‘Mar gai main!’—I am dead—is what Amaya would sometimes utter in Hindi, at the point of climax, which would also push me over the top. In France, they call it la petite mort, ‘the little death’. The dictionary defines it as the post-orgasmic state of unconsciousness after a sexual act, with the release of chemicals that relax the body, leaving it in a state of euphoria. In brain scans on women in the throes of orgasm, neuroscientists have found lower blood flow to parts of the brain. Avanti too had voiced ‘little death’ once but in a very different sense to mean the spiritual release of the soul that comes with transcendence through the expenditure of the ‘life force’. Her guru had taught her that orgasm is the closest some people come to a spiritual experience of the divine because of the momentary loss of the self. It is in a sense, he said, a rehearsal of the ‘big death’ when one is released from the human bondage of the cycle of births and deaths.
The affair with Amaya made me reclaim a degree of leisure in my frenetic activity-filled life at the office and at home. I realized that leisure is not the same as the absence of activity. It lies in the stillness of conversations; a feeling of oneness when Amaya and I were near each other and not necessarily making love. It was in looking forward to seeing each other; then in the slow pleasure of enjoying each moment when we met. Nothing quite concentrates the mind in the present as kama. When I was with Amaya, my mind seemed to focus only on the sensations present at that time and I lived exclusively in and for those moments, forgetting the normal human condition which is to long for immortality. I failed to remember that I inhabited an impermanent universe in which at the end there is only death. Kama, by affirming life, taught me that this is how life ought to be lived: in the here and now; this is the natural way of love.
When I compare my love for Amaya to my adolescent love for Isha, I cannot help but conclude that love at a later age seems to be richer and finer than young love. This was also the conclusion of the French writer Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pseudonym Stendhal:
For the very young, love is like a huge river which sweeps everything before it, so that you feel that it is a restless current. Now a [mature] sensitive person has acquired some self-knowledge . . . will be a thousand times more brilliant and durable than those of the sixteen-year-old, whose privileges are simply happiness and joy. Thus, the later love will be less gay, but more passionate.
Amaya’s greatest gift to me was to open the door to ‘pleasure’, the other meaning of kama. In contrast to kama pessimists, Aristotle’s ideas on pleasure had come to me like a fresh breeze during my college days. My favourite Greek philosopher has a balanced view of life, somewhat similar to the ancient Indian sages who invented multiple goals of life. Aristotle’s ideal life gives a prominent place to pleasure, and I think he would have understood my life of pleasure with Amaya even if he wouldn’t have exactly approved. Of course, he was partial to ‘intellectual’ pleasure (in contrast to ‘sensual’ pleasure) but with his usual common sense, he pointed out that even eating, drinking and sex are necessary and pleasurable aspects of the natural human life. Excessive indulgence is what is bad, not pleasure itself.
Aristotle defines pleasure as an ‘unimpeded activity’. By ‘activity’, he doesn’t mean that one needs to be active in an athletic sort of way; even the activity of resting on a beach and watching the waves can give pleasure. But his point is that pleasure is not the consequence of an activity or a separate activity; the activity itself is enjoyable. In other words, making love to Amaya and ‘enjoying making love to Amaya’ are undifferentiated—they are not two different activities. Aristotle also warns that if I engage in two activities at the same time—reading and listening to music, for example—I am likely to get less pleasure from either; to enjoy music is to listen to it effortlessly and not be distracted by reading and vice versa. If I eat sweets in the theatre, I am likely to diminish my enjoyment of the play.
Opposed to Aristotle was another school of thought in ancient Greece called ‘hedonism’. Somewhat like the Charvakas in India, hedonists believed that pleasure is the highest good and every human being should strive to minimize pain and maximize pleasure. This is the secret of happiness. Ethical hedonism is supposed to have originated with Aristippus of Cyrene, a student of Socrates, but its most famous advocate was another ancient Greek, Epicurus, who thought that the greatest good was the absence of pain. He believed in modest, sustainable pleasure, in a calm, free and tranquil state. This came through living virtuously and rationally among friends. He praised the simpler pleasures, and advised abstinence from overindulgence in bodily desires—for example, eat moderately; likewise, with sex. A wise life of pleasure entailed neither to harm another nor be harmed. He too had a bias for intellectual pleasure; he felt that it was less important what you ate than who you ate with. The best state of mind a person could achieve is one of calm serenity.
A modern version of hedonism, utilitarianism has had a huge influence on policymakers in recent times. It is associated with two British philosophers, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, who believed that the duty of the state is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain among its citizens. Their liberal followers placed some of the blame for the citizens’ misery on social conditions and believed that the state could ameliorate them through reform. They contributed indirectly to the creation of the ‘welfare state’ in the second half of the twentieth century. Instead of ‘pleasure’, they used the word ‘utility’ and their goal was to maximize it.
Freud’s concept of the ‘pleasure principle’ has also influenced thinking in modern times. Based on the simple idea that human beings seek pleasure and avoid pain, it serves as a ‘positive mechanism’ that motivates a person to recreate in the future pleasurable situations, avoiding painful ones. Darwin gives the example of the most practical definition of pleasure I have come across: ‘I heard a child a little under four years old, when asked what was meant by being in good spirits, answer, “It is laughing, talking, and kissing.”’ Freud contrasted the pleasure principle with the ‘reality principle’ which gives a person the ability to defer immediate gratification of a desire. Infants and children are governed far more by the pleasure principle but as we mature, alas, we learn to postpone gratification in favour of long-term goals. Hence, Mill, following Plato, differentiated between higher and lower pleasures, with a definite preference for the former, more intellectual ones.
A contemporary kama optimist is the French philosopher Michel Onfray, who defines hedonism as an ‘introspective attitude to life based on taking pleasure yourself and giving pleasure to others without hurting yourself or others’. He seeks a joyous aesthetic of sensuality that engages the brain’s and the body’s capacities to their fullest extent. He has thus explored the sources of sensual pleasure in science, painting, food, wine and sex. But his quest for pleasure is also deeply ethical because one must never indulge in it at the expense of another. My main reservation about hedonism is its insistence that pleasure and pain are the sole basis of intrinsic value. I value beauty, goodness and justice even though I may not have experienced them or derived pleasure from them. They are good in themselves—there are other things we value besides pleasure.
~
One day, while Amaya and I were making love, I thought suddenly, ‘I am making love to Amaya.’ Thus, I was no longer making love, but thinking, ‘I am making love.’ I became aware of my ‘self’ watching myself. When I was watching myself, I wasn’t making love any more. They were two different experiences. The first experience was of making love and the second was the thought, ‘I am making love.’ I could not do both simultaneously. To think about making love I had to stop making love, at least briefly, in order to ‘think about making love’. The unconscious present of making love was lost, replaced by a conscious thinking moment. My inner experience had changed. I was no longer in the unthinking present, no longer experiencing the pleasure of making love. I was thinking of my ‘self’ rather than unconsciously making love—thinking perhaps
about how I could do it better, how I could become a better lover.
One of the great discoveries of ancient Indian philosophers was to find these two persons within us: the doer and the observer—what is called ‘reflexive consciousness’ in western philosophy. One of them is making love; the second is reflecting on the person who is making love. It made me aware that the doer in me was living a life focused on the present while the witness in me was concerned with observing and judging the doer. The doer kept changing from one moment to the next, as a different sensation entered into my head. What provides continuity between this moment and the next is the observing self, which creates the illusion that I am the same person from one moment to the next. The ancient philosophers in the Upanishads were aware of this dichotomy and they called the observer ahamkara, ‘I-ness’. But they also realized that ‘I-ness’ (or the ego) is the principal cause of human problems. It is responsible for envy, status anxiety and other ‘egoistic’ and selfish behaviour. Hence, they proposed that the only authentic way to live is ‘self-forgetting’, learning to forget the ‘I-ness’.
The concept of presence has long been familiar to Buddhists, who believe that the experience from moment to moment is the only reality. The ‘permanent I’ is an illusion, a narrative fiction of ‘I-ness’ that provides continuity, making me believe there is a ‘self’ that I cannot feel or touch but which continues from one moment to the next. The only authentic life is in the present moment; in recent years, this idea has grown popular in the West under the name of ‘mindfulness’. It teaches one to fully inhabit one’s experience. My father used to say that the great human flaw is to live in an abstract future rather than in the concrete present. The genuine way to live is for the present—focused on the ‘acting self’, who is only aware of the moment. Our memory creates the illusion that the ‘I’ of this moment of making love is the same as the ‘I’ of the moment when I am thinking of making love. It creates the illusion of a separate thinker who provides continuity to our experiences in the past. Ironically, our recollections, our memories are also taking place in the present. Thus, it is not possible to separate ourselves from our present experience; our life consists entirely of present moments.
Kama has made me aware of this old truth. I have spent a lifetime looking forward to pleasure in the future but when it does arrive, I don’t slow down to enjoy it. I keep looking forward to the next pleasure. Thus, I am chronically disappointed. I have to thank Amaya—and the leisurely experience of making love to her—for making me aware that leisure is not only a luxury but it is essential to the human spirit. It is in the ‘slow living’ in the present moment that creativity is also born. Galileo invented the clock while watching leisurely a pendulum swing in a cathedral. I consider kama a ‘duty to oneself’ because the act of love forces one to be in the present—it make one ‘alive’ to the moment. It is quite the opposite of our productivity-oriented work culture, which prizes ‘hard work’ and makes us plan forever for the future. Our ancients realized this connection between kama and creativity, which must have been one of the reasons why they raised it to one of the goals of a flourishing life. To become aware of this higher purpose of kama, a ‘duty to oneself’, can help reclaim our primordial humanity.
10
HAPPY LOVE HAS NO HISTORY
Is it possible to trust someone who has not been unfaithful?
You are what your deep, driving desire is.
As your desire is, so is your will.
As your will is, so is your deed.
As your deed is, so is your destiny.
—Brihadaranyaka Upanishad IV.4.5
One evening in the park with Amaya, I suddenly felt helpless. The ground was unsteady and twisting sideways, and I fell into a flower bed. This happened a little over six months after we began our affair. With Amaya’s arm around my shoulder, and my arm around the small of her back, I hobbled up the path on to the road, and we took a cab to the Port Trust hospital nearby. Meant for the employees of the Port Trust, it made an exception and treated me in the emergency room. I had broken a bone just above the ankle. When I got home, I had to lie to Avanti about what had happened. My explanation was so stilted that even I didn’t believe it.
So, the deception began. I piled lies upon lies and grew more and more uncomfortable. While convalescing and feeling bored at home one day, my eyes fell on an old copy of the Old Testament that someone had left behind in our flat. I leafed through it aimlessly and stopped at the terrifying verse from Leviticus. In it, God asks Moses to tell the Israelites:
If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife . . . both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death.
I grew afraid. The verse took me back to my unhappy days at the Christian missionary school, where I learnt to feel guilty about any sort of pleasure, especially the bodily kind. They taught me that it needed willpower to resist temptation and only the weak-willed strayed. Even in my parents’ home, the expression ‘a life of pleasure’, such as the lives of Ramu Mama and Anand, had disparaging overtones. I looked at the sun rays streaking in through the embroidered curtains that Avanti had brought from a visit to Jaipur.
I had been genuinely torn between the two women in the past six months. It was a different love I felt for each one but it was true and authentic in both cases. And it could have gone either way. I used to waver by the day, by the week. On some days, I thought I couldn’t live without Amaya. On others, I felt only Avanti and the girls would make my life meaningful. I was at an impasse.
A gentle breeze began to blow and the curtains began to move gently. I decided that I couldn’t stand the abnormality of my life any more. I hated the deception. It was unhealthy to live in this way. I was constantly in conflict and struggling to make sense of the direction in which I should go. I was in a quandary. In the midst of these unhappy musings, Avanti arrived.
‘You’re home early?’ I said.
‘Yes, the interview finished early, and I was concerned about your ankle, and so I thought I would write it up later.’
‘Who were you interviewing?’
‘Just some dumb idiot in the health ministry. Are you hungry? The girls will be home soon. Would you like a snack with them?’
I didn’t answer. Avanti looked at me with concern.
‘You look miserable. I know this injury must be difficult, sitting around the house all day.’
’I want to tell you something, Avanti.’
‘What is it?’ There was concern in her voice.
‘Oh, nothing.’
‘What?’ She looked at me insistently.
‘Well . . . I’ve gone and fallen in love. It’s absurd, I know. A big mistake, I’m sure. I met her in July on the train to Pune when I had gone for Ashok’s memorial service. She lives in Baroda and teaches film at the university there.’
There was pin-drop silence.
‘So, this has been going on for a long time?’
‘It was wrong of me not to tell you, but I thought it wouldn’t last. I figured I’d get over it. I didn’t want to worry you.’
There was a pause.
‘Is she beautiful?’
‘Yes.’
Another pause.
‘It’s funny!’ she muttered.
‘What?
She was speaking quickly as though to herself. ‘I am foolish, a blind fool—I didn’t notice a thing.’ She stopped suddenly and then resumed: ‘Everything’s been just the same. Better, in fact. You’ve been kinder.’
She gave me a puzzled look. I was feeling cold although it was a warm day.
‘Why tell me about it today?’
‘Because it’s been getting to me. I have been feeling guilty. I lied to you about my injury.’ Then I told her the whole story.
‘But you are in love . . . so you must be happy!’ she said in a bitter, unnatural voice.
‘I am not, that’s the thing. I love you.’
‘Then why?’ she asked.
Before I could reply, sh
e left the room. Soon I heard the sound of plates breaking. I rushed to the kitchen and found Avanti hurling on the floor, plate after plate, cup after cup, and our prized bone china too which my parents had given us at our wedding—the Wedgewood set had come to my mother as dowry from my grandfather and she had passed it on to us. I tried to stop her but she pushed me away and continued with the demolition. I couldn’t bear it and left the house, hobbling on my crutches. I returned after an hour and noticed that the porcelain china cupboard was empty. Every single piece was lying shattered on the kitchen floor.
I went and sat on the sofa in my study. Avanti came in after an hour and sat down at the desk, her face ashen-white.
Kama Page 35