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Copyright © Khushwant Singh 2011,
who asserts the moral right to be identified
as the author this work
First Published 2002
Revised and updated 2011
The views and opinions expressed in this book are the author’s own and the facts are as reported by him, which have been verified to the extent possible, and the publishers are not in any way liable for the same.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or otherwise be copied for public or private use – other than for “fair use” as brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews, without prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN 978-93-81431-00-9
Designed and typeset at
Hay House India
Printed and bound at
Thomson Press (India) Ltd., Faridabad, Haryana (India)
Dedicated to the memory of my wife,
Kaval
who died on the mornng of December 28, 2001
CONTENTS
Introduction
WOMEN
1. The Begger Maid
2. The Male Venom
3. Is the Indian Woman Different?
4. Shrimati India
5. Woman’s Breasts
6. Female Porn
7. Woman’s Eyes
8. Eve-Teasing
9. Libber at a Loss
10. Women’s Lib
11. When Women Demanded Their Birthright
12. Thoughts on Marriage
SEX
13. Sex in Indian Life
14. Sex and Marriage
15. Nature and Sex in the Classics
16. Celibacy and Chastity
17. The Art of Love-Making
18. Of Men, Women and Sexuality
19. Acharya Rajneesh and Sex
20. Sex Wars
21. Whoring and the Law
LOVE AND LUST
22 What is Love?
23. Love is Dead
24. Love and Lust
25. Love and Matrimony
26. Obscenity, Pornography, Erotica
27. Oodles of Love
28. The Language of Love
29. Love in the Age of Innocence
30. Aphrodisiac
31. The Right to Go Nude
32. Dirty Monsoon Musings
33. Confusions About Marriage
34. Love is Dumb
35. Love Letters
36. A Monument of Undying Love
Introduction
I am 96 years old with more than 100 book titles (I have lost count) to my name. I have no great opinion of myself as a writer and am often assured by my publishers that I have good reasons to regard myself as a second-rater. A somewhat peevish editor of one of India’s leading daily newspapers once told me: ‘You have made bullshit into “an art form”.’ Evidently people like to read bullshit. Though I am often described as a dirty old man, a drunkard and a womaniser, I have quite a few readers. I am reminded of lines by Hilaire Belloc:
When I am dead, I hope it may be said:
‘His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.’
My books may not sell like proverbial hot cakes but they do cater to the tastes of those who like to read spicy hot stuff like they relish bhel-puri on the sands of Chowpatty beach. I feel amply rewarded to know that once a while I bring a smile on my readers’ faces.
These articles and essays were written for different magazines over almost half a century. I had all but forgotten about them as I kept no records of them. I owe a debt of gratitude to readers like N. Krishnamurthy who took pains to keep clippings and made them available to publishers. The readers will find a lot of repetitive views and quotations which may irritate them; I tender my sincere apologies to them.
– Khushwant Singh
WOMEN
I will be the master of what is mine own:
She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house,
My household stuff, my field, my barn,
My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything.
–William Shakespeare
(Taming of the Shrew)
1
The Beggar Maid
I trained my field glasses on her. She turned to look if anyone was around. Having reassured herself that she wasn’t being watched she took off her dhoti and stood stark naked in the pouring rain. It was my beggar woman.
For the first few months after taking over the editorship of The Illustrated Weekly of India I lived as a paying guest of a young Parsi couple in a flat in Churchgate. I did not know many people, so had very little social life. I walked to office every morning and walked back every evening as I refused to use the car and chauffeur provided for me.
Among the earliest friends I made was A. G. Noorani who combined practicing law with journalism. He was a bachelor. We began to spend our evenings together: we would go for a stroll along Marine Drive and return to my flat. I had my evening ration of Scotch; Noorani who was a teetotaller had a glass of aerated water. Then we set out to try different restaurants in the neighbourhood. After dinner we tried different paanwallahs and bade each other good night. This routine was upset with the onset of the monsoon in Bombay when I ran into the lady about whom I write today.
There was a break in the downpour. I was alone as I stepped out of a restaurant. A gas station and a few shops were on my way home. I stopped there to buy myself a paan and chatted with a bhelpuriwallah and asked him how his business was during the rains: not very well, he admitted. ‘Magar iski kismat jaag jatee hai’ (her fortune increases) he added pointing to a woman sitting on the steps of a shop nearby. ‘What I can’t sell, I give to her. She is a beggar. Thori paagal hai (she is a little mad).’ I looked at the woman hungrily gulping bhelpuri. An uncommonly attractive girl, she was in her mid-twenties.
Fair, beautifully proportioned, uncombed hair wildly scattered about her face, a dirty white dhoti untidily draped around her body. I gazed at her for quite some time and wondered what an attractive young woman was doing alone in this vice-ridden city. I fantasized about her long into the night.
Thereafter I made it a point to buy my after-dinner paan from the same paanwallah by the gas station, exchanged a few words with the bhelpuriwallah as I ogled at the beggar maid on the steps of the closed shop. I often saw her talking to herself. I tried to buy bhelpuri to give to the girl, but the stall-owner rejected my offer. He had plenty of leftovers and feeding the girl was his monopoly.
One evening while I was at dinner the clouds burst in all their fury and roads around Churchgate were flooded. I tucked my trousers up to my knees, took my sandals in my hands, unfurled my umbrella to save my turban and waded through the swirling muddy water. Both the paanwallah and the bhelpuriwallah had shut shop and gone home. I saw the beggar girl stretched out on the marble steps barely an inch above the stream of rain wat
er running past her. She couldn’t have had anything to eat that night. I was sorely tempted to give her some money but was not sure how she would react. I walked home thinking about her, and thought about her into the late hours of the night.
It poured all through the night. As I woke up to look out of the window which overlooked the maidan with the Rajabhai clock tower on the other side, the rain was still coming down in sheets. The maidan was flooded. I saw the shadowy figure of a woman walking across the maidan with a tin in hand. I saw her hike her wet dhoti and start splashing water between her buttocks. I trained my field glasses on her. She turned to look if anyone was around. Having reassured herself that she wasn’t being watched she took off her dhoti and stood stark naked in the pouring rain. It was my beggar woman. She poured dirty water on her body, rubbed her bosom, waist, arms and legs. The ‘bath’ over she put the wet dhoti back on her and sloshed her way back towards Churchgate station.
The vision of Venus arising out of the sea in the form of a beggar maid of Bombay haunted me for many days that I was away in Delhi. When I returned to Bombay I made it a point to go to Churchgate for my after-dinner stroll. The paanwallah and the bhelpuriwallah were there. But not the beggar. I asked the bhelpuriwallah what had happened to the girl. His eyes filled with tears and his voice choked as he replied: ‘Saaley bharooay utha ke lay gaye’ (the bloody pimps abducted her).
2
The Male Venom
Men have many faults, women only two: Everything they say, and everything they do.’
The fact is, men have abused women from the day Eve was born out of Adam’s rib. They have created myths about their being low in intelligence, poor in physique, devious in their ways and totally unreliable and repeated them ad nauseam so long that most women accepted them to be true and developed an inferiority complex. It was only in the last century that women began to question assumptions of male superiority, claimed equal rights and hit back with vigour at their denigrators as male chauvinist pigs. While men have conceded that women are every bit as good as they in all fields of activity, women have not forgiven them for the centuries of humiliation they had to suffer and constantly remind them of their past misdeeds.
I recall an exercise in female vendetta: In Her Master’s Voice: Five Thousand Years of Put-Downs and Pin-Ups a compilation made by Tama Stair, a journalist and director of numerous advertising agencies. She had no right to grieve against sexual discrimination but nevertheless thought it best to keep men reminded how nasty and brutish their male ancestors had been to women on her mother’s side. She quoted rustic proverbs, sacred texts, founders of religions like Zarathustra, the Buddha and Martin Luther, philosophers like Aristotle, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung down to oafs like Adolf Hitler to make men of the present generation squirm at their forefathers’ pronouncements against women.
There is a Punjabi proverb that women’s brains are located in the heels of their feet. A German parallel runs ‘a woman has the form of an angel, the heart of a serpent, and the mind of an ass.’ Till modern times a woman was regarded as her husband’s property to be treated or disposed of as he willed. Shakespeare in The Taming of the Shrew summed it up thus:
I will be the master of what is mine own:
She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house,
My household stuff, my field, my barn,
My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything.
Even Leo Tolstoy, the enlightened philosopher-writer, had a very low opinion of female morality: ‘So-called decent women are different from whores mainly on that whores are less dishonest.’ Hindu sages believed that ‘they who are full of sin beget daughters.’ Milton was not far away in subscribing to the same kind of belief:
… Oh! why did God,
Creator wise, that people’s highest Heaven
With Spirits Masculine, create at last
This noveltie on Earth this fair defect of Nature, (Woman)..?
Women were believed to have an insatiable appetite for sex. Shiekh Omar En-Nefzawi in his classic The Perfumed Garden has this episode:
Long ago there lived a woman named Moarbeda, a noted philosopher who was reputed to be the wisest person of her time. It is recorded that one day some questions were put to her, and these were some of her replies:
In what part of woman ‘s body does her mind reside? Between her thighs.
And in what place does she experience her greatest pleasure?
The same.
And what is a woman ‘s religion?
Her vulva.
And with what part of herself does she love and hate?
The same …We give our vulva to the man we love and refuse it to the man we hate.
Although we men at times talk of the chastity of women, deep down we fear their sexuality. There is a Sanskrit proverb which says: ‘In the absence of men all women are chaste.’ There are innumerable references in English literature to women never saying no to sex and even when they say ‘no’ they mean ‘yes’. A passage in the Ramayana asserts that even married women are not immune to sexual temptation:
Women that are of good family, beautiful and well married do not stay within the moral bounds. This is the failing in women … Even those women who are held in high esteem watched over and loved, they too, given the chance, will fasten even unto hunchbacks, the blind, simpletons, dwarfs, and cripples … And when women cannot come on to a man at all, they even fall lustfully on one another, for they will never be true to their husbands … …There is not a man they would not go to – be he old or young, handsome or ugly – for they think to themselves only: ‘He is a man, and I want to enjoy him …’
The fire has never too many logs, the great sea never too many rivers, death has never too many beings of all the kinds, and lovely-eyed woman has never too many men. This, O divine Rishi, is the secret of all women. So as soon as a woman sees a handsome man, her vulva becomes moist … Not the richest enjoyment of their wishes, not ornaments, nor protection and home do they hold in such esteem as satisfaction and pleasure in love.
The god of death, the wind, the underworld, the ever burning entrance to hell, the knife-edge, poison, serpent, and fire – women are all of these in one.
Ever since the five elements have been, and the worlds have been made, ever since men and women were made – ever since then, these faults have been in women.
Bharthruhari asserted that ‘women have one man in their hearts, another in their words and still another in their arms.’ A Polish proverb put it more bluntly: ‘Water, fire and women will never say “enough”.’ And a Chinese proverb held: ‘When a woman’s lips say “it is enough”, she looks at you with her eyes and they say “again”. Sheikh Omar of The Perfumed Garden waxes on the theme:
Men, hear my words about woman,
Her lust is writ between her eyes.
Heed not her words, though she be the
Sultan’ s daughter;
Her malice is infinite …
Men, beware and delay the love of woman,
Never say ‘I love you’
Or ‘This is my companion.’
She loves you only while you’re thrusting –
That kind of love can’t last.
Lying on her breast, you love her …
Fool! In the morning she’ll call you a pig.’
And this too is something nobody questions:
Wives entertain slaves in the husband’s bed.
Trust a woman and lose your head!
Women are not reliable, asserts Aby Nuwas (A.D.800):
Rely not on women, trust not in their hearts;
Their faith is found in their private parts.
The French existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, could be unbelievably crude in his references to female sexuality:
The obscenity of the feminine sex is that of everything which “gapes open”. It is an appeal to being as all holes are. In herself woman appeals to a strange flesh which is to transform her in
to a fullness of being by penetration and dissolution … beyond any doubt, her sex is a mouth and a voracious mouth which devours the penis – a fact which can easily lead to the idea of castration. The amorous act is the castration of the man: but this is above all because sex is a hole.
In short, no lady can ever be a gentleman because when she is bad she is unbelievably bad. Wrote James Barrie:
Oh the gladness of her gladness when she’s glad,
And the sadness of her sadness when she’s sad;
But the gladness of her gladness,
And the sadness of her sadness,
Are as nothing, Charles,
To the badness of her badness when she is bad.
That’s the sentiment behind Kipling’s oft-quoted line: ‘the female of the species is deadlier than the male.’
Are women more jealous and envious than males?
Freud believed they are. As the women’s lib movement gathered force, male resentment got stronger. In an interview Evel Knievel, an American, said: ‘Women’s libbers are a pain in the ass. I treat women the way I always did, except I treat women’s libbers different: if I catch one, I try and screw her a little harder.’
A logical consequence of the deeply ingrained suspicion against woman is the male outlook on the institution of marriage: women trap them into it. ‘If wives were good, God would have had one,’ says a Georgian proverb. ‘Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same,’ goes a British joke. ‘The sooner it is ended, the better’. ‘A woman gives a man but two happy days: the day he marries her, and the day he buries her,’ said Hipponax (6th century B.C.).
However, it was always conceded that women have fatal attraction for men. A Chinese anecdote narrates: ‘A young monk, who had been raised from early childhood in the monastery, went one day with his teacher to the city. Seeing women for the first time, he asked his teacher what these might be. ‘They are tigers,’ replied the teacher, ‘and they will eat you up.’ Returning to the monastery, the boy seemed lost in thought. Finally he spoke: ‘If those are tigers, reverend Sir, then I would prefer to be eaten’.
Khushwant Singh on Women, Sex, Love and Lust Page 1
