~
‘Every personal existence is upheld by a secret,’ wrote the great Russian writer Anton Chekhov. This line from ‘Lady with a Lapdog’ keeps running through my head as I think of those difficult weeks after I met Amaya. I think about secrets, about how hard it is to know another person completely, and about how much we need our hidden, interior lives. Human desire is mysterious and veiled, and this makes it difficult to understand ourselves.
I couldn’t get Amaya out of my head. I felt I had two lives: one, open and visible to Avanti and our children, to our friends and acquaintances; the other life was in my mind, concealed from everyone. In this secret, unseen life, I felt I was sincere and did not deceive myself. But in my ‘open’ life at home, at work, and at the Bombay Gym, I hid my innermost thoughts about Amaya, and these were by far the more honest and the more interesting. I loved Avanti but I also felt a powerful desire pulling me towards Amaya, and this desire seemed to become the true reality beneath the mundane surface of my daily life.
It didn’t surprise me that I turned to one of Chekhov’s wisest stories to make some sort of sense of the confusion in my mind. On the surface, ‘Lady with a Lapdog’ is about illicit love, but it’s deeper meaning lies in the tension between our public and private selves, between the person we show to the world and the one we keep to ourselves. I discovered Chekhov at twenty after I saw his play, The Seagull. I had gone with a friend and both of us came out of the theatre mesmerized. We resolved on that day to read everything he had written. Before long, we were on a Chekhov spree—swapping books, reading plays and recommending stories. One of these was ‘Lady with a Lapdog’. Vladimir Nabokov has called it one of the greatest stories ever written. I must have read it many times, and each time I wanted to go back and read it again. One of its byproducts is that it taught me to write sparingly. At some point one realizes that ‘less is more’, and Chekhov reinforces this lesson, letting the reader’s imagination complete the picture, especially when it comes to emotions; he endows commonplace objects, say, a woman’s earring or an open window with immense, startling power, which reveals the mystery of existence.
This story is about an adulterous affair between a Russian banker and a young, married woman on holiday in Yalta. Dmitri Gurov is unhappily married, has a daughter and two sons, and is frequently unfaithful in order to escape from his loveless marriage. The young lady, Anna Sergeyevna, is introduced to us as a ‘young blonde, not very tall, in a beret, walking along the embankment; behind her ran a white dog’. People at the hotel refer to her as the ‘lady with the little dog’. After they meet, Gurov discovers that Anna too is trapped in a loveless marriage. The two spend their brief, delightful days together, walking, taking drives in the country and making love. Eventually, they return to their spouses and to the routine of their quiet, desperate lives. Gurov thinks at first that this was another pleasant fling and expects to forget Anna soon. But he cannot. He is haunted by her memory and realizes he has actually fallen in love for the first time in his life. He goes in search of her, chances upon her in a small-town theatre, and discovers her looking ‘lost in the provincial crowd, not remarkable for anything with a vulgar lorgnette in her hand’. She confesses that she still loves him and they begin to meet secretly in Moscow. Both are, however, troubled by the illicit nature of their love. They struggle to find some sort of integrity in their secret relationship. While they are grappling to find a solution, the story ends . . . without a resolution.
Chekhov’s story took on a profound significance for me after I met Amaya. At the end, Gurov and Anna are left wondering how they can free themselves from the intolerable fetters of conventional middle-class life. The lovers think they will find an answer and a new, splendid life will begin. But it is clear that the complicated part is just beginning, especially since divorce was not permitted at the time. The truth is that there is no liberation from the real bondage of life wherein we never know our true selves. Gurov and Anna believe that it will work out but Chekhov is less optimistic. I wondered if this meant that my relationship with Amaya was doomed even before it had begun. It was a heartbreaking warning when my secret desire for Amaya was the only true reality in my humdrum daily life.
It occurs to me that ‘Lady with a Lapdog’ is a low stakes version of Anna Karenina. Both women are named Anna; both have a fateful affair; both feel guilty and profoundly sad at the end. But Chekhov’s Anna neither suffers from Karenina’s cosmic despair, nor does she become a victim of a tragic suicide. She is in a melancholy state in the end, in agony over the shameful secrecy of her affair and desperate to become free of the intolerable fetters of social bondage. ‘How? How?’ Gurov asks in anguish but, of course, there is no answer.
The division between public and private life both in Chekhov’s story and in my secret desire for Amaya corresponds to a distinction that the historian of religion and philosopher Mircea Eliade draws between two modes of being. He calls it the sacred and the profane. In premodern times, Eliade says, ‘Man wished to live as much as possible in the sacred,’ which he believed was ‘the true reality . . . saturated with being’. He believed in the cosmic love of Radha and Krishna in Gitagovinda, and of Shiva and Parvati in the Kumarasambhava. These were not stories—the gods were real and they lived the true reality. Anna and Gurov also believe that their secret love is sacred in some way—it is the only true reality of their lives. I felt the same about my romantic feelings for Amaya—there was the something ‘sacred’ in our powerful, ineffable attraction for each other on the train; the ‘profane’ lay in the everydayness of outward appearances that I presented at work, at home and in society. Eliade uses the term ‘hierophany’ to designate this type of momentary disruption: ‘By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself.’ Human life is a constant search for the sacred, for it constitutes true reality.
~
I arrived home in the evening from the station to a scene of domestic bliss. Avanti was reading a book, a cup of tea beside her. Our younger girl, Arushi, aged four, was sitting on the floor writing down alphabets in her schoolbook. The older one, Akhila, aged eight, had a needle and thread in her hand and was learning to do embroidery. Our middle-aged Labrador was sitting between them, watching everyone with polite interest. He barked as soon as I entered the drawing room. The little one squealed with delight, leaped up and ran towards me. Jumping into my arms, she showed me the rings on her fingers.
‘Look, Ma’s rings! Do you think I am wearing too many?’
‘Certainly not, you must put on more.’ She giggled and ran back to her schoolbook.
Avanti gave me a warm, welcoming smile and came towards me and embraced me affectionately. She asked if I wanted a cup of tea. By now Akhila and the dog had also crowded around me.
‘She’s not supposed to be wearing Ma’s rings.’
‘Yes, I will! Ma let me.’
The Labrador didn’t want to be left out of the conversation and woofed gleefully.
Little Arushi asked her mother, ‘Where did I come from, Mummy?’
‘You were my lifelong desire, my love.’
I went up to shower and change. Tagore was right in believing that a mother’s desire for a child was the purest form of desire. As I thought about the comfortable, cheerful scene below, I was filled with the warmest feelings for this family which was mine and mine alone. Amaya’s hold over me had loosened. Avanti’s open-hearted, comfortable greeting pushed away resentful feelings. I tried to locate the good and the beautiful inside her, beneath the layers of habit and routine in our daily life. I remembered how she used to carry on her back the younger girl when she was a baby as she pushed the older girl’s pushchair, talking to both of them incessantly. Only the other day, she had come home irritated with her boss but had had the presence of mind to reprimand the man from Electric House for overcharging us on the previous month’s utility bill. She was determined, impetuous and alive.
So what if we had stopped makin
g love! I felt suddenly that it wasn’t something so odd. Even the psychologist had reassured me of that. What was perverse was my reaction—my attitude that relentlessly dissected it as some sort of failure in our marriage. I felt it was I who should learn to think about it in a more mature way. Instead of feeling let down, I had to learn to accept that a gradual decline in the intensity and frequency of sex between a married couple is merely an inevitable fact of biological life and, as such, an evidence of a deep normality. To rebel against it was to protest that life was not perfect or permanently happy. It needed a certain wisdom in life to redraw one’s expectations about a successful life. Instead of dwelling on our failure, it needed maturity to turn over to the other side of the bed, and be ready to accept with stoic calm, rather than rancour, some of the necessary compromises of long-term love.
The following morning, I quietly slipped into my daily routine. I joined the children at breakfast and chatted with them till it was time for school. I hugged and kissed them before Avanti took them down in the lift and put them on the school bus. Meanwhile, I read the Post over coffee. At 8.15 a.m., I went down and spotted my driver and the gleaming Mercedes-Benz waiting to take me to work. As soon as I entered my office, I turned to look out of the window. It was a calm day after the monsoon storm. Looking out at the harbour had become second nature, a habit cultivated over the years. It helped me to focus on the most important things I had to do. Soon, I became slowly absorbed in my work. Over lunch, I discussed the day’s news with my colleagues. After work, I played tennis at the Gym and was home in time for dinner. Occasionally, Avanti and I would go out in the evening—to the theatre or for a film or an exhibition. When we were invited out to dinner, I mostly went alone because Avanti preferred to be with the girls at dinner time. I had resumed effortlessly the customary pattern of my life, and Amaya had quietly slipped into a distant recess of my mind.
So I thought. But two weeks later, Amaya suddenly reappeared. It was a rainy morning and I was on my way to the office. Her image came into my head and remained with me, becoming more and more vivid as the day went on. She accompanied me home and was present in the stillness of the evening when I heard from my study voices of the children preparing their lessons. I smiled as I looked at the sharp, delicate features of her face. When I shut my eyes, I heard snippets of our conversation on the train. When I opened them, she peered at me, first from the bookcase, and then from the window. She seemed younger and lovelier than I had imagined. She admonished me for having returned to the futile busyness of my life, making ‘to-do’ lists and hurrying around all day long. Whatever had happened to my resolutions?
She did not visit me in my dreams that night but the next day she kept following me about like a shadow. This is ridiculous, I thought. I must be going out of my mind. I wanted to confide in someone but I was too ashamed. And what would I say? That I was in love? Avanti had noticed that I was suddenly preoccupied—she called me ‘distant’—and put it down to pressure at work. At the office, someone also remarked that I was unusually detached. Meanwhile, Amaya kept flooding my mind relentlessly.
To preserve my sanity, I decided I had to see her. Before we had parted, Amaya had told me that the best way to reach her was to call her when her husband was away, teaching a class at the university. So, I phoned her one evening from the office.
She answered with a businesslike ‘hello’.
‘Hello stranger, is this seat taken?’ I asked, trying to sound matter-of-fact but I was actually trembling.
There was a long silence at the other end.
‘Why didn’t you call?’ She finally broke the silence. ‘I was so worried. I thought you had made a fool out of me.’ She sounded terrified.
‘How have you been?’
‘I knew you were not that sort of a person. I knew you’d call, and here you are. Oh, how you frightened me! I was half dead. How about you?’ She was breathing hard.
‘It was all normal for the first couple of weeks,’ I said. ‘I got caught up in the routine of life and everything seemed to be the same. And I thought we would never meet again. But then all of a sudden, you entered my head a few days ago. And I can’t seem to get you out.’ With my heart beating violently, I told her how she kept appearing in the most unlikely places.
‘I have missed you terribly,’ she said.
‘You are there all the time . . . at work, at home. I don’t know what to do.’
‘I think of you every day,’ she said.
‘I hear you in my head talking to me, smiling at me. Honestly, I think I am going crazy.’
‘I am so unhappy, Amar.’ She said my name for the first time. ‘I have thought of nothing but you. I want to forget you but I can’t.’
‘Shall I come to Baroda?’
‘Oh no! Everyone knows everyone here. No, I’ll come. I’ll see you in Bombay.’
‘When?’
‘I’ll call you. Let me organize things here.’
‘Come soon.’
‘I’ll call you. At work, right?
‘Yes.’
‘What do I say?’
‘Give your name and say you have business with me. I’ll tell my assistant to expect a call from you . . .’
‘But what if he asks about my business?’
‘He won’t.’
‘Oh Amar, I am miserable.’
‘For how many days can you get away?’
‘I don’t know. Where will I stay?’
‘I’ll find a place. Don’t worry.’
‘I shall never, never be happy here.’
‘Call me.’
‘I will . . . definitely.’
~
Amaya did call the next day but I suggested we postpone our meeting. She was devastated. I wasn’t quite ready, I explained. I felt torn. I loved Avanti and the kids, and didn’t want to jeopardize my marriage. Yet, I loved her too and believed genuinely that she may be my last chance for a certain kind of happiness. Since I was caught in a dilemma, I needed time. If we met now, it might be too soon—I wouldn’t be comfortable and our meeting would be a failure. Amaya was clearly unhappy but she understood my predicament. As for her, she said, her mind was clear. She had never loved her husband and she had finally found someone in her life whom she could love; and she was willing to wait.
Behind my temporizing and rationalizing, the truth was that the adulterous thought of seeing Amaya was plainly thrilling. I tried to think about it objectively. Who has not been tempted, I reasoned, by the alluring idea of an affair with a beautiful stranger? Especially when one is in middle age, and after tiresome years of raising children. There is also the fear that life is passing by and one may never get another chance at ecstatic happiness. It is quite another thing what one does about this captivating thought but the idea itself is so natural, so human. There is, of course, the fear of adultery and the hugely negative public verdict. But I sometimes think the fault may also lie with the person who refuses to admit to adulterous possibilities. Such a person would be doing ‘wrong’ in the deepest sense if he refused to entertain the idea of illicit love. Could one really put faith in such a person who has never been tempted?
What inhibits a person from acting on these exhilarating thoughts is a cloud of guilt that hangs over one at the prospect of hurting others—one’s spouse, one’s children, one’s parents. There are always victims in adultery. To someone like myself, an Indian male, the dilemma presented itself as a clash between two goals of life, dharma and kama. Dharma is duty to another, and kama is duty to oneself. Even the Kamasutra, a book devoted to hedonistic pleasure, states at the beginning that the restraining hand of dharma must trump kama. We are made all too aware as we are growing up about our duties to others and forget that we also have duties to ourselves. Of course, one is also inhibited by the ‘public verdict’. Human beings may have become more liberal and modern but society remains traditional. I was frightened at the thought that if my affair was discovered, I would be branded a cheat, a rat and a scumbag.
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It is curious to think of kama as ‘duty’ when it is, in fact, a normal human inclination to maximize one’s own pleasure. Human beings are self-directed and protective of their own interest, and none more so than the ‘me’ generation. This is why we need to be reminded about dharma, our duty to others. The interests of others do not come naturally to us—it takes effort. Since childhood we are bombarded by the Mahabharata’s exhortation: ‘Do not inflict upon others what you would not do to yourself.’ This conditioning of dharma is relentless and we become all too aware about our duty to others—to our family, our community, our nation—and in many cases, even begin to feel guilty about our ‘selfish’ urges of kama in both its meanings of ‘desire’ and ‘pleasure’. Yet despite this, the Indic civilization elevated kama to a goal of life, where pleasure had a place in the good life and was worth striving for. This thought would not have made sense to me when I was studying in my Christian missionary school and learnt to associate kama with sin. Fortunately, my grandmother’s ganja-smoking pandit came along as a nice corrective, who taught me that kama is intrinsically valuable, and so I feel more comfortable today with the thought that kama may also point to something valuable that I owe to myself in order to live a good and flourishing life.
The dharmasankat, ‘moral dilemma’, that I hinted at, but did not elaborate on the phone to Amaya, was simply this: Do I betray Avanti or myself? As I wrestled with the problem, I could not find a way out. I was being pulled by two conflicting aspects of my character. I faced an impossible choice: to be a good person and not hurt others (dharma) or fulfil a natural, human capability that I had been given for pleasure and happiness (kama). Both ends were part of my conception of the good life. The dilemma lay within my ‘character’, as Aristotle would have said. Either way I would lose, I reasoned. If I decided to have a fling with Amaya, I would put my love for Avanti at risk. If I abstained from temptation, I would resent the lost opportunity for a certain kind of happiness and might even blame Avanti. And the resentment might turn me into a stale, repressed and mean man. If I decided to keep the affair secret, I reasoned, I would have to lie all the time, and become inauthentic. Confessing to it, on the other hand, would be worse. It would bring needless pain to everyone and probably end my marriage. A broken marriage would most certainly affect the girls, who were still too young to understand. If I placed the children’s interest above mine and remained in the marriage for their sake, I should be prepared for the disappointing day when they would inevitably leave home. If I put my own interest above theirs and ignored them in my decision, I would earn their unending resentment. Thus, there was no answer and perhaps this is why the Mahabharata says:
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