Kama

by Gurcharan Das

  after tasting their delights?

  Avanti blushed at the last line. Anand was clearly trying too hard and his strategy seemed to rebound. Avanti, who had been in an easy, relaxed mood, changed her tone suddenly, saying stiffly that love was not about ‘naked thighs’ but existed only in the heart and was directed selflessly to bring happiness to the beloved.

  Anand praised her forthrightness but argued that it is always better to follow nature. ‘Pleasure is the natural outcome of the attraction between a man and a woman.’ The human temperament is sensual, he said, but society had imposed unnatural values. We should put more faith in our own physical impulses and not adopt artificial notions like modesty and faithfulness.

  ‘Isn’t modesty a nice thing in a woman?’ she asked.

  ‘No, modesty is not natural.’ Anand felt that it made a woman ashamed of her own desires; and after marriage it enforced another artificial virtue called faithfulness. Once she had conquered nature and become totally artificial, a ‘modest’ woman believed that she had the right to be admired.

  Avanti was not impressed. ‘I am sorry but we are not all motivated only by pleasure. Isn’t the delay between desire and pleasure a part of the civilizing process? Otherwise, how are we different from animals?’

  ‘No, it turns people towards god, religion, bhakti and all sorts of unnatural things.’

  ‘Unnatural?’ said Avanti sharply.

  ‘Yes, religion enslaves us, making us forget our true, free nature.’ Anand explained that religion was chiefly responsible for converting a joyful sexual relationship into a right of exclusive ownership, and then getting the state to legalize and enforce it.

  I interrupted this remarkable dialogue with an offer of drinks. Avanti rose to stretch herself.

  ‘I don’t know, Anand,’ she said. ‘Your ideas are too extreme. Your world is all about nature and selfish pleasure. Where is the place for tenderness?’

  I went to the kitchen to fetch drinks and sandwiches. I was proud at the way Avanti had resisted his seduction. But when I returned, there was a sudden quiet. Anand had moved closer to her. Their conversation had become more intimate. They were too absorbed in each other and didn’t see me. As Anand passed her a biscuit from the tray, his hand grazed her full, rounded breast in what appeared to be an innocent gesture, but I could tell that it was a carefully planned move. She blushed but did not recoil. It had given her pleasure. He seemed pleased at the way the seduction had got back on track and he felt emboldened.

  ‘When I was climbing the staircase to this flat—it was the most beautiful moment this evening.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘It was the anticipation of meeting you.’

  Avanti had let her guard down and was clearly relishing his attentions. He reached for her hand, again in a perfectly innocent way; he clasped it as if it were a piece of china from an expensive private art collection. He raised it to his chest, bent over her and inhaled deeply, savouring its scent. She felt the warmth of his breath and it seemed to arouse her. I marvelled at the mastery of the seducer, observing the delicate movement of his body. Lips made contact with skin. This was another well-rehearsed move by a consummate nagaraka. I couldn’t help but admire the professional at play. His hypnotic nature had begun to mesmerize her.

  I was observing a new facet of Avanti and growing increasingly uncomfortable. I felt like a voyeur. It may have been a role that suited Charles Swann in Proust’s novel but it was upsetting me terribly. I was afraid at what might happen. Events were moving too quickly. I felt angry with Anand for misusing my relationship with Avanti. I despised my own jealous feelings. I wanted the performance to stop, but I felt helpless. I went back to the kitchen to think. When I returned a few minutes later, Anand looked at me and comprehended the look of jealous suffering on my face. He stopped the seduction; he did it in such a gentle, polite way that Avanti could not take offence. He rose to leave suddenly.

  ‘I must go,’ he said, looking at his watch.

  ‘Why must you leave?’ Avanti implored.

  ‘The time has just flown. I have to meet someone at seven.’

  ‘Do stay, Anand.’ You can phone and postpone . . .’

  ‘I can’t I’m afraid.’ He gave us both a good-natured smile and left.

  Anand’s departure left us both in a state of confusion. The question on our minds was: why did he have a change of heart? I wondered if he had a private code of honour that none of us knew. What ended the seduction in progress was when he perceived the look on my face and realized that he might be transgressing. And the sudden appearance of an appointment was a gallant ‘white lie’ to protect Avanti from feeling hurt at his act of stopping the seduction midway.

  As I thought some more about this incident, I believe all three of us discovered something about ourselves that evening. Avanti became aware of the ‘woman’ in her, full of untamed desire that had broken free for the first time and found uninhibited expression. There had been hints in the past but this evening clinched it—at least, in my eyes. She was not, however, ashamed at this discovery. It was almost as if she was relieved. I had seen her in a new light and I found her more attractive, more human, and it probably provoked my feelings of possessiveness and jealousy. She too must have seen it on my face. To know that she was desired seemed to have a positive effect on her. Both Avanti and I became aware of the fine line between friendship and desire. I must have harboured these feelings unconsciously but only now did I become aware of them. Oddly, Anand too became more ’appealing’ in both our eyes. In his amoral life, we realized that he had a sense of boundaries when it came to the objects of enticement. What ended the seduction was when he appreciated what he saw in my face, and probably felt a peculiar sense of loyalty to me.

  ~

  The surprising restraint shown by Anand left me confused. Just as I was beginning to despair over finding a satisfactory answer to my insistent question about what lovers want, I discovered a clue on the serene face of a sculpture of the Mathura school. I had been dawdling in the National Museum in Delhi one afternoon when I chanced upon it. What I saw on the composed face of the Mathura sculpture was a feeling of cool harmony, and it made me reflect on the values of the classical age in Indian history. Her face revealed urbane restraint—as though she understood the Kamasutra’s sagacious advice about letting the matter rest ‘after some consideration’. That harmony, I thought, might be the result of having found the proper place for erotic pleasure in human life. This, in turn, might come from having achieved any number of stabilizing balances that I had been struggling with—between dharma and kama, passion and dispassion, sexual freedom and convention; and between what the Mahabharata calls pravritti-laksano dharma, ‘the active way of life’, and nivrutti-laksano dharma, ‘the contemplative way of life’.

  To return to the question, what do lovers want: is it carnal pleasure or adoration or the good of the other? This simplistic triad of wishes had emerged in my mind as a sort of working hypothesis based on observing the three individuals who were at the centre of my emotional life. My own experience as a failed nagaraka had taught me that lovers needed to balance the positive and negative aspects of kama. This meant solving the dilemma that Isha had left me with: how to obtain passionate pleasure without getting embroiled in destructive possessiveness and jealousy. The latest incident with Avanti had struck a cautionary note.

  The poets and the artists of the classical period were aware of the need for a fine balancing act between these opposing forces of kama. Kalidasa captured it nicely in the restraint of his verses about dispassionate love. In the following elegantly polite dialogue in Malavikagnimitra, the king extricates himself from a difficult position when his wife discovers his love affair. The queen invites him to see the Ashoka tree in their garden where she presents him with his paramour, adding that the tree only blooms because of the beauty of his new mistress. The king’s humble reply is an epitome of Gupta self-control, couched in double meaning, as he subjects the
tree and himself to her kindly rule:

  Your Majesty is not mistaken

  in doing honour to this Ashoka tree

  that scorned the dictates of the lovely spring

  and let its blossoms only waken respectfully

  beneath your care.

  The Kamasutra’s nagaraka, similarly, could not have been successful unless he reconciled the demands of dharma and kama, which was Vatsyayana’s cautionary warning in the opening lines of his text. In the same period, Bhartrihari’s love poetry depends on a delicate balance between convention and freedom, and he should have known it after the huge reverses he experienced with women. Kamini Masi’s eyes contained the same understanding when she instructed me in sringara rasa. On the gaze of the Mathura sculpture was not merely understanding about the puzzles of kama but a deep compassion for the flawed human condition. Her civilized composure is at the heart of the classical values of harmony, restraint and balance, which were behind the self-confidence of the age of the Guptas.

  The incident at the theatre in Bombay when Ruchi Saigal snubbed Isha suggests that while lovers are happiest in their private world, they also desire acceptance in the public world—at least, they don’t want to be shunned. The story of Anna Karenina is filled with rich insights into many things but it is certainly a testimonial to this truth. A closer look at Anand suggests that lovers have complex motivations. Not only does he seek sex but the game of seduction is almost more important. The chase matters as much to lovers as the destination. Seduction is also the game that the great lover-god Krishna plays in his divine leela. So powerful is this game that even Avanti, the most unlikely person, almost succumbed to Anand’s seductive charms.

  There is something to learn from the ancient Greeks about the difficulty of balancing the dilemmas of kama. Just as India searched for a balance between dharma and kama, the West sought something similar between the Apollonian and Dionysian principles. In Greek mythology, Apollo and Dionysus were the sons of Zeus. Apollo, the god of reason, reflects the rational principle in life; Dionysus, the god of chaos and irrationality, represents emotions and instincts. Apollo is also the sun god, full of light, clarity and form, whereas Dionysus is also the god of wine and fertility, representing drunkenness, passion and ecstasy.

  Friedrich Nietzsche, the nineteenth-century German philosopher, used this binary to illuminate Greek tragedy. He felt the Dionysian spirit displayed creative and intuitive power while the Apollonian was necessary to give it form and structure. Both were needed in life as well as art. Without the Apollonian, the Dionysian lacked form and edifice to make an intelligible piece of art, and without the Dionysian, the Apollonian lacked the vigour and hunger. Although they are diametrically opposed principles, they complement each other in human life. Nietzsche criticized the modern age for being too rational, seeing the world primarily as an object of knowledge, and lacking the tragic spirit that depended on exposing the irrational depths that lay beneath our coherent surface.

  There appears to be a remarkable similarity between life-affirming kama and the Dionysian principle. Just as Nietzsche felt regret over the submergence of this principle in the modern West, I feel sad about its loss in contemporary India. The excessive emphasis on dharma in today’s India has devalued kama. It has not yet recovered from the ascetic influence of Mahatma Gandhi, who held up celibacy as a goal of life during the struggle for India’s independence. The urban middle class has still not shed the Victorian ‘middle- class morality’ (as George Bernard Shaw called it). As a result, the creative life force of kama has been forgotten. India needs to repossess it, and with it one of the goals of the ancient Indian life. Only thus will harmony be restored to the chaotic modern Indian experience.

  So, when life gets too much for me I go back to the National Museum to gaze at the tranquil face from Mathura. I reflect on the values of the Guptas—passionate love, harmony, detachment and urbane restraint—and remind myself about the classical balance as one way to live a flourishing but sensible life. I lost that balance when I fell in love with Isha—I became possessive and jealous and spoilt my chances of becoming a nagaraka. In the end, what lovers want is not so very different from all human beings—to be able to cope with the cruelties of day-to-day life and still retain a vision of goodness and beauty. This comes from achieving civilizational equipoise. The gaze on the sculpture from Mathura spoke to me and held out the hope that even I could live a successful life in which all the purusharthas are in equilibrium.

  7

  FRIENDS AND LOVERS

  The discovery of romantic love

  Sometimes the day is better than the night

  and sometimes the night is better than the day

  but I wish day and night would both disappear

  when I am not in the loving arms of my lover.

  —Amaru

  Almost six months had passed since Anand’s aborted seduction and Indira Gandhi was now firmly in the saddle in Delhi, ready to begin her long populist rule. She had succeeded her father after decimating the opposition from the old guard of the Congress party and gone on to win the General Election in 1971 handsomely. No one imagined at the time that her son Sanjay would defy all norms of decency and constitutionality and try and build a version of gangster rule, and Indira’s hubris would lead to the Emergency in the mid-1970s. Mercifully, it did not last very long.

  The confused events of that evening in my flat had the unexpected consequence of bringing Avanti closer to me. After Anand left, both of us were embarrassed at first but soon realized that we had learnt something. We were not sure what it was but it was the source of pleasure. I was surprised that given her middle-class upbringing, Avanti was not a prude and her response to Anand did not bother her a bit. She confessed honestly that she liked him—she had been tempted and had almost succumbed but she was also relieved that it did not go any further.

  She took time to recover while I stood still, gazing at her. She took my hand in an innocent, friendly way, and said, ‘I am glad you are not a nagaraka.’ There was sadness in her eyes as she recounted incoherently about something that had happened when she was twelve. She spoke haltingly and waveringly about a distant uncle who had tried to force himself on her in Ujjain. She had fought back, and in the end had succeeded in running away. But she had lived in fear of him for years. The incident with Anand was, in fact, the opposite—it turned out to be cathartic. It had jogged her memory, but on this occasion, she felt that she was in charge. It had, thus, helped her to put her past fears behind her. She was in the end grateful to Anand.

  After a long pause, she raised her head and there was a stoic quality in her eyes. As we walked down the stairs to the street, she seemed to be at peace. I gazed at her and found in her a peculiar nobility, something I had not noticed before. Her head, her neck, her arms, her whole figure, in fact, seemed to be defined by a courageous sort of beauty. After I dropped her home, I stood still on the street for some time, thinking. She was a complex soul with both an erotic and an ascetic side to her.

  ~

  Kama has always had a troubling relationship with violence. A lot has been written about it, but one of the most engaging examples I know is an Urdu story by Saadat Hasan Manto, set during the violence which accompanied the partition of India. What attracted me to it initially was its title, ‘The Woman in the Red Raincoat’, which conjured the memory of Isha in a pink raincoat that afternoon waiting for me in the rain by the gate of 23 Prithviraj Road. Manto’s is the story of a young man who has lost his bicycle shop during the partition riots. Since he has nothing to do, he joins a roaming band of arsonists. Soon, he is bored and one rainy day, he decides to abduct a woman. He has no feelings of revenge, nor is he driven by ethnic or religious sentiments. He just wants some excitement.

  I’m not sure I was thinking even. I was in a kind of daze, very difficult to explain. Suddenly a shiver ran down my spine and a powerful desire to run out and pick up a girl took hold of me.

  He stops the first woman wh
o goes by. He can’t see her face. All he can tell is that she is wearing a shimmering red raincoat. He doesn’t ask if she is Hindu, Sikh or Muslim, and takes her home. In his faintly lit living room, he doesn’t quite know what to do. He doesn’t want to rape her and suggests politely if she is interested in sex. He even says that she can leave if she is not interested. After overcoming her initial fear, she seems to relax and to his surprise, she agrees.

  I was about to get up, when she grabbed my hand and put it on her breast. Her heart was beating violently. I became excited . . . taking her into my arms.

  Just then, his servant brings in a lamp, and he discovers that the woman he has abducted is not young or attractive, but an older woman. Shocked, he says: ‘You may leave now if you wish.’ She goes away but dies on the way home in a car accident. His friend reprimands him later.

  You are her murderer. In fact, you are the murderer of two women. One, who was a great artist, and the other who was born from the body of the first woman in your living room that night and whom you alone know.

  The second woman he is referring to is the one who emerged from a new awareness of her sexual self, a paradoxical consequence of abduction and aborted seduction. The story is engaging, I find, because it isn’t about ethnic hatred or the normal sexual violence associated with the partition of the country. It is about a romantic seduction gone awry. From it, I learnt that kama is complex—the abducted victim becomes a desiring subject; the abductor becomes a polite seducer and then cruelly snubs the object of his seduction. The author of the story, unable to understand the complex motivations of his characters, is only able to say, ‘But then these were strange times.’

  ~

  Avanti began to spend more and more time at her guru’s ashram in Igatpuri. Often, she would be gone for the entire weekend, sometimes combining it with a holiday on Friday or Monday. While making small talk over tea, she randomly uttered one evening, ‘All is sacred!’ I gave her a quizzical look; she explained that this revelation was the premise behind all Indian speculation—sarvam khalu idam brahma, ‘this whole universe is truly brahman’. And brahman, she felt, was the closest Sanskrit equivalent to ‘sacred’.