Kama

by Gurcharan Das

  I was reminded of my role as a host and I went towards him to gather the pieces of glass while offering him another drink. On the way, I heard Ruchi whisper to Sheila, ‘This is becoming embarrassing!’

  ‘What did I tell you?’ replied Sheila. Others in the room also glanced more than once at Isha and Anand. ‘It’s quite improper,’ said Ruchi, although she was enjoying the sight of a brewing scandal. Soon, Isha and Anand joined the others. Isha’s husband was surrounded by those who were avidly interested in the stock market. They were blatantly pumping him for stock tips.

  ‘Your husband has such an easy way of making the most complex ideas simple to understand,’ Kamini Masi said to Isha.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Isha with a smile, not taking in a word that was being said.

  ‘I must confess I don’t understand the stock market and feel quite ridiculous,’ said Anand.

  ‘You . . . ridiculous! Now that’s a joke!’ retorted Sheila. ‘A man is ridiculous who is rejected by women, not the one who conquers them.’

  ‘My dear Anand,’ Ramu Mama added playfully, ‘how can any husband feel safe with you around?’

  ‘No, no . . . surely I am not a predator. Am I?’

  ‘Women want you and surely you must enjoy it,’ said Kamini Masi.

  ‘One of the aims of civilization is to make life as pleasurable as possible, isn’t it?’ said Anand. ‘The difference between animals and us is that they have no choice but to eat and sleep alone. A cultivated human being neither eats alone, nor sleeps alone.’

  ‘Well, I am glad my niece is not around,’ said Sheila. ‘She is finally going to marry and I don’t want her getting ideas.’

  Avanti was calmly taking in what was being said. She had a smile on her face and seemed perfectly at ease, although I detected the same quality of detachment in her. She rose above the gossip and the decadence. A sudden breeze made her lift her hand to flick her hair backwards. I hoped she was enjoying ‘her party’, although someone else was not. Vikram Suri went up to his wife and suggested it was time to leave. He had work to attend to before the markets opened in the morning. Without looking at him, Isha replied that she would be staying for supper. He looked unhappy. He turned around to thank me for the party. I urged him to stay but he left politely.

  ~

  My heart went out to Isha’s husband. I concluded that he could only cope with his unfaithful wife by deciding to quit society. He must have seen through the absurdity of the gay social whirl of the big city where

  if you keep quiet, you are dumb

  if you are eloquent, you are pretentious

  if you are distant, you are arrogant

  if you are intimate, you are presumptuous

  if you are patient, you are not manly

  if you are impetuous, you are ill-bred.

  Whereas I felt sorry for Vikram Suri, my father would have viewed his renunciation in a more positive light, thinking it the right thing to do when one has completed one’s duties as a householder. Certainly, Suri had made enough money to retire into the third stage, vanaprastha. True, they did not have any children, but that was Isha’s choice, and to this extent his duty to the second stage of life would always remain incomplete. My guess is Suri had seen through life, realized its transience and decided it was time to escape the prison of the sensual world. Thanks to Isha, his position in society had become completely absurd. As for me, even now when I have grown old, I vacillate, aware of the irony in enjoining a deluded man to abandon the world of his delusion.

  There is another lesson about kama here. Every love affair, like every marriage, is unequal. And the one who loves more is also more vulnerable.

  Desire has a restless quality and it seeks novelty. One is not content with what one has and is often unable to reciprocate love. I loved Isha but she loved Anand and who knows whom Anand loved. Vikram Suri’s plight reminded me of Bhartrihari. He vacillates between worldly indulgence and asceticism, but eventually retires to the tranquillity of the forest. Soon, however, he begins to miss the gaiety of the court life, and in particular the woman he loves.

  But the next moment he is not sure. He is confused between the two sorts of life:

  Cut off all envy,

  Examine the matter,

  Tell us decisively, you noble men,

  Which ought we to attend upon:

  The sloping sides of a majestic mountain

  Or the buttocks of a woman abounding in passion?

  Even after the fog lifts, the ambiguity of kama remains:

  I do indeed speak without bias,

  This is acknowledged as truth among men:

  Nothing enthralls us like an ample-hipped woman,

  Nothing else causes such pain.

  After six months in the forest he realizes that he cannot live thus, forgotten in a hermitage. He misses his unfaithful wife. But he is a kama optimist at heart and decides that it’s worth the risk of falling in love as long as one is aware that there will come a day when love will become bitter. So, he returns to the city and begins anew a life of kama.

  At first she rebuffs me,

  then in a mood born of dalliance,

  passion is roused;

  slowly her body falls languid,

  and composure is shed,

  leaving her bold enough to indulge in games of love

  played by her limb’s abandoned gesture—

  a woman’s pleasure is my delight.

  The story has no ending, for he gets discouraged once again. He is easily enticed by women and invariably gets ensnared in their bondage. He begins to feel again a revulsion against the world’s sordidness. He longs for the calm of the forest to dwell as an ascetic on the banks of a mountain river and pass his days in spiritual meditation. The theme of Bhartrihari’s poetry is the confusion, longing, pain and ephemeral pleasure of love. Even in his erotic verses, he keeps returning to life’s absurd transience when he should be focusing on sustaining the mood of love.

  Bearing the luster of a full moon

  at its loftiest phase,

  the lotus-face of a slender girl

  locks honey in her lips.

  What is tart now like unripe fruit

  on vines of gourd,

  when time has run its course

  will be an acrid poison.

  ~

  Soon after Vikram Suri left, supper was served. Avanti and Kamini Masi helped out in the kitchen. Isha and Anand left soon after; they left together which aroused looks from some of the guests. After another hour or so, the last of the guests had gone. Ramu Mama and Kamini Masi were the last to leave. Only Avanti remained. Jealousy and defeat were written on my face; she put her arm around me, trying to comfort me. Then the dam burst. I broke down and began to cry on her shoulder.

  ‘I can’t help it. It’s tearing me up from inside. I set myself to become a nagaraka and I botched it up, didn’t I?’

  ‘You are trembling.’

  ‘I am miserable, Avanti,’ I lamented.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ she said, hugging me. ‘It was I who wanted you to invite Isha and Anand.’

  ‘No, no . . . I was the one who desperately needed to see Isha and knew she would come running if I invited Anand. I hate her.’

  There was silence as she held me and I felt her comforting warmth against my body. We remained thus until my pain began to ebb.

  ‘I love Isha now even more when I am jealous . . . when I actually hate her.’

  ‘Maybe there’s your answer,’ she said.

  I looked at her puzzled.

  ‘I almost wish you had succeeded in becoming a nagaraka,’ she said with a nervous laugh. ‘At least, you wouldn’t be taking yourself so seriously. You would have cultivated a playful attitude—here today, gone tomorrow; you’re a speck of dust, you don’t matter; if you die, no one will miss you . . . not for too long anyway. A handful of people may, but even they will forget you after a while; the world will continue as though you were never there. So, enjoy the game while you are
alive—loosen up and live with a light touch.’

  Avanti suddenly grew embarrassed, realizing that she had been sounding preachy. I confessed to her that for a few moments during the evening I was jealous of her and Anand as well. ‘The look you gave him worried me,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t worry, I have very few expectations.’ She said this in a matter-of-fact way, as though she were speaking about the weather. She laughed nervously and finally got up to leave.

  ‘My heart still aches for Isha!’ I moaned.

  ~

  Male jealousy reached a pinnacle in Othello, Shakespeare’s most romantic figure. I do not have a scrap of his heroism but what I have in common with him is the intolerable thought that another man might possess the woman I love.

  ‘At least Othello had a right to be jealous,’ Avanti argued. He was a husband whereas I was only Isha’s lover in an adulterous relationship. Isha had never promised me anything. Why should I feel betrayed?

  I retorted that my jealousy was a natural reaction to the fact that Isha preferred Anand, and so I had a good reason to feel jealous.

  ‘Maybe both you and Othello are naturally jealous.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If you love her more when you are jealous, then we are not speaking about love; it’s about possession. You miss not possessing her.’

  Avanti had a point. Shakespeare too evokes the idea of possession when Brabantio is told that he’s been ‘robbed’. When asked of what, he is told of his daughter, Desdemona, as though she were an expensive piece of jewellery that has been stolen from him and is now in ‘the gross clasps of a lascivious Moor’. Shortly thereafter, he speaks of his daughter to the duke as though she’s his property: ‘She is abused, stolen from me, and corrupted.’ Brabantio is unwilling to accept that his daughter has a mind of her own and has chosen Othello out of her own free will.

  Unlike Shakespeare, who thought of jealousy as the fear of losing a possession—either household property or a person—Avanti believed that love was the opposite. It was about giving, not owning. It was about bringing happiness to the beloved. Hence, she called both Othello and me ‘naturally jealous’.

  ‘How can you say that!’ I protested. ‘Othello’s flaw was the opposite—he was too trusting.’ He was easily deceived by Iago, a kama pessimist, who saw only animal desire in Desdemona, a desire that would soon be satiated and be ready for a change. Iago believed that Desdemona would change her affections as soon as she tired of Othello’s body. My own reading of Othello is that he was too impulsive. Without waiting for real evidence, he became unreasonably jealous and then acted with violence. ‘He may have been foolish and tragic,’ I told Avanti, ‘but I still admire his love. It has majesty, and he is far nobler than I could ever be.’ Seeing the wreck of his faith and his love, he says:

  If she be false,

  O, then Heaven mocks itself!

  This is the tipping point of the play. Till now, Othello was a brave warrior and a devoted husband but from here onwards, his jealousy builds and his personality disintegrates. His anxieties, his vanities coalesce to create reasons for him to believe in Desdemona’s betrayal, and of his own undoing. From sexual anxiety it is a short leap to sexual jealousy. Othello idealized Desdemona as something sacred. Her purity has been polluted, her sanctity desecrated like a violated temple, and only her death can extinguish the sacrilege and restore the pre-existing holiness. I never had these illusions about Isha. I may have felt the madness of revenge but I was incapable of violence. Othello’s love and grandeur, on the other hand, remain undiminished till the end, and so does my admiration for him.

  ~

  If the expression of male jealousy reached a peak in the sixteenth-century England of Shakespeare’s Othello, it climbed a notch higher in Proust’s novel in early twentieth-century France. Proust makes us believe that the gender of jealousy is ‘masculine’, quite the opposite of the conclusion reached by classical Indian poets. Like Avanti, his premise is that male jealousy depends on a patriarchal society’s belief in ‘possession’ and ‘control’—that a woman is a man’s possession and he must control his possessions. Both possession and control require an up-to-date knowledge of the woman’s activities. Thus, knowledge is critical.

  Swann’s love grows with his jealous obsession with Odette’s affairs with other men. He constantly needs to know what is happening in her life. Even when he finds out that it is quite harmless, his jealousy does not go away: he is ‘gluttonous of everything that would feed its vitality’. He becomes suspicious of something else; he is forever searching in his obsessive desire to know. His curiosity is like a historian’s who is deciphering manuscripts to get at the truth. Swann’s curiosity appears to be satisfied when he finds a love letter. He thinks it is Odette’s but he is wrong. His jealousy

  rejoiced at the discovery, as though that jealousy had an independent existence, fiercely egotistical, gluttonous of everything that would feed its vitality, even at the expense of Swann himself.

  Swann is never sure whether Odette is telling the truth. Like Isha, Odette lies. She conceals her doings from Swann, which seems logical to her; only, he cannot understand it given his patriarchal mindset. Odette is not only impossible to possess, she is unknowable. Isn’t this true of all human relationships? It is not true that the more you love the better you understand. The only wisdom in love is that ‘the other is not to be known’.

  Finally, Swann marries Odette for reasons that no one understands, including himself. But his jealousy has nothing to do with being a husband. The volume ends with Swann exclaiming to himself:

  To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type!

  Proust appears to come to the same bizarre conclusion as Avanti—‘great love’ has less to do with the appeal of the beloved and more with the jealousy of the lover. And Odette was not even Swann’s type!

  Proust helped me to prove Ruchi Saigal wrong. She believed that only insecure and immature people felt jealous. Avanti too felt that my compulsive jealousy was a defect in my character—that I may be a ‘controlling’ person. Yes, I did have possessive feelings towards Isha but all lovers do. It is a natural reaction to the fear that your beloved will prefer another. Ruchi Saigal called it ‘unhealthy’. Feminists also believe that male jealousy is related to the patriarchal ‘ownership’ of a female but they too are wrong.

  One can tell a possessive person by their concern for the things they own. At the time in Bombay, I was the proud owner of my first car, a red Standard Herald—and I would naturally have been upset if someone had stolen it. Was I similarly troubled because Anand had stolen Isha? Surely, a car is an object while Isha was a subject. Was I somehow guilty of treating Isha as an object? The loss of an object such as a car, it seems to me, entails indignation or feeling wronged, not jealousy. When Isha chose to sleep with Anand rather than me, I became jealous because she preferred to sleep with him rather than me. Cars cannot choose or prefer in that way. Choosers are persons, not objects, and jealousy deals with persons.

  I may have been guilty of Ruchi Saigal’s second charge, however—of feeling insecure with regard to Anand. I wanted Isha emotionally for myself. Avanti felt my insecurity was just another way of being possessive in an objectionable way. I can, however, imagine cases of being jealous without thinking of someone as an object. Since I regarded Isha as a choosing person rather than an object, my wanting her to prefer me to Anand was definitely not that kind of insecurity.

  Finally, did jealousy mean that I was a ‘controlling’ person? Was I trying to manage Isha’s behaviour in an objectionable sort of way? Many of my married friends expect sexual exclusivity from their spouses and they tend to control their behaviour. But I only wanted Isha to prefer me to Anand and did not want to manipulate her in other ways. Thus, I don’t think I was guilty of being controlling either.

  In the end, I felt proud that I ha
d refuted all the charges that Ruchi and Avanti had levelled against me. But this philosophical sparring left me exhausted. It may have helped me to understand my jealousy but it did not diminish my suffering. Swann’s jealousy regarding Odette made me realize that there might be unexpected benefits in jealousy. One of these was to make me take an interest in others. Some people are by nature inquisitive about others’ lives. I am not. When I began my affair with Isha, I was not interested in her day-to-day life. I paid little attention to what she said to someone or what another told her. Our relationship existed in a stratosphere, disconnected from mundane life. It was only when I began to fear losing her that I became inquisitive, like Swann. When she refused to see me, for example, I would wait for her at her grocery store, hoping to run into her. I took an interest in the commonplace details of where and with whom she was spending her time. My jealousy opened up another world, as it did for Swann.

  ~

  Bhartrihari, Proust and Shakespeare have described the emotion of jealousy in wondrous ways. I find myself drawn to these in the autumnal vanaprastha of my life, perhaps, because I’ve become more and more accepting of human weaknesses. When I ought to be thinking of retiring to the tranquillity of a forest to contemplate, I remain incurably ensnared in the city’s temptations. Women are still an enigma to me. I am attracted, not to a single woman, but to every woman who is young, affectionate, charming and voluptuous. Her eyes still turn my head in the evening fragrance of the garden. The direction of my thoughts stings me and I blush at harbouring feelings not befitting a man in the seventh decade of his life. But I have learnt to smile indulgently at myself. I may feel a little ridiculous but then I think the renouncer too might be a tad ludicrous.

  6

  WHAT DO LOVERS WANT?

  Pleasure, adoration or empathy?

  A woman desires any attractive man she sees in the same way as a man desires an attractive woman. But, after some consideration, the matter goes no further.