Kama

by Gurcharan Das

  ‘Why don’t you marry her?’ she asked.

  ‘Because I am happy with you and the girls.’

  ‘And you love me?’ She had tears in her eyes.

  ‘I adore you.’

  ‘You don’t want a divorce?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What’s wrong with our marriage?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s a good marriage.’

  ‘Then why?’

  Avanti got up. I feared another bust-up. She circled the room like a beast, twice, and then sat down.

  ‘Where are the girls?’ I asked.

  ‘With their friends. I called Sheila and asked her to keep them for the night.’ She looked at me, desperation in her eyes. ‘Why is this happening? What am I going to do? There are people coming home tonight.’ She looked at her watch.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Ramu Mama, Kamini Masi, Anand and . . . I thought they would cheer you up . . . you have been in low spirits since your injury. It was meant to be a surprise.’ She was shaking.

  ‘Oh!’

  She looked out of the window at the sky and said, ‘I had gone out.’

  ‘Where?’ I began to grow afraid.

  ‘Marine Drive.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I went to fling the ruby into the sea.’

  ‘The ruby necklace!’ I was aghast.

  ‘Then I thought of dear Ramu Mama. And I thought, why hurt the poor man—he’s been so good to us.’

  ‘You didn’t chuck it?’

  ‘No, don’t worry, it’s back in the safe upstairs.’

  I was relieved.

  ‘Is she good in bed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is the sex really good?’ she asked in a harsh voice.

  ‘Avanti,’ I pleaded, ‘why must we speak about . . . ?

  ‘I want to know!’ she said, raising her voice.

  There was another pause.

  ‘Tell me, what shall I tell the girls?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘But they will have to know.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘And what will they tell their friends?’

  ‘You are moving too quickly.’

  ‘Here, just the other day I was saying to the little one that you were working too hard . . . and you . . . you were romping with your lover . . . What shall we tell our guests tonight?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘But they will sense it.’

  ‘You can blame me.’

  ‘That’s easy,’ she said with a hoarse laugh.

  ‘How could I have wronged you so . . . so deeply.’

  ‘Stop it! Blaming yourself is easy. Makes you feel noble and humble.’

  ‘I feel ashamed. I can hardly breathe.’

  ‘Your self-pity is sickening.’ She gave me a look of such loathing that I recoiled.

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Tell me about your woman. I don’t even know her name.’

  ‘Amaya.’

  ‘That’s a nice name. What’s she like?

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘I want to know. I want to meet her.’

  ‘What!’ I was shocked.

  ‘Do you have a picture of her?’

  ‘Really, this is too much.’

  ‘Show me her picture.’

  I limped across to the drawer of my desk and pulled out Amaya’s photo from a jumble of papers and gave it to Avanti.

  ‘She is beautiful! What lovely hair too. No wonder you fell for her. ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Thirty.’

  ‘Ten years younger than me. She’ll steal you from me, I’m sure.’

  By the time we were done with our conversation, the sun had set. It was getting dark and a spring cloud hung over the balcony; behind the trees the horizon was clear in the fading glow of twilight. The guests were expected soon. Both of us went to the kitchen and cleaned up the mess and then went upstairs to dress for dinner.

  Although Avanti put up a brave front at the party, she was in torment the entire evening. She didn’t get much sleep that night, and in the morning I met her at the dining table.

  ‘So, where do we go from here?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you going to marry her?’

  ‘No.’

  She was pensive; she seemed to be speaking to herself. ‘Where does this leave us—the girls and me?’ Before I could say anything, she asked, ‘Tell me, where did I go wrong?’ Her eyes were wet.

  ‘Nothing. You’re not to blame. It is me, me . . . I have done wrong . . . I still love you.’

  ‘How is that possible?’ she exclaimed. She then looked at me and quickly looked away. There was silence. I could hear the clock ticking. When she spoke again, her voice was low, almost a whisper.

  ‘How is that possible?’ she repeated the question as though speaking to herself. ‘How can you love two people—it’s disgusting!’

  ‘Maybe it’s a sickness, and it will heal.’

  ‘What do I say to your mother? She’s coming next week. But she never liked me, anyway.’

  ‘Oh, forget her. It will be over soon.’

  There was another silence.

  ‘So, when do you want to leave?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘But you’ll have to.’

  ‘I love you and I adore the children.’

  She explained that she had thought over the matter and decided that it would be impossible for us to live together in the same house. She thought it would be a good idea if I started looking for a place to stay. When I mentioned the kids, she said she would find a way to tell them something, and she got up and left.

  ~

  There is an abundance of clichés surrounding adultery but the truth is that it is different each time. What hurt the most in my conversation with Avanti was her recollection of the innocent babble of our four-year-old . . . about my supposedly working hard when I was, in fact, cavorting with Amaya. A verse from a medieval Sanskrit anthology has the same ring about it, awaking the painful memory.

  Again today

  Your cruel father has not come

  child, the day is over

  darkness has swallowed the path

  let us sleep.

  I concluded from our talk that the normal human intuition about adultery is mostly correct: cheating in a marriage is unethical for many reasons. By falling in love with Amaya, I had broken a promise to Avanti and was guilty of wrongdoing. I was also responsible for hurting Amaya by making her an occasional companion who would always come ‘second’; although she didn’t protest, it would eventually affect her image of herself. Her husband was the third aggrieved party although he did not know as yet about our affair. Our children were also victims, for Avanti’s pain would flow down to them. Finally, our parents couldn’t be unaffected. Moreover, there was the guilt of deception; I had lied to Avanti. For all these reasons, I felt diminished in my own eyes. I had always thought of myself as a certain type of person, and now my sense of self-worth was shaken.

  I wondered if there might be any way to mitigate my guilty conscience. After all, there are situations when even lying (to save a life) or killing (in self-defence) can be justified. Could there be a ‘good’ affair, or at least, not a ‘bad’ one? What about the duty of kama, one’s duty to oneself? In this moral reverie, I had so far dwelled on dharma but could there be circumstances to override one’s duty to others? Could there be benefits from the affair that might outweigh the suffering? I tried to imagine a situation where both couples had terrible marriages, and in these circumstances, the happiness from a genuine affair of the heart (or even a divorce) would outweigh the pain caused to others. This was obviously not true in my case. But there could be situations where I could argue that I had a duty to look after my emotional well-being. Even if adultery is generally wrong, could there be conditions under which it might be morally right? A strict duty moralist would say ‘no’ and insist that I adhere to a code of ‘no cheating’. A strict eth
ical egoist, however, who justified his acts purely on the basis of maximizing his own pleasure would come to the opposite conclusion. But these are extremes and generally most people’s intuition falls in between.

  These moral musings left me troubled and uneasy. The ideal thing, I suppose, is to not be tempted; if one is, then not to rationalize one’s self-serving behaviour by appealing to the duty of kama. There are no easy answers in ethics and it often comes down to one’s own judgement and self-image. Of course, one should do right by others, but it is also important to do right by oneself. My concern for Amaya made me think about the importance of self-respect. Just as my own self-image was diminished by this affair, I wondered if Amaya’s affair with a married man lessened the respect that she owed to herself.

  ‘Romantic love is adulterous by definition.’ There has always been a conflict between romance and marriage. Religious and political establishments want a married couple to live faithful, predictable lives for the well-being of their children, the family, the social order and the species. But there have existed at all times free-spirited individuals, often artists and writers, who have sought happiness through passionate love. These kama optimists were a subversive force, for they challenged the safe and steady order created by the kama realists. They have existed everywhere but in ancient India they belonged to a long tradition which flowered in the classical Gupta age and persisted in the medieval courts. The poets wrote mostly about the pleasures of illicit love and rarely praised faithfulness.

  . . . and there is the deep shyness

  of one’s own wife

  the most beautiful and most

  graceful showing

  her love

  opening flower

  but who in this world can

  fill one with joy

  like another man’s wife

  loving with naked breast.

  The pleasures of adultery may be momentary and often mixed with fear, but they are clearly worth it, according to these poets. As I said, an adulteress is called asati in Sanskrit and there is even a term, abhisarika, to describe the woman who visits her lover’s house at night. Straightforward admissions of adultery, such as the one below, are charming but rare.

  ‘Where are you going, fair maid, on such a night?’

  ‘To where he dwells that is dearer than my life.’

  ‘And fear you not, so young, to go alone?’

  ‘But Kama is my escort who has well-feathered shafts.’

  What drives one to illicit love is often the deathly routine of domestic, conjugal sex or the complete lack of it, as I knew so well from my life with Avanti. The Kamasutra, of course, offers instruction on how to seduce other men’s wives and its supreme lesson is not to get caught.

  Adultery was common in the premodern West too, especially among men, when marriages were arranged. But why does it persist in the modern world when romantic love has entered the marriage scene? Since the nineteenth century, novels and plays in the West have dealt mostly with the younger generation’s struggle to establish ‘love marriage’, replacing the traditional one of parental choice. Young people have since grown up believing that romance is a noble thing and above the laws and customs of society. The attitudes, earlier confined to poets and artists, have become democratized as today’s youth think that one has not lived until they have experienced passion at least once in life. The ‘honeymoon’ symbolizes romance within marriage as the couple run away for a few days from the mundane demands of domestic life. But inevitably, romance fades over time, and they become vulnerable to adultery. No one teaches them that the desire for possession is much more exciting than possession itself—‘to possess her is to lose her’.

  My mother did warn me. During the turbulent days when I insisted on marrying Avanti, she cautioned that marriage is about getting accustomed to one another and to routine and lasting it out. Romance is the opposite, feeding on obstacles, short excitations and sorrowful partings. The advantage of the Indian ‘arranged marriage’, she felt, was that you entered into it without illusions. You knew from the beginning that it was forever and you tried to create conditions for lastingness. In modern ‘love marriage’, you are not prepared. When conflicts of temperament or tastes surface, you ask insistently, ‘Why did I marry?’ And since you are brainwashed by romantic propaganda, you seize the first occasion to fall in love with somebody else. This is just as easy now for women since more and more are educated and working.

  In the West, after the sexual liberation in the 1960, the young have lost much of their regard for marriage. Today, they breathe a permissive culture of the Internet. However, many are still drawn to the ideal of remaining faithful, bringing up children and living through thick and thin. But marriage is going out of fashion and adultery is not even worthy of gossip. The old protections provided by society’s safety measures and social compulsions are fading. When you are the victim of adultery or separation or divorce, you are on your own, mostly alone in your unhappiness.

  Is there an irreconcilable contradiction between marriage and human longing? Is adultery a law of nature? There are some marriages that combine harmoniously the ideals of romance and family and endure happily despite adultery. But they seem to be an exception. When the physicality of desire diminishes in a marriage but love between the two is still deep and mature, how does one prevent the calm love of a happy marriage from being shattered by the storm of a new desire for another person? This was at the heart of the crisis in my marriage. The other difficulty was that middle-class society had not found a way to cope with adultery. Of course, with the breakdown of marriage, western society is more relaxed now about personal living arrangements. But the India in which I grew up was not so different from Anna Karenina’s Russia. A third problem was one of authenticity. I found it impossible to sleep with Amaya and not spoil the things I cared about at home with Avanti and the girls. My inner feelings began to differ from what I displayed to the outer world, particularly after my accident. I felt the endless deception corroding my spirit—the same spirit, ironically, that Amaya had been responsible for energizing and lifting.

  ~

  After Avanti’s announcement, I was in shock all morning. I went through the motions at the office but I was unable to focus on anything. The world had collapsed around me and I didn’t know what to do. The only certainty in my mind was that I didn’t want to lose Avanti and the girls. I phoned Kamini Masi. Perceptive as ever, she had detected that something was wrong the night before. I asked her to meet me for lunch and I told her everything. I begged her to meet Avanti. ‘I’m afraid she is going to leave me. Please speak to her.’ She phoned Avanti as soon as she got home and asked her to come by after work. ‘It’s urgent, my dear!’ They spent the evening together and the same night Kamini Masi met me in a quiet corner at the Bombay Gym.

  ‘All is not yet lost, my boy. She is unsure,’ Kamini Masi said. ‘It matters to Avanti that you were not disloyal even though you were unfaithful.’ This was the conclusion that Kamini Masi drew from her tête-à-tête with her. Then she went on to recount what had transpired between them.

  ‘Everything is finished now, after what has happened—it’s over!’ Avanti had declared. ‘I love him dearly and there are the children—I am tied, you see. But I cannot bear the thought of another woman in our lives. It’s torture.’

  ‘I feel terrible,’ I said. ‘I wish I could take her pain away in some way and make it my own.’

  She gave me a strangely censorious look and said, ‘What have you gone and done, Amar!’

  ‘I feel miserable, Kamini Masi.’

  Kamini Masi returned to her conversation with Avanti, who had told her: ‘It’s been going on for more than six months, and I didn’t suspect anything, believing that I was the only woman in his life. It never entered my head that there could be someone else. Just when you are convinced that you are happy . . . suddenly there is a tragedy . . .’

  ‘Poor thing, she broke down and hid her face in her hands,’ Kamini Mas
i recounted to me. ‘I was deeply moved by her agony and tried to comfort her.’ I told her, “Your pain is my pain, Avanti. You are the best thing in Amar’s life. I have known you both ever since two innocent, charming teenagers came to deliver a package at the Imperial Hotel in Delhi; I cheered when you got married. And now after more than twenty years, the only thing I am sure of is that Amar is a person of integrity and he loves you. These things happen in life, and I’m sure it will pass. Give him a chance. He is filled with remorse.”’

  Kamini Masi stopped suddenly and looked at me suspiciously. ‘You’re not going to make a liar out of me, Amar—you do love her, don’t you? You do feel remorse?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  She resumed her account.

  ‘I can imagine being carried away by desire,’ Avanti had told her. ‘But deceiving me deliberately for six months . . . And to go on being my husband at the same time as . . . as this . . . this slut. She is pretty, Kamini Masi, and ten years younger. I have no chance.’

  ‘Give him another chance, Avanti. I’m sure he doesn’t want to break the marriage. He knows what a jewel he has in you . . . besides he loves you.’

  ‘But I haven’t exactly been a good wife,’ said Avanti. ‘We haven’t made love for ages—and it’s my fault. I love him but I have gone off the physical thing. I know it bothers him—he even went to Ramu Mama for advice, and they consulted a psychologist. Is this all that men care about, Kamini Masi?’

  ‘I’m no expert,’ Kamini Masi replied, but men do seem to care more about the physical thing. The sensible ones though, like your man and mine, they would never jeopardize their homes and families. We should allow them a little slack, I think, for their sanity and ours. Amar is good-hearted and he’s ashamed for the children’s sake and for yours.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Avanti said. ‘I realize that his position must be terrible too—it is worse for the guilty than the innocent—if he knows he is the cause of all the misery. But how am I to forgive him? How can I be his again after this? For me to live with him now would be too painful. Just because I love him as I do, just because I cherish everything we have had in the past . . .’