Kama

by Gurcharan Das

  ‘If it does go to court, Anand might help ensure a fair trial,’ Ramu Mama suggested. Anand’s life had taken a dramatic turn in the past year after Rajiv Gandhi became prime minister, succeeding his mother. They had been classmates in Doon School and remained friends. Over the years, they had met discreetly, and he had now been appointed adviser to the prime minister. Anand had just shifted to Delhi after taking a leave of absence from his company.

  This was the saddest period in my life. I yearned to live in my own home with Avanti and the girls, but as the months went by, I became resigned to the idea that it might never happen. I was the subject of gossip in Bombay’s commercial circles and so it was just as well that I lived in an anonymous flat in the suburbs. Since I was not welcome in the company’s office, the senior executives of the company would routinely come to consult me in my flat.

  The only redeeming moments during this gloomy period were my get-togethers with the children. Two afternoons a week I would meet them after school and take them out to a café at Churchgate. It was usually for cake and ice cream at Bombellis. Sometimes, they wanted samosas and pakoras instead, and we would go to Berry’s next door. Once in a while, they wanted mango ice cream sandwiches and we would hop across the street to K. Rustom’s. I would have preferred to take them to the Bombay Gym but it would have meant having to meet people, and this would fuel gossip, and I certainly didn’t need that.

  ‘Why don’t you come home to live with us, Papa?’ little Arushi asked one day.

  ‘Because Mummy won’t let him,’ replied Akhila sharply.

  ‘Why won’t she?’

  ‘I shall come back to live with you one day, my princess,’ I reassured her.

  I lived quietly and rarely went out. Kamini Masi and Ramu Mama tried to cheer me up, inviting me for this or that, but I usually made an excuse. Occasionally, I would visit them quietly in their home when Kamini Masi would fill me in on the gossip in the city about our friends. She said that Avanti was sometimes seen at plays and gallery openings. Once in a while, she would be seen in the company of Anand when he came to visit from Delhi. I was jealous, she could tell, and she tried to reassure me.

  ‘There is obviously nothing between them,’ she said.

  ‘How can you be so sure?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m not, but I also know Avanti.’

  ‘But he’s attractive and powerful. Any woman would . . .’

  ‘No, she loves only you.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘They’re just friends.’

  Despite what Kamini Masi said, I was certain that Avanti and Anand were lovers. I knew from the aborted seduction many years ago that Anand was one of the few men that Avanti found attractive.

  ‘Just remember, Amar, you’re a man of principle and you will prevail in the end. Even your love for Amaya was based on some sort of crazy principle.’

  ~

  Although Indu Vakil did not think the case would escalate and come to trial, she wanted to be prepared for the worst. While studying the law, she discovered that India still retained an archaic law on its books from early colonial days that made adultery a criminal offence. It was based on the patriarchal principle that the husband of an adulteress could be prosecuted because the wife was a husband’s ‘property’; a wife could not be, nor could the lover of an unmarried woman. Although the British had brought the law to India, they had got rid of it in the UK. In India too, the law had rarely been enforced.

  In going through the legal literature, Indu found that most Indians were opposed to the law, finding it patriarchal and discriminatory and out of touch with contemporary reality. Yet, it had lingered because vocal conservatives of all faiths continued to oppose its removal. In 1951, one Yusuf Aziz challenged its constitutionality on grounds of gender discrimination, but the Bombay High Court upheld it on the argument that there were other seeming discriminations in the law, especially on behalf of women. In 1971, the Fifth Law Commission recommended making the law gender-neutral and reducing the prison term from five to two years. The recommendation was ignored.

  In 2003, the Malimath Committee, constituted by the Union home ministry, declared: ‘There is no good reason for not meting out similar treatment to a wife who has sexual intercourse with a married man.’ It concluded that the law should penalize anyone who has sex with ‘the spouse of the other person’. The committee’s recommendation was met with outrage from the public and triggered the question: why should men or women, acting consensually, be treated as criminals? In 2006, the National Commission for Women argued that the rationale behind the law was ‘anachronistic and unpalatable’; at a time when the Supreme Court recognized the legitimacy of live-in relationships, adultery legislation had no relevance in the present day. Moreover, a law that treated a woman as a man’s property, like a cow or a car, was offensive. It recommended that adultery be decriminalized and be treated as a civil misdemeanour, not a crime.

  Laws against adultery have existed around the world but they have gradually disappeared with changing standards of sexual morality. Originally based on a general concern that husbands might be bringing up children that were not theirs, the laws applied only to married women. In recent times, the courts have argued that adultery laws offend human rights and the freedom to live one’s private life without interference from the state, especially when the relationships are voluntary and consensual. Europe and parts of Latin America have decriminalized adultery. But in the US, eighteen states still had adultery laws in their books in 2013, although they were rarely enforced. In Asia, South Korea was the last country to strike down its adultery law, in 2015, which had carried a two-year sentence and had been applied extensively—under it, 53,000 South Koreans had been charged and more than half of them had been sent to jail since the 1980s. In many Asian countries, a married woman could also be charged with adultery and a married man could be charged with ‘concubinage’—keeping a mistress. In Muslim countries under sharia law, adultery still carries very harsh penalties for women and is often used by men to dispatch unwanted wives.

  ~

  Listening to Indu’s legal talk about Amaya’s husband, I realized that vengeance is one of kama’s uglier faces. I could easily imagine Amaya’s husband plotting a quiet, cold revenge. The French say, ‘La vengeance est un plat qui se mange froid’—revenge is a dish best served cold. Why cold? I suppose because vengeance usually involves cool calculation. The thirst for revenge is a human instinct. If a good person suffers, the bad person should suffer even more—this notion is deeply embedded in the human psyche. This is why we like happy endings where the villain gets his due. Revenge thus fulfils a legitimate human need. It impels us to demand that people pay for the harm they do to others, and it thus brings about a degree of equilibrium to our minds, a sort of ‘balance of honour’.

  Human beings are, of course, ashamed to admit to such thoughts, and Indu, who had met Amaya’s husband as a part of her investigation, was not surprised that he talked of many things but was unwilling to confess to ‘hate’ or ‘revenge’. Generally speaking, those who are motivated by power, status and honour tend to incline towards revenge. Shakespeare’s Verona was one of these and suffered terribly from feuds and vengeful behaviour. Romeo and Juliet were victims of such a feud that went on from generation to generation. In India, revenge rebounds upon the avenger through the universal law of karma where you reap what you sow.

  One of the most distressing tales of sexual vengeance is Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Kreutzer Sonata. Unlike Manto’s subtle tale of kama’s violence, ‘The Red Raincoat’, Tolstoy’s is brutish. In it, a Russian aristocrat, Pozdnyshev, suspects his wife of having an affair with a handsome violinist. She is a pianist and the two sometimes play Beethoven’s famous ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ on violin and piano. The husband, troubled by jealousy, cuts short a business trip and comes home unexpectedly. It is late at night and he finds them together in the dining room, innocently discussing music. Convinced that she has deceived him, he k
ills his wife in a fit of jealous rage. There is no evidence that she was, in fact, unfaithful. Hence, he feels guilty but he convinces himself that the real crime is lust which turns all women into whores in the eyes of men.

  Pozdnyshev’s wife was much younger and he argues that he was drawn to her because of her girlish loveliness, in particular by a sexy sweater. She gave him five children but as the years went by he grew tired and irritated by family life. His wife lost her youthful charm and acquired the ‘look and smell of a large overripe peach’. Sexual passion, Pozdnyshev says, ‘No matter how it’s arranged, it is evil, a terrible evil against which one must struggle . . . The words of the Gospel that whosoever looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery relates not only to other men’s wives, but precisely—and above all—to one’s own wife.’ The answer to the riddle of kama lies in abstinence. Tolstoy’s protagonist says that there is an inherent inequality in every sexual act and hence it is a form of rape. Although women are naturally weaker, they are forced to level the playing field through their ‘sensuality’, which helps to erase some of the inequality with men, and lets them gain full control.

  The story is autobiographical, expressing Tolstoy’s feelings of deep repugnance for his own wife, Sophie. Tolstoy received many letters asking him to explain the novella’s meaning. In reply, he wrote an afterword in which he confirmed that he shared Pozdnyshev’s opinions. The afterword was called, ‘Epilogue to the Kreutzer Sonata’, in which he says:

  Let us stop believing that carnal love is high and noble and understand that any end worth our pursuit—in service of humanity, our homeland, science, art, let alone God—any end, so long as we may count it worth our pursuit, is not attained by joining ourselves to the objects of our carnal love in marriage or outside it

  Tolstoy tried to counter the criticism that abstinence would bring an end to the human race. He explained that celibacy was a noble ideal; he didn’t advocate that everyone should abstain from sex but one should try and strive for the ideal. As a Christian, he added that marriage was instituted by the Church, not by Christ. Love, sex and marriage were self-serving and hindered ‘the service of God’.

  Tolstoy’s ideas on celibacy and pacifism had a deep impact on Mahatma Gandhi in India but The Kreutzer Sonata created a scandal around the world. It was banned in Russia and Tolstoy struggled for years to get it out of the clutches of the censors. In America and Europe, the novella inspired a movement of celibacy in pursuit of Tolstoy’s Christian asceticism. The movement also propagated non-violence, vegetarianism, physical labour and a life of austerity. A young Romanian castrated himself after reading the story. Others were appalled. In 1890, Emile Zola, one of the most popular writers of the day, called the novella a ‘nightmare, born of a diseased imagination’. Towards the end of his life, Tolstoy began to doubt his ideas. He confessed in a letter in 1891: ‘There was something nasty in The Kreutzer Sonata . . . something bad about the motives that guided me in writing it.’ Sexual vengeance can have deeply tragic consequences and the actions of Amaya’s husband were benign in comparison, say, to the shocking horror of Medea’s revenge—she kills her children to punish her husband—in Euripides’s play.

  ~

  ‘What indeed,’ asks Walt Whitman, ‘is finally beautiful except death and love?’ The American poet’s words bring me back to the main theme of ‘love-death’, which defined this period in my life. Yes, I was miserable in having to live separately from Avanti and the children; I was mournful about sending Amaya away; I was angry at the revenge that Amaya’s vengeful husband had extracted. But what really defined this period of my life was the profound grief over Isha’s death. In the ancient world, poets sang about the sufferings of love but with an expectation of happiness at the end. Love only became an existential issue with the birth of romantic love in medieval Europe. ‘Love-death’ became an exaltation, a dramatic source of tragedy and ultimate beauty. This catastrophic quality of love turned into a new category of thought, particularly after the German composer Richard Wagner wrote a hauntingly beautiful opera, Tristan und Isolde, where the music expresses his romantic philosophy even more than the words uttered by any character.

  Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is sometimes thought to be an example of ‘love-death’, or liebestod, a German word made famous by Wagner’s opera, where at the end, Isolde sings movingly over Tristan’s dead body. Wagner brings to life a medieval legend of forbidden love and inevitable death, the story of two lovers who unknowingly drink a magic potion and ultimately die in each other’s arms. As a literary expression, liebestod (from the German liebe, ‘love’, and tod, ‘death’) signifies that the two lovers consummate their love in or after death. Wagner had understood that where kama itself is the essential motif, it creates a love that is fated to end in heart-rending loss and death.

  What exactly is the relationship between love and death? I seemed to get intimations when I watched Isha’s face at the hospital—alive at first and dead afterwards. But I only began to understand it after listening repeatedly to Birgit Nilsson sing Isolde’s disturbing aria on a CD. Even so, I was mostly confused and frustrated until a young friend sent me an explanation by the English philosopher Roger Scruton. Most of us know, Scruton says, that love is rooted in an animal need and mired in compromise and selfishness; but we also know that ‘through love we are capable of sacrifice . . . which nourishes our sense of the sacred . . . This sacrifice offers a kind of proof that we can transcend our mortal condition . . . we can become something higher than victims of our fate.’ Thus, ‘love-death’ is a triumph over our day-to-day mundane life, a final proof of our freedom. Isolde’s death is ‘a renewal . . . a dramatic proof that love can be fulfilled in death, when death is chosen, and this fulfilment is a genuine redemption’. In this way, Wagner found significance in the sacred qualities of human passion, giving fresh meaning to ‘redemption’.

  Like Shakespeare, Wagner’s ambition was to uncover the nature of tragedy within the human heart. But he sought to achieve it not through plot but by evoking inner states through music. Tristan and Isolde do not act; they feel. German Romantics like Wagner went back to Greek tragedy to show that what makes human beings different from animals is not reason, as the Greeks thought, but their capacity for romantic love. Wagner was deeply influenced by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, whose ‘categorical imperative’ commands us never to treat a human being as a means but always as an end. This moral notion reinforced in Wagner’s mind the fundamental idea of romantic love, through which woman becomes a ‘subject’ unlike the ‘object’ of earlier erotic love. Although human beings are subject to natural laws, they are also self-conscious and can transcend their fate through moral choices. Thus, Kant provides a philosophical foundation for romantic love, giving women full human agency in a patriarchal world.

  Wagner transforms the old medieval Tristan legend into an existential fable by choosing one emotional conflict in each act. In Act One, both Tristan and Isolde are torn by the struggle between kama and dharma—what they owe to themselves and what they owe to others; whether to be true to their own integrity or to society’s honour. Individual happiness and social responsibility are irreconcilable. In Act Three, the conflict is between life and death, what Freud called ‘eros’ and ‘thanatos’. Freud would have also termed Tristan and Isolde’s yearning as an attempt to recreate our first state of consciousness—the ‘oceanic state’—when as babies we do not feel separate from our mothers. As Tristan lies dying in the end, he longs for Isolde to lose herself in an infinity of love. And Isolde in the liebestod evokes the primordial awareness of the baby’s isolation as the lovers try to escape the limitations of the individual ego and the weight of self-consciousness through death. Isolde’s last words are, ‘unconscious, utmost bliss!’

  Wagner called his ending a ‘transfiguration’ in order to express the profound irony that the lovers have found their salvation through sin. Death here is not the ending of life but moksha, a ‘liberation’, a transiti
on to a higher state of being. The relentless musical rhythms release a flood of erotic energy, fusing the sexual with the sacred. Wagner devotees call Isolde’s transfiguration the most spiritual moment in all of western drama. I could relate to the music of the liebestod—it reminded me of the ending of the Gitagovinda, of the mystical union of Radha and Krishna, who also discovered the soul through the body.

  This might be one of the reasons why romantic love was born in India in the form of bhakti, ‘divine love’. The Vaishnava bhaktas rejected the goal of moksha in favour of devotional love. Whereas the concept of moksha conjures fear, bhakti is comforting and joyful. In the Gitagovinda, when Radha and Krishna are together, there is sambhoga, ‘love in enjoyment’. When they are separated, they use the metaphor of ‘love-death’. Radha’s friend tells Krishna that only he can save her from the separation of death. When separated from Radha, Krishna ‘seems to die’. The same sentiment pervades other mystical traditions. In Arab mystical poetry, Ibn-al-Farid says, ‘Death through love is life; whoever does not die of his love is unable to live by it.’ Similarly, Saint John of the Cross says he dies because he does not die, that only in the dying of love, losing himself in union with God will he be able to cry out, ‘Now I live!’

  In a programme note, Wagner explained this moment: ‘What Fate divided in life now springs into transfigured life in death.’ Listening to Wagner’s ‘love-death’ music helped me to make some sort of sense of what the doctor had said about Isha’s ‘will to die’. When I was visiting the hospital, I too had a fleeting experience of the sacred, especially when I saw Isha’s eyes full of life at one moment and inert the next. Even though love had been unkind to Isha, she had scorned death for the sake of her belief in love. Her death was not futile but an assertion of her existence.