~
So, I returned home to my safe, conventional, middle-class life undamaged, except in my heart. I reached home trembling with fear, hoping fervently that I could make up to Avanti. I entered the apartment and waited nervously for her to emerge from the kitchen. Proust says that the ‘conversation of a woman one loves is like the ground above a dangerous subterranean stretch of water; one senses constantly beneath the words the presence, the penetrating chill of an invisible pool; one perceives here and there its treacherous percolation, but the water itself remains hidden’.
I stood up tensely as soon as she came out. She pointed to two suitcases in the corner. She had packed them, she said, with all the essentials I would need because I would not be living here any more. She spoke calmly but with determination. She had made up her mind.
‘But for heaven’s sake, Amaya has gone out of my life!’ I moaned. ‘She is as good as dead.’
‘Well, you are dead as far as I am concerned.’
‘But, but . . .’
‘I hate you.’
‘But I love you.’
‘Let’s not have a scene.’
‘Are you saying you want a divorce?’
‘I don’t know what I want. I just want you out of here.’
‘But, but . . .’
‘Let’s not discuss this any more. The lawyers will figure it out and they can talk to each other.’
‘Can I see the children, at least?’
‘They are in school but I’ll send them to see you.’
I left in shock, carrying the two suitcases. Fortunately, a ‘transit flat’ of my company happened to be available at the time and I moved into it. Each time I tried to contact Avanti, she either hung up on me or didn’t come to the phone. My assistant cancelled all our social engagements and I learnt to spend the evenings alone. It gave me plenty of time to think. I knew in my bones that Avanti still loved me. Instead of ‘I hate you,’ she had really meant to say:
Sometimes I love you, sometimes I hate you.
But when I hate you, it’s because I love you.
The words are from a song by Nat King Cole and were familiar to both of us. I wondered if I was fooling myself this time around; she may have really begun to hate me. Love and hate are both aspects of kama but they are also aspects of each other. Is it possible that Avanti loved and hated me at the same time? She may have loved me but hated my relationship with Amaya. Love makes one selfish and demands exclusivity; hatred, on the other hand, is happily shared.
When Avanti said ‘I hate you,’ she may have also meant something darker. Albert Camus, the French writer, describes a lonely man in his existentialist novel The Outsider, whose only companion is a dog that constantly follows him around. The ungrateful man, on the other hand, is impatient, forever cursing, kicking and deriding the poor creature. Yet, when the dog dies, the man is bereft—he ‘loved’ the dog. The abuser was profoundly attached to the victim. This is one of the most paradoxical aspects of kama that I discovered in those lonely days when Avanti had sent me away. I realized that I had taken her for granted, forever judging her over the smallest thing. And yet I still hoped that Avanti ‘hated’ me in the spirit of Nat King Cole’s ‘I hate you because I love you’.
~
I loved Amaya down to my soul. The look on her face, as she left without saying goodbye, keeps haunting me. I tell myself I have to stop looking back with longing for those days. Vijjika, a seventh-century female poet, reminds me of Amaya’s sorrow:
He’s stopped loving me
no longer cherished in his heart
no more affection for me
passes me in the street doesn’t know me
o friend as I go on looking back
with longing for those now lost days
what keeps my heart from falling to pieces.
Those days are indeed lost forever. Amaya was not supposed to be in my life. We just happened to meet by chance on the Deccan Queen one morning. I still cannot fathom after all these years what led a devoted husband to plunge into an impulsive love affair from which he struggled vainly to escape. My life was supposed to be a tale of two friends who fell in love; they got married despite the usual obstacles; but one of them didn’t anticipate that romance would fade inevitably; he grew restless and was unfaithful. This was not supposed to be in the script; he was torn between his two loves and couldn’t make up his mind. He was caught in Blake’s ‘web of desire’ and because his mother fell asleep while he was still in the womb, he did not how to escape.
In my darkest moments, I loathed my life and wished I could get away from all women to a tranquil place free from desire. I felt an aversion for kama and ‘the mess of love’, as D.H. Lawrence calls it:
We’ve made a great mess of love
Since we made an ideal of it.
The moment I swear to love a woman, a certain woman, all my life
That moment I begin to hate her.
The moment I even say to a woman: I love you!—
My love dies down considerably.
The moment love is an understood thing between us, we are sure of it,
It’s a cold egg, it isn’t love any more . . .
From Avanti and Amaya, my mind went back to the woman who had first broken my heart. When I had asked Isha to marry me on the terrace at the party that I had given for Avanti, she had dismissed me contemptuously as though I had offered her a ‘cold egg’. This was, of course, before the tables turned and she became Anand’s victim. And now, I find that I had behaved no better in sending Amaya away.
When Isha had refused my love, she had said that she found this ‘love marriage business’ a dreadful bondage. She found middle-class domesticity repulsive and wanted something different from life—something more open than the narrow intimacy of couples who live confined lives behind shut doors. She didn’t like ‘affairs’ either, for they tended to degenerate into another kind of coupling in her mind. I don’t think Isha knew what she wanted.
In these cynical moments, I envied Anand’s unemotional, carefree life of a nagaraka. Lawrence’s vision of love consisted similarly of two words, ‘independence’ and ‘attachment’. He visualized lovers as two pole stars, not one as the satellite of the other—both equal, inseparable yet separate, moving together through space. Like Lawrence, Anand was a primitivist, who celebrated pure bodily, animal love, which Lawrence calls ‘love without ego’ later in the same poem. Both rejected the cerebral ‘sex in the head’ which makes a mess of human love.
When I split with Amaya, I didn’t know if Avanti would forgive me and take me back. So, I was taking a risk. Why didn’t I marry Amaya? Why did I return to Avanti? As I think back to my anguished struggle at the time, I believe that I missed another kind of love in the companionship Avanti had provided over the years. Once achieved, it was unalterable and lifelong. Possibly, my love for her had grown deeper and profounder than I was aware of. With every passing year, I had got used to a permanent and undiluted happiness in her company alone. It was certainly a different kind of love from what I felt for Amaya, which too was as real as anything I have known.
Had I been a young American, I would probably have gone to Avanti instantly and announced—in the interest of transparency, no less—‘I have fallen in love with someone else, dear. I want a divorce.’ Since Americans take the romantic view of marriage more seriously than anyone else, there are more divorces and less happiness in their marriages. If I had done that, I would have thrown away years of investment in my marriage. Instead, I chose to keep the affair a secret for almost half a year. Avanti blamed me for the deceit but it gave me time to think. Was it out of kindness that I concealed my affair until I was certain about what I wanted in life? I try and console myself that these are the sort of white lies that make for civilization.
Perhaps I am justifying my affair with Amaya in a self-serving way, but I have concluded that in a balanced marriage, husbands and wives should not blame each other for chance disloyalties; they s
hould feel pleased that they have for the most part managed to remain devoted to each other. Too many get it wrong—they put the ethical focus on the false idea that the urge to wander is something terrible. But in reality, it is the ability to remain together that is worthy and honourable. We should not praise celibacy—it is not natural or particularly admirable. I believe that we should praise fidelity instead, which helps to make marriages endure. Fidelity is an achievement, worthy of dignity and praise.
~
Ever since I can remember, I have felt needy and insufficient. As a child. I longed for my mother. When I grew into an adolescent, the object of my yearning changed to Isha. When I couldn’t possess her, I felt miserable. Luckily, Avanti came along a few years later and we married eventually. I was deliriously happy for some years but gradually the romance went out of our lives. My desire, however, did not, and I craved for new pleasures. This is when I met Amaya and fell in love with her. My life has taught me that human desire never seems to end; as soon as you have what you want, a new and unforeseen desire emerges.
In the Mahabharata, King Yayati discovered the same truth: kama is endless. The more you feed desire, the greater it becomes. The stronger my cravings, the less satisfied I feel. One day Sharmishtha, a princess, and her best friend, Devayani, the daughter of a powerful Brahmin, were out in the woods. The girls came upon a pond and since it was hot, they decided to swim in the water. When they came ashore, the princess mistakenly put on Devayani’s clothes. Enraged, Devayani accused Sharmishtha of stealing her clothes; they fought and the princess stripped her and pushed her down a well.
Yayati happened to be out hunting the same day and he heard Devayani’s cries and rescued her. He gave the naked girl his upper garment to cover herself and they fell in love instantly. Yayati went and asked Devayani’s father for her hand. The Brahmin agreed to the match on two conditions: one, that Yayati should remain forever faithful to his daughter, and two, that Sharmishtha should atone for her bad behaviour by becoming his daughter’s handmaiden. Yayati agreed.
In due course, Devayani gave birth to a child. Sharmishtha grew jealous and eventually seduced Yayati, who broke his vow and succumbed to her advances. Their affair went on for years and Sharmishtha had three sons by him stealthily. As the children were playing one day, Devayani was struck by the resemblance of one of them to her husband. She asked the boy about the identity of his father. On learning the truth, she went into a rage and complained bitterly to her Brahmin father, who cursed Yayati and deprived him of his youth and vitality.
Since Yayati had been a just and good king, the public protested and the Brahmin had to relent. He gave the king a way out: Yayati could recover his youth and vitality if one of his sons would exchange it with him. None of his sons agreed to the swap except the youngest, Puru, born of Sharmishtha. Thus, Yayati went on to enjoy a thousand years of pleasure. He discovered in the end that his sexual appetite was still undiminished and declared: ‘The hunger for pleasure can never be satisfied by more pleasure . . . not all the grain in the world; neither all the gold, nor all the women, are enough for a man. A man grows old but not his desire.’ Dismayed by this bizarre realization, Yayati returned his borrowed manhood to Puru, whom he anointed as his successor. He then renounced kama and retired from the world.
The root of this puzzle of kama lies in human insufficiency. Our longing for love comes from being incomplete. When we possess another person, we feel more whole, more secure and more at ease. Love helps to still desire. But only temporarily, it seems, for desire has a clever way of metamorphosing. You achieve one desire and another appears. Money, applause and power are common desires. They give us temporary satisfaction but soon enough, they tend to inflate in the form of a desire for more money, more applause and more power. They are self-seeking and self-directed.
Genuine love, on the other hand, is other-directed, as Avanti always reminded me. St Augustine felt that the love of God is the ultimate other-directed love and it is capable of breaking the cycle of ever-increasing desires. By transforming one’s desire from being self-directed and selfish into caring for another human being, one can help break the cycle of endless desire, and liberate oneself from human bondage. But it is easier said than done; it appears to me to be too idealistic a route for the ordinary person.
Desire is indeed insatiable but Yayati’s answer, vairagya, ‘detachment’, is not the right one either. Renouncing kama and living in an emotional wasteland is too extreme and also beyond the ordinary individual. My own attempts at trying to extinguish desire have proven this amply. So, the riddle of kama remains: how do we rechannel the primal force of kama towards a positive end?
~
The problem lies not only in our insufficiency or in our endless desire but with romantic love itself. We imagine that we are special, as I did when I met Amaya. But the banal truth is that in countless nauseating novels that came out in the West in the mid twentieth century, the same situation is repeated over and over again: the same husband who fears the same flatness and the same old jogtrot of married life in which his wife loses her ‘allure’ because no obstructions come between them. Such husbands are pathetic victims of a myth, the mystical promise of which faded long ago.
Although my sympathies are with kama optimists, my affair with Amaya has brought home a sobering lesson. I always believed in passion as something that would alter my life and enrich it with the unexpected, with thrilling chances. Even though I loved Amaya till the end, I now believe that passionate love is an everlasting, guileless illusion of humanity. Notwithstanding all I have said in favour of romantic love, I believe it is a deceptive fantasy of freedom and of living to the full. A human being becomes truly free only when he or she has attained self-mastery. A person in a state of ecstasy and passion loses self-control. The challenge is how to live a life with love and still remain genuinely autonomous.
When it comes to the old debate between dharma versus kama, the Kamasutra had a reason to choose dharma. Some acts, such as breaking a promise, are wrong. Adultery involves the breaking of a serious commitment made at marriage; it causes more pain and hurt than other broken promises; the ‘wronged’ spouse views it as rejection, as loss of affection. Since it also entails deception in most case, it is tainted by the wrongness of lying. Since sexual love is supposedly exclusive, adultery entails deceiving the spouse or the extramarital partner about ‘feelings’. This is quite apart from the emotional disease of jealousy, which is not only a destructive passion but is based on regarding the spouse as a possession or as an object.
There is another challenge to romantic love which Simone de Beauvoir posed in the middle of the twentieth century in her famous book, The Second Sex, which is rightly considered the harbinger of contemporary feminism. For Beauvoir, the riddle of kama originates in the fact that the word ‘love’ doesn’t mean the same thing to both sexes. She quotes Nietzsche from The Gay Science:
The single word ‘love’ in fact signifies two different things for man and woman. What woman understands by love is clear enough: it is not only devotion, it is a total gift of body and soul, without reservation, without regard for anything whatever. This unconditional nature of her love is what makes it a faith, the only one she has.
A man, on the other hand, has other interests. Even if he loves a woman deeply, she is only one part of his life; she is not as necessary to him as he is to her. For Amaya, loving me became central to her identity and her womanliness, but I never defined myself in the same way. She was intelligent and must have been aware of this; yet, she willingly accepted this self-deception.
Beauvoir argues that it is not only patriarchy that has foisted on women this false romantic ideal that Nietzsche speaks about, but ironically, women themselves have accepted this view of themselves. Happiness in love for a woman is to be a part of a man—a superior being, ‘a god’, in Beauvoir’s words—and she is forever resigned to her second place. Inevitably, her man turns out to be flawed, and when he falls, tragedy follows
(as it did in Amaya’s case). The woman eventually gets disillusioned, realizing that it was a false ideal. It led to bondage and when she realizes it, she feels her life has been a wasted sacrifice. What is particularly damaging about her self-deception is that she genuinely believed that she was acting for the sake of her freedom, her fulfilment and her self-realization.
This is why Beauvoir’s critique is so brutal. She has exposed romantic love as a dishonest sham as far as the woman is concerned. Whereas the woman in love sought a form of self-realization and emancipation, it turned into a descent into servility and loss of self-respect. Romantic love is evil because it harms the woman and leaves her pitifully dependent and insecure. When the woman begins to fear the loss of her lover, she tries to manipulate him. Even if the manipulation works, the woman knows, somewhere deep within, that she is weak, powerless and open to exploitation.
Beauvoir’s answer to popular romantic love is a different kind of love—she calls it ‘genuine love’—which entails the ‘mutual recognition of two liberties’, where both remain free and neither is mutilated by servitude. Since Beauvoir’s time, women have achieved some victories and have come some way. Their efforts to achieve independence and an enlargement of their field of interests and activities have been remarkable in many cases. But the romantic ideal still persists for far too many, and this was expressed by Marlene Dietrich with guileless melancholy in her famous song, ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love’.
11
LOVE-DEATH
What indeed is finally beautiful except death and love?
For an instant he is a child,
For an instant a youth delighting in passion,
For an instant he is a pauper,
Kama Page 38