Khushwant Singh on Women, Sex, Love and Lust

by Khushwant Singh

  It did not occur to these poets that blind people also fall in love.

  The earliest symptom of being infected by the love bug is to have a compulsive desire to keep repeating the beloved’s name. However commonplace the name may be, love gives it a magical quality and one wants to repeat it like a mantra. In Twelfth Night Shakespeare exploded in sheer joy over his beloved’s name, Olivia:

  Make me a willow cabin at your gate

  And call upon my soul within the house;

  And sing them loud even in the dead of night;

  Holla your name to the reverberate hills,

  And make the babbling gossip of the air.

  Cry out, ‘Olivia’.

  Next to drooling over the name of the beloved comes the desire to praise her looks. For many years my favourite opening tribute used to be Byron’s:

  She walks in beauty, like the night

  Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

  And all that’s best of dark and bright

  Meet in her aspect and her eyes.

  Christopher Marlowe went one better than Byron:

  Oh thou art fairer than the evening air

  Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.

  When in love you cannot think of anything except the Beloved. It becomes an obsession and you cannot concentrate on your work but keep playing: ‘He loves me, he loves me not.’

  Shakespeare was the supreme poet of love in all its manifestations. It would be impossible to abridge his outpouring in one article. In one of his sonnets, which I often quote when in a state of depression, he writes of the uplifting potential of the beloved:

  When, in disgrace with Fortune and Men’s eyes,

  I all alone beweep my outcast state,

  And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

  And look upon myself, and curse my fate.

  Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

  Featured like him, like him with friends possest,

  Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

  With what I most enjoy contented least;

  Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising

  Happily I think of thee; and then my state,

  Like to the Lark at break of day arising

  From sullen earth, sings hymns at Heaven’s gate;

  For thy sweet love rememb’red such wealth brings

  That then I scorn to change my state with Kings.

  Othello’s speech when he receives Desdemona as she arrives after a very rough passage on the sea has been my favourite as an expression of fulfilment:

  If after every tempest came such calms,

  May the winds blow, till they have wakened death

  Let every labouring bark climb hills of seas

  Olympus high; and duck again as low,

  As hells from heaven. If it were now to die

  T’were now to be most happy. For I fear,

  My soul hath her content so absolute,

  That not another comfort like to this,

  Succeeds in Unknown fate.

  The bard was incredibly naive in believing that love between ‘true minds’ was everlasting, eternal:

  Let me not to the marriage of true minds

  Admit impediments: love is not love

  Which alters when alteration finds,

  Or bends with the remover to remove.

  O, no, it is an ever-fixed mark,

  That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

  It is the star to every wandering bark,

  Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be

  taken

  Love’s not Time’s fool though rosy lips and cheeks

  Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

  Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

  But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

  If this be error and upon me proved,

  I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

  The trouble is that at the time one falls in love one becomes an idealist and cannot conceive that one may not feel as intensely about the other as one did first. Here we have Mathew Arnold’s impassioned pledge to remain ever true in Dove Beach:

  Ah, love, let us be true

  To one another! for the world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new;

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  Unfortunately it is rare to find people who fall in love only once in their lifetimes and only give up when ‘death does them apart’. Most of them are for ever falling in love with other people and hoping that the new involvements would prove more rewarding than the last. To wit Omar Khayyam’s lines which married people could quote when engaged in an extra-marital love affair:

  O love, if thou and I could with fate conspire

  To change this sorry state of things entire;

  Would we not shatter it to bits

  And remould it nearer to our hearts desire?

  The latest addition to my personal anthology of love poetry, some of which I found to have lethal charms, I stumbled on re-reading Christopher Fry’s plays. Take, for instance, the following lines in The Lady’s Not for Burning to express desire to the beloved:

  … And if existence will Molest a man with beauty, how can he help

  Trying to impose on her the boundary

  Of his two bare arms?

  I am not quite sure what the following lines mean, but they sound quite profound:

  What is deep, as love is deep, I’ll have

  Deeply. What is good, as I’ll have well.

  Love as Complete Surrender

  The most memorable lines come from the Bible. Ruth’s prayer enshrines all that love can command: ‘… And Ruth said, Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me…’

  Not many English poets except Robert Browning accepted such total surrender as expression of love. ‘All the Latin I know is ama – I love,’ he wrote. He also accepted the traditional role of men being seekers, women the sought:

  Escape me? Never

  Beloved!

  While I am I, and you are you,

  So long as the world contains us both

  While the one eludes,

  Must the other pursue.

  Urdu has many memorable couplets on different facets of love, of which the quest, the indifference and cruelty of the beloved seemed to obsess poets more than fulfilment. For Meer Taqi Meer, the quest was perennial and never ending:

  Jaisey naseem, har sehar;

  teyree hee karoon hoon justajoo

  Khan-ba-khaana, dar-ba-dar,

  shar-ba-shahr, Kooba-ba-koo.

  (Like the breeze every morning

  I go looking for you

  From house to house, door to door

  City to city, lane to lane.)

  There are Agha Hashr Kashmiri’s beautiful lines:

  Sab kuchch khuda say maang liya

  Tujh ko maang kar;

  Utthay nahin haath mere

  Is dua kay baad

  (I asked all I could ask for

  When I asked for you;

  Once my prayer was answered

  I did not raise my hands in prayer again.)

  Having got his heart’s desire, the poet expresses his gratitude not to God, the granter of wishes, but to his beloved. To wit Majrooh Sultanpuri:

  Mujhey sahal ho gaeen manzilein

  Yeh havaa kay rukh badal gaye

  Tera haath haath mein aa gayaa

  Ke
h chiraagh raah mein jal gaye

  (My goal appeared in easy sight

  Winds changed course to ease my way

  When your hand I took in mine

  Lamps along the route burnt bright.)

  Then there is Momin Khan Momin’s reminder to his unfaithful mistress:

  Voh jo ham mein tum mein qarar thha,

  Tumhen yaad ho key na yaad ho

  Vahee yaanee vaada nibah tha

  Tumhein yaad ho keh na yaad ho.

  (The pledge that you and I made together,

  You may remember or may have forgotten

  The vow to remain true to each other,

  You may remember or may have forgotten.)

  Vo jo lutf mujhpe thhey peyshetar,

  Vo karm ke thha merey haal par

  Mujhey sab hai yaad zara zara,

  tumhein yaad ho keh na yaad ho

  (The love that you had for me some time ago,

  The concern you had for my lot,

  I remember some of it,

  You may remember it or may have forgoten.)

  Love Letters

  There are people who instead of looking forward to meeting their beloved want to get away so that they can write love letters to them. After gushings of poetry, the prose of love letters does really sound prosaic. A good example of it, going beyond variations of the ‘I-love-you’ theme is the correspondence Jean-Jacques Rousseau carried on with Countess Sophie d’Houdetot. In one written in the summer of A.D. 1757 he says:

  Come Sophie, that I may torture your unjust heart in order that I on my side, may be merciless towards you. Why should I spare you, whilst you rob me of reason, of honour, and life? Why should I allow your days to pass in peace, you, who make mine unbearable! Ah, much less cruel would you have been if you had driven a dagger into my heart, instead of the fateful weapon, which kills me! Look what I was and what I am now; look to what a degree you have abased me. When you deigned to be mine, I was more than a man; since you have driven me from you, I am the least of mortals. I have lost all reason, all understanding, and all courage; in a word, you have taken everything from me!

  Robert Schumann, the composer, enjoyed writing to his wife; sometimes he wrote several letters in the same day. One goes as follows:

  How happy your last letters have made me – those since Christmas Eve! I should like to call you by all the endearing epithets, and yet I can find no lovelier word than the simple word ‘dear’, but there is a particular way of saying it. My dear one, then I have wept for joy to think that you are mine, and often wonder if I deserve you. One would think that no one man’s heart and brain could stand all the things that are crowded into one day. Where do these thousands of thoughts, wishes, sorrows, joys and hopes, come from? Day in, day out, the procession goes on. But how light-hearted I was yesterday and the day before! There shone out of your letters so noble a spirit, such faith, such a wealth of love! What would I not do for love of you, my own Clara!

  Nathaniel Hawthorne could write poetic-prose as well as he wrote poetry:

  Dearest, I wish I had the gift of making rhymes, for me thinks there is poetry in my head and heart since I have been in love with you. You are a Poem. Of what sort, then? Epic? Mercy on me, no! A sonnet? No; for that is too laboured and artificial. You are a sort of sweet, simple, gay, pathetic ballad, which Nature is singing sometimes with tears, sometimes with smiles, and sometimes with intermingled smiles and tears.

  Napoleon Bonaparte known more as a soldier than a man of letters could write touching love letters to Josephine:

  I have not spent a day without loving you. I have not spent a night without embracing you; I have not so much as drunk a single cup of tea without cursing the pride and ambition which force me to remain separated from the moving spirit of my life. In the midst of my duties, whether I am at the head of my army or inspecting the camps, my beloved Josephine stands alone in my heart, occupies my mind, fills my thoughts. If I am moving away from you with the speed of the Rhone torrent, it is only that I may see you again more quickly. If I rise to work in the middle of the night, it is because this may hasten by a matter of days the arrival of my sweet love.

  In one of his long letters to Adele Foucher, Victor Hugo explained the nature of human love and the essential role of sex in its fulfilment:

  There is one word, Adele, which we appear until now to have been afraid of using – the word love; nevertheless what I feel for you really is genuine love; the problem is one of knowing whether what you feel for me is also love …

  When two souls, which have sought each for however long in the throng, have finally found each other, when they have seen that they are matched, are in sympathy and compatible, in a world, that they are alike, there is then established for ever between them a union, fiery and pure as they themselves are, a union which begins on earth and continues for ever in heaven. This union, is love, true love, such as in truth very few men can conceive of, that love which is a religion which defies the loved one, whose life comes from devotion and passion, and for which the greatest sacrifices are the sweetest delights …

  The world, Adele, does not comprehend such passions which are the prerogative only of certain beings who are granted happiness like yours or misery like mine. For the world, love is nothing more than a carnal appetite, a vague inclination which indulgence sates and absence destroys …

  At this point, however, bear in mind that nothing should be carried to extremes. I am not claiming that our bodies are of no importance in the greatest of bonds. The good Lord has understood that without physical intimacy, there could never be any intimacy of the soul, because two beings which love one another must to some extent share their thoughts and their deeds. This is one of the reasons why he has created the attraction of one sex for the other, which is the only indication of the divinity of marriage.

  The Love Lingo of Sanskrit

  There is a lot of finesse in Sanskrit love poetry as well as plenty of earthiness. From the Ramayana we have a lover exulting over the simple fact that he breathes the same air as his beloved:

  Blow, wind, to where my loved one is,

  Touch her, and come and touch me soon:

  I’ll feel her gentle touch through you,

  And meet her beauty in the moon.

  These things are much for one who loves –

  A man can live by them alone –

  That she and I breathe the same air,

  And that the earth we tread is one.

  Bhartrhari admitted that:

  The clear bright flame of man’s discernment dies When a girl clouds it with her lamp-black eyes.

  He chastised his fellow poets for making much of the beloved’s beauty:

  Her face is not the moon, nor are her eyes

  Twin lotuses, nor are her arms pure gold:

  She’s flesh and bone. What lies the poets told!

  Ah, but we love her, we believe the lies.

  He explores the woman’s body as if it were a landscape:

  If the forest of her hair

  Calls you to explore the land,

  And her breasts, those mountains fair,

  Tempt that mountaineer, your hand

  Stop! before it is too late:

  Love, the brigand, lies in wait.

  Adultery was not frowned upon as a venal sin. Dharmakirti thus encourages a married girl to go to her illegitimate tryst:

  The road is rough; and, oh, the moon is bright

  Suppose my husband should discover

  People may talk – But can I bear tonight

  To disappoint my lover?

  And so she walked a step or two, and then

  Turned and came back again.

  Amaru had a similar message:

  Where are you going in the dead of night?

  To meet my love who is life and death to me.

  And are you not afraid to walk alone?

  How can I be alone? Love keeps me company.

  For sensuous conceit, it is hard to match Sudraka:


  Thundercloud, I think you are wicked.

  You know I’m going to meet my own lover,

  And yet you first scare me with your thunder,

  And now you’re trying to caress me

  With your rain-hands.

  Amaru captured the agony of a lover separated from his sweetheart in this memorable verse:

  The lamps were lit and the night far spent,

  And he, my love, was on love intent

  And he knew full well just what loving meant:

  But he made his love in a cautious way,

  For the wretched bed upon which we lay

  Creaked, and had far too much to say.

  The Language of Lust

  As good as any definition of love that I have come across is ‘When spirit and body interanimate’. John Donne was quite clear that the ultimate aim of every affair of the heart is the coupling of bodies:

  Who ever loves, if he does not propose

  The right true end of love, he’s one that goes to see for nothing but to make him sick.

  Remy de Gourmont wrote in his Natural Philosophy of Love: ‘Given the two chief pieces of the apparatus, the sword and the scabbard, nature, as one might say, leaves it to the imagination of each species to decide the best manner of using them.’

  Poets and writers have viewed the woman’s body in different ways and compared their endowments to a banquet to feast their eyes on, a landscape of sensuous hills and groves, as specimens of architectural voyeurism. In the Song of Solomon, in the Old Testament, the poet describes her ‘as fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as the army with banners.’ And goes on:

  Thy belly is like a heap of wheat set about with lilies

  Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are

  twins.

  The Old Testament has some exquisitely sensuous love poetry. An all-time favourite of mine is the following from the Song of Songs:

  My beloved spoke, and said unto me

  Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away.

  For, lo, the winter is past,

  The rain is over and gone;

  The flowers appear on the earth;

  The time of the singing of birds is come,

  And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;

  The fig tree putteth forth her green figs,

  And the vines with the tender grape

  Give a good smell.

  Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away

  O my dove, thou art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs,