A Book of Memory

by Sudhir Kakar

  Surprised by the depth of my feeling yet reluctant to let me take a step that he believed would ruin my life, my father finally offered me the compromise solution of studying industrial management, a compromise, so to speak, between engineering and philosophy. There was no separate discipline of management in Germany at the time and the courses pertaining to management—economics, statistics, accounting, organizations—were part of what Germans called Betriebswirtschaftlehre, which can be translated both as business economics and industrial management. In the hope that I could still convince my father to change his mind before the academic year started in October, I reluctantly agreed to apply for admission to the industrial management course.

  All hell broke loose when I informed my parents that I had been admitted to Munich University to study physics. I received a telegram in which the message ‘cease and desist’ could not be clearer. The telegram was followed by letters to which I reacted with hurt and unconcealed bitterness.

  All the exact figures about the money spent on me in Ahmedabad, Calcutta & Germany were most impressive. But there was no need to rub in the point of my complete financial dependence. I had never dreamed of doing physics against your wishes. I had only tried to convince you, that in spite of any misgivings you might have the confidence in me that I know what is the best for me but apparently it was too much to expect. Still you could have removed the velvet glove a little more subtly. Anyway there is no need to write to the University Registrar. I have [also] got admission in Industrial Administration & if you want me to do that, I’ll do that or if you prefer me to come back as you wrote I’ll do that also. From now on I’ll be like a trained monkey & if I get a good job with your help you’ll be able to bask in people’s approval which I hope will compensate a little for all the figures you have given . . .

  My father must have been upset at the appearance of a crack in our relationship which we both had believed was full of pride in his son on his part, admiration for him on mine, and unconditional love on both. In his anguish he turned to my surgeon-grandfather for counsel. My grandfather not only advised him to stay firm but even disapproved of the compromise solution of management studies my father had offered me.

  My assessment may be wrong but I think the young man is a bit lazy of nature, and laziness is a cardinal sin both in Eastern & the Western conception of ethics. There are too many wandering monks in our country & surely we won’t keep adding one, if we can help it. I would advise you to write to Sudhir regularly every week as a matter of father’s duty & to cultivate his interest in the family. He has been sent to Germany for engineering & he must justify his stay in Germany by becoming a good engineer. We do not appreciate funny tricks & magical juggling . . . tell him repeatedly that he belongs to a family that believes living on earth & not in the clouds.

  I made a last despairing attempt, though with little hope.

  22 October 1959

  After long thought I am going to reply to your letter. Your letter, though very reasonable in tone, has made me feel quite miserable . . . I can see myself, through the years ahead of me as a disgruntled, cynical man, disrespectful towards his superiors, with frustrated hopes & ideals & always blaming his parents’ selfishness for his downward journey.

  Believe me, it is selfishness. It might be cloaked with good intentions and the comforting thought of my immaturity, though I find it very surprising that maturity is being confused with age. You have certain plans for me and they must be fulfilled and it doesn’t matter what the cost is to me, stripping me of all ambition, enthusiasm & ideals, leaving me nothing in exchange, not even the satisfaction of being a dutiful son, since I am doing it not because of my choice but on financial sword’s point.

  I admit to my selfishness. You say your hopes are centred on me but if your pride has other channels besides money and social position then I would have given you reasons to be proud of me. It isn’t too late yet. I go down to the university on 28th or 29th and if I receive your telegram before that date I can still change. Silence, of course, would mean that I’ll take Industrial Management . . .

  There was no reply.

  At the end of October 1959, I left Hamburg for Mainz, the capital city of Rheinland-Palantine to study Betriebswirtschaft. During the next five years, I wrote regular, chatty letters to my parents. They gave all the news as to what was happening in my life: progress in studies, my election to the students’ council of the university, travels in Europe, and listed achievements such as playing for my club in the German Table Tennis League and the winning of several tournaments. It took me many years before I shared some of my inner life with my father again.

  ‘I made a mistake,’ he admitted many years later. ‘I should have trusted you more. You could have studied Sanskrit, philosophy, literature in the eight years that were wasted in the study of engineering and economics.’

  ‘They were not wasted years,’ I tried to console him. ‘They left me without the feeling of inferiority that students of humanities often have in relation to the hard sciences. And,’ I added jokingly, ‘they gave me the distinction of being the only psychoanalyst in the world who is an engineer and an economist.’

  ‘And the only engineer and economist who is a psychotherapist,’ he said laughing.

  The standout memories of the semester I spent in Mainz are the two ‘firsts’ that mark the memory of any man: the first time I slept with a woman and the first time I fell in love. The two events were sequential, the women different.

  Lack of money had been one of my constant complaints in my letters from Germany. Now, as a student with even less money than what I had as a trainee in Hamburg, I was determined to earn some of my own so that I did not have to continue writing begging letters to my parents. The consequences of financial dependence on my father were still fresh in my mind. Through a chance encounter with another Indian in the student cafeteria, a man in his late twenties who impressed me with his confident manner and his second-hand Mercedes 180, I was offered a part-time job that consisted of selling an encyclopaedia of around twenty volumes to black American soldiers. My commission on every sale was generous and, what is more, it was in dollars when the exchange rate was four German marks to a dollar. The Indian, let me call him Navin, which might well be his real name, was not a student but represented an American publishing company which wanted to recruit coloured students for this particular segment of potential customers. The only other student Navin recruited was a Nigerian who was in the habit of ambling off to one of Mainz’s many post offices after lunch. Here, he stood in front of the door in his thick overcoat, a knitted blue wool cap pulled over the ears to keep out the cold, asking every young woman who went into the post office whether she would sleep with him, the only German sentence he spoke without difficulty. The almost inevitable rejection, whether indignant, amused or surprised, did not faze him in the least. ‘I am happy with even one per cent return on the investment,’ he said.

  Navin picked us up every evening in his Mercedes around nine and drove us to one of the American bases in Rheinland: Ramstein, Landstuhl, Kaiserslautern. He would somehow manage to sneak us in and we were then on our own till he picked us up at a prearranged bar near the base around midnight. I suspected that what we were doing was not only illegal but even dangerous. Especially since Navin cautioned that we avoid American military police and tutored us on the unlikely story of being invited in by an officer (who was absent from the base that night and whose name Navin somehow wormed out of one of the sentries at the gate) in case we were caught.

  The sales pitch that Navin taught us would not have won an award at a marketing convention. I was supposed to approach a black soldier who was sitting alone or reclining in his bunk with, ‘How you doin’, man?’ This was to be followed up with, ‘Great town, Jim! Did you say your name was Jim?’ After being corrected, I was supposed to use his name at the beginning of each sentence. I would then introduce the product I was selling with, ‘Jim, do you know the colour of the ass of an ass?�
� The soldier’s amused shake of the head was to be my opening for extolling the merits of the encyclopaedia set which contained the answer to this question as also any other information he or his family would ever need. I am afraid I did not sell many encyclopaedias. The soldiers were lonely young African American men, predominantly from small towns and rural areas of the South, and I could never resist the impulse to educate one on the real Indians—as compared to the American variety—if he expressed surprise at my origins by saying something like, ‘Go away, man! You ain’t no Indian. You don’t look shit like the ones I seen back home.’

  The American forces were segregated in those days with whites and blacks having separate living and recreation spaces. When I was not working I liked to spend my evenings in a bar in Mainz that was frequented almost exclusively by black soldiers. Sometimes I dropped in at that bar for a quick drink late at night on my way home after my ‘sales calls’. Waiting for Navin or the Nigerian at one of these black-only bars near an American army base, I had begun to feel at home in these friendly, dimly lighted places where the music machine also played the blues or the cool jazz of a Miles Davis or Gerry Mulligan, besides the songs of the reigning deities of popular American music. Most Germans, such as my landlord, regarded these bars as dens of sexual excess and uncontrolled violence, their spread in villages and towns near the American bases a clear sign of the moral degradation of post-war German society.

  The young German women who frequented these bars, almost all blonde, natural or through artifice, were believed to be prostitutes who saddled German society with unwanted ‘Negerkinder—negro children’. The idea of a sexual relationship between a white woman and a black man was as offensive to the whites in American military as it was to the Germans. The bars were often raided by both the German police, looking for prostitutes, and the American military police, mostly white, who tended to treat a drunken black soldier much more roughly than a white one.

  I met her at the bar in Mainz. I don’t remember her name; let us call her Inge. Inge was a regular who often sought me out whenever I came alone to the bar. I was flattered that this beautiful girl, a couple of years older than I, preferred a poor Indian student to the ‘rich’ soldiers with their flashy fin-tailed Buicks and Chevrolets. One cold February night, after we had been talking for a while, I summoned enough courage to invite her home for a glass of wine.

  Now home was a converted garage, with a toilet attached to it by the owner of the house who wanted to earn some extra money by renting it out to students. It was heated by burning coal bricks in a tiled oven that was effective as long as the bricks lasted. The room tended to become icy cold on winter mornings. I shared the room with a visiting Pakistani scientist in his mid-thirties, with a doctorate in zoology, who was in Mainz for one semester on an exchange programme. We got along well together. His only goal for his European stay, he confessed, was to sleep with a woman who would take off all her clothes for the act. He had been married for ten years, he said, and in all this time he had never seen his wife naked, even when they made love. A deeply conservative Punjabi Muslim, his wife would only lower her shalwar trousers till her ankles and pull up her long shirt so that it covered her face and head whenever he approached her. She adamantly refused to be fully unclothed ‘like a prostitute’, or be kissed on the lips. I don’t remember whether he ever succeeded in fulfilling a desire he cherished more than scientific success.

  My Pakistani room-mate was visiting friends in Bonn and since there was no seating arrangement in the room except for a round, chipped wooden dining table and the four chairs our landlord had given us, we repaired straight to bed. We had had plenty to drink and I was in a hurry—before the alcohol wore off and Inge changed her mind. It was a cold night and the warmth of Inge’s body against mine under the quilt increased my ardour to the point where my caresses became rougher than the languorous stroking that had always formed a part of the foreplay in my imaginings. Inge began to moan and twist next to me and I thought I had hurt her. I was contrite and was mumbling apologies when Inge, so to speak, took the matter in her hand and quickly finished what I had begun with such anticipation.

  Inge was gone the next morning when I awakened. I did not go to the bar for a fortnight though there was nothing I wanted more than to sleep with Inge and repeat, under less anxious circumstances, the launch of my sexual life as a man. But I was convinced that I had impregnated her. Where would I get the money for the travel and the clinic’s fees for an abortion in Holland? Abortion was a criminal offence in Germany of the 1960s, ruled by the conservative Christian Democratic Party under its patrician chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. Imagination—that visualizes scenes of disaster with greater gusto than those of triumph, prefers to discern a sabre-toothed tiger rather than strawberries in the reddish patch shimmering through the green undergrowth outside the cave—became hyperactive. I imagined having to marry Inge, giving up my studies and taking up a menial job as a waiter or a labourer to support her and a mischling baby like the ones left behind by black soldiers of the US occupation forces. I imagined the shock on the faces of my family at what I had done. I could almost see my crusty grandfather berating my father, who stood before him with his head lowered in shame, ‘I always told you the boy was irresponsible. He needed discipline which you failed to give.’ Each evening, when I was returning to my garage-room, I dreaded the sight of Inge waiting for me with the news of her pregnancy.

  When the virulence of the imaginative fever had abated and a resurgent desire had begun to dissipate the pall of fear, I again went to the bar one evening. Inge was there, sitting with a couple of soldiers around a table, laughing and drinking. She completely ignored me. I sat alone in a corner for well over an hour, drinking my usual, slightly sour, cheap and bad Durkheim red wine. I then went home.

  Youth is nothing if not emotionally supple. Within a month of the Inge fiasco that combined youthful naivete with sexual self-discovery of a sort, I fell in love. For the first time in my life, I encountered not the comic masks of Eros that had so far been my lot, but glimpsed its radiant face. A slim, beautiful girl with soft, dark brown hair that fell to the shoulders, high cheekbones and grey eyes (or do I, to my shame, superimpose the colour of her eyes from later loves?), Eva was a student of art history at the university. I wooed her with a passion that swept away the shyness with which I normally approached women. Opinions may differ whether it is happy or unhappy love that makes a person feel most alive—poets seem to lean towards the latter view—but no one will dispute that to be in love is the nearest that we mortals can approach the state of mystical grace.

  After long evenings of talk—of books, art, music, ourselves—wherein we were discovering each other with delighted surprise, I would walk her back to her hostel. The one vivid scene of those evenings that my memory serves up is of my sitting on a low wall in the Roman ruins located a couple of hundred metres from her hostel, looking up at her third-floor window till the light in her room was switched off. I would continue sitting on the cool stones—it was the end of spring—for hours on end in a state of voluptuous reverie, oblivious of time, my senses keenly attuned to the rustling of the grass in the soft breeze, the sharp cry of a bird in sleep, the gradual change in light as the stars dimmed and gave way to the roseate dawn. No one can convince me that love’s gift of a heightened sensate responsiveness—that persisted throughout the day, amplifying it as the time for our evening meeting approached, that rekindled the world around me with a fresh vision—was also not deeply spiritual. For moments on end, I felt akin to John of the Cross who even as ‘He passed through the groves in haste/And though he saw them/In their natural state/He left them garbed in/Beauty to his taste.’3

  As the weeks passed and summer was upon us, our meetings acquired an edge that both of us at first sought to deny. For though we were united in avidly seeking the delirium of love’s passion, dreading the loss of such feverishness and a consequent return to a world of ordinary consciousness, arid and alien, I wanted
more. My love, suffused with the press to complete itself sexually, was becoming imperious and obsessive. I could not understand why my physical yearnings though reciprocated were not consummated. Beset by the erotic within myself, I was often beside myself. Eva recoiled. In a sad replay of millions of such scenes of young love from all over the world, she made the same accusations that women since time immemorial have made against their lovers: of being a mere body for satisfaction of his lust. I could not explain my inchoate feelings, that my love was innocent, tender and lustful, all at once. I felt ashamed about being sexually importunate and humiliated by the repeated rejections.

  Many years later, when I was living in the US, we exchanged letters prior to our plan of meeting again on my next visit to Europe. Eva had married, had a three-year-old daughter, and was unhappy. In one of her letters, she wrote: ‘In the last stadium I misunderstood you; as I see it now there were no problems between us except a “technical” one (this realization comes a bit late, doesn’t it?)’ and in a subsequent one:

  I read old letters and hit myself on the head that I misunderstood you. I felt humiliated as a replaceable ‘erotic object’ . . . I found that from my childhood on I rebelled against my parents. I was an obedient daughter only in one respect: I swallowed without questioning the fatal Christian teaching of man’s dualism, his irreconcilable division in body and soul. I believe your withdrawal, your silence began from a certain point. I must have hurt you a lot. Our chance to be happy together is gone.

  Perhaps like most first loves, our love was doomed from the start because of its mercurial intensity. It had pressed towards union, unmindful of all that divided us. How much was I a part of her rebellion against her parents or, for that matter, she a part of mine? I had once accompanied Eva to her parents’ home in a village about a hundred kilometres from Mainz. I remember the atmosphere in the house as gloomy, the parents taciturn. I had attributed the sense of darkness to their experiences during the Second World War—her father, an officer in the Wehrmacht, had returned home after years of being a prisoner of war in Russia. I never let the thought cross my mind that their coldness could have something to do with their daughter bringing an Indian home. Sifting through the cold ashes of a fire that, fuelled by youth, once burnt so high, I also wonder how compatible our temperaments were. Eva was a serious girl, perhaps high-minded is a better word. Eventually, she may have felt repelled by my occasional Punjabi bawdiness, a part of me I had kept concealed from her.