Kama

by Gurcharan Das

  There is melancholic sadness at the very heart of kama.

  Part of the problem emanates from the fact that kama is blind primal energy, as the Vedic myth points out, embodying the unconscious power of instinct. This explains why the vast majority of rape cases are incestuous, among persons that one knows, not strangers. Hence, dharma, the power of discrimination, has to step in, for unbridled kama can be dangerous. Even the god Brahma could not resist his daughter’s beauty in the Shiva Purana. As the couple go around the sacred fire, Brahma sees Sati’s naked feet; desire overcomes him, and four drops of semen fall to the ground. The gods are, after all, projections of human frailties.

  I am also convinced that the ideal of modern marriage that Avanti and I had embraced unconsciously is also responsible for this dilemma. It is a recent phenomenon, as I have said, which was born around the industrial revolution, an ethos of the new emerging middle class. It combines three ideals—family, love and sex—all of which make exclusive and excessive demands on a couple. The original idea behind marriage was to raise a family; then a second ideal of romantic love was added; and finally, a third belief was appended—that one’s partner should also be a great performer in bed. In earlier times, a man might have fulfilled these three distinctive needs through three different individuals according to a masculine perspective. A wife made a comfortable home and cared for his children; a lover met his romantic needs, albeit clandestinely; and a prostitute was always available for great sex on payment. This division of labour met the needs of men who were in comfortable circumstances. In my grandfather’s time, a man did not have these contradictory expectations of modernity. He did not expect romance from marriage—it was a social duty to have children and perpetuate the family. If he felt the desire for great sex, he might have visited a prostitute; if he felt the need to combine romance with sex, he might have gone to a cultured and accomplished courtesan. It wouldn’t have troubled him or my grandmother unduly. Of course, it was a one-sided business and my grandmother didn’t have a choice; it was a patriarchal society.

  Today we make intolerable demands on one individual to meet all the three needs—familial, romantic and sexual. A woman feels huge pressure to fulfil all the three tasks, plus the additional stress of having to make a successful career outside the home. All that she wants, according to Kamini Masi, is a ‘love marriage with a good and loyal man’. The ambition of the modern marriage places a huge burden on a couple and this might also have been behind my unconscious desire in wanting both Avanti and Amaya. When the ideal of ‘love marriage’ took hold in the eighteenth-century West, it replaced an older, more mundane reason to get married—a motive that is still well and alive in India: people marry because they reach the age of marriage; their families think they ought to ‘settle down’, protect a few assets they own, and raise a family. The modern ‘love marriage’ reached the new middle class in India via cinema and legitimized romantic love as the basis for marriage. Countless movie screens in the twentieth century showed moonlit nights and bumblebees on the Dal Lake in Kashmir, and young people rebelling against their parents, yearning for an institution based on feelings rather than economic and social status.

  In the West, these feelings were encouraged by novels in the nineteenth century. They were certainly behind the tragic fate of the heroines of two of my all-time favourite novels, Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina. Both women had enviable financial security but were trapped in loveless marriages. Both had modern, romantic expectations from life, and they dared to fulfil them illicitly. Society, however, was not kind to their adulterous affairs and their lives brought heartbreaking tragedies. Had they lived in premodern times, they would have accepted their loveless lot. Or had society evolved a mechanism to meet the burdensome needs of love marriage, it might have been different. The response of modern bourgeois society has been to push the problem under the rug.

  The dilemma of ‘duty to the self’ versus ‘duty to another’ is old and universal. It afflicted the House of Windsor egregiously in the twentieth century, creating a constitutional crisis. Edward VIII, the king of England, shocked the world when he chose kama over dharma. He abdicated the British throne for the love of Wallis Simpson, a divorced socialite. Sovereignty devolved upon his brother George VI and soon thereafter upon his niece, Queen Elizabeth II. At the time of Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953, her sister, Margaret, wished to marry a divorcee, Peter Townsend, sixteen years her senior with two sons from a previous marriage. Since the Church did not permit remarriage after divorce, the young queen asked them to wait for a year—a bit like my mother—hoping that given time, the affair would peter out. But it did not. Queen Elizabeth agonized over the dilemma, trying to find a way out of the Royal Marriages Act, 1772, so that Princess Margaret could marry Townsend and also keep her allowance, her royal title, and stay in the country. But it didn’t work out, and she had to force her sister to choose duty over love, even as the people of Britain stood solidly behind Margaret’s romance. Unlike her uncle Edward, Elizabeth preferred duty to the State and the Church at the risk of breaking her sister’s heart. This dilemma was portrayed elegantly in a recent television series, Crown, shown in 2016 to high praise.

  Edward and Margaret obviously chose kama over dharma but classical Indian tradition would have supported Elizabeth. The conflict between dharma and kama is debated candidly in the classical texts of ancient India, along with the third goal, artha, ‘material well-being’. Dharma almost always wins. The epic Mahabharata says that ‘dharma is the best, artha is the middling and kama is the lowest, and man should so act that dharma would be the principal goal of his life’. The less ambivalent Ramayana, obviously, sides with dharma. Manu believes that one should try and achieve all the three goals of the trivarga, but when they are in conflict dharma should be preferred. Even the secular non-dharmic texts, the Kamasutra and Arthashastra, are careful to toe the line of dharma. However, some of the medieval commentators took the opposite view. Yashodhara states in Jayamangala that kama is as basic to human life as food. Interesting analogy that! Kama is usually linked to procreation in the classical texts—to perpetuate the species. But here the commentator refers to what is good for the individual and not only for society, and the implication is in favour of the physicality of sexual love. He adds that if one denies desire, it only grows, and leads to an unhealthy state of frenzy which endangers the body.

  ~

  In the end, kama won over dharma. I met Amaya a week later at Bombay Central. She looked even more beautiful than I had remembered, vulnerable and elegiac. Masses of shiny hair covered her big eyes. We took a taxi to a small but clean hotel in a quiet, leafy place in Wadala, a part of the city with parks and college campuses, but decidedly unfashionable. I drew Amaya to me in the taxi and began kissing her hands and her face.

  ‘What are you doing? Are you mad?’ she whispered in horror, pushing me away.

  I tried to reassure her that riding a Bombay taxi was an anonymous experience.

  ‘Don’t, there are people on the road.’

  As we were getting out of the taxi at the entrance to the hotel, someone went past on the road. Amaya grew afraid. ‘Let’s go in quickly,’ she whispered. The lobby smelt of the cheap scent characteristic of small hotels. It was quiet and almost empty, and Amaya was relieved. We entered our room and I shut the door. She looked around and after she had reassured herself that we were alone, she fell on my chest. She looked pale, exhausted by the journey and the suspense. Our kiss was slow and prolonged. Her lips seemed to exude the moisture and fragrance of freshly cut flowers. Although it was our first kiss, it felt completely natural, as though we had known each other in another life. She turned around suddenly and looked again to see if anyone had seen us. I faced her intently, put my arms around her, and kissed her.

  ‘So here you are, at last!’ I said.

  She turned away from me and pressed her handkerchief to her eyes. She was crying.

  ‘I am so happy,’ she said.

 
‘Let’s have some tea. You look exhausted.’

  ‘I’m scared.’

  I rang for tea. It came quickly and as I poured it, she went and stood at the window with her back to me. She was crying again.

  ‘Come, come, this will warm you.’ I rose to comfort her. I put my hand on her shoulder and handed her the cup. The lace curtain spread a lattice across her body that I traced with my fingers. While she kept looking out of the window, I turned and saw my reflection in the mirror on the dresser. My hair was beginning to turn grey—I seemed to have grown older during the past year. And now with a grey head, I couldn’t believe I had fallen in love again.

  I returned to the sofa and she joined me. It was tiny, barely able to hold the two of us and our knees were touching. It was the first time that either of us was going to be unfaithful and there was an awkward feeling about taking the next step. Suddenly, there was a knock on the door. Amaya jumped up, her face a picture of consternation. It was the room boy, asking if we had any laundry to give and when he might clean the room. After closing the door, I saw that Amaya’s face had turned pale. Her long hair hung mournfully and her eyes were filled with tears again.

  ‘It’s wrong. I despise myself.’ She was speaking more to herself than to me. ‘It’s not my husband, I am deceiving myself. It’s wrong, even you will despise me.’

  I reassured her that I could never despise her, but she remained nervous and unhappy. I offered her some water which was lying in the jug on the table. She drank it in silence and felt better. I decided that we needed to get out of the room. She was reluctant at first but then agreed. We walked towards the docks, where I had heard that there was a restaurant frequented by shipping agents, their clients, and others who sailed on merchant ships. I thought we would have lunch there. We walked in silence and soon found a quiet park. It was mid-morning and the breeze had begun to blow from the sea. She sniffed the flowers in the park. I spotted a bench and she smiled for the first time.

  ‘Hello stranger, is this seat taken?’ she asked.

  Both of us laughed; she seemed to relax for the first time and become the person that I remembered on the train. We sat and chatted cheerfully. She spoke about her life. She had married early. She was only nineteen and didn’t realize what she was doing. Her husband was a good, honest man but he was not her type. Ever since then, she had yearned for something more in her life. She found meaning in cinema, especially in the study of art films, but it also made her more and more discontented. The films confirmed to her that there was something else to live for. Then I came along, out of nowhere, and something happened. She suddenly felt that a different sort of life might be possible.

  I was content to listen to her in the silence of the park—a quiet punctuated by the sounds of mynahs, parrots and taxis. Soon the monsoon sky began to get covered in clouds. She remembered what I had said on the train—about breaking the daily trance of busyness and inattention; it reminded her of something that her father used to say. Look at the sky at least once a day, he had taught her; focus on only one stretch, one piece of the sky and watch it change.

  ‘You’ll become aware of the air around you, Amar, the scent of the morning freshness, a tree, a garden wall overhung with green branches, a handsome cat, the face of a beautiful child. Try it one day! Begin with a section of the sky and watch it change . . . the rest of the day might turn out to be different. It might open your eyes.’

  The sky above us, however, was now threatening rain. It began to drizzle. We jumped into a taxi and reached the restaurant well before the lunch crowd. Both of us were hungry. We talked openly, our conversations ranging from love, life and the city. She was her wilful self. The classic Catherine Deneuve look was back, and she was soon enjoying the admiring glances of those around us. Her hair kept falling on her face and she gently brushed it away with her hand. After lunch, I asked her if I could show her something of Bombay. Museums? Art galleries? She did not answer. After some time, she said softly, ‘Let’s go back to the hotel.’

  As we headed towards the street corner to hail a taxi, she walked ahead of me on the narrow pavement. I watched her hips shifting beneath her sari, an arousing movement of her rear against the light fabric. We sat close in the taxi and I felt her sari was charged with static electricity, clinging in wavelets to her thighs, and the charge seemed to slide across to me. She held my hand as the taxi turned and then glanced at the bustling city, its living people, and beyond towards the grey sky. She was no longer shy when we entered the lobby of the hotel and walked comfortably to our room. Once in the room, there was no awkwardness. She began to take off her sari without warning and suddenly she was naked. Her determined self was now in charge and she took the initiative.

  Once in bed, she clung to me unconsciously and I felt stirring inside her a strange, growing passion, swelling till it filled her space. And then I began a rhythmic motion that was a deepening whirlpool, swirling deeper and deeper within her till she consisted only of feeling. She began to cry but it was different from the morning—these were inarticulate cries of life. She could soon feel me ebbing away, leaving her alone. The storm of weeping continued and then it was quiet. Soon, it was over for me. I lay still after I had finished. I began to withdraw but I never quite slipped out of her even after it was over. She receded into an unworldly silence and a mysterious zone so far away that I could not reach her. She clung to me and I held her close but we said nothing. She crept nearer and lay her hand on my chest, and before long, there was utter, incomprehensible stillness.

  I mentioned the relationship between kama and dharma but I have an inkling that there might also be a connection between kama and moksha. In that stillness, after making love to Amaya, I truly experienced ‘self-forgetting’, living in the present, not the past or the future. Avanti believed that the mystic also lives in the present. In that stillness, I experienced a childlike sense of wonder, unclouded by the usual fear of the future or regret for the past. Avanti felt that in meditation, a spiritually evolved person raises his level of consciousness to another degree of perception where the past and the future disappear. Only the stillness of the present remains. This is why the Kamasutra reminds us that kama is for its own sake, an end in itself, not for producing children or serving another end, such as transcendence, as the tantra philosophers would have us believe.

  The next thing I remember hearing was the sound of water running in the shower. After some time, I followed her into the bathroom and I turned her around in the shower admiringly. She was pliant and docile without her clothes. She moved readily to my touch. She was utterly beautiful, surprisingly slim. A bit of dark hair between her legs. We stood beneath the shower. I nestled flat in the meeting of her behind. I began to scrub her back and then I soaped her breasts; we glistened beneath the water.

  I wrapped her in both the towels. She felt soft as velvet as I carried her to the bed. We lay across it diagonally. We remained close for a long time, without talking. Gradually, I began to draw the towel apart with care. Her flesh appeared, still smelling a little of the soap. I put my arms around her; she opened her legs but I resisted the temptation to go in. I was content to hold her and feel her bare body beside mine. I didn’t know what to think. I hardly knew her. Yes, I loved her but I wondered what she was really like. Who was this woman called Amaya? She turned to look at me.

  ‘You are not on a power trip—that’s what I like about you. You’re as comfortable in a rundown taxi as in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz. None of the “managing director” stuff about you.’

  I blushed.

  ‘What will Avanti say when you get home?’

  ‘She doesn’t know.’

  ‘Will you be staying with me tonight?’

  ‘I shouldn’t.’

  ‘Do you want to?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then why don’t you?

  ‘There will be less lying if I don’t.’

  ‘Do you love Avanti?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

&nb
sp; ‘I don’t love my husband.’

  ‘That’s the difference. Mine is a more difficult situation.’

  ‘Does she love you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you love me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How can you love us both?’

  ‘I do. I love you both—that’s all I know, and I know it for sure.’

  ‘Eventually, Avanti will find out. What will you do then?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Marriage is overrated, you know.’

  There was a long silence. She had quietly fallen asleep without another word. I continued to lie beside her as she slept. Then I went and stood by the open window, looking out at the lights and the night. It was one of those moments when you can hardly believe that you are alive and are deserving of such happiness.

  ~

  And so, we began our affair. Amaya came to visit me once a month. She would come usually for a few days and always wanted to stay in the same hotel, in the same anonymous, unfashionable middle-class neighbourhood where she felt safe in the belief that we wouldn’t run into anyone we knew. I would meet her twice a day—at lunch and in the evenings after work. We made love both times and afterwards there were clandestine partings, and I would go home to Avanti and the children in time for dinner. I have lingering memories of quick disrobing, the unveiling, the exposure of our bodies, and of our secret talk. The carnality of the affair was brutal. I was surprised at her capacity for simple sexual pleasure: her voice would change as quickly as her personality, assuming a hoarse, brazen, almost dissolute sound; her cheeks warm with a touch of red on the cheekbones, would be ardent, reminding me of the girls that Anand would occasionally go to meet in Bombay’s slums. At the same time, she could turn phrases and do things that got inside me and made me feel alive. I hold memories of a certain dignity in the way she responded to stray comments about people on the street or in the hotel; of glancing through the trees towards the horizon; in observing the dusky light filtering through the curtain in the evening, falling on her naked body. Her integrity lay in her consistent and determined belief in what she wanted from life, and in this she was true to herself.