Kama

by Gurcharan Das

  ‘Narcissism’ comes from the Greek myth about Narcissus, a handsome youth who rejected the advances of Echo, a nymph. Instead, he fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water. Unable to consummate his love, Narcissus ‘lay gazing enraptured into the pool, hour after hour’; the word today signifies the pursuit of gratification from vanity and egoistic self-admiration. In daily usage, it means excessive absorption with oneself accompanied by a certain amount of hubris.

  When Avanti asked Ramu Mama’s friend if I was a narcissist, he was careful in differentiating the use of the word in child psychology versus its use in everyday language, where it carries negative connotations of lacking empathy, being selfish and arrogant, susceptible to flattery, bragging and megalomania. To ensure that Avanti did not carry the wrong impression, he spoke about a ‘healthy narcissism’ which he equated with ‘self-esteem’, a normal part of growing up.

  Freud argued that a certain amount of narcissism is healthy and essential for normal human development. Narcissism becomes unhealthy when a person is unable to direct all or most of his libido, or sex drive, outward; then he becomes incurably sick or psychotic. He keeps returning to the original state of omnipotence and finds it difficult to direct his love towards another external object.

  When Avanti called me a ‘mama’s boy’, she was unwittingly echoing the conclusion of the distinguished Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar, who contends that ‘among Indian men the process of integrating these archaic narcissistic configurations developmentally is rarely accomplished in the sense that it is among men in the West. [But] this does not mean that Indians are narcissistic while westerners are not.’ He explains that it is a matter of degree and it may have to do with the Indian father. ‘The ambiguous role of the father in Indian childhood is yet another factor that contributes to the narcissistic vulnerability of [the] Indian male. For the narcissistic injury inherent in the abrupt dissolution of the mother–son bond can be tempered through the reinforcement provided by the boy’s identification with his father.’ At the moment of the child’s severance from the mother’s intimate company around the age of five, he needs another guardian to guide his sense of identity.

  Unfortunately, the father in India tends to be a ‘distant figure’ and I can confirm this from my own experience. I admired my father but did not have emotional access to him. Kakar says, ‘In autobiographical accounts, fathers, whether strict or indulgent, cold or affectionate, are invariably distant.’ He gives the example of Mahatma Gandhi, who was surprised by the uncharacteristic reaction of his father to a confession during adolescence:

  I was trembling when I handed the confession to my father . . . He read it through, and pearl-drops trickled down his wet cheeks, wetting the paper. For a moment he closed his eyes in thought and then tore up the note . . . Those pearl-drops of love cleansed my heart, and washed my sin away . . . This sort of sublime forgiveness was not natural to my father. I had thought that he would be angry . . . But he was so wonderfully peaceful.

  I tend to think that Avanti was wrong in ascribing excessive male narcissism to me. The emotional turbulence that I experienced over Isha during my adolescent years may have been decisive in helping to create a healthy break with my mother and overcome any latent narcissism—consistent also with Freud’s belief that the welling up of libidinal energy occurs first during puberty and adolescence. In a repressive society like ours where obstacles to sexual intimacy are huge, it was a harrowing experience, as it arose in the context of doubt, uncertainty and fears of rejection. In all societies, adolescents feel some insecurity, not knowing if their love will be reciprocated but in my case it was frightening, chaotic and traumatic.

  Freud related infantile narcissism to his more notorious idea, the ‘Oedipal complex’. He believed that attachment to the mother would inevitably lead to antagonism towards the father (who is supposedly a rival for the mother’s attention). He felt that it was a crucial task of childhood to overcome this complex as it would inhibit the person from developing mature adult relationships. The reason that we are not aware of these Freudian thoughts is that they reside in an unconscious region of our minds, where they lie seemingly forgotten. They are unacceptable to the conscious mind and it represses them, primarily because of their sexual content. Civilized life depends on repressing many unconscious desires, he felt, but we end up paying a price for this repression in terms of happiness and mental health.

  ~

  When things couldn’t get worse, I got a call from Anand one morning. He asked me to join him for lunch. He was unaware of what had happened but he immediately grasped the gravity of the situation and volunteered to fly the following day to Delhi to speak to my mother. In any case, he said, he had another meeting coming up in Delhi and would try and bring it forward. He left the next day, met my mother and called me immediately afterwards. I couldn’t believe it—my mother had relented and agreed to the marriage. He had to repeat himself three times on the disturbed trunk line before the news sank in. I ran to meet Avanti and she too was incredulous. Both of us couldn’t comprehend Anand’s selfless act and felt profoundly grateful. We rushed over to Ramu Mama and Kamini Masi to give them the good news.

  ‘Ah, in that case, I must fly up and congratulate your parents personally,’ said Ramu Mama. True to his word, he arrived at our home in Delhi the following day with a present that was generous even by his extravagant standards. It was a rare ruby necklace that had belonged to the Jaipur royal family since the early nineteenth century. He had bought it some years ago at a Sotheby’s auction in London.

  ‘You should be proud of your son, Gauri,’ he said, congratulating my mother. ‘And the girl, Avanti, um . . . she is a gem.’

  My mother turned away. After a pause, she collected herself and said, ‘Let’s not talk about it. It’s decided.’

  Ramu Mama could see that her heart was heavy. She didn’t want to hear about the marriage. She still hadn’t reconciled to it although she had given her consent. As far as she was concerned, her hopes had been dashed, and she would have to live with it. She changed the subject and said to Ramu Mama, ‘Amar adores both of you. You’ve looked after him like a son.’ Then they talked about the family and the old times in Lahore.

  After an hour, Ramu Mama rose to leave. He handed the ruby necklace to my mother, quietly and unobtrusively. The look that my mother gave him was priceless. To be able to gaze at a necklace worn by the queens of Jaipur, and that too now under her own roof, was beyond her wildest dreams. She felt transported into the stratospheric world of the royalties. It helped to assuage some of her pain, not only because of the ruby’s value but because it elevated her in the eyes of her friends and relatives. The whole world would talk about it. No one in her acquaintance would have a daughter-in-law who possessed a royal jewel.

  ‘You can’t do this, Ramu!’ she uttered. ‘It’s . . . it’s far too valuable. It belongs in a museum. Why, I wouldn’t be able to sleep with it in the house . . . and think of the cost of the insurance.’

  Ramu Mama, beaming with pleasure, said that Avanti would look lovely wearing it. ‘Gauri, promise me, you will ask her to wear it on her wedding day.‘ As he was leaving, he let slip unassumingly that the necklace carried a lifelong insurance policy and Amar could sleep comfortably at night.

  ~

  Behind my mother’s preference for an arranged marriage was an understandable wish—the couple should be compatible. It was conventional wisdom in her circle of family and friends that a marriage would endure if the couple were of similar backgrounds. I am not wholly convinced of this argument. I know of plenty of marriages that have flourished between couples of hugely diverse backgrounds, far more different than Avanti’s and mine. My favourite example is that of forty-five-year-old Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the great Russian writer, and twenty-year-old Anna Snitkina, two very different people of very distinct backgrounds.

  Anna entered Dostoyevsky’s life as a fledgling stenographer of humble means when he was already a celebrated
writer. He was no great catch, however. He remained sick with frequent epileptic fits; his finances were in disarray; he was addicted to gambling; his relatives sponged off him; and he was prone to unreasonable jealousy. To keep creditors away, he sold the rights to a collected edition of his works on the condition that he would write a new novel of 175 pages within a year. At the time he was deeply absorbed in writing Crime and Punishment and before he realized it eleven months were gone. He was in despair, fearing that if he did not deliver the new book in the next thirty days, he would lose the rights to all his works to the wily publisher.

  Dostoyevsky thought up an innovative solution—he would dictate the book, a radical idea at the time. A friend recommended Anna, who was the best student in the new local stenography school and needed the money. She was thrilled at the invitation. For the next twenty-five days, they worked diligently. Anna would arrive at Dostoyevsky’s house at noon and stay until four; each night she typed what he had dictated and proudly tallied the number of pages they had completed. Despite the gulf in their backgrounds, they became friends. She was moved by the respect he showed her, treating her like a partner rather than hired help.

  One day he asked her, ‘If I were to marry, what kind of wife should I choose—an intellectual or a kind person?’

  ‘An intellectual, of course.’

  ‘Well, no, if I had to choose, ’ he said, ‘I’d pick a warm and kind person, someone who would love me despite my flaws.’

  In the end, the collaborators succeeded in completing the novel on time. He paid her fifty roubles and they said goodbye. In the following days, he found his life bleak and empty. He missed Anna’s vivacious presence. Three weeks later, he invited her back to help him complete Crime and Punishment. He also asked her opinion about a new novel that he was contemplating, and excitedly began to narrate the plot. It was about a sick and troubled middle-aged artist, who had fallen hopelessly in love with an attractive, exuberant but younger woman. He felt singularly unworthy of her as he felt he had nothing to offer. He asked Anna if the young heroine of the story could possibly fall in love with such a flawed, debt-ridden hero.

  ‘Isn’t it impossible?’ Dostoyevsky asked.

  ‘No. Why impossible?’ Anna explained that the heroine was sensitive and wise, and the artist had a kind, responsive heart.

  ‘And do you really think she could truly love him for the rest of her life?’

  Anna nodded. Dostoyevsky fell silent, and then he hesitantly added. ‘Put yourself in her place for a moment,’ he said in a trembling voice. ‘Imagine that this artist—is me; that I have confessed my love to you and asked you to be my wife. Tell me, what would be your answer?’ He became suddenly embarrassed and nervous and regretted what he had said.

  The façade of fiction had fallen and Anna was stunned, realizing that this was no longer about literature. She couldn’t believe that Dostoyevsky had actually fallen in love with her and as he was afraid of being rejected, he had created the pretence of fiction to save them both embarrassment. She looked into his troubled face and said, ‘I would answer that I love you and will love you all my life.’

  Fyodor and Anna were married in February 1867 and remained deeply in love until Dostoyevsky’s death fourteen years later. What emerges in Anna’s memoir, Dostoyevsky Reminiscences, is the extraordinary story of two very different people from completely distinct backgrounds who complemented each other perfectly and brought great happiness to their lives.

  ‘I was not distinguished for my good looks, nor did I possess talent nor any special intellectual cultivation, and I had no more than a secondary education. And yet, despite all that, I earned the profound respect, almost the adoration of a man so creative and brilliant,’ writes Anna.

  She was unable to comprehend many of his ideas. He once tried to explain a chapter, ‘The Grand Inquisitor’, from The Brothers Karamazov to her, but it went completely over her head. She was practical, however, and also understood the demons inside his head. She worked hard to free him and his family from debt. She had a good head for business and quickly mastered the book trade, separating the good from the bad publishers and creating plans for mass distribution of his books. She not only saved Dostoyevsky but made him into a national literary success.

  Many years later, Anna asked herself how it was possible for two very different people to live together happily. She got the answer from a friend, Strakhov, in a letter that she quotes in her memoir:

  No one, not even a friend, can make us better. But it is a great happiness in life to meet a person of quite different construction, different bent, completely dissimilar views who, while always remaining himself and . . . and not currying favor with us . . . he would stand as a firm wall, as a check to our follies and our irrationalities, which every human being has. Friendship lies in contradiction and not in agreement!

  ~

  There were many weddings in Delhi that winter but in none would the groom’s mother have borne her disappointments with such stoic dignity as Gauri Kumar. The ruby necklace had mitigated some of her discontent but it could not compensate for her lost dreams of grandeur. Both Avanti and I had wanted a simple wedding. Sharma-ji, however, wasn’t going to be denied a grand traditional ceremony; he had to show off to the world. In deference to my mother’s wishes, he had compromised reluctantly to a Punjabi Khatri wedding, instead of a Brahmin one. By now, Punjabi weddings had become the norm in Delhi ever since refugees from Punjab flooded the city after the partition and changed its complexion irrevocably.

  I arrived in Delhi a few days before the wedding to give my mother moral support and help out with the arrangements. Avanti was already there, settled in her parents’ new home, which everyone called the ‘wedding house’. It had all the bustle and gaiety of a place of anticipation. There were sounds of the young everywhere—Avanti’s cousins and their friends were continuously in and out of the house, chatting interminably, laughing incessantly. Their excitement was infectious and fed the matchmaking and gossip of the older women. The delicious breath of feminine anticipation pervaded the sensuous air. Although it was Avanti who was getting married, it was the younger girls who found themselves immersed in the currents of desire which traversed the house, and reverberated around them, and grazed their untouched maidenly bodies. For the older relatives, it was mostly a chance to see the big city, make merry, enjoy the hospitality of the bride’s family and ventilate old grudges.

  I woke up early on the morning of my wedding and exclaimed, ‘My day of days!’ I rushed downstairs to find my parents examining a handsome white mare on which I would ride in the evening to the bride’s home for our wedding ceremony. With her usual attention to detail, my mother was instructing the horse merchant to make sure that she was washed and groomed till her skin shone, and then saddled and caparisoned brilliantly.

  ‘What do you think of her?’ she asked.

  ‘Beautiful!’ I said.

  We then scrutinized a gold-embroidered robe that I would wear, a pair of Kashmiri slippers with turned-up spurs, and a deep yellow velvet scabbard with silver mountings.

  ‘So, they meet with your approval?’ she asked proudly.

  ‘Completely!’

  My ‘day of days’ went by quickly. My mother remained busy with dozens of arrangements. I was with her much of the day but she did not let her guard down, nor express her reservations about Avanti. Years later, however, she revealed to me that what she found most difficult to cope with in my relationship with Avanti was the emotional equality implicit in it.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I had asked.

  ‘You give her so much importance. Boys didn’t do that in my day.’

  From the way I spoke about Avanti, she felt I was speaking about an equal. She envied Avanti for this. Her own marriage, in contrast, was a traditional institution based on the old division between housewife and the male breadwinner. This is how her life had been and her mother’s and grandmother’s. But now, she found, husbands and wives were becoming colla
borators in a joint emotional enterprise that even trumped their obligations to children and parents. When she asked about Avanti’s job, she was secretly jealous of Avanti’s opportunities and her ability to engage with the ‘maleness’ of the outside world. She begrudged the uninhibited way we laid claim to sexual pleasure outside the compulsions of reproduction.

  I arrived at the bride’s house at sundown looking like a princely warrior about to lead a ceremonial charge. The bride’s family was waiting anxiously under an arch of flowers. It was an impressive sight. Quite unlike his Brahmin ancestors, Sharma-ji stood out in a pink turban. He wore a cream-coloured double-breasted gown which flowed like a robe, emphasizing his height. Behind him stood obediently, in order of seniority, his brothers, his brothers-in-law and his nephews—all arrayed in pink turbans. The women of the house, adorned in silks and gold, stood at the back, eager to see the groom.

  Sharma-ji came forward and solemnly placed a garland of marigolds around my father’s neck. They embraced. All the other pink-turbaned members of both households followed suit, exchanging garlands with their counterparts. I pushed aside the veil of white flowers that cloaked my nervous face, alighted from the horse, and was led by the women towards the veiled bride. Avanti wore a heavy red sari adorned with gold threadwork that matched the rubies around her neck. She placed an elaborate garland around my neck. This was no ordinary gesture—she was re-enacting the ancient svayamvara, ‘the bride’s choice’, following in Damayanti’s footsteps in the Mahabharata. So beautiful was Damayanti, the story goes, that all the gods had vied for her hand; but she was in love with Nala, a human prince; the gods assumed his human form and she became confused at her svayamvara; when confronted with half a dozen Nalas, Damayanti kept her poise, noticed that only one of her suitors cast a shadow, and she confidently garlanded her human love.

  The women of the house led us inside, where I was made to sit next to the bride. I was put through a bantering session in which I was quizzed and teased by the women from Avanti’s family. Kamini Masi had prepared me for the ritual and so I wasn’t totally at a loss for answers.