Kama

by Gurcharan Das

  The play begins, not surprisingly, with death—another scuffle on the streets of Verona in which one of the families’ retainers is killed. Its cause is an ancient feud between two aristocratic Italian families, the Capulets and Montagues. The Capulets have a daughter, Juliet, who, at fourteen, has become marriageable; the Montagues have a young melancholic son, Romeo, who arrives with his friends uninvited to a masked ball at the Capulets. He has intimations that this party will be the beginning of his end. He sees Juliet from a distance and falls in love at first sight. Soon, they get a chance to speak and then kiss without even knowing each other’s names.

  Romeo: Thus from my lips, by thine, my sin is purged.

  Juliet: Then have my lips the sin that they have took.

  Romeo: Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged!

  Give me my sin again.

  [They kiss again]

  But just as quickly they discover they are enemies. Juliet wails:

  My only love sprung from my only hate

  . . . Prodigious birth of love it is to me

  That I must lose a loathed enemy.

  Romeo leaves soon thereafter with his friends. Immediately, however, he turns back; he leaps over the wall of the orchard of the Capulet estate, where he spies Juliet at a window, and he hears her speak his name on the balcony in these immortal lines:

  Wherefore art thou, Romeo?

  Deny thy father and refuse thy name.

  Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,

  And I’ll no longer be a Capulet . . .

  What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

  By any other word would smell as sweet . . .

  Romeo, doff thy name,

  And for that name, which is no part of thee

  Take all myself.

  He informs Juliet that he would happily give up his name which has become hateful to him. She is afraid for his life if her kinsmen spot him but he finds greater peril to live without her love. They exchange vows of love and decide to marry. She wishes him ‘Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow/That I shall say good night till it be morrow.’

  Romeo rushes to his friend and confessor Friar Lawrence, who consents to marry off the young lovers secretly; in their love, he hopes to end the ancient feud between the Capulets and Montagues. The following day, as Romeo awaits Juliet, Friar Lawrence fears calamity. Soon, Juliet arrives and they are married. Juliet’s nurse is aware of their secret and finds a rope ladder to help Romeo climb on to Juliet’s window for their wedding night.

  The next day, Tybalt—Juliet’s cousin—is in a rage; he has discovered that Romeo had been present at the Capulet’s feast; he challenges him to a duel. Romeo tries to appease him but his friend, Mercutio, accepts Tybalt’s challenge. Romeo tries to stop them; he leaps between the combatants. Tybalt wounds Mercutio fatally. As he lies dying, he curses both families for quarrelling senselessly:

  A plague o’ both your houses!

  They have made worms’ meat of me.

  Romeo is inconsolable. He wonders if Juliet’s beauty ‘hath made me effeminate and in my temper softened valour’s steel’. In a macho frenzy of revenge, he kills Tybalt and is then banished by the prince from Verona for his crime. When he learns of his expulsion, he is terrified, preferring death: exile is like a ‘golden axe’ that cuts off his head. Meanwhile, Juliet waits impatiently for her beloved with another premonition of death. Soon, she learns about what has happened and is deeply disturbed at finding herself married to her cousin’s killer. At the thought of her husband’s exile, she feels as if she has become death’s bride.

  Eventually, Romeo steals into Juliet’s room in the night and they consummate their marriage. The next morning the lovers awaken to the sound of a lark heralding the dawn. As they bid farewell, mortality is not far from Romeo’s mind. After he leaves, Juliet is overwhelmed by a sinister image of her lover descending into the garden below, ‘as one dead in the bottom of a tomb’. She then learns of another reversal—her father, affected by recent events, intends to rush her wedding to Paris. Unable to reveal that she is already married to Romeo and unsure of what to do, she hurries to Friar Lawrence and threatens to kill herself. He devises a plan to reunite her with Romeo: she must drink a potion the night before her wedding to Paris and appear dead temporarily; after she is laid in the family crypt, the friar and Romeo will retrieve her secretly, and she will be free and happy to live with her husband, away from quarrelling parents.

  That night, before taking the vial, as she bids goodnight to her mother and nurse, Juliet has another presentiment of death. The next day, the nurse and her parents discover Juliet’s pale, limp body as

  Death lies on her like an untimely frost

  Upon the sweetest flower of all the field.

  Her father laments pompously that death is now his son-in-law. The Capulets’ arrangements for their daughter’s wedding turn into preparations for a funeral.

  Meanwhile, Friar Lawrence’s message does not reach Romeo in exile in Mantua. When he learns of Juliet’s death, he procures a vial of poison from a reluctant apothecary and rushes back to Verona to take his own life beside Juliet’s tomb. His intentions are ruthless: ‘Savage-wild / More fierce and inexorable far / Than empty tigers on the roaring sea.’ Outside the Capulet crypt, he sees Paris scattering flowers on Juliet’s grave. They fight. He kills Paris, enters the tomb, opens the vault and sees Juliet’s inanimate body and discovers that death has not been able to conquer her beauty.

  —O my love, my wife!

  Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath,

  Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.

  Thou art not conquered. Beauty’s ensign yet

  Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks.

  The image of death as a lover continues to hover in the tomb as the play nears its end. Romeo drinks the poison and dies. Juliet awakes to find Romeo asleep; she kisses his poisoned lips to revive him but realizes that he is dead; she buries his dagger in her chest, falling beside him.

  Every scene in Shakespeare’s tragedy seems to conjoin love and death, making us believe that the two sides of kama are inherently intertwined in human nature. Romeo and Juliet courted ‘love death’ the moment they met at the Capulet feast and succeeded finally in embracing it in their tombs. Freud believed that love (eros) and death (thanatos)—the erotic drive and the death drive—lie at the root of human desire. But the irony is that grand, imperious and infinite desires, the sort that torment Romeo and Juliet, can never be satisfied. Plato teaches that desire depends on the lack of its object. If the object is obtained, the desire dies. Our young lovers must thus remain forever unsatisfied, continually reproducing their desires. The impossibility of satisfying desire leads them to consummate their love in death. So, to keep our sanity we need a myth or a story and, as the prince says in the last lines of the play:

  Never was a story of more woe

  than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

  Kama is a subversive force, posing a danger to society. But society fights back to maintain order. Hence, the standard reading of this play is as a humanist tragedy about passion’s battle against the social order. Romeo and Juliet know very well that marriage is the rite that consecrates love. As soon as Juliet suggests marriage to Romeo as his ‘honourable’ purpose in the balcony scene, Romeo hastens to Friar Lawrence to get them married. Despite this, our lovers are like Isha, essentially defiant of institutions and antisocial to the core. Of course, the Capulets and Montagues did eventually reconcile, and so the ‘death drive’ of the young lovers did serve a social purpose. Whether Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy of character or of fate is an old debate—it appears to me to be a combination of both inside and outside forces—and it will go on. Whether Isha or Shakespeare’s lovers were responsible for their own deaths matters less; more importantly, they remind us of our humanity.

  ~

  ‘Everything has gone from me,’ I told Kamini Masi. ‘I retain only the certainty of Avan
ti’s goodness and I can’t go on spoiling her life any longer.’

  ‘Don’t be too hard on yourself.’ She empathized with my situation in which I had to cope with grief over Isha’s death, the pain of abandoning Amaya, while trying to save my relationship with Avanti. She consoled me, saying that time would heal things.

  ‘I don’t know two people who deserve more to be together than Avanti and you.’

  Kamini Masi put her faith in Avanti’s spiritual disposition. It would eventually help her to resolve our relationship. Unlike Isha’s death drive, Avanti had another sort of desire, which trumped all others—she sought obedience to the eternal. Kamini Masi explained that from Avanti’s viewpoint, my love for Amaya or Isha had been a form of human bondage. For her, wisdom lay in recognizing that life is transitory and the little time that we have should be spent in seeking liberation from this bondage. Avanti did not take human passions too seriously and did not believe that marriage should be based on emotions.

  ‘So, where does it leave us—our marriage and our kids?’

  ‘She may have spiritual ambitions but she is also a woman and feels betrayed. She is aware of the nobility of your heart, messy and hidden as it might be. Once she gets over her jealousy—it will take time—she will return to you one day. She knows you better than you know yourself. Patience, dear boy.’

  I felt better after this conversation. If I knew Avanti, she must be engaged in an analysis of pros and cons, and had not yet arrived at her QED. Kamini Masi had mentioned that Avanti had blurted out ‘I hate him,’ and I had felt deeply hurt. I tried to make sense of Kamini Masi’s reassurances that deep down she loved me. How could one love and hate a person at the same time and I realized that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. Love and hate are discrete rather than opposite experiences. When two people call theirs a love–hate relationship, they are referring to different aspects of each experience. Didn’t Elizabeth and Darcy love and hate in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice? It felt almost therapeutic in recalling Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy, everyone’s favourite couple. They are both disdainful of and fascinated by each other. One person’s hatred increases the other’s enchantment. In the process, Austen seems to ridicule the whole notion of love at first sight, what Romeo and Juliet had experienced in Shakespeare’s play.

  In their disastrous first meeting, a sullen, arrogant and aristocratic Darcy is unforgivably rude to Elizabeth and her family, and attempts to sabotage the relationship of her sister Jane and his best friend. A promising start to a novel about a love–hate relationship! As the story progresses, each emulates the other’s thoughts and behaviour. They are attracted to each other; although they begin to love, they are not aware of it; and they fight to undo that love. Finally, Darcy proposes marriage but his proposal is so convoluted that instead of love, it inadvertently expresses hatred. In a hilarious but dramatic scene, Elizabeth is hurt, angry and vindictive, accusing him of not valuing her. She squashes his massive pride by rejecting his proposal. To win her over, he writes a long letter explaining himself. Although it is in a tone of wounded pride, it is a genuine love letter and the turning point of the story.

  Gradually, Elizabeth’s hatred is replaced by guilt and shame at her behaviour towards Darcy. ‘How despicably have I acted!’ He too confesses, ‘I was . . . allowed, encouraged, almost taught . . . to think meanly of all the rest of the world, to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own.’ Their earlier hatred was directed outwards, towards the other; now it is directed inwards, towards themselves. This reversal of direction causes a change in behaviour in both and leads them to love and be loved. As Elizabeth and Darcy go through their mating dance, their manners are transformed, especially Darcy’s, who becomes kinder and rescues the Bennet family from disgrace. As love replaces hatred, humility and caring supplant pride and prejudice.

  They say hate is the other side of love, and this is what Kamini Masi meant: if you haven’t really hated someone, you haven’t really loved them. The lesson for Avanti and me was to learn to turn our hatred inward rather than outward and convert it into love. This is no easy matter and the lovers in Pride and Prejudice take a good-sized novel to achieve it. I hoped that no matter how angry and hostile Avanti felt right now, she would get over it. Once she grasped that Amaya was gone, and Isha was dead, she might slowly begin to understand. And having done so, I hoped her hostility would fade.

  In any case, Avanti would have agreed enthusiastically with Jane Austen’s premise that love at first sight is not a good foundation for marriage. Gratitude and esteem are far better, and hence she would expect that Elizabeth would have a change of sentiment. This is the reason that Kamini Masi too felt that Avanti would come around.

  ~

  ‘When sorrows come,’ Shakespeare says, ‘they come not single spies, but in battalions.’ Two years after I had broken up with Amaya, I continued to live separately from Avanti and the girls. The ‘transit flat’ of the company was no longer available and I had shifted to a modest one-bedroom flat in the western suburb of Khar. Its chief disadvantage was that it was far away from Avanti and the girls, and this seemed to cut me off even more from them.

  I woke up on a cool morning in December to find myself staring at my face in the newspaper. After putting the kettle on the stove, I was fumbling with the Bombay Post when my eyes fell on the photograph in a popular gossip column which had an account of my affair with Amaya. Its only redeeming feature was that it reported accurately that our affair was over long ago. I was still trying to absorb the import of the news when the phone rang. It was Avanti. She said sarcastically that I was famous and asked if I had seen the photo and the news item. She mentioned that it was our older girl who had been the first to point it out. ‘Look, Ma, look who’s in the paper!’

  It was rare for her to phone me. It was I who would always call, usually to tell her when I would be coming to town to pick up the children after school and take them out. Although her manner was cold and matter-of-fact, I sensed she wanted to talk, especially about Isha. But the call was interrupted by a knock on the door. I asked if I could call her back.

  ‘No, don’t bother.’

  A few days later, I received a message from the chairman of the board of my company. He requested me to come for a special board meeting that he had called at his home the following evening. ‘What is it all about?’ I asked. I wanted to be prepared, just in case any papers were needed. He replied that he couldn’t discuss it on the phone; nor was it a subject that he wanted to talk about at the office. Hence, he was holding the meeting at his home. And no, I didn’t need to bring any papers.

  I arrived at his home to find the entire board assembled in his living room, speaking in hushed voices. As soon as I entered, the conversation stopped and from the grave faces around me, I felt perturbed. As soon as I sat down, the chairman cleared his throat nervously, and began to speak about a legal notice that he had received a few weeks ago. It was from a lawyer in Baroda that gave details of an offence I had committed based on Section 497 of the Indian Penal Code. I was puzzled and asked what it was all about. He explained that Section 497 related to adultery. I was frightened. The lawyer was acting on behalf of Amaya’s husband and stated that his client wanted me removed from my job, failing which they would be forced to file a First Information Report (FIR) with the Baroda Police.

  The chairman went on to say that he had ordered a confidential investigation and the report from the agency had come in a few days ago. There was clearly substance to the complaint, corroborated by the fact that my wife and I were living apart. The board had discussed the issue at some length over several sittings, and in all fairness, he added, the board was divided on what to do. On the one hand, there was a strong feeling that I was a ‘high performer’ and far too valuable to the company to let go. On the other, the company could not afford a scandal that might sully its name and impact its share price on the stock exchange. The report in the Bombay Post had alrea
dy been damaging to the reputation of the company. Hence, the company had decided not to ‘fire’ me but ‘suspend’ me for an indefinite period until ‘things cooled down’. They hoped that this action would satisfy the complainant and the issue would be resolved.

  Feelings of guilt and shame overwhelmed me, and I sat in stunned silence. I couldn’t think straight; my head was crowded with unhappy thoughts of Amaya which refused to leave. The chairman paused and everyone looked at me for a response. At the mention of ‘adultery’, I had already pronounced myself guilty. I didn’t bother to deny the charges, but I mentioned that the affair had been over long ago, although my wife and I continued to live separately. I looked at the legal member of the board and asked incoherently about the penalty under this offence. He replied matter-of-factly that Section 497 was punishable by up to five years in jail, but he hastened to add that hardly anyone had ever been convicted under this section.

  The chairman stated that my family could stay in the company flat while I was under suspension. They did not want me to attend office but I would be retained on a consulting relationship at half the salary and had to make myself available to give advice to company executives at a discreet, neutral location, which might as well be my anonymous flat in the suburbs.

  Terrified, I went over to see Ramu Mama.

  ‘Ah vengeance—the oldest and basest of human motivations!’ exclaimed Ramu Mama.

  Since Amaya’s husband was driven by revenge, I worried if it might escalate into a court case. Since I was completely out of touch with Amaya, I had no way of knowing how her husband had discovered our affair. I worried for her. Ramu Mama suggested we meet Indu Vakil, an old friend of ours who practised at the high court. She quickly hired a detective and made a discreet investigation. The probe revealed that Amaya’s husband had no real evidence but had hired a lawyer with a dodgy reputation for fabricating evidence and ‘fixing things’. He was behind the plant in the gossip column and the damaging photograph. Indu didn’t think he would take this further as the husband’s main objective was to hurt my career and he had already succeeded in doing so.