A Book of Memory

by Sudhir Kakar

  My only memory of the two years of college that stands out among an otherwise pleasant but undistinguished medley of scenes of voraciously consuming Hindi novels (my favourites were Upendranath Ashk and Jainendra Kumar) during the lazy days of college vacations, swimming or playing tennis at the Jaipur Club in the evenings and being with friends and family, is a momentous physical event: the advent, one summer afternoon—I don’t know how else to say it without sounding clinical, vulgar or coy—of sexuality made material.

  Like many boys growing up in the villages and small towns of India in the 1950s, I had picked up and believed the traditional Indian lore surrounding masturbation. Masturbation was more than just a waste of semen, the material form of vital energy. Food is converted into semen in a thirty-day period by successive transformations (and refinements) through blood, flesh, fat, bone and marrow till semen is distilled—forty drops of blood producing one drop of semen. Each ejaculation involves a loss of half an ounce of semen, which is equivalent to the vitality produced by sixty pounds of food. Longevity, creativity, physical and mental vitality are enhanced by the conservation of semen; memory, will power, physical stamina, good eyesight and many other virtues depend upon abstaining from masturbation when young. Even at the beginning of the twenty-first century, television gurus, like Asaram Bapu, who command audiences in tens of millions, extol the glories of preserving semen: ‘This seed [semen] is marrow to your bones, food to your brains, oil to your joints and sweetness to your breath and if you are a man, you should never lose a drop of it till you are thirty years of age and then only for the purpose of having a child which shall be blessed by heaven.’3 I had no reason to doubt these ancient verities.

  Masturbation, then, would have meant cataclysmic depletion for someone who nursed ambitions of sporting glory; I had added tennis and badminton to my other sporting activities and had recently become the state champion in table tennis. Actually, it was not till I was almost eighteen and living in Ahmedabad with my aunt Kamla, when one afternoon, gripped by an unbearable sexual excitement to which I will come later in this chapter, I first stepped into the forbidden territory of hastamaithun—hand intercourse, and (in Nabakov’s words) ‘dissolved in a puddle of pleasure’.4 Nature, of course, was no respecter of cultural traditions and it was on a hot day in May or June 1953, at the age of fifteen, that I suddenly awoke from my afternoon siesta with a clammy pyjama rubbing against the inside of my thigh, and the deeply satisfying but equally disturbing feeling of having entered manhood. These feelings were immediately succeeded by a hot flush of shame. I rushed to the bathroom, thankful that my parents and my sister were still asleep. I took off the pyjama where the telltale portion of the cloth had become stiff as canvas, as if overstarched, and hid the pyjama under a pile of washing. I knew my mother would find it on Sunday, the day when the washerman came to take away soiled clothes for washing and ironing. I could see the dhobi squatting on the floor, as he always did, the clothes heaped in front of him. Under the watchful eyes of my mother, he would go through the pockets of each pair of trousers and shirt to make sure they were empty. He would then begin counting the clothes in each category while my mother noted down the figures in her dhobi register. I could hear the dhobi say, ‘8 men’s underwear, 5 petticoats, 4 shirts, 6 bedsheets, 6 pillowcases, one with a tear, 6 pyjamas, one with semen stain’. I could see my mother stop writing and look up in shocked disbelief.

  I hoped the stain would either be not seen by her or miraculously disappear before Sunday. Whatever evidence to the contrary, the infantile part of my conscience, like that of most people, was convinced that parents not only did not have sex but were ignorant about the facts of life. The sign of my sexual maturity, like that of my sister’s first period, would be an assault on their innocence that would make them recoil in disgust. It did not mitigate my culpability that this was, strictly speaking, not a nocturnal emission, but an afternoon disaster. But since my mother did not hint at her knowledge even when starched pyjamas began to happen with some regularity, I soon became comfortable with and even looked forward to these emissions that were accompanied by such pleasurable dreams. The dramatis personae of the dreams were, of course, banished from my awareness the instant I opened my eyes. It also helped that the dreams and their climaxes occurred only in early mornings, a consequence of the fact that the level of sexual hormones in the bloodstream is highest at this time of the day, and I could immediately go to the bathroom without exciting comment. I did wonder for a while, though, whether I was suffering from what Ayurveda calls svapnadosh—dream fault, an illness peculiar to young men with an excess of kama or desire coursing through their bodies—but was reassured by other boys that the frequency of my clammy dissolving was normal.

  When I did not stand first in the university in my Intermediate Science examinations, as my father expected, but occupied a ‘lowly’ sixth position, my father’s disappointment was palpable. His plans for me envisaged my going to study history at the prestigious St. Stephen’s College in Delhi. After a master’s degree in the subject, I would take the nationwide civil services examination and follow in my father’s footsteps into the higher echelons of Indian bureaucracy. Now, with these results, he doubted whether I had the ability to pass the gruelling civil service examinations or even be admitted to the college in Delhi.

  I remember we were in Kashmir at the time for a family vacation and staying with one of my grand-uncles in Srinagar. Family consultations, to which I was not invited, took place. With the ruling out of a career in the civil service, there were only two options that were open to a middle class boy: engineering or medicine. The third option, joining the Armed Forces, was reserved for those who came from military families or were considered intellectually below par. ‘Don’t worry, he can always join the army,’ was a consolation offered to parents of a son bemoaning their child’s unsatisfactory academic performance. Since I had the tendency to faint at the sight of blood, medicine was ruled out, to the regret of my surgeon-grandfather. The matter was clinched when Kamla not only offered to help me get admission to the engineering college in Ahmedabad but also proposed that I stay with her during the three years of my study. The idea that I would not be living alone in a students’ hostel in some unknown town or city was a huge relief to my parents.

  With full confidence in the family’s, especially my father’s, dedication to the cause of my well-being, I had never given serious thought to my future. I would go along with whatever the family decided was good for me. Assertion of something called ‘individuality’ or the idea of generational conflict, of the young rebelling against the authority of the old, were not part of Indian imagination at the time. Fifty years later, although the possible existence of a generational tension is now acknowledged, the idea of an inevitable generational conflict is still viewed as an outlandish Western import, which it might well be, another instance of a Western cultural assumption masquerading as a psychological universal.

  My only reaction to the profession chosen for me was in a letter to my father during the first year in Ahmedabad. ‘As regarding the college, I am quite satisfied by it. I am not particularly interested in engineering studies though I try my best to take an interest in them . . . The subject I am most interested in is psychology. I can even read books on it in my spare time.’ More a premonition than a protest, I doubt whether my father even registered the muted misgiving.

  As I begin to write Kamla’s story, I have before me two vellum-covered DIN 3 notebooks. Their thick off-white pages are covered with her distinctive handwriting that did not noticeably change over the course of her life. The notebooks are her diaries from June 1940 to May 1941 which I discovered in her papers after her death. In these pages, Kamla is eighteen and engaged to be married to Khem Chowdhry who, after his return from England, has recently joined the Indian Civil Service and is thus considered a great catch by the family. The notebooks, one with a blue and the other with a red cover, are a present from Khem who wants ‘dearest Kamla’ to kee
p a record of her life. From the dedication, I can sense that Khem is a serious young man who believes in the virtues of discipline and self-cultivation.

  As I riffle through the diary, I cannot help smiling as I encounter the full range of emotions of a young girl’s first love, her awed discovery of love’s many riches: its solemn devotion as much as its erotic excitement, its opening not only of the body but also of the soul to another person.

  Had a lovely night with Khem in the lawn, so lovely that it was nearly 2 a.m. before I let him go . . . He is always the first one to realize the late hour and tear himself away. I wish he weren’t so rational and full of common sense at times. Was it unladylike of me to insist on his staying so long? But I can’t help it. I love him so much . . . Well, I must stop my dear Khem, all my thoughts are full of you and will ever be. I have only one devotion left and that is for you.

  But the moments in which the world vanishes and time stops in ‘blissful ecstasy’ as they lie (fully clothed) in each other’s arms are rare. Since Khem is posted in Chakwal in the north of Punjab, 300 miles from Lahore, the courtship proceeds mostly through letters. Whenever Khem comes to Lahore or visits the family on their holidays in Kashmir, my grandparents do not really approve of the engaged couple spending time together alone. But since Khem is such a desirable son-in-law, they grudgingly tolerate their daughter going for walks or staying up late with him without a chaperone hovering in the background. That is, as long as the couple is careful not to excite comment. Khem is a ‘modern’ man and they too have aspired to a similar modernity in the upbringing of their daughters. In this modernity, that is still being negotiated by a vast number of Indians who are entering the emerging middle class, the girl has a Western-style education, is comfortable in social interactions with men who are not members of the family, yet follows a strict Indian moral code that does not permit sexual expression before marriage. The Indian modernity, in the process of definition since three-quarters of a century, is a search for that elusive combination of Western and Indian attitudes and values. One reason why Khem had selected Kamla as a partner was not because she was college educated and could ride and knew ballroom dancing—necessary accomplishments for the future wife of a ‘sahib’ but rare for an upper middle class girl from Punjab—but that she had studied at Santiniketan. This was the famous educational institution in rural Bengal set up by an Indian icon and Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore to chart the contours of precisely such an Indian modernity. In Santiniketan, Kamla had learnt to play the sitar and became a keen student of Indian classical dancing. Kamla’s lament at one place in her diary that she cannot express the whole range of her feelings in her inadequate English, the only language she can write in is, of course, a part of the price paid for this hybrid modernity.

  To return to the young girl’s diary where she movingly delineates universal expressions of passionate love as if they are being discovered afresh as, indeed, they are. In love’s idealizing fervour, which recognizes only the spontaneity of religious passion as its equal, the beloved is the most intelligent and noble of men. ‘In Khem I have found everything that I dreamed about in my companion and something more. I love him and admire him.’ In the perennial way of lovers, she seeks to submit to the beloved, adjust her own character by main force to that of the beloved. ‘He has a sincere and passionate desire for me to increase and improve and I must do it for my own self and for his self . . . I must continue dancing, practise more and still more on my sitar, tomorrow I’ll start learning cooking too which is most essential.’

  She marvels at the changes taking place in her; her stubbornness has changed to docility, haughtiness to submission. But this willing depletion of her self inevitably leads to periods of self-doubt, even masochistic despair.

  I am only a normal person with ordinary capabilities. Does he love me or not? Will he repent his decision?

  …

  I am sure he loves me. I will make myself be loved by him. Unless I give him a chance to offend he can’t get angry.

  …

  I often dread my future life, will I be able to make him happy, will I be able to come to his standards of intellect.

  Khem takes what is happening to her for granted, as if he has a right to annex the territory she has willingly ceded. Whenever she feels his letters lack the love she deserves, that they are only lectures, ‘sermons’ on self-improvement, her individuality reasserts itself and she displays a capacity of looking at him, herself and their love with an objectivity one does not normally associate with an eighteen-year-old middle class Indian girl in the 1940s. And if some of her observations on women sound banal that is only because they are truths that have been articulated so many times by women all over the world before and after her.

  These moods of his. Although I love him I must say he is very selfish and self-centred . . . A woman does not fear her death nor the death of her lover but the dying of her love.

  …

  Women, we have less vanity and more pity. Our instinct is on the whole a safer guide through life than our intelligence. Love means to a woman far more than it means to a man, it means everything. Men are so selfish by nature.

  …

  We girls are not free, from one domination we go to another, never allowed to express [our] own ideas and ambitions. They eventually die within . . . Mere puppets, clay that can be molded in any form. All our education is aimed at one point, to make a good housewife.

  …

  We do not claim our rights. If they are given to us, we are pleased and think them as favours.

  She is aware that she is ambitious—‘I have so many different ambitions. Will any of them reach somewhere? I have hopes for the future. I think I will get somewhere in life’—and already mourns the impending loss of her ambitions with marriage. ‘Dancing I am still very fond of and will always be. It has been such a passion with me but no one realizes it. K. wants me to continue but ultimately I’ll have to give it up. If I have a daughter I’ll teach her from the very beginning.’

  The claims of individuality are quickly denied by renewed pledges to dedicate her life to him and to her love, as wrenching remorse follows phases of inner rebellion and doubt. ‘I wish I were never in love if this is what love is,’ she often cries in the pages of her diary. I am filled with an aching tenderness as I read this diary entry. All lovers weep, I would have liked to console her, passionate love has been cursed as an affliction as often as its ecstasies have been celebrated.

  Kamla has enough insight into herself to recognize that some of her pain comes from her own nature. ‘What a palmist said about my nature is very true—I am of a very loving disposition but I will never be satisfied with the amount of love given to me. I always will feel that I should have more, that the response is not equal in the quantity and intensity of love I give.’ (‘I wish you had remembered this insight of your eighteen-year-old self when you became cold to me towards the end of your life,’ I want to say to her as I turn the page of the diary.)

  In the beginning of September, Kamla decides that she would like to postpone the marriage date, fixed for October 1940, to February of next year. She would like to go back to Shantiniketan for a few months to become more accomplished in her music and dance. Khem strongly backs her resolve in face of my grandfather’s reservations. I suspect that the return to Shantiniketan, where she had discovered her self as a person with ambitions and talents, hides her panic at the approaching marriage and the threat it would constitute to her budding individuality and sense of purpose.

  Once in Shantiniketan, she pines for Khem’s letters but is also proud that alone among her other five room-mates, she has been marked by a great love (and its impending consummation), a state which her friends long for in their imaginations but have not known in reality. One of these friends, perhaps the young woman she is closest to, is Mrinalini Swaminathan, who is destined to play a crucial role in her life. Three years older, Mrinal is outgoing and self-confident. She has been to school i
n Switzerland, has toured extensively in Europe and the US and is a talented Kathakali and Bharatanatyam dancer. Kamla is envious of her friend. ‘I hope one day I am a very good dancer. I want it to be so much. Mrinal is very good—firstly she has a nice figure, then she has long arms and there is something in it which is attractive . . . she thinks a lot of her dancing but does it very well too.’ Envy clouds vision when one looks at the admirable qualities of the envied person, but it also brings to bear a magnifying glass on her flaws. Kamla is benign in her assessment of her other room-mates but of Mrinal she writes,

  Mrinal has a high opinion about herself and she is so insistent about it that she forces that opinion on you. She dominates merely on the strength of her superior knowledge of English and money. She has some talents. But look at the facilities she has had, the opportunities. With ambition and these circumstances one can reach high the steps of fame and love comes with it, by itself. How I wish even now I had these opportunities. Let me be something, some day but very very soon.