Only through compassion for his beloved, when the lines
of stars were sinking low in the sky
and she was holding tightly to his chest,
he showed some willingness to close his eyes.
Looking at his lover’s face, her eyes sleepless and red, her hair tangled, he is filled with passion, and makes love to her again, culminating in this final verse:
With the day and the night the same to him,
Shiva spent his time making love
and he passed twenty-five years
as if it were a single night
and his thirst for the pleasures of loving
never became any less in him
as the fire that burns below the ocean
is never satisfied by the rolling waters.
~
Twenty-five years of making love, indeed! The original in Sanskrit says literally, ‘a hundred and fifty seasons’ and as there are six seasons in the Indian year, the poetic translator has made it easier by converting the gods’ cosmic lovemaking time into mundane human years.
I was just as confused by Kalidasa’s verses as I had been by Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda, trying to make sense of god as an erotic lover. Avanti, however, had no problem. Drawing on the teachings of her guru, who was a Kashmiri Shaivite, she explained that unlike kama pessimists such as the Theravada Buddhists, who regard the body as the primary cause of suffering and ignorance, Shiva’s body is pure, infinite consciousness. This cosmic consciousness is contained in the human body, as also in the bodies of other creatures down to the lowest life. From an individual’s perspective, the human experience is the result of past karmic actions. From a cosmological perspective, however, it is the result of Shiva’s cosmic desire. The cosmic polarity between Shiva and Parvati (Shakti) is manifested as the sexual desire of male and female bodies.
Kamini Masi had a different take on my dilemma. She said that it depends on the one who listens to Kalidasa’s poem. For the believer, it is about divine love suffusing the cosmos, and this includes human sexual love. It fills you with transcendental bliss because it is about your god; if you are a non-believing aesthete, it evokes the emotions of the sringara rasa; if you are neither, it confers the divine blessings of the gods. So, it is up to you.
The Kumarasambhava raises the question as to whether our actions are preordained or not. Parvati’s marriage to Shiva was determined by the gods who wanted her to produce a son, Kumara, who would grow up to liberate them from the misdeeds of the ghastly Taraka. Her father helped by sending her to serve Shiva with the help of Kama. But what about my marriage to Avanti? Was it predetermined too as though destiny had provided each of us a platonic other that we just had to find? Since it happened against the fierce opposition of my mother, at times there seemed nothing inevitable about it. And yet, you could say that the die was cast the day she came bouncing into our home as our neighbour a decade ago.
I jokingly called Avanti my ‘erotic-ascetic’, a phrase that is used famously to explain the paradoxical nature of Shiva. It is captured in the ubiquitous representation of the linga in every Shiva temple. Shiva is also the mythical founder of yoga, wherein the yogi draws up the seed, urdhvaretas, conserving and sublimating his sexual energy via meditation and ascetic practice and transforms it into creative power. The raised linga is thus a natural symbol of chastity in yoga, and later in tantra practice.
This helped me to understand why Kalidasa found no inconsistency between spiritual aspiration and human desire when he described the uninhibited lovemaking of Shiva and Parvati in canto eight. Where the non-believer sees a contradiction in Shiva, the devotee finds none. Shiva conforms to ‘human nature’ with both its ascetic and erotic tendencies. The god is normal and whole. It is the ascetic who is abnormal, aspiring to chastity and trying to rid himself of the erotic side of his humanity; the libertine is equally deviant on the opposite side. Shiva is also a householder who fulfils the duties of a husband, including the pursuit of kama. Appropriately, his wife is idyllically beautiful, endowed with curved hips, generous upward-tilting breasts and lotus eyes. She can only wait so long during her husband’s ascetic practice. When her patience runs out, she seduces him into lovemaking, and they unite for a period equal to Shiva’s meditation.
Shiva, the yogi, transforms sexual desire into spiritual heat, tapas, through yoga. Although sexual fluids normally flow down and out, Shiva’s yogic practice directs the flow upward, raising the power of his seed to the eye centre. This rising spiritual force is manifested in the myth where Shiva burns the love-god, Kama, who had interrupted his meditation when he pierced him with the arrow of ‘fascination’. Shiva later took pity on Kama’s grieving wife, Rati, and revived the love-god, allowing him to live bodiless. Shiva says to Rati, Kama ‘is not destroyed but lives in a sublimated state’. Indeed, kama exists in the human mind as an emotion. The yogi sublimates the emotion of desire during his practice and transforms it into creative power. Freud understood this. He regarded sublimation as a sign of civilization and human maturity whereby socially unacceptable sexual impulses are deflected in human beings, and often transformed into creative acts.
What is common between the kama pessimist and the optimist is the Sanskrit word tapas, which means the heat generated in the creative act of meditation as spiritual power; but it can also signify the heat of kama, the heat of desire in the sexual act. At the cosmic level, tapas is the generative power that creates the universe. At the individual level, tapas is the heat experienced as sexual passion in the body. The worlds of the pessimist and the optimist are thus related, and it falls on myth to resolve these apparent contradictions, in the same way as dreams help resolve inconsistencies in our daily lives. In his myths, Shiva appears to be balanced and pragmatic in the way he combines the two roles. He is against the excess of the erotic libertine as well as the excess of the ascetic renouncer:
He (Shiva) is able to mediate in this way because of his protean character; he is all things to all men . . . The myths make the Hindu aware that his society demands of him two roles which he cannot possibly satisfy fully—that he become a householder and beget sons, and that he renounce life and seek union with god. The myth shows the untenable answer arrived at by compromise . . . The myth makes it possible to admit that the ideal is not attainable.
In the Shiva myths, women are not simply givers but also the recipients of pleasure. Additionally, the eighty-four sexual postures (maithunasana) described by Vatsyayana are meant to be learnt by both male and female yogis, who unite with their consorts in imitation of the love play of the gods. Women too were empowered within the ashrama system to attain liberation, the fourth and final aim of life. For many Hindus, men are not spiritually superior. In fact, some sages even stated that women are more capable of attaining liberation than men and there are famous examples of powerful female ascetics, gurus and saints, including Gargi, Lallesvari and Mirabai.
The practice of bhakti offers another solution to the paradox of Shiva’s dual nature. Bhakti came later in history and addressed the related question of the devotee’s love for god and vice versa. Just as Krishna and Radha’s love keeps the universe going, so does Shiva and Parvati’s. Just as Krishna acts for no other motive than leela, so does Shiva, who tells Parvati that since they are gods, their love is for its own sake and self-sufficient, and does not have to lead to reproduction like human love. Hence, there is no reason to have a son. She replies, however, ‘What you say is true, but nevertheless I wish to have a child. I long for the kiss of a son’s mouth.’ Hence, another myth has to be created to accommodate Parvati’s desires.
~
Soon after we moved into our new apartment, Avanti invited ‘the conspirators’, as she referred to the trio that had collaborated to make our marriage possible. And so, Kamini Masi, Ramu Mama and Anand were at our home one Sunday for lunch. There was much fun, laughter and happy talk as we reminisced about our days together. I mentioned to Anand that the Kumarasambhava was the perfect answer
to a cynic like him who believed that love and marriage did not go together.
‘It’s possible but not likely,’ he said. ‘Desire is founded on pleasure but marriage is based on social utility.’ Marriage, he felt, was about duty, honour and fidelity and not love necessarily.
‘You’re hopeless!’ declared Kamini Masi.
As I think back to those happy days, I ask myself, when had life been so good to me? I felt as though I had climbed a few steps on Plato’s ladder of love. In his famous dialogue, Symposium, Socrates introduces his teacher, Diotima, who says that a lover is attracted to something good in the beloved. This ‘goodness’ might consist of any number of things—from physical beauty to intelligence to ethical traits of character. The lover hopes that possessing this ‘goodness’ might lead to a better life. Even the search for the ‘other half’, which Aristophanes refers to in the same dialogue, is a desire to possess the ‘good’ in the other half. It doesn’t mean that the beloved is a good person overall but the lover is drawn to the good qualities in the beloved. By uniting with each other in marriage, the lovers hope to pass on this goodness to the next generation through their children.
Plato’s ‘Idea of the Good’ attracted Avanti instinctively as she was already inclined to think of love in an altruistic way. It appealed to me as well because I hoped unconsciously to have Avanti’s good qualities rub off on me, making me a better person. We were ready to climb Diotima’s ladder. It was a natural step to move up from attraction for each other’s bodies to a love for the specific ‘good’ qualities in the other. From here, Plato expected us to climb to the next stage, where we would begin to perceive the same goodness in other human beings and learn to esteem them equally as though we were all ‘part of a single sea’. Thus, we would evolve from a selfish love for each other to a love for all humanity, becoming morally better as we ascended Plato’s ladder to the ultimate ‘Idea of the Good’. This is the origin of the phrase ‘Platonic love’, which was first used by Marsilio Ficino in De amore (1484).
Unlike Plato’s metaphor of the ladder of love’s ascent, I think the emotional state in my conjugal relationship with Avanti is captured better by Bhavabhuti, the eighth-century Sanskrit poet and playwright. He thought of love as a fulfilling emotion when the heart finally finds rest, when there is no yearning any more, ‘no twoness’:
This state where there is no twoness
Where the heart finds rest,
Where feelings do not dry with age,
Where concealments fall away in time
And essential love is ripened,
Sacred is this state of human fulfilment,
Which we find once if ever.
Perhaps the explanation lies in the fact that Avanti and I had been friends before we became married lovers. Nietzsche put it well: ‘It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages’; this is why, ‘When entering into marriage one ought to ask oneself: do you believe you are going to enjoy talking to this woman right into your old age?’ Everything else in marriage, he felt, is transitory—most of the time you are together you will be conversing. The great advantage of friendship is that it values differences between two human beings far more than married love; the differences between Avanti and me, I felt, would make us both richer. The truth is that it is unnatural for two human beings to be together constantly. The work of married love too often leaves us feeling unprepared, and nowhere more than when lovers confront the gulf of their daily differences.
Nietzsche is not necessarily the most reliable source for advice on marriage considering that he never married himself. He did propose to the stunningly beautiful Lou Andreas-Salomé in 1882, whose only claim to fame is that ‘she is the woman who never married Nietzsche’. Salomé was then twenty-two and he was thirty-seven. At that time, she was in an affair with the author and gambler Paul Rée. She replied that she preferred Nietzsche as a friend because she valued her freedom too much to marry anyone. Nietzsche’s mistake was to propose too hastily—he forgot that a woman will not voluntarily give up her liberty for a man who is unknown and untested.
Considerations of liberty are understandable but expectations of perfection are not. I had my differences with my mother but I agreed with her about one thing: the myth of romantic love creates a desire for perfection in lovers, and this presents serious risks when it comes to marriage. The more we idealize a person, the more disheartened we grow when we get to know them. The sad truth is that human beings are imperfect and our yearning for perfection often kills love.
Where the myth fails, human love begins. Then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws.
My mother did have a point when she said that sensuality often makes love grow too quickly; the root remains weak and easy to pull out. Both Avanti and I were aware that we had not approached marriage through sensuality. Although we had always found each other attractive, we came to it through friendship that morphed one day into love. Our relationship had a logic of its own. It was neither driven by the sex drive, nor motivated by the traditional considerations of property or progeny. Because we had been friends, there was a certain equality and mutuality in our relationship that my mother envied. We would have to negotiate constantly and work through it because it did not follow the old rules.
We were unaware at the time, but a new world was getting ready to emerge in India after the 1990s’ economic reforms which would unbind India mentally and unleash a sexual revolution, beginning with the upper-middle classes, and we would catch up with a sexual revolution that was already under way in the West. A female English friend came to visit us in 2001, and from her we acquired a fashionable new vocabulary, including words like ‘commitment’ and ‘relationships’. She casually asked Avanti why she had not agreed to any of the proposals that had come from her family for an ‘arranged’ marriage.
‘If you are going to marry,’ Avanti replied, ‘it might as well be someone you know and like.’
Our friend surprised us when she said, ‘I approve of the sensible Indian idea of an arranged marriage.’ She said that her friends in the West subscribed to the ‘silly idea of a perfect soulmate’. It is an illusion, she felt, and it does great damage as everyone seems to be searching for a flawless partner. The more they idealize the lover, the more disillusioned they get. It is because of this illusion that so many marriages in the West end in divorce.
‘Marriage has its inherent limitations on how exciting it can be,’ said Avanti, sounding a bit like my mother.
‘But neither do we want our lives to degenerate into comfortable mediocrity,’ I said. ‘We want marriage to make us better persons.’ Although my defensive response was addressed to our English friend, it was meant for Avanti.
One evening the three of us went to a movie called Bridget Jones’s Diary. Our friend was keen for us to see it. ‘Everyone is talking about it in London,’ she said. It was about what we had been discussing—the ‘illusion of the one soulmate’, and how so many women in the West fail to take a pragmatic approach to relationships; and so many British men suffer from the disease called ‘the man’s failure to commit’.
We enjoyed the movie immensely and discussed it threadbare over dinner. The next day we were still thinking about the film when our English friend told us a true story about her closest girlfriend, who informed her breathlessly one day that she had finally met, late in life, ‘The One’.
‘My heart sank!’ she exclaimed. ‘And, of course, The One turned out to be a rat.’ She said that for years she had been drilling into her friend’s head that the perfect man did not exist. It’s one of the reasons why so many English girls stay single for so long. The boy next door is not good enough. ‘It’s for this reason that I hanker after the pragmatic Indian idea of arranged marriage. It’s refreshing to know that your man doesn’t have commitment issues and your woman doesn’t have mystical ideas about the perfect mate. Both are content to settle down to a normal life—it’s the grown-up thing to d
o.’
Our English friend left after a week but not before making her point in a telling way. She recounted that Thomas More, the English statesman, fell in love with the younger sister in a family, but thinking it might reduce the chances of the older sister, he married her instead.
9
THE ENIGMA OF MARRIAGE
Duty to oneself versus duty to another
There is melancholic sadness
at the very heart of kama
—Mahabharata I.85.7–8
As we were changing into our pyjamas, Avanti mentioned casually, ‘Not tonight.’
‘Why not?’ I asked with a forced smile.
‘No, not tonight.’
‘But that’s what you said last night; and the night before; and every night this week.’ After a pause, I asked, ‘What shall we do then?’
‘Let’s read.’
‘But we do that every night.’
After more than a dozen years of marriage, I suffered from the inescapable sulk of a lover. Avanti no longer felt the same physical desire. I remembered wistfully the blissful months immediately after our marriage when both of us used to rush home from work in anticipation of the evenings and nights of utter delight. But slowly and inexplicably, desire receded from her end, especially after the children came along. I felt resentful. My work too became more demanding and I came home later and later. I felt our marriage was caught in a middle-age inertia and it was beginning to dull my sensual feelings. Every desire seemed to become a decision in our unloving proximity.
We had raised two lovely girls while I had spent the years slogging and climbing the ladder in the shipping company where I worked in Ballard Estate. Even though I had risen to the top, life had grown increasingly tiresome. Although Avanti and I had a good marriage in all other respects, the daily routine of life had taken its toll. With the passage of time, I was becoming increasingly aware of my mortality, wondering if this is all there is to life. Feeling frustrated and unhappy, I complained to Ramu Mama. He listened sympathetically but didn’t offer any advice. We met again the following week and he told me he had spoken to his old psychologist friend—the same one who had once explained ‘male narcissism’ to us over dinner. Sensing my reluctance, he said, ‘Meet him at least. See him as my friend, not as his client, without any obligation.’ I agreed half-heartedly.
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