A Book of Memory

by Sudhir Kakar

Your letter has touched off a chain reaction. Two special sentences ‘My whole being shivers at the idea of going through the humiliations of an informal relationship’ . . . I think our mutual relationship with the three of us is atypical—with a high degree of informal content since love itself is not formal and society must be formal . . . That I run away from conflicts is a personality trait . . .

  At another place:

  As I write this I have suddenly become conscious of our problems. Basically, human relations are identical in all spheres. Only in some the attachment is much greater than in others—and as a thing becomes more valuable and precious, so does one become less capable of handling it as the anxiety and the cost of failure distort our vision.

  Vikram becomes much more persuasive and his letters acquire a compelling urgency whenever Kamla wants to break the impasse by trying to escape from the triangle. One such crisis came in 1953 when Kamla, who was away in the US on a study tour, was seriously thinking of leaving Ahmedabad to settle in Delhi where my surgeon-grandfather’s friend Sir Sri Ram had offered her an assignment in his Delhi Cloth Mills that was similar to the work she had been doing at ATIRA.

  May I preface my comments on your A’bad—Delhi thinking? You have asked me to keep the long-range implications in view. It is precisely here that I get lost in complete darkness at the thought of losing our active partnership in work, in joy and in unhappiness. Our association is to me like life itself. Is it an ‘unfair act’ to struggle to live? Is one being ‘nonobjective’ if from shivering cold one craves for warmth? . . . Our association is a vital part of our future life. It is not just the knowledge of being loved, or writing on these scraps of paper once or twice a week. It is not even our Tuesdays and Saturdays, or our Kashmiri tea, or the green lawn in the evening . . . it is a place to rest a bursting head, to be near when the dams burst. All this dies when one is separated even by 600 miles. The shadows of memory would be all that is left.

  Two following letters contain fragments of dreams through which Vikram communicates his feeling of culpability for taking away Kamla’s emotional freedom. In the first, he says, ‘I had a dream: We had gone somewhere and suddenly a crowd started coming between us. I finally pushed them away. I found you in some sort of a cage where I could not come near you.’ As the producer, director and actor of his dream, reflecting an unconscious realization, it is of course Vikram himself who has created the images of both a caged Kamla and the crowd of others that separates them.

  In the second, he writes, ‘Today is Wednesday, and I have woken up very early at four. I had a dream in which I received from you a letter addressed to Kasturbhai. I opened it fearfully and discovered that it was a “kharab” [his term for accusatory or angry] letter. Something is wrong with the poor fellow’s subconscience.’

  I cannot help noticing the Freudian slip in the last line: subconscience, instead of subconscious, an unintended revelation of his feelings of guilt that he deserves her anger for not acting on a love he continues to proclaim loudly and with such persistence.

  Three weeks later, the ripples of reflection on his being single-minded in love have extended to cover both love and work:

  When K. was ill, I did a lot of reflection. Much of it was about singleness of mind. On the one hand I get intensely engrossed and am tied to people and things. To each individually I am completely faithful and I think my interest is deep. But look at it from the totality of my existence and my record is little better than [that of] a butterfly—and while I perhaps have a reasonably satisfying existence, the flowers take a dim view of it! . . . I think you feel I should be single minded about Physics. Is it to the exclusion of an emotional life—to what you or Mrinal or Kartik or Panchmukhi mean to me?

  More letters follow, their content increasing in emotional urgency:

  24.1.54

  It all really boils down to Dopey. There is a very large part of me—more than I think you realize or dare to imagine—which will only live as long as there is a Snow White in whose lap I can lay down my head . . .

  12.2.54

  My hurt feeling is not important—it is something that will become numb with time. What I believe is important is the mentally and emotionally crippled life for the future. I don’t think I am selfish in claiming that this will happen to you just as much as to me . . . The question is whether you see the problem in this light? I am not sure of this. I look upon the two of us as just one, being inseparably tied together. You also emotionally feel this way—or else you would not have told me that it has to be our decision, not just yours. But intellectually it does not make sense to you. My curse of ambivalence is matched in you by a Rydebechian heart to an independent woman. I love this combination in you—but I am afraid it does not make you too happy to be reconciled to either one. (underlined in original)

  18.2.54

  You write ‘I am happy even though I am away from you’, and ‘Won’t you let me go to Delhi?’ To which the answer is of course, yes. It would be the first major achievement in my life if I can make one person happy—at least at a distance of 10000 miles from me if not with me.

  28.2.54

  Poor Dopey has failed, and perhaps rightly so, as he is a selfish idiot . . . Are the scars of the past unhealable or are they so deep that any future life together as a three-body system does not have a chance to stabilize on its own merits? . . . To all three of us the problem is different. My fabric of life has you in it as a central theme.

  Dopey, of course, does not fail. Snow White has little chance against his indisputable love and beseeching charm as he plays on their shared memories.

  6.4.54

  Today is Tuesday night. It’s a painful business to be reminded of the drive in my Sunbeam, your head in my lap and the light from passing street lamps occasionally giving me a glimpse of you, the Kashmiri tea and melon, the terrace and the dark sky with the Milky Way.

  3.5.54

  It was in 1944 that I became a poor fellow at Lahore station. It is then four years since you came for your interview and became slightly infected with my malady. Malati became conscious of herself only in Poona in December 1949. All this, and every time we have seen each other are so fresh in my mind that I can daydream for long hours sitting at the window of this houseboat. I doubt if any two people in the world have felt as intensely as we have for the last four years. I am certain that in taking some things for granted, as almost inevitably happens in marriage, a great deal of the sharp edge and excitement of love must get dimmed. Some might consider that the insecurity without marriage is too great a price to pay. This must depend to a large extent on the individual temperamental make-up. Perhaps there is also a ‘man’s’ and a ‘woman’s’ side to it. And all this completely leaves out of account children. Like in everything else one ends up by saying ‘it depends’.

  Using every means at his disposal to persuade her to stay back in Ahmedabad, Vikram reassures Kamla on the value he places on her intellectual ability and insight into people. She is already his professional consultant in all his business and institutional ventures and it is certainly flattering when he writes:

  I was thinking the other day what a wonderful director [for the PRL] you would make if your interest in psychology was not so single minded and you took the trouble of understanding some physics and chemistry. As a ‘heavenly body’ you should still be interested in astronomy and my poor PRL.

  He offers Kamla vistas of professional glory in a field dear to her heart: the creation and directorship of a research centre in group dynamics in Ahmedabad with the financial assistance of an American foundation. Kamla decides to stay back in Ahmedabad.

  The crisis in their relationship is not resolved but becomes dormant, to flare up three years later as Kamla rattles against the bars of her golden cage yet again. This happened in the last year of my stay with her, but absorbed in the turbulent unfolding of my own youthful identity, I cannot say I noticed the signs of a crisis in their relationship. I attributed their occasionally glum faces ar
ound the breakfast table, when Vikram usually dropped in for coffee and idli in the morning, to normal lovers’ quarrels.

  This time Kamla envisages a move to the newly established Administrative Science College in Hyderabad or to the psychology department of Bombay University where a professorship has fallen vacant. Vikram again protests:

  8.6.57

  While I write this I feel that it is not Kamla’s cerebrum which needs all the pro and con arguments. It is Malati’s thalamus which wants to know how much I need her—if I will look after her. And the reply to this is that ‘Yes, in as large a measure as you can possibly imagine.’ For some time now you must have noticed that I stopped being my own advocate—when I realized that really anything that would bring peace and happiness to you would do the same to me, that it is for you to judge my rather imperfect role rather than for me to gloss over its imperfections.

  He offers her the chance to work with Tavistock Institute in London, famous at the time for its pioneering work with large organizations, using methods of applied psychoanalysis. Vikram has talked to Ken Rice and Eric Trist, the leading lights in Tavistock at the time, of the possibility of setting up Tavistock’s Indian counterpart at Ahmedabad. They are ‘greatly interested in going ahead with you. I think I can work the whole thing out—that is if you want it. Do you?’

  Kamla stayed on in Ahmedabad but from his letters of subsequent years, I can sense that their relationship is changing. Perhaps the change is helped along by Kamla’s psychotherapy sessions with a psychoanalyst in London, curiously—another triangle—the same person Mrinal too has consulted. Not only time but the hurts and the inherent instability of a threesome have taken their toll. Theirs will remain a close friendship, though, and they would never lose their excitement of working together. The tenderness between the two will deepen even further, but Vikram and Kamla will no longer be wrapped up in each other as they once were. The sexual charge between Malati and Kumar, too, will wane and although later Kamla would have other lovers, Vikram would always remain as the love of her life.

  The changing relationship also spurred Vikram to re-examine his own life and its priorities, an introspection that led him to withdraw from the responsibilities of the family business and to concentrate on the building of public institutions.

  Almost everyone is engaged in working like hell to make things for men to consume—steel to machinery to cloth to chemicals to use in houses or to wash things or to carry things from place to place so people could consume them. It is an edifice of gratification, of self-generating prosperity and more work and more activity. This is fine, but if being personally engaged in business, this is what my existence adds up to—the sum total is pretty dismal. I ask myself why I do it and how can I stop being in a rut.

  To keep Kamla in Ahmedabad, Vikram successfully lobbied the Indian government to locate one of the two postgraduate institutes of management—set up on the lines of leading American business schools that were regarded at the time as the last word in management education and largely responsible for the efficiency and dominance of American companies in world business—in Ahmedabad rather than Bombay. And since Vikram’s and especially Kamla’s connections were all with Harvard, matters were so arranged that the original collaborator for the Ahmedabad institute, the University of California, withdrew its offer and was replaced by Harvard Business School. Vikram became IIM’s first director. Although officially Kamla was the research director, Vikram never took a major decision in the running of IIM affairs without consulting her.

  Six years after I had left Ahmedabad and was in the throes of a less than conscious identity crisis after my return from Germany in 1964, it was with Kamla that I sought refuge when I joined IIM as a research fellow. I will return to that eventful year, in a later chapter, when the stream of her life once again joined mine.

  It was while living in Kamla’s house that I developed an interest in Western psychology and philosophy. In her large library, I browsed through the books of Schopenhauer, Whitehead and Russell and remember being fascinated by Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Psychopathology of Everyday Life and The Future of an Illusion. I cannot pretend that I understood everything I consumed so voraciously. Reading these books was like travelling through a foreign country in a fast train, with glimpses of unusual landscapes where I might have wanted to linger and strange towns I might have liked to explore further. I was still a shy and awkward adolescent, with no one to discuss the world I was discovering in these books. I sensed, though, that in my inner world I was being guided away from my native Indian imagination, full of myths and marvels, lighted by the Romantic numinosum—that ineffable feeling in the presence of the sacred, into an iconoclastic way of seeing the world where, if one looked hard and deep enough, all gods have clay feet. It is only now, as I get older, that even as I continue to keep faith with Freud’s ironic vision of human existence, I become less and less enamoured of the bargain I made when I was young. Perhaps it is true that the innocent eye sees nothing. On the other hand, the view of the suspicious eye remains irrevocably partial. I have learnt to appreciate the romantic vision as a second innocence where gods may well have clay feet but where each grain of clay may be infused with divinity. Like many other men and women, Indian or not, I oscillate between the romantic and the ironic ways of seeing the world and our place in it.

  The visitors to Kamla’s house were a further revelation. As I listened to their animated talk, absorbing information, attitudes and ideas, I was also discovering the fascination of being an individual, of being a person who did not need to think or behave solely as a member of his family or caste. Through Kamla, Vikram and their visiting friends from Europe and the US, I caught glimpses of an Occident which, in my imagination, became ‘home’ of the heroic individual following his desires and inclinations, unencumbered by social expectations and human ties. It was this caricature of the psychological man that enthralled me then and remained my ideal for many years of my youth. For, yes, however much I was later to long for the warmth of family and community, and return to a celebration of their virtues, I regarded these as wholly confining in those days.

  I have never really resolved the conflict between the pleasures of individuality and my early memories of the warmth, essentially erotic, of being connected to others. In India, I have often deplored the excesses of a relational orientation that easily slips into conformity and conventional behaviour, making many Indians psychologically old even when young. In the West, on the other hand, I have expressed discomfort with the Western individualistic orientation which has a tendency towards self-aggrandizement, ‘the looking out for Number One’, and the belief that the gratification of desires is the royal road to happiness. In a postmodern accentuation of ‘fluid identities’ and a transitional attitude towards relationships, of ‘moving on’, the contemporary Western person (and the modern upper class Indian) may well embody what the Jungians call puer aeternus—the eternal youth, ever in pursuit of their dreams, full of vitality, but nourishing only to themselves while draining those around them. I believe that the traditional Indian view of the person who is open, porous and connected to all of existence is an intangible human heritage that needs to be preserved and defended against those adherents of the modern model who would not brook the existence of a competing model of the person. It is valuable not because it is traditional but because it opens up alternative avenues of thought and creativity which diverge from those that derive from the dominant contemporary view of the self as individual and bounded.

  My Ahmedabad years are also memorable for my first sexual encounter which was a disaster (not that the subsequent one was a triumph). More than fifty years later, its memory still has the power to send a flush of shame shooting through the neuronal pathways of my brain. I was eighteen. As a member of the Gujarat table tennis team I had gone to play in the national championships at Colombo. Ceylon, as Sri Lanka was called then, although an independent nation was a member of the Indian Table Tennis Federation
and was the host to the championships that year. In the evenings, after the matches ended for the day, players amused themselves in various ways including, for a few of the veterans, whoring.

  Our coach, a genial Punjabi in his late thirties who had represented India internationally, offered his two best players, my close friend Subash Mashruwala and I, a night out on the town—actually a village fifteen miles from Colombo—where he knew of a whore from his previous visits to the island. Eager to lose an oppressive virginity and at last truthfully be able to say to my college friends that I had slept with a woman rather than falsely claim through broad hints that I had already done so, I clambered into the ramshackle taxi. After a bumpy ride on unpaved roads, we reached our destination around ten at night, a two-room hut at the outskirts of the village. On the way, Subash and I fortified ourselves, for what lay ahead, with swigs from a bottle of rum our kindly coach shared with us. I was careful not to drink too much, unsure how much of the rum was enough to give me courage and yet not affect my performance.

  The woman who opened the door before quickly bolting it once we were inside was barely twenty. She was short, dumpy and ugly. When she smiled, which was rare, a gold molar gleamed against her teak-dark skin. The small room that served as the waiting area was bare except for the framed print of Christ exposing his bleeding heart on one wall and two wooden chairs leaning against the other. A kerosene lantern, its burning wick glowering through the smoky glass, spread a dim yellow puddle on the cement floor littered with bidi butts and what looked like scattered remnants of a snack of roasted chickpeas.

  As our mentor, the coach had the rights of the lord of the manor and went in first. My agitation was increasing. I leaned the chair against the wall and stood up on its seat to peep through the narrow transom above the closed bedroom door. All I could see in the dim light was his naked back as he knelt between the woman’s outspread legs, thrusting between her thighs in a slow, measured tempo. He must have sensed my eyes on him because he suddenly stopped moving and looked back at me. ‘Don’t look, kaka,’ he said paternally, using the affectionate Punjabi expression for son, before resuming the thrusts, ‘your turn will come soon.’