Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! For the world which seems
To lie before us like land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, no 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.
This was often followed with lines from Shakespeare’s Othello:
If after every Tempest, come such calms,
May the winds blow, till they have waken’d death:
And let the labouring bark climb hills of seas
Olympus high: and duck again as low,
As hell’s from Heaven. If it were now to die,
T’were now be the most happy. For I fear,
My soul hath her content so absolute,
That no another comfort like to this,
Succeeds in unknown fate.
If the lady happened to have long hair, there was always T. S. Eliot’s memorable little piece about weaving the sunlight in the hair, holding flowers in her arms and so compelling his imagination for many days and many hours and disturbing his midnight cogitations and his noon’s repose.
I bring all this up because of a sudden revelation that all the very best love poetry is addressed by men to women – and not the other way round. A woman cannot praise a man’s beauty because manly men are not beautiful. Furthermore, dwelling on a man’s physical aspect would expose a woman to the charge of being a wanton or a slut. How then is a poor woman to tell a man that she loves him except by repeating the three words: I love you or I miss you?
36
A Monument of Undying Love
The two were too deeply in love with each other to bother what the rest of the world thought. Rai wrote: ‘For I’m afraid you and I have fallen into a fatal combine that is love plus friendship. Love may be powerful and overwhelming – ‘electric’ as you call it – but when years pass you may well find electricity is useful at night, but not needed by day.
On one side was Nayantara Sahgal, daughter of Vijayalaxmi Pandit, niece of Jawaharlal Nehru, cousin of Indira Gandhi, and a celebrated novelist. She was married to Gautam Sahgal, a muscular, jocular, hard-drinking Punjabi with hearty laughter and an ever ready punch for anyone eyeing his lovely wife. The Sahgals have three children. At the time the love letters began, Nayantara or Tara was in her late thirties.
On the other side was E. N. Mangat Rai, ICS. Nominally a Christian, he was a product of St. Stephen’s and Keble College, Oxford, with a bright academic career behind him. He was the only candidate in the ICS exams to score full marks for the English essay. He was also the youngest officer to become chief secretary of Punjab and Kashmir.
At the time of the correspondence with Tara he had two broken engagements behind him and was married to a Christian lady, Champa. The couple, childless, had been drifting apart for some years. Mangat Rai was a mature 48, much respected for his rectitude and ability to influence people.
When Nayantara and Mangat Rai met, both were eager to share each other’s private hells and explore possibilities of a paradise where no one resented another and everyone was full of understanding for others.
Unfortunately, their spouses did not understand. The liaison made Gautam Sahgal hit the bottle and periodically hit his wife, more than once beating up Mangat Rai too. Champa refused to see her husband’s need for another companion and berated Nayantara. The one positive outcome of the turbulent relationship was the outflow of the best of literary talent, producing some of the most readable love letters.
How did the letters manage to get preserved? Nayantara evidently destroyed what she received to prevent them from falling into her husband’s hands. Rai not only preserved what he received but even made carbon-copies of his letters.
Why did they decide to publish them?
Explained Mangat Rai: ‘In all your last three letters you mention the destruction of our letters. I am sorry this is on your mind and that I do not give you immediate relief from an avoidable anxiety. But I do not agree. I think it is a risk we should take, of keeping them, for they are more than just an exchange of news and moods. One does not often have this kind of experience to share and define. The written word of the time does capture an aspiration, at times beauty, often intensify, an idea seen in particular way. Let us keep them between us and not destroy them.
Mangat Rai philosophized on his liaison with the following words: ‘So my immorality or amorality would hold that there are endless patterns of morality between God and man, man and woman, even man and animal, and in each case the moral is to honour the terms of the particular equation, the unwritten law that is peculiar to that relationship. Where you don’t, you sin. And where equations clash, and moralities clash, do not be afraid to accept the principle of hurt, but with it also the responsibility that what you seem in an advance of the human good, general or particular, or an advance of truth both of which, along with freedom, and achieved only through long processes of suffering and of hurt.’
Nayantara’s marriage was on the rocks because her attitude to marriage was at variance with that of her husband who held her not being a virgin at marriage against her and also believed in the husband’s right to lay down whom she could or could not see.
‘But that was not all. I could see there was a difference of kind between his attitude and values, and yours. He gets that almost demonic strength for his point of view from the fact that he believes so completely in the traditional marriage contract, and complete possession of the wife. Your point of view comprehends a much bigger canvas of possibilities – of life and freedom. Indeed that possession is not possible, or of any value, unless you possess what is of itself, or its own nature, given in freedom. It seemed almost as if two cultures were at battle, and between husband and wife usually the lower culture (if I may call it that) wins, because of its very narrowness, which gives it a crude immediate strength. The more complex and subtle culture, because much of what it demands and needs is on the fringes of the uncertain, the untried, and often even suspected to be immoral, tends always to lose.’
The two were too deeply in love with each other to bother what the rest of the world thought. Rai wrote: ‘For I’m afraid you and I have fallen into a fatal combine that is love plus friendship. Love may be powerful and overwhelming – ‘electric’ as you call it – but when years pass you may well find electricity is useful at night, but not needed by day. It is when you get the softer daily food of friendship combined with love that there is difficulty of escape, for it provides both nourishment and aspiration, and you may see the stars even on a walk through fields, or a chat in the drawing room. It’s where values and beliefs are always confirmed that there can be friendship, and if you love too, it becomes a difficult thing to break. And I think this has happened to us, and I mention it here to underline that you face a difficult problem.’
The affair naturally proceeded to consummation. Mangat Rai wrote: ‘I want the whole of you, and am aware as to how I do. I don’t want you physically behind a bush, or in a sudden release of desire when there is an opportunity, a ‘quick one’ when the lights are out as it were. I do when the whole of you is with me, when I can give you the whole of my body and being, and take you gently always, as far as the spirit and being go, fully and wholly and almost as if it had to happen as a continuation of our togetherness – in conversation, and in warmth, and even in laughter – an affirmation of a full expression. I put it badly, but you know in your bones, I think, what I mean, and that it is possible, and has, in a sense, happened between us.’
The feeling was ardently reciprocated by Nayantara: ‘I felt a little hesitant with you. We were new to each other and I was seeing a side of you I hadn’t seen, your “relentless pursuit” carried into the physical realm. And I don’t know why you should have any reservation about yourself. I have
none about you, a lover aware of your beloved’s needs. I did feel you are designed for a woman who not only wants pleasure, but for one who longs to please. And I would give much for the time to lavish myself on you, spend time in discovering you in this way, building a new intimacy between us. As for your “ravenous hunger” to give me as much as you get, I do understand it. But in our circumstances, meeting as we do, so very seldom, should we worry about it? There might well be that need on an everyday basis, but just now I feel (dreadful confession) anti-equality, and happy, and to be able to give is a great joy for me. So let me.’
The exchange of letters took place between 1964 and 1967. Mangat Rai was posted in Kashmir during the 1965 Indo-Pak war and was transferred to Delhi as special secretary in the petroleum ministry. For a while Nayantara stayed on in Bombay with her husband and after he divorced her, in her mother’s flat. Except for some meetings in Bombay, Delhi and Chandigarh they kept in touch through letters. Rai’s career came to an end when Indira Gandhi, who never liked her aunt, Vijayalaxmi Pandit, denied him promotion because of his association with her cousin whom she liked even less.
Khushwant Singh on Women, Sex, Love and Lust Page 13
