‘Why are you so late, sir?’ inquired one of the women. ‘We thought you might have changed your mind.’
‘Ask my horse, dear madam,’ I replied.
‘And why, sir, didn’t you marry a good Punjabi girl from your clan rather than our Avantika?’
‘Because there doesn’t exist a princess of Avantika in the Punjab.’
‘And, sir, how does our Avanti happen to be wearing such a precious necklace this evening? Did you steal it by any chance?’
This was a question we had not rehearsed. I answered simply, ‘For that, dear ladies, you must ask my Ramu Mama.’ Not surprisingly, the necklace had created a sensation the previous day when my mother had handed it to Avanti. Sharma-ji couldn’t stop talking about it—it lifted his status in the eyes of the world—but Avanti herself was embarrassed when asked about it and feared for its security.
Appearing satisfied with my answers, the women laughed enthusiastically. Everyone remarked how beautiful Avanti looked. The unusual light and shade in the room seemed to give her a fragile and iridescent quality. Her soft, black plait interwoven with flowers appeared longer than usual, setting off her pale face and her striking eyes. As we got up to move to the stage in the middle of the garden for the wedding ceremony, I caught my mother’s eye in the distance. In it was an unmistakable look of disappointment. Her heart was weighed down and this diminished some of my happiness. She had determined to keep secret her feelings of regret but I had penetrated her stoic exterior. She tried to atone for it by putting on a pleasant smile but the damage had been done.
Avanti and I climbed on to a platform decorated with white flowers and open to the stars. Two priests, one from each family, were about to begin chanting Vedic rites in Sanskrit. The crowd paid no great attention to us. Following my gaze, Avanti noticed a group of my loud relatives who seemed to fall upon each other with cries of joy. They met only at weddings and funerals, embraced tearfully and exchanged the latest gossip about our second and third cousins. Avanti’s eyes caught Anand in the crowd and her eyes sparkled. He was staring at her and she gave him an imperceptible smile. He was speaking to Ramu Mama and Kamini Masi, who also turned to look at us. Avanti showed them with gratitude the ruby necklace she was wearing.
I was surprised to see Isha, who was talking to my mother. She turned to look at me and I gave her a smile of deep gratitude for coming. She was looking older but still had the same insolent smile under a mass of dark hair. I discovered the next day that she had left behind with my mother a ridiculously expensive present—a diamond necklace for Avanti. At a distance was another group—this one consisted of my poorer relations. They sat quietly in a corner, content to observe the festivities, not feeling the need to make small talk. Silence was not an awkward thing in their life; they were happy merely being together with their own—simple people trying to enjoy a frail night of happiness.
The pandit intoned ‘Om Swaha’, and the ceremony began. The parents of the bride and the groom picked up incense and threw it into the sacrificial fire. Avanti and I sat across from the priests with their elaborate trays filled with incense, holy water from the Ganges, sacred thread, honey, flour, rice and fruit. The pandit explained that the wife was part of her husband, and henceforth no religious ritual could be performed without her. I held Avanti’s hand and repeated in Sanskrit, ‘I hold your hand for our happiness. May we both live to a ripe old age. You are the queen and shall rule over my home. I am the heaven, you are the earth. Let us marry and be joined together. Your heart I take in mine. Our minds shall be one. May God make us one.’
The interminable ceremony went on. Eventually, Avanti and I took the seven sacred revolutions around the holy fire. On the first round, I prayed for sustenance; on the second for strength; the third for keeping our vows and ideals; the fourth for a comfortable life; the fifth for our cattle; the sixth for harmony during the different seasons; and the seventh round was for fulfilling our religious duties. After this, Avanti mounted a stone, which symbolized the strength of our union. Together we gazed at the Pole Star, and prayed for constancy. We vowed that we would be loyal and never get separated like the seven stars in the constellation above. Avanti sipped the holy water from the Ganges to wash away her impurities and begin a new and pure life. Finally, Sharma-ji ‘gifted’ his daughter to me in the honoured ceremony of kanyadan.
It was two in the morning and the long Vedic ceremony was over. Avanti and I were married. As we walked inside, I noted the crowds had thinned. Most of the guests had left soon after dinner, and only a few close relatives were lingering. I had no way of knowing what was going on in Avanti’s mind during the ceremony.
~
We were back in Bombay and glad to be by ourselves. One evening, Avanti beckoned me with her eyes. I tilted my head so that my face touched hers and I placed my mouth on hers. She kissed me for a long time, and then there followed a well-ordered sequence of short kisses, each one different from the previous one. Breathing deeply, I remained standing, astonished at the way nature guided my beloved, and now my wife, to kiss the way she did.
Avanti looked at my face anxiously. I smiled and she felt comforted to be at home with me. The anxiety of keeping up appearances had disappeared. A subtle energy flowed out of me that made her feel at ease and happy, and at home. Her female sensibility registered it instinctively. I felt my blood heating up. I bent down towards her and kissed the brown nipple of her breast. Looking up, I saw her face full of longing; her eyes, with contracted pupils, yearned for more. From her breast flowed the answer: trembling uncontrollably, she was ready to give herself to me. She swears that she remembers nothing about what happened after that:
Well, really there is nothing I can tell
of what men do in love; no, not a word:
He started to undo my dress, and—
well, I swear I can’t remember what occurred.
I put my arms around her and drew her to me. I’d always desired to feel her full roundness but suddenly she felt surprisingly small. As I lay her on the bed, there was no resistance. She became even more desirable nestled beside me. My blood vessels burnt with wanting for her, for her softness. Softly, I caressed her, stroking the slope of her legs and thighs, and she moved her warm body nearer and nearer to mine. My hardness rose against her with insistent assertion. As she felt me, she let herself go, yielding with a helpless quiver.
She awoke to the new thrills rippling inside her, responding to each thrust, rising to a climax. She lay quiet at first but then began to utter wild little cries. Soon it was over, too soon for her. She could do nothing to prolong it. She could not harden me or grip me. I lay still. She waited and cried softly as she felt me moving out of her, contracting, and then I slipped out of her. She wanted to appeal softly to me to come in again and fulfil her. With soft, benevolent fingers she stroked the hair on my head which lay on her breast. I had not yet satisfied her wild craving. I came and finished so quickly while she lay dazed, disappointed and lost.
‘Silly boy, you are a curious, gentle lover,’ she said. ‘Very gentle yet detached; aware of every sound outside but not of the splashes inside me.’ Vatsyayana would have been disappointed with my failure to learn his foremost lesson—give her pleasure first before yourself.
As the days passed, she learnt to hold me gradually, to keep me there inside her even when my crisis was over. And I discovered how to be more skilful and to stay firm inside her while she was still wildly alive, climbing to her own summit. As I felt her achieving her satisfaction, I felt a sense of fulfilment. Vatsyayana would have approved of my progress.
‘Ah,’ she whispered trembling. Soon she was still, clinging to me as we lay there in our respective remoteness. I laid my hand on her arm and softly, gently, I began to move down to the curve of her crouching thighs. And there my hand softly stroked the curve of her body in a tender caress. We lay in stillness. What was she feeling, what was she thinking? She was a strange woman at this moment; I wanted to speak but dared not break
her mysterious quiet. I lay there without moving, my body on hers, both of us wet with the sweat. We were so close, yet fundamentally strangers, and peaceful and serene.
Thus, the game of love went on. Our bodies got to know each other in those warm, sweet nights. We learnt to sleep naked and uncovered, damp with perspiration and the odour of heat beneath the whirring fan above and the windows open, seeking any kind of breeze we could find. Sometimes, it was better in the day and at other times at night.
After years of being friends, Avanti and I were now lovers. I felt in those delicate night hours how archetypal to human consciousness was marriage. We awakened early, often at dawn, and we would sit on the terrace, looking upon the greyness of the air and the white, curling sea waves. As we sipped chai silently, I felt an overwhelming gratitude, for being able to live in harmony with this woman.
This is, perhaps, what love is. All that we might hope to accomplish is the sharing of our solitude with another person. Love is founded on an understanding of our primal aloneness, something I learnt early in childhood with my mother—the intimacy of kama helps us to overcome this loneliness. For the first time in my life, I felt that being on the earth is a limited experience. It will end one day although the world will continue without us. I had to love Avanti because time was limited. In this love, I experienced the value of time, having lived like a spendthrift for much of my life.
Six months later, we moved into a larger apartment in the same neighbourhood of Colaba. Avanti spent the first few weeks furnishing the new flat. She had the walls painted, bought new handwoven curtains for the windows, and equipped the place with cane and rattan furniture, suitable to the tropical climate of our city. She bought some crotons, ferns and umbrella palms from the nursery nearby. The only expensive thing she acquired was a leather easy chair for me. But she never stopped working even when her friends advised her that she should now ‘fulfil herself as wife and mother’. Leaning on the windowsill, her magnificent head slanted to one side, and a loose cotton gown wrapped carelessly around her, she would wave to me as she saw me off. Only then would she dress and quietly rush off to her journalist’s job.
I would set off to work, with a spring in my step, my nostrils filled with the morning air of the sea. Without a care, I plunged into my work. Each evening I would hurry home, find Avanti waiting at the window, and mount the stairs to our flat with excitement in my heart. A walk together on Cuffe Parade in the evenings, followed by a light dinner, constituted the new pleasures of our life. I would awaken each morning with surprise to find her beside me on the pillow; watch the early sunlight falling on her cheeks and her eyes, looking larger than ever as she blinked in quick succession while waking up. I had first encountered the dark eyes a decade ago; now they reflected the light filtered through the curtains, and seemed to carry layers of colour, dark at the depths and growing brighter towards the surface. I thought to myself that I was a lucky man.
~
Nothing quite evokes the erotic pleasures that Avanti and I experienced in those early days of our marriage as the Kumarasambhava, the greatest poem about conjugal love. Written by Kalidasa in plausible, elegant Sanskrit in the fifth century, it recounts the marital life of the gods, Shiva and Parvati. To compare our human love to the cosmic love of the gods seems presumptuous but it is easy to forget that this divine couple are the parents of us all; they are present in the marrying of every couple and their union is the model for every union. Like the Gitagovinda, Kalidasa’s poem is passionate, but unlike it, the passion is erotic and worldly, not romantic and mystical. Even though events take place on a cosmic scale, Shiva and Parvati come alive as two persons whose lives are dappled with subtle humour.
The poem opens in the snowy abode of the Himalaya, the king of the mountains and father of Parvati. The gods urge the father to give his daughter in marriage to the great god Shiva. From this divine union will be born Kumara, who will destroy the demon Taraka, who has been terrorizing the gods. Her father agrees and sends Parvati to Shiva’s Himalayan hermitage where the ascetic god is engaged in meditation. Kama, the god of love, accompanies her to divert the god’s mind towards love. He shoots Shiva with his first arrow of infatuation. Angry at being disturbed, Shiva burns Kama to ashes with the heat of his third eye. But Shiva is so impressed with Parvati’s sincerity, earnestness and charm that he falls in love with her. Kama may have been burnt but his work is done. They agree to marry and the final two cantos of Kalidasa’s epic poem describe the wedding and lovemaking of the divine couple.
The last or eighth canto is notorious. Medieval Indian commentators reprimanded Kalidasa for daring to depict explicitly the mating of gods; prudish Victorian translators were too shocked and omitted it. By today’s liberated standards, it is remarkably discreet, filled with alluring and sensuous descriptions of nature. The intimacy of the gods is fused with an attitude of reverence and the tangible presence of the transcendent. As a homage to one of the greatest kama optimists of all times, Kalidasa, I shall quote from these verses on cosmic conjugal love, borrowing freely from Hank Heifetz’s poetic translation, which has also captured Kalidasa’s metrical patterns.
Shiva and Parvati have just got married. The great god is reclining, curious, pretending to be asleep when his wife turns around to look at her lover. As he opens his eyes with a smile, she closes hers ‘as if struck by lightning’. She stops his hand moving to her navel but the knot on her silken robe ‘loosens by itself, all the way’.
Alone together, before she would let her robe fall,
and cover Shiva’s eyes with both her palms,
but now she was left troubled by that useless effort
as the third eye in his forehead looked down at her.
As they kiss, she keeps her lower lip away from his teeth and lets her arms hang when they embrace; but even with her restraint and lack of response, he finds pleasure in loving his wife. He kisses her gently, leaving her lower lip unharmed; runs his nails without scoring her and ‘she bears only what she can bear’. The following day:
Eager to find out what happened in the night,
her friends questioned her when it came to be morning,
but she, out of shyness, did not calm their curiosity
though her heart longed to tell them all about it.
When she looks in the mirror, she sees her lover behind her and tries to hide her traces of pleasure. When her mother sees the divine couple, she sighs with relief, ‘for nothing lifts a mother’s heart more than knowing her daughter is loved by her husband’. Thus, the days go by. As Parvati comes to know the taste of pleasure step by step, she abandons her earlier reserve. When he holds her to his chest, she embraces her lover without hesitation. She no longer turns her face shyly, nor tries to fend off his hand moving to the knot of her belt. Soon their love has become so rooted that it is a pain to be separated even for a short while.
After a month, the heavenly couple leave Parvati’s home in the Himalayas, and go on a whirlwind tour of the world, not unlike modern-day honeymooners.
Rich in the embrace of Parvati’s breasts,
he rode as swift as the wind to Mount Meru
where they passed a night devoted to love
on a bed made of flakes of gold leaves.
On the way, she stops to swim naked in the Ganges.
In the Heavenly Ganga, Parvati struck her lover
with a golden lotus and closed her eyes
as Shiva’s hands splashed her. Swimming, she needed
no waistband, as the fish glowed around her.
As they glide from place to place, Shiva describes the breathtaking beauty of nature and animals in the setting sun. He shows her elephants leaving their feeding grounds for the shore ‘where lotuses have closed around bees’; wild boars leading their herds out of the deep mud with tusks that have ‘fed on sprouts of tender lotus stalks’; peacocks settled on a tree, their ‘feathers opening to drink the reddish gold of the fading sun’. He tells her:
The lotus
, though its petals have closed like a bud,
still, for the moment, is slightly open as if,
out of love, it were leaving the space for any bee
that wishes to enter and stay there the night.
And points to a mountain:
See how the mountain itself has broken up
the evening light among the tangled manes
of its lions and its trees flowing with . . . their
new leaves and its peaks rich with ores.
As the sun sets, it is time, he reminds her, for evening prayers, which means that he must leave her for a while. She is angry and jealous. He tries to appease her on his return:
Give up your anger, angry without a cause!
I have bowed down to the twilight and no other.
Don’t you know that your husband in the rite of life,
like the cakravaka bird, will always be faithful?
Day turns into night and he likens his beloved to the stars as ‘the moon seems to kiss the face of the night’. He tells her to ‘use the moonlight slivers to fasten her hair while the moon is busy uniting with its due star, the face of which is sparkling like a newly-wed girl trembling with fear as she and her bridegroom are joined together’.
Shiva now picks her up, ‘she who is heavy with the weight of her hips, her golden belt hanging down, and he enters a house of jewels with its splendours created by the power of his mind’.
Though, as they loved, the moon suffered when she seized
his hair and they tried to outdo each other scratching
where nail marks should not be made and Parvati’s belt-string
easily opened to him, still he was never satisfied.
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