into a shower.

  ‘This is madness!’

  ‘Yes, divine madness!’

  Soon, we were back in my flat. We took off our wet clothes, dried ourselves and she lay naked beside me, breathing lightly and staring at the wooden rafters and the fan on the ceiling. Her brown skin and dark hair glowed from the wetness.

  ‘I have always loved your curly hair, your dimples and your big eyebrows,’ she said as though she were making a catalogue.

  Soon our conversation was infused with intimacy and the afternoon became filled with the healing power of her words. Suddenly, I was conscious of an unusual silence in the flat; I could hear the tap dripping in the bathroom. She turned on an elbow, and lowering her neck, she gazed for a long time into my eyes. Then she gave me the same sad smile I had seen many times. I was about to say something when she pressed her warm hand on my mouth. We lay on the floor watching each other, eye to eye, our bodies touching and healing temporarily the sadness and the languor of the afternoon. I felt her strong mouth on mine and my arms closed on her.

  After we had made love, she lay lightly in the crook of my arm, her hair blown across my mouth by the sea breeze. She got up slowly. Sitting up on the floor, she clasped her ankles, then got up and pulled out one of my old loose shirts from the closet and threw it over her and walked to the terrace to look at the sea. I followed her after a while. I watched my lover’s face with passionate concentration as it reflected the benign light of the fading afternoon. I observed that our behaviour, our attitudes, even our passion was in some ways a response to the luminous, sea-swept city. I remembered one of our first kisses by the sea—a kiss broken by her laughter. Later, she had placed her hand in mine as if to make amends. It had been an overture to a ravenous and possessive sexuality. The one sure clock in our life was the sea and its tides at which we gazed continuously from my terrace. Each passionate encounter left a different meaning about love.

  Isha was clearly troubled and it had to do with something beyond our love. She was beautiful, I thought, and beauty, if it is accompanied by intelligence, stirs a feeling of inferiority in me. The sun was falling flat across the sea and the water was pale with it. It was the hour for making confidences to a lover.

  ‘Look here, Isha,’ I said after a pause. ‘What more do you want from an afternoon like this?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she answered wearily.

  ‘Is it your husband?’

  ‘I never think about him, poor fellow.’

  There was a long silence. I watched her intently. ‘Do you still love Anand?’

  She was startled. ‘What . . . why do you ask?’

  ‘That handkerchief over there, with an A on it—you’ve been trying to hide it all afternoon. Is it his?

  ‘Odd that you should ask, I ran into him a few weeks ago.’

  ‘Here in Bombay?’

  ‘Yes, he has just moved here . . . with a big job too.’

  ‘But you didn’t tell me?’ I became wary. My mind, like a lake of clear water, was suddenly clouded by a disturbance below the surface. Isha tried to reassure me but it was to no avail.

  ‘How sad you look!’ she said.

  I began to understand her restlessness. She had never quite shed Anand, and now he had begun to loom large once again. The memories of my past returned with new fears. The handkerchief, which had been unimportant until a few minutes ago, now assumed in my mind an ominous significance. I could imagine her looking at Anand much the same way she was looking at me. I felt mad with jealousy and suddenly I wanted him dead so that things might be just as they had been in the past eighteen months. Having once experienced the disappointment of her love, I was terrified by her ability to hurt me. She was fickle and capricious and had no sense of loyalty. She only wanted to be adored; nothing else mattered. So, was my happiness over? I was angry with her husband who seemed to s
tupidly do nothing, although the situation demanded it insistently. He ought to be suspicious; he ought to guard Isha from predators like Anand. I felt irritated by his indifference and his inability to establish his rightful claims on his wife.

  But I was torn. I had been the greatest beneficiary of his inaction. If he grew suspicious, it might also undermine my own fragile position, and I would be the loser. So, I retreated quickly from this awkward mental space. It did not stop me from retaining a self-righteous belief in my sense of entitlement to Isha’s affections. I did not feel guilty or ashamed for loving Isha; instead, I felt indignation, contrasting her husband’s apathy with my own love. I may not have had any legal claim to Isha, but I felt more deserving of her love.

  Soon, it began to drizzle. Gradually, the rain turned into a monsoon torrent and we rushed inside. Isha took a towel and dried my forehead and hair. At her touch, a feeling of happiness coursed through me. She took off my wet shirt and dried herself. Despite knowing her intimately for more than a year, I felt shy seeing her naked body and looked away. But she seemed completely at ease. On the roof we could hear the rain beating down. From an overflowing gutter the water poured in a steady stream on to the street. As the air turned thick inside, I opened a window and made tea for us.

  The rain had penetrated my guard but also washed away some of the tension. It was still pattering down but the force of the storm was over; only a trickle now issued from the gutter. I sighed as I watched this woman whom I loved so obsessively. I felt no exhilaration this evening, only sadness and resignation.

  ‘I feel jealous,’ I said.

  ‘Love demands jealousy.’ She shrugged matter-of-factly. ‘If you are not jealous, you are not in love.’

  I suspected I was no longer her only lover. Two weeks later I knew for sure. The phone rang early on a Saturday morning.

  ‘Hello,’ said Isha, ‘are you asleep?’

  ‘No, but when can I see you? This morning?’

  ‘I am with Anand.’

  ‘If only you could come . . .‘

  ‘No, it isn’t possible.’

  Isha told me that she had come to see me the previous evening but had found the door locked. When I heard this, I felt the same elation I used to feel when I went past her house in Delhi. In the past two weeks, we had met only once, and that too briefly, even though I had left messages for her at work.

  ‘Can I invite you both to lunch?’

  ‘No,’ she replied firmly.

  ‘Then when can I see you?’ I implored.

  ‘I don’t know. Stop being irritating.’

  Isha had cooled and her prickly manner was new and hurtful.

  ‘Look, I must go out now,’ she said suddenly and hung up.

  ‘Go out,’ I thought unbelievingly. And where was she going? I no longer trusted her, nor believed anything she said. She had always disconcerted me with her lies. In the months before Anand returned to Bombay, I tended to mostly accept what she said even though it was less than the truth. She led me to think that our affair would never end, that one day we might even marry. I shouldn’t have believed her, of course, but I liked to hear the sound of the words coming out of her mouth, if only to give me the satisfaction of rejecting them myself. She constantly played a game of make-believe, knowing all the time that our liaison was a temporary distraction which would be over sooner rather than later.

  ~

  ‘Love demands jealousy’ were the words Isha had used, and this is one of Proust’s unique contributions to our understanding of kama. The torment I felt at Isha’s absence was part of a recurring pattern, beginning with the anguish I used to feel as a child at my mother’s absence combined with the impossibility of possessing her. Proust’s great insight is that jealousy heightens the anguish at the beloved’s absence and the lover’s impossible desire to possess the beloved. In the first volume of his novel, the lover is Charles Swann, who is besotted with Odette, a former courtesan who will later become his wife.

  Jealousy begins one evening when Odette complains of a headache and declines to make love. Swann suspects that

  perhaps Odette was expecting someone else that evening, that she had merely pretended to be tired, so that she had to put the light out only so that he should suppose that she was going to sleep, that once he had left the house she would put it on again and would open her door to the man who was to spend the night with her.

  Swann returns at midnight to spy on her. He thinks he sees a light in her window and knocks on the shutter; he hears a voice; the window opens. Two old men stand in an unfamiliar bedroom, looking at him questioningly. It’s the wrong window! His doubts about her fidelity remain, however. He does not tell her of his misadventure although he is

  glad that the satisfaction of his curiosity had preserved their love intact, and that, having feigned for so long a sort of indifference towards Odette, he had not now, by his jealousy, given her the proof that he loved her too much, which, between a pair of lovers, for ever dispenses the recipient from the obligation to love enough.

  Swann concludes that Odette is not seeing another man and has not lied to him. But jealousy has reduced him to a shameless ‘peeping Tom’. Impassioned by ‘the desire for truth’, he spies on her, bribes her servants, listens at the door. He tries to explain every moment in Odette’s day. One afternoon, he calls on her unexpectedly, but she does not answer the door, though he hears noises within. He tortures himself wondering about her relationships with others. Facing uncertainty, he is forced to admit that he cannot possess every aspect of Odette’s being. As his jealousy grows, Odette feeds it by cooling off herself and keeping him at arm’s length.

  Proust belongs to a long western tradition of kama pessimists who thought of passionate love as a pathological condition leading to madness. Beginning with Plato and Cicero and followed by the Christian Fathers, they considered passion to be a disease. Like a doctor analysing himself, Swann is lucid in his prognosis:

  He realized at such moments that interest, that gloom, existed in him alone, like a disease, and that once he was cured of this disease, the actions of Odette, the kisses that she might have bestowed, would become once again as innocuous as those of countless other women.

  Swann has made a diagnosis but this does not mean that he can do anything about it. Likening the suffering to a ‘deep, secret wound, which tormented him day and night’, he engages in evasive actions to avoid confronting the fact that he is a patsy in his relationship with Odette. His love follows a downward spiral, reaching new circles in hell, as he discovers that she once worked in brothels and likes women as well as men. Eventually, his love diminishes like a fever. And as it ceases, so does his jealousy. No longer in love, Swann is indifferent when he discovers that he was right—Odette had slept with his rival on that day—and he marvels why he ever loved a woman who was not at all his type.

  ~

  Kamini Masi’s diagnosis of my ‘disease’ was quite different from Proust’s. She felt that I had breached a central tenet of sringara rasa when I got romantically entangled. I had gone against the classical ideals of dispassionate love. The Kamasutra would have regarded my obsessive, romantic love for Isha with distaste. A real nagaraka would not have let hurt pride get in the way and would have accepted with equanimity the fact of being abandoned by a mistress who had grown tired of him. Isha was actually doing a better job in following the Kamasutra’s script. In a chapter titled ‘How to Get Rid of Him’, the text states cold-heartedly:

  If a man is attached to her and has done favours for her in the past, even if he now yields but little fruit, she keeps him around by lying. But if he has nothing left at all . . . she gets rid of him . . . and gets support from another man. She curls her lip and . . . talks about things he does not know about. She punctures his pride. She has affairs with men who are superior to him. She ignores him . . . She does not offer him her mouth.

  The erotic love of the Gupta age was a precarious balancing act. It sought passionate pleasure without becom
ing victim to tender, romantic feelings and the destructive possessiveness of sexual desire. It searched for equilibrium between the disorderly, instinctual forces of nature and the civilizing attempts of culture. Vatsyayana confesses that it is difficult to reconcile these opposing forces in order to achieve balance and preserve harmony:

  When the wheel of sexual ecstasy is in full motion, there is no textbook at all, and no order.

  Love in the nagaraka’s world is not romantic but hedonistic, somewhat alien to us ‘moderns’. I must confess I was not attracted initially to classical Sanskrit poetry. I found it formulaic, impersonal and lacking in spontaneity. I couldn’t relate to the erotic mood of sringara rasa, which I found depersonalized. It was voluptuous and delightful but it did not touch my heart. For one whose sensibility is moulded by individualism, it is difficult to identify with the impersonal protagonists of these poems. They speak not of a particular man or woman but of man and woman in general—he is always handsome; she is always beautiful.

  Slowly, over the years, however, it has grown on me. I no longer mind if the nayika, the ‘heroine’, has a face that always resembles the moon; her eyes are those of a fawn; her body stoops erotically from the weight of her full, rounded breasts; her tiny waist, her wide hips, and her thighs like the trunk of an elephant. It is a cultivated taste, I have discovered, which revels in the endless playfulness of love’s ambiguity. According to the Kamasutra, the nayika is an ‘independent heroine’ just as the nayaka is an ‘independent hero’, both words originating in Sanskrit drama. Although these courtly lovers operate in a patriarchal world defined by the dharma texts, these appellations eliminate their social differences. As lovers, they are free agents—she could be a married or an unmarried woman of any class—thus, placing the world of pleasure beyond the sordid reality of hierarchy and power. This discourse of the courts of ‘early historic’ India was a foretaste of the medieval bhakti movement. In Jayadeva’s poem Gitagovinda, the heroine, Radha, has as much human agency as her divine lover, Krishna.