Kama

by Gurcharan Das

  We began to speak fast and at the same time, and this helped to get over some of our initial bashfulness. Inevitably, we spoke about our days as neighbours in Delhi, and then stopped abruptly to look questioningly at each other. She recalled vividly our bicycle rides to Khan Market, our visits to Connaught Place, and even our bewildering meeting with Ramu Mama and Kamini Masi at the Imperial Hotel. I turned suddenly and pointed out a building on our right. She knew it. ‘Chateau Marine!’ she exclaimed. I raised my eyebrows, impressed. Her hair was flying in the breeze and I thought there was something exquisite in the way it landed on her shoulders.

  ‘It’s Nargis’s home—every child knows it, silly boy!’

  I understood why she had insisted on visiting Marine Drive. Of course—she was a film buff and wanted to see the homes of the cinema legends. She told me that Nargis had grown up in a flat in that building with her mother, Jaddan Bai, a famous singer at the time. Mother and daughter had run a popular salon there, and aspiring actors, producers and writers used to pay court in the evenings to the two formidable ladies. One of them was the brilliant Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto, who went on to write the most poignant story about the partition of India that I have ever read.

  Avanti was in great form and narrated how Nargis first met her lover and co-star, Raj Kapoor, here. She had been cooking dinner, making chapattis, when the famous actor had knocked; she had rushed to open the door and he found her covered in flour. Avanti burst into a laugh at her own story; so did I, seeing her happy and carefree. In their salons, she told me, they used to gossip about Nargis’s rival, Suraiya, whose apartment we were now passing. I pointed out to the ground floor of another elegant art deco structure, Krishna Mahal. Avanti said that Suraiya had thrown her lover’s ring into the sea ‘right about there’! She indicated with her outstretched arm the spot where Dev Anand had broken their affair.

  ‘He is still my heart-throb!’ She sighed.

  Hindi cinema, which later came to be called Bollywood, has always been a mirror of our desires at the national stage. As I think back to those early decades after Independence, I find that the mirror reflected the innocence and idealism of Nehru’s Age, as heroes and heroines chased butterflies on the Dal Lake in the Kashmir Valley. The talk of movie stars reminded Avanti of Kamini Masi, and I filled her in about the important role that Ramu Mama and she were playing in my life. Soon after the art deco buildings, we followed the sweeping curve of the sea, passed the gymkhanas with their open cricket fields, then a shabby aquarium and a nondescript hostel for female students till we reached Chowpatty beach at the foot of Malabar Hill.

  ‘This is where they immerse Ganesha, don’t they?’ Avanti exclaimed. ‘It’s Tuesday today, you know—Ganesha’s day.’ Then she asked a thousand questions about Bombay’s boisterous ten-day festival to the god, most of which I was unable to answer.

  Against the setting sun, I watched Avanti’s oval face, which had now acquired the loveliness of a woman in full bloom. She still had the same clean skin and colour of her younger days. Her full mouth and rounded body could not be more different from Isha’s angular looks. We watched children of all ages playing around an ancient Ferris wheel and a merry-go-round. The hawkers were busy setting up bhelpuri and kulfi stands. Our bus turned and we rode up a winding stretch, rounded Teen Batti, and further up the hill along fashionable houses and gulmohar trees till we reached Hanging Gardens. We got off and stretched ourselves. She had loved the bus ride. Marine Drive had been everything she had hoped for, especially the homes of the film stars.

  I felt an awkward shyness as we sat down in the café. We spoke rapidly, almost feverishly. After speaking non-stop for ten minutes, we were quiet suddenly. I asked about her parents.

  ‘They are still looking for a suitable boy.’

  She had graduated, and to get away from home and the marriage market, she had applied for a job of a copy editor at the Bombay Post.

  ‘Here?’ I said incredulously.

  ‘Well, you are here, and I thought I would at least have one friend.’ After a pause, she asked, ‘Are you happy to see me?’

  ‘I am thrilled.’ I meant it. She was just what I needed. It was a relief to speak in a straightforward way without having to dance around Isha’s frenetic and impulsive moods.

  ‘I didn’t tell you about it on the phone. I wasn’t sure . . . besides, I might not get the job.’

  ‘You must come home,’ I said. ‘I shall have a party for you—you must meet my friends.’

  ‘So, how does it feel to be a successful man about town?’ she asked.

  ‘Anand is the real nagaraka,’ I replied with a wry smile, trying not to sound bitter.

  ‘Anand?’

  ‘I have caught the disease again, Avanti.’

  ‘What, you silly boy?’

  ‘Jealousy.’

  I gave her a full account of Isha’s return into my life, beginning with the fateful evening at the Bombay Gym when she reappeared, vulnerable and forlorn. Avanti listened intently. I tried to skip over our lovemaking but she insisted on hearing it all. She kept returning, wanting to know the graphic details of the physical act, desiring the tiniest particulars. I was embarrassed but she clearly was not. I felt flattered at seeing her mildly jealous.

  ‘So, when you phoned this morning, I thought it was Isha,’ I said, concluding my story. ‘I haven’t been sleeping well lately. I wake up at night in torment wondering what to do. Ever since Anand came to Bombay, I have been feeling a stinging hurt. The old desire for her body has been replaced by the ache of jealousy.’

  ‘It’s an infatuation,’ Avanti said blithely.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘The past has come back to haunt you. You’ll get over it.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  Avanti dismissed my misery as ‘hurt pride’. She was more concerned about Isha’s husband and about my reputation. ‘It’s not good for you. Even when they are not true, reputations remain in people’s memories.’

  ‘What does it matter if all of Bombay knows,’ I said with bravado.

  ‘Society is unforgiving.’

  I argued that ‘reputation’ is not an innate part of a person’s personality. What matters is my memory of the look in her eyes when I held her pliable body, and the feelings in our hearts when we possessed each other entirely. ‘Perhaps if you didn’t see her for a while, she’ll miss you and come back,’ she said. Then we fell into silence. Having unburdened myself, I felt that a weight had lifted.

  ‘Do your parents know?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I miss your father, Amar. He is very special person—he’s in the world but not of the world. Your mother never liked me. I lost touch with them after we moved houses.’

  ‘What about you, Avanti? Any boyfriends?’

  ‘No, I’m not adventurous like you. I think it is wrong to make love outside marriage.’

  ‘I meant . . . happiness?’

  ‘Happiness is a word I am too scared to utter.’

  Soon it grew dark. There was a breeze from the harbour and I watched her hair blow. The animation on her face was replaced by a mournful expression. It gave her a sense of mystery and I didn’t want to pry. Gradually, the extended arc of the street lights below came on, transforming Marine Drive into the ‘Queen’s Necklace’, a choker-length of twinkling jewels. We watched the lights in silence.

  I looked at her and she gave a melancholy smile. Eventually, we got up, much to the relief of the waiters, and took a cab to her uncle’s apartment in Back Bay where she was staying. We sat apart in the taxi but were thrown together suddenly as it turned sharply. The street had been dug up and some workmen were pushing a drainpipe into the ditch. Avanti’s face glimmered under the street light. In the semi-darkness I noticed the long line of her neck. I couldn’t make out the expression on her face.

  As we turned towards Marine Drive, we were welcomed by a gust of salty air. The sea was dark but a few fishing boats lit with hurricane l
anterns were rocking in the water. On the other side, the bright flats of the rich were spread against the western night sky. Avanti leaned against my shoulder but looked away. Her hair blew across my eyes. I could see in the distance, through her hair, the bright string of boats swaying rhythmically on the water. She sat resting gently against me.

  On an impulse, she stopped the taxi. As we walked along Marine Drive, the sea seemed to grow sombre and the palms on either side cast scrawny shadows. Black-and-yellow taxis rushed by noisily. Having talked all evening, we were content to walk without speaking. Eventually, we sat on the smooth cement sea wall and stared at the dimly lit stars that hung in the cloudless night. The water was smooth and dark, hardly making a sound against the sea wall. A white-haired man holding the hand of a young girl passed by. Two slim boys, arm in arm, followed them, speaking loudly in Marathi. One of them was carrying an idol of Ganesha. He saw Avanti look admiringly at it.

  ‘Would you like to touch god’s feet? he asked. ‘It’s Tuesday.’

  ‘Certainly!’ exclaimed Avanti.

  As she reached over to touch Ganesha’s feet, I wondered how Avanti always seemed to find an intimate moment with the divine. Why couldn’t I touch god on Tuesday evenings?

  ~

  I was delighted to have Avanti in Bombay. She was just what I needed at this tumultuous time. She brought peace, calm and a dose of reality into my life. She dismissed my feelings for Isha as ‘infatuation’; I resented her glib attitude, thinking that she wasn’t taking me seriously. ‘Infatuation’, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is an ‘intense but short-lived passion in contrast to lasting feelings of love’. I wondered if there was any truth in what Avanti believed.

  One of the great studies of infatuation is Turgenev’s late novel Spring Torrents about an encounter between a young Russian nobleman, Sanin, and an Italian girl, Gemma, whose mother runs a café in Frankfurt. While on a European holiday, Sanin visits the café and orders a glass of lemonade from Gemma. He is bewitched by her ivory skin and wavy hair and is so drawn to her that he misses his coach. Over the next few days, he visits the café daily and is more and more enchanted by her, especially ‘the black depths of her eyes suffused with shadows and yet luminous at the same time’. He learns that she is engaged to be married to a plodding merchant but she doesn’t care much for him. Gemma, on her part, is also attracted to the charming Russian. They exchange ecstatic love letters, and Sanin is so overwhelmed by her that he decides to sell his Russian estates and move to Frankfurt. He proposes marriage to her.

  Providentially, Sanin learns of a potential buyer for his property—a wealthy young, married Russian woman, Maria Nikolaevna, who also happens to be on a holiday in Germany. He visits her to discuss the sale of his property but instead is seduced by her powerful personality and voracious sexuality. Sanin abandons Gemma and sets off for Paris with Maria Nikolaevna and her tame husband. This dramatic turn of events proved Avanti’s point. I was suffering from the same sort of fantasy as Sanin and this is why she referred to my feelings for Isha as a passing ‘infatuation’. My overactive imagination had concocted an illusion of a sophisticated nagaraka, making me believe that I was in the same league as Isha.

  How could Sanin have seriously considered selling off his estates in Russia to devote the rest of his days in managing a family café and living happily with Gemma and her slightly hysterical mother? It was a delightful dream of Sanin’s, and once he met an attractive woman of his own class, he quickly realized it. Both of us were victims of weaving romantically fictional narratives in our minds. Sanin’s rapid seduction by Maria Nikolaevna showed me disturbing aspects in my character. Both of us had created an image of an ideal of freedom in our heads which was fuelled by Isha’s and Gemma’s charms. Surely, it was madness on Sanin’s part to believe that he could become a man of business and run a café!

  Turgenev has illustrated an important feature of kama. Infatuation can be propelled not just by a mistaken notion about the other person—thinking that she is lovelier and more sympathetic than she really is—but also by an error about oneself. In imagining ourselves to be someone else, we create an appealing vision of our own character and ignore our flaws and fears. What we need at this point is a reality check, and is that what Avanti had provided me? She had concluded that friendship is a better guide to love than infatuation.

  Avanti may have devalued my feelings for Isha but she failed to assuage my obsessive jealousy. She tended to view the world in a rational way. Perhaps because she had not suffered as I had. Dharmakirti, the Buddhist poet and philosopher of the seventh century, expresses how our mind blinds us to the wisdom of the heart and how pain, above all, strips down our rational defences and puts us in raw, direct contact with the emotional truth of our being.

  A hundred times I learnt from my philosophy

  To think no more of love, this vanity,

  This dream, this source of all regret,

  This emptiness.

  But no philosophy can make my heart forget

  Her loveliness.

  Dharmakirti, however, does not express his feelings of jealousy in his poetry, and certainly not as openly and innocently as I did to Avanti. In fact, none of the poets of the classical Sanskrit tradition did. They would have understood my feelings—and even empathized with my pain—but they would not have expressed male jealousy. In the aesthetic sensibility that developed in classical India a woman could be jealous but not a man. The rasa, ‘mood’, of female jealousy was, in fact, extensively cultivated in classical poetry. A jealous man, on the other hand, lowered his dignity, risking becoming a figure of ridicule.

  Patriarchy has always demanded stricter fidelity from a woman than a man. An unfaithful man is rebuked but an unfaithful woman loses her sense of worth, her udarata, ‘nobility’. As a result, the aesthetic sensibility that developed in the classical period allowed a woman to express jealousy, not a man. Her man still retained his udarata and was worthy of her love even if he was unfaithful. But a jealous woman was resigned to tears or silence. A man, however, would have demeaned himself if he had expressed jealous feelings since his unfaithful wife or beloved would already have lost her value and honour. She would have become asati, ‘wanton’, when she was unfaithful. A jealous man or husband would have been considered foolish in caring for something that was of little value. This is why there is no expression of male jealousy in the Kamasutra.

  ~

  Avanti did get the job and soon she settled down in a paying guest flat in an old, nondescript building in Colaba, not too far from where I lived. She helped me to plan the ‘grand party’, as she called it, where I had promised to introduce her to my friends. I may not have succeeded as a nagaraka, but I wanted my party to be modelled after a ‘salon’ in the Kamasutra:

  A salon takes place when people of similar knowledge, intelligence, character, wealth, and age sit together in the house of a courtesan or in a place of assembly or in the dwelling-place of some man and engage in appropriate conversation. There they exchange thoughts about poems or works of art, and in the course of that they praise brilliant women whom everyone likes . . .

  As we were making a guest list, I found that I had friends in three social circles of Bombay. When I asked which circle interested her the most, she said that the circle didn’t matter, only the person did. She did insist, though, that I invite Isha, Anand, Ramu Mama and Kamini Masi.

  Those who belonged to the high end of Bombay’s society seemed to know each other and met often at each other’s parties. They belonged to different circles, however, and while these sometimes intersected at weddings and funerals, the rest of the time people preferred to stay within their own circle. When I arrived in Bombay, I naturally gravitated to the ‘boxwallah’ circle, which was made of executives like myself who worked in the larger multinational and Indian companies. I got to know some of them at the Bombay Gymkhana, where I played tennis regularly. While I made many acquaintances in this circle, I sought the friendship of
only a few.

  I yearned for the circle of intellectuals—writers, journalists and artists—some of whom I had met through Raj Desai and Ramu Mama. I would see them in coffee houses and loved the clash of ideas in their conversations. But they did not accept me easily, thinking that I had sold out to the commercial world. A third circle consisted of academics, and I did manage to make a few friends from Bombay University, but they too were suspicious of my commercial connections. Once in a while I would get a chance to enter other circles—of government officials, entrepreneurs and even a few merchant princes—but I never managed to find an enduring place in any of them.

  ‘To which circle does Anand belong?’ asked Avanti.

  ‘To the most fashionable one, of course,’ I replied. ‘With an excellent job, his father’s connections, and an education in England, all the doors seem to open before him. Besides, he is a charming bachelor, and all the mothers of eligible daughters swoon over him.’

  ‘Is this envy speaking?’ she asked.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I confessed. I didn’t like Anand’s crowd. He moved among spoilt young men who made their own rules; they had contempt for ordinary, middle-class people. In his world, all the men were handsome and all the women beautiful; there was only gaiety, laughter and abandon; men and women didn’t have to live as husband and wife; and they found nothing wrong in seducing a girl and abandoning her.

  ‘Ah, your precious world of the nagaraka!’ Avanti gave me an ironical smile.