Kama

by Gurcharan Das

  She complained about my father’s all-too-casual reaction to his elevated status. He didn’t make an effort to cultivate society, and she couldn’t very well go out alone. Nor did he help out in their sprawling new house and garden—it was left to her to plant shrubs and furnish the house. It was clear to me that my father disliked the sudden ramping up of their social life, which interfered with his set routine, especially his meditative evening walk. He found their new ‘friends’ false and boring. The one redeeming feature was his work, which was now more interesting, involving as it did motivating and training younger doctors, who responded to him eagerly because he was not political and cared genuinely for those who worked for him.

  There remained only one unfulfilled wish in my mother’s life. It would complete her happiness if she were able to make a grand alliance for her son. She was about to launch on a roll call of families with eligible daughters when I stopped her.

  ‘Well, that’s what I came to talk about . . .’

  She grew pale. ‘It isn’t the Sharma girl, is it?’

  ‘Yes, Avanti.’

  She scowled. Her dream of a brilliant match for her son was suddenly replaced by the prospect of a dowry-less bride.

  ‘Well, you better go inside and have a shower. You are filthy after the train journey. The geyser is on and there is plenty of hot water.’

  I walked uneasily to my room. In the corridor I stopped to see pictures of the family on the walls, some in sepia going back to my grandfather’s days. While I showered, I asked myself why I feared my mother. What if she didn’t give her assent to Avanti? What would I do? I couldn’t imagine marrying without her approval. Curiously enough, my father’s reaction did not enter my head. I assumed he would go along. In fact, Avanti’s spiritual inclinations would be an advantage in his eyes.

  An hour later, I was seated on a cane sofa having tea on the veranda overlooking the garden. The sun was strong now and I had moved into the shade. My father had left for work. A few minutes later, my mother, looking pale and agitated, arrived. I began to speak feverishly about Avanti. She heard me in a composed manner, although I could tell there was an upheaval inside her. She could not understand why her son would wish to bring her pain when everything was going so well in her life. She subdued her feelings, however, adopted a quiet tone, and we discussed the whole matter peacefully. The alliance, she confessed openly, was not what she had hoped for as regards birth, wealth or rank. There were far worthier families with attractive daughters.

  ‘I’ve never loved anyone as I love Avanti,’ I began.

  ‘Not even Isha?’ she asked sceptically. ‘Have you latched on to Avanti on the rebound?’

  ‘Rebound?’

  ‘After Isha, I mean.’

  ‘I would have been miserable if I had married Isha—not that it was a possibility.’

  ‘I had always dreamt of a different life for you . . . different from ours. Even now, I am filled with such yearnings when I pass 23 Prithviraj Road . . .’

  ‘And what about Isha’s poor, suffering husband?’ I said bitterly.

  In her dreams of status and wealth, my mother tended to gloss over the pain that Isha had brought into others’ lives. Although we never discussed it explicitly, she had heard whispers of Isha’s promiscuous life. She found it distasteful but she excused it as ‘upper-class morality’. In her mind, the upper classes were different, and sexual freedom was an expression of their power and status. What mattered to her was the indelible image etched in her mind of a privileged life of the sort that Aditi Malik had lived.

  ‘Marriage is a serious business, Amar . . . and it is irrevocable. I’m not saying it should only be a matter of calculation. But the emotions and upsets of a love marriage are not a part of our tradition. You marry to have children, it’s as simple as that. That’s why it matters into which family you marry.’ There was nothing wrong with Avanti’s family, she added, but they were ‘ordinary’ people. They might be proud Brahmins with an ancient heritage but this did not bring success in the modern world. Her other objection, albeit less important, was the proximity of our ages. She felt that ideally a bride ought to be five to seven years younger than the groom, ‘because a woman ages faster’. When that happens, a man is tempted to look elsewhere. Avanti was only a year younger and this added to the risk.

  ‘And I believe that anything is preferable to marrying and living together without love,’ I declared.

  ‘Of course, we should expect to live with love . . . but in an arranged marriage love develops gradually.’

  For one human being to love another was not easy, she explained. It needed work. ‘This is the work of marriage. The trouble is that young people today are unprepared for this work, especially when differences emerge.’ Rather than being a fault line, the gulf ought to be a source of deeper communion, she explained.

  ‘But Avanti and I have known each other for a decade, and so have our families. It almost feels like an arranged marriage . . . except that love has come before marriage rather than after it.’

  ‘I don’t understand, Amar. I always thought Avanti was the conservative daughter of a traditional Brahmin family and would only marry within her caste.’

  ‘Her family may be conservative but Avanti has a very modern sensibility . . . in some ways even more modern than mine.’ There was a pause as my mother looked at me sceptically. ‘What about love?’ I asked. ‘Don’t you believe in a love that just happens without having to work at it?’

  ‘Romantic love is a myth. You have to learn to live with the other person with their differences. This is what an arranged marriage does. By matching family backgrounds, one minimizes differences and risks. Marriage is a bit like life itself—it has its limitations about how exciting it can be.’

  ‘So, you don’t approve of Avanti?’

  ‘Why don’t you wait for a year, Amar? If you still feel the same way, then go ahead.’

  ‘You don’t like her! I know it.’

  ‘If it’s the right thing to do, it can wait. The main thing is not to hurry.’ This was her final take on the matter and the conversation ended.

  The following day I found the house stirring at dawn. I sat up on the bed covered in a quilt, my legs drawn up under me and my chin in my hand, feeling depressed after the previous day’s conversation. I wondered how I would impart the news to Avanti. I dressed quickly and came down in time for a walk with my father. In the mood I was in, every promise of distraction offered relief. We walked mostly in silence towards the river. I saw a bluish fog rising from the water of the Yamuna. The air was crisp and the sun was ascending from behind the horizon. We turned to walk along the bank. Feeling somewhat shy, I asked him if he agreed with my mother’s views on Avanti.

  ‘Your mother has strong views.’

  ‘She doesn’t like Avanti.’

  ‘No, she had other plans for you. In her heart, she secretly hoped to make a great match for you.’

  ‘What do you think about Avanti?’

  ‘I like her.’

  ‘Then, speak to Ma, please!’

  ‘Yes, of course. But I don’t know if it will do any good.’

  ‘Well, try anyway.’

  With that reassuring thought, I felt a release of tension. There was some hope, I felt, as I walked back home on lighter feet.

  ~

  Behind the confused strife between mother and son was the uneasy coexistence of two moral systems, one inherited from orthodox Hindu kama realists and the other from the romantic tradition of the kama optimists. In the mother’s mind, marriage was a religious duty for the sake of the general well-being of society and the human species. The British Raj in India had reinforced this duty with a Christian stamp and saddled it with a Victorian middle-class morality. These repressions were very real in the Indian middle class when I was growing up in the years after Independence.

  In contrast to the mother’s religious morality, the son embraced another morality, which derived from European modernity. Although i
t arrived on Indian shores on the coat-tails of the British Raj, it had older Indian roots in the erotic tradition of ancient times and of bhakti in the medieval period. The young middle class breathed the atmosphere of romance and passion mostly through the mesmerizing influence of Hindi cinema. But with one difference. Whereas the old ‘arranged marriage’ has practically died in the twentieth-century West, it continues to be well and alive in India. As a result, there is much confusion with regard to the nature of conjugal happiness. In older, conservative minds, passion and marriage remain irreconcilable, if not mutually exclusive. Younger Indian minds have become more liberated especially after the 1990s and look to a more open future; girls, especially, are becoming more spirited and independent.

  In my mother’s eyes, marriage was a utilitarian institution of limited purpose. She reflected the kama realist view that society had to impose laws to counter the natural human tendency for sexual promiscuity. Sex had to be confined within marriage, and indeed, family was the institution that ultimately ensured the survival of civilization. This view has also been conventional wisdom around the world. But human beings have had to struggle with it and try to make bearable the ‘unnatural’ restraints of sexual constancy imposed by marriage. The cultivation of erotic love in ancient times and romantic love in medieval times came about partially as a reaction to these impositions of Christianity in Europe and the Dharma texts in India.

  To Gauri, the idea of a ‘love marriage’ between Avanti and Amar was clearly subversive. She might have thought differently during her idealistic days in college in Lahore when she was introduced to romantic novels, where passion was something morally noble, and needed no law or custom. Whoever loved passionately was supposed to be exalted and for them social barriers had ceased to exist. But Gauri had a practical nature and soon outgrew these ideas. She saw through the mirage of romance where love fed on obstacles, short excitations, and partings. For this and other reasons, marriage could not be founded on the fleeting emotions of love and passion.

  And now to confront Amar’s passion was disagreeable, especially at this pleasant, comfortable stage in her life. In her mind, modern ‘love marriage’ undermined the basis of the institution which lay in its indissolubility and the husband’s juridical responsibility towards the family. When the modern ‘love marriage’ couple experienced the daily humdrum of routine and conflicting temperaments, they wondered, ‘Why did I marry?’ And they seized the first occasion to fall in love. This was the dangerous side of a ‘love marriage’.

  In the real world, Gauri believed that marriage was made up of daily togetherness, boring routine and growing accustomed to one another. If lastingness was what marriage was about, then it had to be established on the basis of duty and convention and not individual risk. Such a life was hardly conducive to sexual passion. Years ago, she may have argued with Sharma-ji about his obsession with getting Avanti married soon after puberty; she may have disagreed with his extreme views about women; but she basically was on his side when it came to the soundness of the institution of ‘arranged marriage’. The families of the boy and the girl had to be responsible for the choice of a lifetime partner.

  Curiously enough, Gauri didn’t seem unduly bothered by Isha’s or Anand’s sexual affairs, which to her mind reflected ‘upper-class morality’. She judged people through the lens of social classes and felt that the upper classes were naturally liberated from the demands of reproduction and routine work, and had the leisure to pursue sexual pleasure. In her mind this sexual licence was hardly ever connected with marriage. Had the question of ‘love marriage’ come up of Amar marrying Isha, she would have judged the matter differently. But when it came to middle-class Avanti, only an ‘arranged marriage’ would do. In her world, respectable middle-class people who sought to create permanent attachments through passionate love were doomed.

  ~

  I returned to Bombay empty-handed and depressed. Avanti had obtained her family’s approval in the meantime. As expected, Sharma-ji had voiced reservations about our caste differences but his wife had quickly demolished his objections. Anything was better than the disgrace of an unmarried daughter, she had said. ‘Besides, we’ve known their family for a decade and Amar is a good boy. He will look after our Avanti.’ She had always secretly hoped that something would ‘happen’ between us. Avanti reported all this to me excitedly when we met on my return from Delhi. Her light-hearted, happy mood evaporated when I narrated the unfortunate story of my weekend.

  ‘Your mother hates me. I’ve always known it.’ Humiliated and angry, Avanti took it as a personal rejection. ‘She was suspicious of me even when we were young.’

  I tried to protest. ‘She just wants us to be sure . . . to wait another year and if we still feel the same . . .’

  ‘We have waited for a decade,’ she said cynically. Avanti was hurt. I tried to explain my mother’s reasoning—her suspicions about romantic love.

  ‘And why didn’t you put up a fight for me?’

  ‘I did . . . but I failed. I have never won a fight against my mother.’

  ‘Indian boys—they are cowards, no spine!’

  ‘It’s only a year, Avanti,’ I pleaded.

  ‘And what do I tell my parents? They are already planning the wedding. My father has been transferred to Delhi and he suggested we hold the ceremonies there. They are ready to announce it to the world.’

  ‘Tell them it will happen after a year.’

  ‘But what if it doesn’t? It’s their honour too!’

  I remained silent. She was hurting.

  ‘There’s nothing more to say, I suppose,’ said Avanti. ‘I’ll see you in a year . . . if you still want to get married.’

  ‘Wait!’ I appealed to her.

  ‘I’ll see you in a year,’ she said with finality and showed me the door.

  Over the next two weeks, I called her every day; she wouldn’t pick up the phone. I went to her flat a number of times but she did not open the door. I called Anand to ask if he could speak to my mother. But his secretary informed me that he was abroad on an assignment and wouldn’t be back for three months. My heart sank.

  This desperate state of affairs went on for several more weeks. I became disheartened and began to believe that it might be over between Avanti and me. Kamini Masi tried to bring us together. At last, she succeeded when both of us showed up at her home one evening but Avanti was cold and barely acknowledged my presence.

  Ramu Mama broke the ice and suggested a solution—a quiet, civil marriage in Bombay.

  ‘You mean without our families?’ Avanti was shocked.

  ‘And a year later, you could have a proper wedding with all the religious ceremonies and with the families.’

  Avanti rejected the idea immediately, saying it wasn’t worth hurting her parents when it was not their fault. As for me, neither could I think of marrying without my parents’ consent.

  ‘Amar’s mother may have a point,’ Avanti said bitterly. ‘We may not even want to marry a year after he meets all the girls his mother has lined up.’

  ‘I don’t intend to meet anyone, Avanti. I love you.’

  Ramu Mama offered to fly to Delhi and talk to my mother but I didn’t think it would work. He was not a good ambassador in this situation. Although she was in awe of his social position and his connections with the highest society, he was tainted in her mind by his relationship with Kamini Masi.

  ‘Have you heard anything from your father?’ Kamini Masi asked me.

  I had, and the answer was in the negative; so, that door too was closed. Matters deteriorated rapidly after that. In the succeeding months, I gave up all hope. I was so discouraged that I stopped trying to meet Avanti. Both of us became reclusive, and so the opportunity to run into each other at social events was also gone. A colleague of Avanti’s at the office told me that her life consisted only of work, reading and weekend visits to her guru’s ashram. I began to resent my mother and stopped writing to her. I ignored her letters, and when I
did reply, it was a few perfunctory lines. She suggested a number of potential girls but I refused to meet any of them. Seven months passed thus, and I began to reconcile myself to the fact that I may have lost Avanti forever.

  ~

  Avanti blamed our failure to get married to ‘male narcissism’, an influential idea also formulated by Freud, whose perspective on the mental life has dominated the world for more than a century. Avanti picked it up in a casual conversation with Ramu Mama and a psychologist friend of his at the Bombay Gym. Freud explains that the male infant initially loves itself since it has no awareness of a separate world. It is a brief period of ‘primal narcissism’ when it feels omnipotence followed by the discovery of his mother’s breast as the first external object. This brings with it an ‘oceanic feeling’, leaving an imprint of two narcissist images in its unconscious: ‘I am perfect’; and an idealized image of the parent: ‘You are perfect and I am a part of you.’ It is an intense image of a ‘lost paradise’, which pulls the child back unconsciously right through life, especially in difficult moments of stress. As the child grows, he learns to overcome his childhood attachment to his mother and outgrows this primary state of infantile narcissism. He moves away from self-love to love others, trading a certain amount of narcissism in the process, which renders him vulnerable to the beloved and some loss in self-esteem. Erotic love in later life turns his love outward instead of inward and plays an important role in preserving his mental health. Love for others helps him become a mature individual and acts as a civilizing factor in bringing a change from egoism to altruism.

  ‘You’re still a mama’s boy!’ Avanti told me after she had bought this account of primal narcissism wholesale, believing that I had not fully made a break from my mother and blamed it for my inability to persuade my mother to marry her.