In Romeo and Juliet, love and death converge, especially when Shakespeare plays with the double meaning of death as ‘extinction’ and ‘sexual ecstasy’, or le petit morte, ‘little death’. With elaborate images of death and foreboding that pervade even the most joyful scenes, the lovers seem to be searching for their own destruction—rushing into death for death’s sake. I only comprehended Romeo and Juliet’s ritual sacrifice after seeing Wagner’s opera. From the beginning, Shakespeare’s lovers isolate themselves from society and its norms; their love will not bring domestic happiness: no child-rearing; no fulfilled old age. It is a love without a future but they cannot renounce it either. In the end, they defy death and its dominion. Unpolluted by the world’s transactions, they are purified by their deaths. Through their sacrifice, they restore our belief in our human potential. Their deaths are purely a human achievement, not transcendental—no miracles, no supernatural powers, no transubstantiation. Their ‘redemption’ once again is a means for regaining the sacred in the world.
Wagner was also influenced in his thinking by the German philosopher Schopenhauer, who, in turn, was inspired by the Upanishads. These metaphysical speculations, he believed, had been the solace of his life and would be his consolation at his death. The Upanishads use the word ‘atman’, meaning both the individual and the cosmic soul. Salvation comes to the soul with the loss of its individuality and its escape from the phenomenal world into the brahman; into the ‘Welt-Atems Wehendem All’, as Isolde says in Wagner’s opera. Extraordinary, that a collection of Hindu philosophical texts from circa 800–500 BCE, which were questioning the old Vedic order, should have inspired Wagner to link love and death. For Tristan’s dialogues with Isolde, Wagner derived much Vedic imagery from the mental experiments of the Upanishads.
Indeed, there is something tragic and consoling about the Upanishadic dialogues as they describe human destiny. In reflecting on man’s search for life’s meaning, they conclude that kama is an obstacle. They seek liberation from the attachments of desire through meditation, leading to a merger of the individual atman with the cosmic atman. Wagner did not accept this kama pessimism of the Upanishads and of Schopenhauer. Instead of renouncing kama, he looked to the more optimistic strand of the Hindu tradition, which had elevated kama to a goal of life. The goal of the lovers is also liberation from human bondage in Wagner’s opera; it comes from the bliss of merging into an oceanic brahman through death. Their heroism lies not in renouncing futile passion but in refusing to renounce it. In sacrificing their lives for kama, they bring the audience in the presence of the sacredness of love.
~
During this painful period in my life, I was tempted to turn away altogether from kama. The sensible answer was never to fall in love again. I yearned to retreat into a cave in the Himalayas, see no one, live frugally and throw myself into an austere life of study and meditation. I read stories of yogis and ascetics, who renounced the world to escape earthly distractions, made vows of chastity and spent their lives in the forest or the desert. Some of them endured life in caves for forty or fifty years, living only off roots and berries, never talking to or seeing other human beings. The very austerity of the hermit’s forest retreat seemed to beckon:
A mattress of earth for a bed,
arms of creepers for pillows,
the sky for a canopy,
pleasant winds for a fan and
the moon for a shining lamp;
with resignation as his woman
and non-attachment for joy,
tranquil and easeful, like a king
the ash-smeared hermit sleeps.
I dithered, however. Like Bhartrihari, I vacillated between the secluded life of the hermit and my bittersweet existence in the city. I was in a state of conflict. Life was beautiful during my best moments with Avanti, Amaya and Isha. Yet, the same beauty turned ugly when things went wrong. All this was very painful to a person who tended to find the world mostly attractive. I couldn’t imagine myself seriously withering away in the isolation of a forest retreat despite my despondent situation. I sensed the absurdity of my position—it was the dilemma of a deluded man considering abandoning the world of his delusion.
Bhartrihari faced a similar dilemma when he discovered the infidelity of his wife. He asked:
Should I settle on some sacred river’s bank
to practise austerities?
Or should I be the gentleman and wait
upon women of high qualities?
Should I perhaps drink from scriptures’ streams
or maybe taste the nectar of vibrant poetry?
How can I decide which to do when life
is here only for the twinkling of an eye?
Bhartrihari considers the relative merits of the four ends of life: should he choose passion (kama) or worldly success (artha) or virtue (dharma) or go to the forest and try and liberate (moksha) himself from these goals? All three possibilities had something to commend them but they were all deficient. Desire for women and wealth, he feels, breeds anxiety; virtue is rare and of little avail either in the world or the forest. Even the tranquillity of moksha is vulnerable to sensuous beauty.
In my confusion, I oscillated between one extreme and the other, realizing fully well that none of life’s possibilities are what they seem. Then I found an unusual answer in the Simhasana Dvatrimshika, in which an ascetic is assailed by similar doubts. Unlike Bhartrihari, however, he is able to resolve them. He feels acutely the absence of pleasure in his life and argues with himself: ‘It is a fool’s idea that joys of the senses must be avoided just because they also bring pain. It is like throwing away rice, rich with fine white kernels, just because it is mixed with some particles of husk.’ So, he affirms that ‘the best thing of all is a gazelle-eyed woman’.
12
THOSE WERE THE DAYS
Each stage of life has a love of its own
Those friends are long gone.
Those green shady trees are now barren stumps.
Our youth is past.
Love has been uprooted forever.
—Gaha Sattasai
Avanti learnt about Isha’s death from a short obituary that was tucked away in a corner on page five of the Bombay Post. It was brief, formal and poorly written, stating the bald facts of her life, drafted probably by an unthinking clerk from one of her family’s businesses. I was still trying to cope with the finality of her death when the phone rang. It was Avanti. She asked if I had seen Isha in the hospital. Had she been sick? How had she died? I told her whatever I knew.
‘Did she recognize you?’
‘Yes.’
There was a long pause.
‘So, how did she die?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Didn’t the doctor tell you?’
‘No.’
‘Why, didn’t you ask?’
‘He said something about her giving up the desire to live. I know what you are thinking—no, it wasn’t suicide.’ But I didn’t elaborate on his theory of the death drive.
‘Was her husband there?
‘No.’
‘And no one from her family or any of her friends?’
‘I don’t know but I didn’t recognize anyone.’
‘It’s strange. I wonder why she asked for you after all these years. And you had had no news of her in recent months?’
There was another silent pause. She asked if I was going to Delhi for Isha’s chautha?
‘Chautha?’
‘Yes, it’s right here in the paper—you silly boy. It says the ashes will be immersed in the river on the fourth day after the chautha ceremony.’
Did I hear her correctly? It had been years since she had called me ‘silly boy’. My spirits rose and I wondered if it meant anything. I tried to picture Avanti’s oval face and rounded body at the other end. It was rare for her to phone me.
‘Should I go, what do you think?’
‘You must go!’ she said emphatically. ‘You are probably the only one w
ho really loved her.’
‘What about you—do you want to come?’
‘She was your friend, not mine,’ she said sharply.
There was an uncomfortable pause.
‘Do you think her husband will be there?’ Avanti asked.
Both of us knew about Isha and Vikram Suri’s divorce. Since she had hoped to marry Anand, she had insisted on it. Poor man, his humiliation had been complete when Isha had insisted on flaunting her relationship with Anand publicly. In the end, he had got disgusted with his wife’s promiscuity and had left the city. While I was feeling sorry for him, an uncomfortable thought crossed my mind. How much did her husband know about us—about Isha and me? When it came to me, Isha had been surprisingly discreet, and so I was never sure how much he knew.
‘Did you read about him recently?’ I asked Avanti.
She hadn’t. I told her about a recent complimentary article about him in Business Times, assessing his legacy as one of the great traders on Bombay’s stock market. It had called him a ‘legend’ and mentioned that he was still fondly remembered on Dalal Street. Isha, ironically, had never appreciated her husband, nor even understood what he actually did. I found it paradoxical that she had been married to a man who was admired by so many and unloved by her. When Anand finally split from her, Isha also left Bombay and the only time we saw her was briefly at our wedding. The overgenerous present, the necklace for Avanti, was perhaps an act of contrition. I couldn’t be sure but it was perhaps her way to apologize for the years of pain that she had brought me; an atonement of sorts. After that she had drifted with different men but never seemed to have found a steady relationship.
Soon after Avanti hung up, the phone rang again. It was a crisp, professional voice from a solicitor’s firm informing me that they had posted a letter requesting me to come to Delhi for the reading of Isha’s will. They required my presence as I had been named the executor. It would take place at the house right after the chautha, he added. I didn’t know the person at the other end but I did recognize the firm’s name. In the old days, Isha used to complain about them—about having to sign papers all the time.
‘Please do come,’ he said politely and hung up.
I was puzzled and confused. I had been in two minds about attending Isha’s chautha, but this decided it. And so, I found myself spreading my bedding that night in the sleeper compartment on the Rajdhani train to Delhi. Instead of Isha’s death, I lay thinking about Avanti and the endearment, ‘silly boy’, which she had uttered for the first time since we had separated.
~
The past two years of living alone, quietly and in anonymity had made me stoical. Facing constant disappointments—both in trying to reconcile with Avanti and with my company—I had begun to feel a bit like Lampedusa’s tragic hero in one of my favourite novels, The Leopard. As he watches his handsome nephew dance with his beautiful fiancée at a grand ball, he is aware that they will not find happiness together because ‘marriage is a year of fire and thirty years of ashes’. Still, as they dance, he finds the sight charming and magnificent. In each other’s arms in the ballroom, they make the most moving couple on earth—who could resist the sight of two young persons deeply in love, dancing as though in the clouds, unaware of each other’s defects, oblivious to the warnings of fate, deceiving themselves into believing that the course of their lives would be as shiny as the ballroom floor. Heady from the scent of her hair, he murmurs sweet nothings into her ears as they tenderly clasp their bodies that are destined to die.
Set in nineteenth-century Sicily, the novel recounts the impending doom of the old order caught in the midst of civil war and revolution. In the bleak light of Lampedusa’s vision of mortality and decay, experience counts for nothing. The young, with their brief illusions, will make the same mistakes as the old. Happiness is fleeting and it offers little consolation. The aristocratic hero has a mature and wise outlook, however, which is able to see life as a whole. But this is of little comfort because he cannot do anything about it. The Leopard is the only novel I know where the film (by Luchino Visconti, with Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale starring in it) was almost as good as the book.
In my own grim circumstances, I tried a different tack. Like a good Hindu, I attempted to make a genuine effort to control my desires. It had been Avanti who had first suggested the idea many years ago after one of her weekend visits to the ashram. But to me it seemed as though I was completing an unfinished project of my father’s and his father’s before him. They had both believed that a man becomes truly free when he attains mastery over himself. In completing an unfinished job, it felt as though there was an impersonal karma that was being passed from father to son. In my case, it was ironical, for it tended to make me smug and self-satisfied.
It is in the Bhagavad Gita that Krishna famously prescribes his recipe of acting without desire. It isn’t easy, for ‘man is made of desire’, according to the Upanishads. Moreover, kama is the primeval force, ‘the firstborn’, according to the creation verse in the Rig Veda. When desire turns into intention, and intention into determination, then action ensues, and it is action that defines a human being. Thus, desire is at the very root of being human. So, why does Krishna advise us to act desirelessly?
In a remarkable verse in Book XIV of the Mahabharata, ‘Kamagita’, ‘song of desire’, Krishna admits that kama is indeed very powerful:
Men do not praise souls driven by desire,
Yet, in this world, there is no activity which is free from desire.
In fact, kama is indestructible, adds Krishna. If I control my desire for wealth and become philanthropic, my desire transforms into an aspiration for reputation or for heaven; if I renounce the world, my desire will reappear as a spiritual longing for moksha. This means that desires undergo changes, moving sometimes from lower to higher ones. The lower ones deal with sensory objects while the higher desires involve intelligence, art and ethics. The noblest desire I have encountered is in Mahayana Buddhism—the Bodhisattva’s compassionate desire to free all living creatures from suffering.
In pursuit of Krishna’s advice to perform desirelessly, some of us make another mistake. We try and stop desiring. Krishna doesn’t mean that one should lose the will to act; what he means by ‘desireless action’ is to renounce the fruits or the personal rewards of action. This is called vairagya, ‘detachment’—to act without caring about who gets the credit. This too seemed to me almost impossible. Can one really curb one’s fundamental, egoistic desires and still remain human? After two years of hopeless experimenting, I concluded that it was almost as utopian as Marx’s ideal of equality. Moreover, I valued the memory of my attachments precisely because they evoked past pleasure and new longings.
Yet, to be civilized is to learn to strike a balance between overindulgence and the complete repression of one’s desires. I ask myself where I should have drawn the line when it came to Isha, Avanti and Amaya. They had brought colossal pain but also the best moments of my life, making it enormously worthwhile. I am bitterly aware that I could have saved Avanti a great suffering had I not succumbed to Amaya. Yet, I have a niggling suspicion that by curbing my desire for Amaya, I would have lived a lie, pretending that my desire did not exist when I really craved for her. I would have had to fake virtue.
Though love is neither painless nor wise, it is impossible to ignore. It is as inevitable as it is unreasonable and it is foolish to deny it. It doesn’t make sense to escape to the jungles, like Bhartrihari, and live on roots and berries. It takes far greater courage to face the adversities of love. The renouncer’s life demands sacrifices but it strikes me as cowardly to run away. At the heart of vairagya is a fear of disappointing oneself before someone else does. The yogi is afraid of loving or of being loved. Living with disappointment takes far greater endurance. True, the yogi’s existence in the Himalayas may be free of emotional turmoil, but he has almost denied a fundamental, albeit painful, aspect of being human.
They say that �
��white lies’ are at the heart of civilization. A certain amount of hypocrisy is necessary to control our impulse to tell people what we really think of them—that they are boring, greedy, loud-mouthed, unreliable and self-centred. Of course, by criticizing others, one runs the risk of being branded a pretentious moralizer, and the Bhagavad Gita is especially harsh on hypocrites who pretend to observe Vedic rituals in order to show off their pious natures. The fact is that our external behaviour (no matter how duplicitous) tends to influence our inner natures. All cultures agree on the importance of a certain amount of self-control of the senses for civilized living. This is why we are repeatedly reminded that dharma is needed to control kama. What white lies are to our outer persona, virtue or dharma is to our inner persona, and both tend to reinforce each other.
Pliny the Elder, the Roman writer, visited India and wrote his famous Natural History in 78 ACE. In it, he proposed that the elephant was the perfect symbol of self-control and sexual propriety, crediting the pachyderm with every possible virtue: sense of honour, righteousness, conscientiousness, and above all, a distinct sense of shame: ‘Out of shame elephants copulate only in hidden places . . . Afterwards they bathe in a river. Nor is there any adultery among them, nor cruel battles for the females.’
~
I arrived early at the chautha. My mother was keen to attend even though the Malik family was in terminal decline. It was a social occasion and my mother wasn’t going to be denied a chance to be seen in high society. She had persuaded my father to accompany her and so the three of us took our seats in a middle row under a large canopy erected on the sprawling lawns of 23 Prithviraj Road. I spotted Vikram Suri in a corner, looking hesitant and insecure, and I went over to greet him. He was relieved to have someone to talk to and asked me to sit on the empty chair beside him. I had not seen him all these years and it was difficult to know where to begin. Although Isha had betrayed him time and again, I could tell that he was in silent grief. He probably still loved her even though she was not deserving of it.
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