Kama

by Gurcharan Das

  For an instant fat in prosperity,

  Then, like an actor,

  With withered limbs of old age,

  His body covered with wrinkles,

  A man at the end of his worldly existence

  Falls at the curtain to death.

  —Bhartrihari

  On a sultry evening two years later, I got a phone call. I was working late in the office. On the line was a doctor from a hospital in Delhi.

  ‘Sir, the problem is serious. Isha is very sick.’

  ‘Would you define “very sick”, doctor?’

  ‘She’s dying.’

  There was silence. I didn’t know what to think. Why was the doctor calling me? I hadn’t seen Isha in years. I waited for the doctor to explain.

  ‘I’m very sorry to have to tell you this but she gave me your number and asked me to call you.’

  I insisted that there must be some mistake. ‘She is still young.’ Perhaps the nurse had slipped up and given him the wrong X-ray or something.

  He replied with as much empathy as he could that Isha’s vital tests had been repeated three times. There was absolutely no question about the diagnosis. I could, of course, speak to the haematologist.

  ‘What about her husband?’

  There was confused silence at the other end.

  ‘But aren’t you her husband, sir?’

  I realized my mistake, remembering suddenly that Isha had separated from Vikram Suri long ago and he lived in a remote village. Her mother had passed away. She was the last of the Malik family line and she didn’t care for her few distant relatives. Surely, she must have someone in Delhi—some close friends in Delhi?

  ‘No, doctor, I am a good friend,’ I replied. ‘What about her family?’

  ‘We have no family members on our records. She wanted me to phone you right away. I also have a letter for you.’

  ‘Dying?’ I repeated incredulously. ‘But that is impossible.’

  He explained that whatever therapy they had at this stage was merely palliative—it could give her relief, but there was no going back. It was a matter of hours. Possibly a day. He made sympathetic sounds. He was empathetic but I couldn’t just keep taking his valuable time. However, I had to know what had happened. What had caused the problem? There was another long silence.

  ‘What should I do?’

  ‘Come quickly.’

  ‘What shall I tell her?’

  ‘Act normal.’

  I told him that I’d be on the next flight to Delhi. There was one at eight o’clock and I’d try to get on it. He said to come directly to the emergency ward where he was on duty. He would be there all night.

  ‘Do ask for me at the reception. ‘

  ‘Can she speak?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I thanked him and hung up. Isha was dying and she had no one to turn to except me. The next thing I was thinking about was God. An improbable nastik like me—perhaps not a diehard atheist but an agnostic for sure—and here I was, with the strange idea of God creeping into my thoughts. I wanted to blame someone, to hit out at someone. Suddenly, Isha’s face was before me. She was smiling and I begged God to save her. For someone who had never prayed, here I was begging God to let her live. I had to act normal, the doctor had said.

  I phoned Avanti and told her that Isha was dying, and I was rushing to the airport to catch the next flight to Delhi.

  ‘What about her husband?’

  ‘Well, you know . . . they have been separated for years.’

  ‘She must have someone in Delhi?

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How strange! You haven’t been in touch with her for more than a dozen years. Or have you?’

  ‘No, the last time I saw her was at our wedding. I was just as surprised that she gave the doctor my name and number.’ I gave her a quick rundown of what the doctor had told me.

  ‘What about Anand? After all, she was in love with him. Why didn’t she give his number to the doctor?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Hello! Hello, are you still there?’ I asked in desperation.

  ‘You’re sure you haven’t been in touch with her?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘I mean she is dying and all.’

  ‘Then you had better go, shouldn’t you?’ And she hung up.

  I managed to get on the last flight of the day to Delhi. My head was a confused jumble of emotions. I was surprised at my strong reaction. I had got over her a long time ago. Besides she had hurt me in a way no one ever had. But the news of her dying had brought back all the emotions buried somewhere deep inside me. I had called Avanti twice before leaving but she had not responded. It must be a nightmare for her—first, to cope with my relationship with Amaya. That had cost me her trust. Now a dying Isha had come back to haunt her. No wonder she didn’t believe me.

  It was almost midnight when I reached the hospital in Delhi and went directly through the main door to the Emergency. Except for the woman at the reception desk, I was all alone. She called the doctor, who came in a few minutes and took me inside his office. He gave me the letter. I could make out Isha’s handwriting on the envelope. I didn’t want to face her and suddenly had the urge to run away . . . far away from the hospital. But the doctor encouraged me to go inside and see her.

  ‘She’s going any minute.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Go!’ he almost shouted.

  Isha was asleep when I entered. I went and sat in an armchair beside her. She looked pale but still beautiful. I asked myself why she was granted so little happiness in life. I sat still, thinking of her and didn’t notice when she woke up. She smiled and held out her hand.

  ‘You?’

  I rose and went closer and held her hand.

  ‘Isha!’

  ‘How lucky for me.’

  I looked into her eyes. They were ineffably sad.

  ‘Is it really you?’ she asked. ‘I think I am dreaming.’

  She remained motionless, unable to stir, her frightened eyes riveted on me. Her face was pale and rigid. Only on its lower part something quivered.

  ‘It is you! I can’t believe it.’

  ‘Isha!’ is all I could say.

  ‘You actually came.’

  I was in tears.

  ‘You are the only one who really loved me.’

  I kept looking at her. Soon her eyes closed. After what seemed a long time, the nurse came in and I looked at her inquiringly, pointing my eyes towards Isha. She checked her pulse and requested me to wait outside. The doctor rushed in as I was leaving the room.

  ‘You have to save her,’ I whispered.

  I kept waiting on the bench outside the emergency ward. Half an hour later, the doctor came out of her room. I stood up. I looked at him and I knew it was over. Isha had not regained consciousness.

  ‘She was still young!’ I whispered.

  He put his arm around me and took me into his office. He could feel my pain but did not want to pry into our relationship. He was quiet for some time and then began to speak gently. In a diffident manner, he said that Isha may have had a ‘death instinct’, an unconscious tendency for self-destruction. He explained that it was the opposite of the ‘life instinct’ which aided survival, propagation, sex and creativity. Freud believed that human beings generally sought pleasure and avoided pain, which he called the ‘pleasure principle’. But occasionally, Freud found in his patients a desire to restore themselves to an inorganic state from which life had originally emerged. Sexual desire could divert this destructive instinct, he added.

  ‘But she didn’t commit suicide?’ I interrupted.

  ‘No, she didn’t, strictly speaking; but she gave up all hope; she felt her life was over and wanted it to end.’

  ‘She wanted to live—no one wants to die,’ I protested. I told him that I had read about someone who preferred to live on a narrow ledge while remaining standing on
a square yard of space for a thousand years, rather than die.

  There was a long silence.

  ‘I could be wrong about the death drive, sir. Even Freud thought he was being speculative about it. So, it’s only a supposition on my part. All I can say is that she was fortunate to see you before she died.’

  After a pause I asked, ‘Can I see her again?

  ‘Of course.’ He led me into the room where Isha was lying and left us alone.

  When I confronted her dead body, I found it an object without a subject; it was limp, ungoverned and inert. I felt awe in the face of death. Perhaps I was responding to the unfathomable spectacle of a body without the ‘self’. It was a radically different sight from what I had seen just a while ago. This body was not her but hers. Isha had always been a free, lively being who was a subject, never an object. But I didn’t want to touch her body. To feel it now without the rite of mutual acquiescence would be to pollute it.

  When I turned to look at Isha again, I got a different feeling. What I was seeing had once been a solid, lasting entity. Isha had gone from being a very live love of my dreams once upon a time to this inert corpse which would be ashes and water tomorrow. Had I loved a transient illusion? Had my passion been for an unreal object? It was a fleeting thought and it passed quickly. What I had just experienced was the transience of the object of my desire.

  Eventually, I staggered out of the room and returned to the same bench where I had been sitting. After maybe half an hour, I realized I couldn’t just sit there forever. The doctor was on his rounds. Since I didn’t know what to do, I went outside. It was pitch-dark. I looked up at the stars and decided that this was where Isha had gone. I looked down and there was a hole in the ground. A taxi came after a quarter of an hour, bringing a patient. It was looking for a fare and I hopped in. It took me back to the airport.

  ~

  What is this power that the dead have over us who are left behind? It is frightening, this deathless love we continue to feel for the ones who are gone. The dark, unmentionable truth is that death is never far from kama—it can destroy those who yield to it. The god Kama is a slave of death even as he tries to elevate life above our finite, limited being; the same impulse that leads us to revere life pushes us in the opposite direction and this is Kama’s burden.

  In the years after Isha left Bombay, I had persuaded myself that I no longer loved her, and I had almost succeeded. On one occasion, in fact, I made a rigorous analysis of my feelings and concluded that she had been a passing infatuation. As the days went by, the intellectual conviction grew in me. This comfortable, rational citadel, built on calculations of the intellect had been turned upside down now and I was overcome by uncontrollable grief at her death. I had clearly been blind to the wisdom of my heart.

  The narrator in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past has also been a victim of the same intellectual recklessness until suffering brings him face-to-face with the truth. In the middle of the novel, he discovers that he doesn’t love Albertine any more . . . that is, until he hears the news of her death. When they had first met, she had been part of a clique of girlfriends who were free and active. They moved around in a group on bicycles, played tennis and might even have had lovers. His eyes fell on Albertine by accident. Once he selects her, however, he becomes possessed and consumed by her. In his cooler moments, he is ambivalent, doubting whether he could ever marry her. He vacillates. Then one day, based on the same sort of rational calculation that I had made with regard to Isha, he decides he no longer loves her.

  Hearing of her death, Marcel is overwhelmed with grief and sorrow, jolted by the realization that, indeed, he still loves her, and profoundly. Martha Nussbaum, the philosopher, analysed this situation elegantly a few years ago in her book, Love’s Knowledge. She argues that the knowledge of the heart cannot be provided by reason or by sciences such as psychology. ‘Knowledge of the heart must come from the heart.’

  The other cause of our myopia about the complexity of the emotional universe is the old Proustian villain, habit. Marcel’s false conclusion about his feelings for Albertine is due partially to plain familiarity. He has got used to her. Habit tends to conceal from us the things that cause us pain, especially those relating to our deepest needs and vulnerabilities. And the intellect compounds the problem by doing a cost–benefit analysis of the heart. ‘Cost–benefit analysis is a way of comforting oneself, of putting oneself in control by pretending that all losses can be made up by sufficient quantities of something else. This stratagem opposes the recognition of love—and, indeed, love itself,’ says Nussbaum.

  In order to grasp the truth of our heart, the answer lies in pain and suffering. Proust says:

  Our intelligence, however lucid, cannot perceive the elements that compose it . . . I had been mistaken in thinking that I could see clearly into my own heart. But this knowledge, which the shrewdest perceptions of the mind would not have given me, had now been brought to me, hard, glittering, strange, like crystallized salt, by the abrupt reaction of pain.

  The realization that I still loved Isha surprised me in the same way. The combination of my intellect and habit had concealed the truth by creating a comfort zone of self-deception. The pain I suffered from her loss in the hospital finally penetrated the illusory defences that I had created. I had to finally acknowledge that I still loved her. ‘The suffering itself is a piece of self-knowing.’

  My sorrow at Isha’s loss raised another question in my mind. Could it be evidence, not of love but of something else, perhaps of fear or grief or some other emotion? Since I was alone and suffering in solitude, I wondered if my emotions were an expression of my loneliness or my ‘incompleteness’ (in Plato’s words) or my own ‘neediness’. Was this then truly a love for Isha or an expression of a lack in myself? The truth is that one can only know what is in one’s own heart and not in another’s. Marcel has the same doubts:

  I understood that my love was less a love for her than a love in me . . . It is the misfortune of beings to be for us nothing else but useful showcases for the contents of our own minds.

  Nussbaum does not agree with Proust. She believes that these doubts are another form of self-deception so that one does not have to face the sufferings of love. Love itself exists, however, and is not merely a figment of our imagination.

  ~

  As I ponder over the mystery of Isha’s heart, I am convinced that she was not in love with Anand or me or anyone else; she was in love with love itself. All the time she was true to her profound and secret thirst. It didn’t matter whom she loved—the important thing was to love. The last time I saw Isha was briefly at our wedding when she brought an extravagantly expensive necklace for Avanti. Once my mother had mentioned, en passant, in one of her letters that she had been to the memorial service of her mother, Aditi Malik, where she had seen Isha in mourning. She had moved back to 23 Prithviraj Road, and she looked quite haggard; perhaps it was the death of her mother or it had to do with her lifestyle, she couldn’t be sure. My mother mentioned that she had heard rumours that Isha had been seen with a succession of very unsuitable men.

  Certainly, Proust is on Isha’s side when he says, ‘What matters in life is not whom or what one loves . . . it is the fact of loving.’ He illustrates this in a conversation about a certain Mme de Sevigne:

  ‘. . . Mme de Sevigne was after all less to be pitied than most of us. She spent a great part of her life with the person whom she loved.’

  ‘You forget that it wasn’t “love” in her case since it was her daughter.’

  ‘But what matters in life is not whom or what one loves . . . it is the fact of loving. What Mme de Sevigne felt for her daughter was far better . . . than the commonplace relations [her husband] had with his mistresses. It’s the same with a mystic’s love for his God . . .

  It is natural to impute a tragedy such as Isha’s to causes beyond her, and the human mind tries to imagine scenarios of how it could have been prevented. What if Isha had married a man whom
she had loved? What if the social order had been more accepting of her promiscuous nature? What if Isha hadn’t fallen in love with Anand? You become attached to tragedy’s victim and tend to look for outside causes, finding it impossible to blame her.

  Isha might or might not have been in love with love, but her doctor seemed to think that this is often the way out for someone who is a slave of passion. To love passion for its own sake is to court suffering all the way until death comes as a relief. Thus, passion and the longing for death that passion disguises are connected. Isha became aware of this and was willing to test its truth by risking her life.

  The only way to understand Isha’s terrible relationship with kama, I find, is through a myth that grabs the ‘death instinct’ and transforms it into a sacred goal. I thought initially of the story of Heer–Ranjha close to home from my beloved province of Punjab; or of Laila–Majnu, a bit further away in Iran; and even further is the adulterous romance of Tristan in distant Europe, transformed by Wagner into a tragic, passionate opera beyond good and evil. Instead of these, I decided on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, everyone’s favourite tale of romantic love and death, which is no longer Shakespeare’s property but belongs to the world. I have an uncommon slant on the story.

  Not unlike Isha’s tragedy, Romeo and Juliet’s love was threatened more from within—by their own flaws—than without. It was not only the working of fate, as the prince of Verona suggests in his famous prologue:

  From forth the fatal loins of these two foes

  A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life.

  No, Shakespeare’s tragedy is not so much about the innocence of tender love betrayed as we were taught to believe in school. It is, in truth, about the frustrated, dark barbarity within human beings when they are denied the splendours of kama. The viciousness of the feuds in the city is matched by the violence inside the hearts of the young lovers. Whatever obstructs their love seems to only intensify it until they reach the last obstacle: death. It is as though the lovers never had any other desire than the desire for death.