Kama

by Gurcharan Das

  I think I failed as a nagaraka partly because of my ‘modern’ sensibility. I envy Isha for her cool, classical sensibility that is right out of the Kamasutra. Isha could have been a heroine in a poem in one of Vidyakara’s anthology:

  I like sleeping with somebody

  different

  often

  It’s nicest when my husband is

  in a foreign country

  and there is rain in the streets at night

  and wind

  and nobody

  But Sanskrit love poetry does not shed much light on male jealousy—my triangular problem with Isha’s husband or with Anand. Roman elegies do. I identify with Roman poets as they project their jealousy on to husbands or rival lovers. They teach how to keep an affair illicit; avoid the husband; and not let rivals, like Anand, muscle in. I succeeded on the first two counts but failed on the third. Thus, Tibullus addresses the husband of his mistress:

  But you, incautious husband of a deceitful wife,

  watch out for me, too, that she commit no sin,

  and take care that she doesn’t hang out and chat with young men,

  or recline with her garment loosened and her breast exposed,

  or deceive you with a nod . . .

  Again he berates him:

  But your wife has become an expert, and yet you, idiot, sense nothing

  when she moves her body with new skill.

  Do you think that it is for you that she styles her hair

  or combs her fine locks with a close-toothed comb?

  As I think about it many years later, my earlier, adolescent love for Isha had fed on the same impediments—the chief one being that girls were inaccessible to an Indian middle-class boy. And so, I went on to invest my beloved object with everything that was precious. Isha did not face the same problem—she belonged to a higher class where barriers were more porous, going back to mythological times. When I moved to Bombay, my situation changed thanks in part to Ramu Mama’s introductions. I climbed quietly into the upper- middle class and began to think of myself as a nagaraka. But I never shed the naive illusions of my adolescent years and this became a problem when Isha returned to my life in Bombay.

  ~

  There are few things that human beings are more dedicated to than unhappiness. They have many reasons to be unhappy but the fickleness of love is clearly at the top of the list as I have learnt from Isha. So did Swann from Odette—reading about it tore my heart; but strangely enough, it consoled me as well. There the comparison ends. Odette was a courtesan; Isha was not, but both moved in high circles. The more apt resemblance is with Kamini Masi. Unlike Ramu Mama and Kamini Masi’s relationship, where a certain touching authenticity prevailed, Swann’s liaison with Odette was false. Falsity was woven into the fabric of the Parisian high society that Proust describes. The French novelist Gustave Flaubert reminds us: ‘Everything was false, false army, false politics, false literature, false credit, and even false courtesans.’

  Courtesans have, of course, existed in all times and places but ‘there has never been an epoch in which they made the noise and held the place they have usurped in the last few years’, wrote another observer of Parisian society in the 1870s. ‘They figured in novels, appeared on stage, reigned in the Bois, at the races, at the theatre, everywhere crowds gathered.’ This is the backdrop of Proust’s novel. The courtesan was ‘the necessary and concentrated form of Woman, of Desire, of Modernity . . . and part of the myth ‘that the courtesan’s attempt to be one of the ruling class should eventually come to nothing’. Her game was ‘to play at being an honest woman’ but her admirers were aware of the game.

  Odette plays the game, and she isn’t alone. Every member in the Verdurin’s salon that she inhabits exudes falseness. As a result, even Swann becomes false.

  It appeared that [Swann] dared not have an opinion and was at ease only when he could with meticulous accuracy offer some precise piece of information.

  Swann rarely ventures an opinion that is not determined by his obsessive love. When he does take a stand, for the first time, in defending some of his aristocratic friends against the Verdurin’s disparaging remarks, his honesty contributes to his expulsion from their salon.

  Odette’s attempts to be part of high society made me laugh and cringe alternately. Proust calls her a cocotte, ‘hen’, a term for women who have not achieved the highest rank in the world of courtesans. Though Odette succeeds in ruling Swann sexually, she had by no means cultivated, like Kamini Masi, the Kamasutra’s sixty-four arts. Had she become accomplished in them, she might have become a ganika, a title reserved for the most beautiful, talented and virtuous among the courtesans in ancient India. Odette, despite her beauty, remained a veshya, an ordinary courtesan.

  ~

  The act of sex may be nothing but when you reach my age you learn that at any time it may prove to be everything. The pain from my encounters with Isha is long past now, and so perhaps, I have the benefit of distance. Isha was tiring of me and needed the freedom to move on. She faced an old human dilemma: how does one reconcile devotion and loyalty to an old love with the freedom and excitement in discovering a new one? How can one be able to love and still be free?

  Devotion and autonomy seem incompatible most of the time. Isha’s dilemma was shared by two of the greatest heroines of literary realism. Anna Karenina faced the same predicament in Tolstoy’s great novel set in imperial Russia in the nineteenth century. Anna was torn between loyalty to her son and husband versus her lover, Vronsky. Madame Bovary faced a similar problem in Flaubert’s masterpiece of the same name. Set a few years earlier, during the ‘July Monarchy’ in provincial France, Emma Bovary also failed to cope with her illicit affairs in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. Both women took great risks and in both cases the establishment found a way to curb their freedom. Society acted in a subtle way, placing the onus on the women to resist their own desires and sublimate their passionate feelings. It is dispiriting that women who stepped out of line in western fiction and opera in the nineteenth century had to die. The dharma texts of the Brahminical establishment in India managed to brainwash the upper-caste woman in a similar, subtle way, placing the burden on the woman to curb her own freedom, and preventing her thereby from snatching a tiny bit of joy from a dreary, dutiful life.

  5

  THE PARTY

  Only a woman, not a man, may express jealousy

  He who is not jealous is not in love.

  —St Augustine

  I was asleep when Isha came in late one night. She used her key to get in. I had been thrilled that she was finally coming and had waited for her. But then I must have fallen asleep. I remembered the light of the moon shining through the window while I was waiting, and it was the same moonlight that woke me up. I noticed that she was intoxicated and dishevelled. She must have been with another man, I thought, and it must be Anand.

  ‘Where have you been? It’s so late.’

  She was taking off her clothes and did not answer.

  ‘I was watching the moonlight waiting for you,’ I said, trying not to sound stood up and slighted.

  She remained silent and slipped into bed.

  ‘Did he throw you out? Is this why you have come now, so late?’

  ‘Go back to sleep!’ she said with finality and turned her back on me and soon she was asleep. But her sleep was not peaceful; she stirred often and tossed and turned, which confirmed my suspicions that she had been unfaithful. Perhaps, she was dreaming of making love to Anand, and this was what was behind her restlessness. My desire seemed to grow with my feelings of jealousy. Each time I tried to touch her, she turned and rolled away in a rebuff. She snubbed my attempts to caress her. But this resistance only heightened my desire. In the end, my efforts to possess her defenceless body were not successful.

  It is just as well that she didn’t say anything before falling asleep as I wouldn’t have believed her anyway. She had got into the habit of lying. She ha
d said blandly a few days earlier that she was calling from the Gymkhana Club, but I knew she wasn’t there. That was the moment when my trust had begun to break. It also meant that she had lied to me on other occasions. This shameful undercurrent of deception shattered our relationship irrevocably. Yet, I continued to feel angry and jealous. I had a sense of entitlement, a feeling that I possessed her even more than her husband.

  In the bright light of the following day, I woke up to find Isha sleeping in my bed. I was happy and all was forgotten. She looked more lovable than ever. There was an innocent mystery to her and it drew me like a magnet. Happily, as she was asleep, I did not have to talk to her. I could be myself. I did not have to chat about silly things. Since I was no longer under her gaze, I did not have to behave in a certain way so that she would think well of me. I was free to create an image in my imagination. Perhaps it wasn’t Anand she had been with in the night. She may have been a passive victim of another man’s attention, an object of male desire rather than someone she was actively pursuing. With that self-deceptive thought, I felt again the possibility of love.

  ~

  ‘If you are not jealous, you are not in love,’ Isha had once said in irritation.

  Isha didn’t know that Augustine had said the same thing centuries earlier. Ramu Mama, however, expressed a similar thought over lunch one day. In his usual offhand way, he said, ‘Since love is hard to detect, we should look for it in jealousy, which is the visible sign of love.’ Kamini Masi and he worried about my growing jealousy over Isha, and they decided to take me out and cheer me up. Kamini Masi, in particular, was puzzled why someone from an upright family would leap into a crazed, jealous relationship with a married woman when he had the prospect of choosing a girl from the best families. Why would an eligible bachelor like me, she asked, risk his reputation by being publicly and obsessively in love with a married woman? And why would he remain obsessed when there was no future in it?

  Evolutionary biology, I discovered, may have an answer to Kamini Masi’s question. Jealousy has deep evolutionary roots that may have helped human beings survive as a species. Our primate forefathers could not be certain of their children’s paternity; hence, they jealously guarded the child’s mother to avoid wasting their scarce resources on another man’s offspring. Our foremother, in turn, was highly sensitive to a rival female who might run away with her man, leaving her alone in a hostile world. Her jealousy helped to guard against a straying spouse.

  According to David Buss, one of the founders of evolutionary psychology, ‘Jealousy is emotional wisdom, not consciously articulated but passed down to us over millions of years by our successful forebears.’ It is what scientists call an ‘adaptation’ to the problem of survival which helped our ancestors cope with reproductive threats. It helped to ward off rivals and conveyed commitment to a straying partner. Of course, one is not conscious of this evolutionary logic. I do not say, ‘Oh, if Isha is sleeping with Anand, then I can no longer be certain of my children and this will endanger the replication of my genes.’ Instead, I feel jealous. A woman deliberately evokes this emotion in a hapless boyfriend to test if he is truly committed.

  Jealousy is thus a useful emotion, not a sign of immaturity as Kamini Masi thought. She also found it odd that I was more concerned about how often Anand was sleeping with Isha whereas she would have been more jealous about her emotional commitment to him. Evolutionary biology suggests that men and women are different in this respect, and it may be due to the inherited emotional wisdom. Because fertilization takes place inside women’s bodies, not men’s, there is always uncertainty about paternity. A woman’s infidelity endangers a man’s confidence that he is the genetic father. He may have invested his resources over decades on another man’s child. Women, on the other hand, are always certain. Their worry is about the loss of their man’s emotional commitment to a rival. Hence, a husband’s ‘one-night stand’ is less threatening. She wants to know instead, ‘But do you love her?’

  I also uncovered in my explorations in evolutionary biology the answer to another puzzle. Isha had other lovers besides Anand and me, as I found out later, and her propensity for affairs bothered me. I had grown up believing that men had a craving for variety but not women. I was wrong. Surely, sex requires two persons, and mathematically, the number of heterosexual encounters should be more or less similar for both sexes. Indeed, men’s passion for multiple partners could never have evolved unless there were women who shared the same desire.

  Are women by nature just as promiscuous as men? The jealousy of our primate forefathers suggests that Isha may have inherited her propensity for infidelity from her ancestral mother. Had our female foremothers been naturally faithful, our forefathers would not have suffered jealousy. Recent empirical research shows that female infidelity exists in all cultures—seemingly the highest in Sweden and the lowest in China—and it is a major reason for divorce around the world. ‘Sperm competition’ research confirms this.

  If a woman has sex with two men within the course of a week, sperm competition can ensue, as the sperm from different men scramble and battle for the prize of fertilizing the egg. Recent research on sperm competition reveals that men’s sperm volume, relative to their body weight, is twice that which occurs in primate species known to be monogamous, a clue that hints at a long evolutionary history of human sperm competition.

  If this is true, then a woman’s reproductive tract must have been a battleground among male sperm to gain access to the vital egg in order to transport the male gene to the next generation.

  A woman always run a greater risk from infidelity than a man. She risks violence from a jealous husband, and if he walks out on her, she may end up on the street, without the means to support her family. Yet, she still goes ahead and has an affair. Evolutionary research suggests that one explanation may well lie in the instinct of survival—a particularly severe winter may have posed a great risk to our ancestral mothers of starving without meat that only a male would have provided from the hunt. A second benefit from having an affair with a man with healthy genes provided protection against changes in climate. A third benefit is protection against the death of her mate. Since disease, war and food shortages made survival precarious, the chance of losing a husband was high. Palaeontological data shows that injuries were mostly to male skulls and skeletons. And today, when divorce rates are above 50 per cent in many cities of the West, the same sort of ‘mate insurance’ provides a safeguard against the reasonable risk of losing a partner.

  Interestingly, women seem to have sexual intercourse with lovers when they are at the peak of their sexual desire, when they are most likely to conceive. A survey of 1152 women revealed that they experienced greater sexual desire when they were ovulating and timed their illicit sexual liaisons during this period. Sex with husbands, on the other hand, occurred when they were not ovulating, suggesting that she wanted to keep her man rather than conceive with him. None of this is conscious, of course.

  The lesson from evolutionary theory is that jealousy is necessary to protect against the threats of sexual treachery. In a hazardous world where human beings are not monogamous by nature, and infidelity threatens to destroy a lifelong relationship, evolution has forged elaborate defences against these hazards. There is thus ‘emotional wisdom’ in jealousy. Feminists, of course, don’t like such evolutionary excuses for men’s bad behaviour. The closer we are to cavemen, they think, the more we are likely to treat women like, well, cavewomen.

  ~

  One morning as I was rushing out to work, the phone rang. Thinking it was Isha, I dashed back in to get it. I had been trying to meet her but she had refused to take my calls—was she calling to apologize?

  It was Avanti! Her soft, cheerful voice was healing. She was on a visit to Bombay and I invited her promptly to dinner that night. But she preferred to meet earlier in the evening, insisting that I show her Marine Drive. She wanted to ride on the upper deck of the famous Bus Number 123, which ran along the deep,
graceful curve of Bombay’s ultimate seaside promenade—our equivalent to Beirut’s Corniche and Cannes’ Croisette.

  Over the years, Avanti had remained in touch. Her long, chatty letters would arrive at regular intervals and describe Sharma-ji’s indefatigable, and sometimes humiliating, attempts to find her a husband. She was still unmarried but it didn’t seem to bother her. She had been reading seriously and did not hesitate to write at length about her never-ending search to make some sort of sense out of life. Sometimes her letters were so abstruse and dense that I had to reread them in order to understand them properly.

  We met at the entrance to my office. She greeted me with irrepressible delight.

  ‘Amar!’

  I gave her a hug.

  ‘I’m not late?’

  ‘As if you could ever be late,’ I said, taking her arm affectionately. She had changed. The pretty, plumpish girl was now a graceful woman. She had lost much of her baby fat and developed an appealing, smartly rounded figure. She looked physically far more attractive than I remembered her.

  ‘How I love that smile on your face! It is irresistible,’ she said.

  ‘And you, my healing beauty?’ I said.

  ‘Healing?’ She looked surprised. ‘You are the man about town, why should you need healing?’

  I changed the subject as we walked to Churchgate station. I had casually mentioned in my letters that Isha was now married and had come to live in Bombay, but had not told her about our affair. We clambered aboard the red double-decker bus and went up right to the front of the upper deck. Luckily, a couple was getting off at the next stop. We promptly grabbed their front-row seats and were rewarded with a heart-stirring view of the bayside boulevard. We feasted on the vast expanse of the Arabian Sea on one side and the magnificent art deco buildings on the other. Although it was early evening, there were already a few romantic couples about, stealing a cuddle and a kiss among the quiet palms.