A Book of Memory

by Sudhir Kakar

  After Subash had come out, hitching up his pants and with a wide grin on his face, it was my turn. The woman kept lying on the bed, her legs still spread, watching me as I stepped out of my trousers and looked for a place to put them and, finding none, threw them on the floor. My excitement was long gone. All I could think of was a quick end to the approaching ordeal. The smell of sexual fluids mixed with that of sweat and stale bidis was awful. But the worst was the sight of white sperm oozing out of the woman’s sex on to her coal-black thighs. It was a few months later that I admitted to Subash that I had been unable to perform, drawing, in turn, his own confession that he too had been disgusted. He had needed the woman to first masturbate him while he kept his eyes shut, fantasizing about other women, and then had instantly ejaculated once he entered her.

  In the summer of 1958, I graduated with a second-class degree in mechanical engineering after three years of studies that had never given me any pleasure. Significantly, my recurring examination dream is of sitting clueless before the question paper in Machine Drawing in my final exams. I then wake up, relieved that I passed that particular exam and can thus approach the coming test in my life, which occasioned the dream, with equanimity.

  The engineering studies, in which I did not do well, were nevertheless salutary for my personal development. They lowered my exaggerated sense of self-worth, created a chink in the conviction of an intellectual giftedness that would enable me to sail through the choppiest academic waters. I see this self-questioning as well as a reluctance to tone down a glorified self-image in a letter I wrote to my father from Calcutta. I had come to the city to work in Jay Engineering Works, specifically at their Usha sewing machine factory, as an apprentice industrial engineer. This was a stopgap arrangement for eight to nine months before I proceeded abroad for further studies. The apprenticeship was arranged by Sir Sri Ram, my grandfather’s close friend, who was the promoter of the company. In the letter dated 10 October 1958, I write to my father,

  Before beginning I must warn you that this is going to be a long, long letter since I am in a mood for introspection as if I am lying on a psychoanalyst’s couch in a dark room with the shutters drawn.

  After receiving your letter I started wondering about myself, past, present and future. Before beginning, I assured myself that for once and all I’ll thrash out the problem finally but gradually I discovered the fact which wiser men than me have realized so many times before, namely, that it is easier to raise questions than to answer them. And so as you go on reading, if you get irritated as I do not suggest any solutions you must remember that after all what am I, but a twenty-year-old boy trying to be earnest but probably sounding long winded in doing that . . .

  You see that I have had a very easy life so far. None of my ambitions have been left unsatisfied. I have always been a hero at school and a hero in college and can never conceive of a time when in my own limited circle I will not be looked up to. My scholastic failure in engineering college I always attributed to the fact that I had no interest in the subjects. This may be a delusion but if it was one it was amply supported by my high marks in the subjects I was interested in . . . But in spite of this a doubt has lingered and a little fear always gnawed at the same place, ‘Am I as good as I think I am?’ So to resolve this doubt one way or the other I had suggested my plan of studying for my BA degree in a foreign university in the subjects in which I have a real interest like Psychology, Anthropology, Philosophy etc. It wasn’t as you thought, just a whim for amusement, but a very vital problem to me affecting my self-confidence. So having been a kingpin so far I would find it very difficult to resign myself to a life of mediocrity as a so-so engineer in a so-so firm in a so-so place.

  In Calcutta I have had the opportunity of seeing the upper class social life first-hand and I thought it will be rather amusing to set it down in the form of a story which I am enclosing. On reading it you might think I sound very smug and superior but this is the way I feel and cannot help it.

  You might wonder what my ideal is? What I am writing is just an ideal to strive for and which may not come for some time but which I hope to achieve.

  The letter then goes on to paint the life of a bachelor in a small two-room apartment full of books and recorded music. The man plays sports, eats out thrice, has a girlfriend and travels to a different country each time during his vacation.

  And then to grow old comfortably with increasing use of books as my companions and evenings at the club. Think of all the untapped reading which I have to do. This is the extent of my desires and I have not the slightest doubt that I’ll achieve their fulfilment since I have never been thwarted as yet, which is all due to you and Mummy.

  So I trust I have been able to convey a little of my thoughts and feelings. And though I am one among billions of other human beings, to myself I am the centre of the universe and to you and Mummy an important part of yours . . .

  I do not remember how my father reacted, or if he reacted at all, but soon the preparations and excitement of leaving for Germany drove my doubts back to their hiding place.

  Rebel in a Known Cause

  1959–64

  Germany

  The cargo ship took almost four weeks to reach Hamburg. The ship belonged to the India Steamship Company of which Sir B.P. Singh Roy, Shiny uncle’s father, was a director. In consultation with my father, he had arranged for six months practical training at Howaldtswerke, a famed shipyard that had built submarines for the German Navy during the Second World War and now built some of the biggest cargo ships sailing the seas. The idea was that after six months of practical training, I would do a postgraduate specialization in industrial engineering. I would then return to India and get a well-paying job as an engineer in a British firm; with the possible exception of the Tatas, Indian-owned companies were regarded with utter disdain in those days.

  Sailing from Calcutta at the beginning of February 1959, the ship made many stops on the way, sometimes doubling back on receiving a radio message that there was cargo to be picked up at a port that did not lie on its planned route. Except for watching a rakish Dev Anand romancing the gorgeous Madhubala in Kala Pani in a cool cinema hall on a hot, sticky afternoon in Madras, my memories of Cochin, Bombay, Aden, Mombassa, Port Suez, London and Rotterdam, where the ship weighed anchor for a day or more, are hazy. What I remember are the seagulls swooping and screaming at each other whenever we neared port, reading novels in my well-appointed cabin in a ship where I was the only passenger, and playing innumerable games of chess with the radio officer. Seeing me lose consistently with the black pieces, he taught me the classic Sicilian Defence and its Najdorf Variation, which extended my resistance without staving off the inevitable defeat. He also taught me two German words, bitte and danke—‘please’ and ‘thank you’, and the phrase ‘Sprechen Sie English?—Do you speak English?’. This was the total extent of my vocabulary with which I began my stay in Germany.

  As the ship entered the Mediterranean and neared Europe, a mounting excitement effectively repressed any feelings of apprehension. My fantasy life, never a laggard, picked up pace. The fantasies, fuelled by a voracious consumption of European fiction and Hollywood movies, were variations of scenes that began with my sitting on a sidewalk café with a bottle of red wine on the table in front of me. At my side is a beautiful German girl with whom I am about to enter into a passionate love affair. In reality, I might have been a gangly twenty-year-old from an underdeveloped country on his way to a continent that regarded itself (and still largely does) as the navel of the world. In my imagination, though, I was sailing for vilayat, the home of the fervently, if secretly, desired ‘wine cup and the sensual kiss’, eager to open its portals and lay its riches before me for my delectation. If a ‘spiritual’ India has been the unconscious of the West, then a sensual Europe was home to the subterranean imaginings of many Indian men of my generation.

  Waking up at five thirty on dark, often drizzly and bitterly cold mornings in March against which my du
ffle coat, purchased at the Army and Navy Store during the stop in London, afforded minimum protection, I would take the U-Bahn to Landungsbruecken, the harbour piers. I would then cross the Elbe on a ferry to reach the shipyard. Through much of this daily ordeal, I was exposed to icy winds from the North Sea that froze the cheek muscles of my face and numbed the tip of the nose but did little to dampen the ardour of my imagination. Cheap red wine, the only kind I could afford on a monthly stipend of 250 German marks, was readily available in taverns where I spent my evenings drinking with another, older Indian, who had come to Hamburg for a three-month training with the Deutsche Bank and lived in one of the rooms of the bank’s guest house for foreign trainees in Blumenstrasse, next to Lake Alster. Thanks to a grand-uncle, Mataji’s brother, who occupied a high position in the Imperial Bank of India, I, too, had been provided a room in the same guest house.

  The ‘sensual kiss’ had to wait till well into the summer. I had joined a ballroom dancing school where from three to four every Saturday afternoon I learnt the basic steps of the foxtrot, waltz, rumba, samba and the latest Latin American craze, cha-cha-cha. It was not till May that on the urging of her young students, none older than sixteen and almost all belonging to the bourgeois middle class, that the teacher also reluctantly agreed to teach rock ‘n’ roll, a dance form still in search of respectability. Rock ‘n’ roll, which I grew to love and in which I attained some proficiency, was all the rage among the working class German youth, the Halbstarken. Akin to the Teddy Boys in England, the Halbstarken wore blue jeans, moved in groups on motorbikes, and fascinated many middle class young Germans in the same measure as they appalled their parents.

  My dancing partner in the school was almost always the lithe teacher, a cheerful woman in her mid-thirties who wore her shoulder-length blonde hair in a ponytail and often wandered off to attend to her other charges, leaving me stranded in the middle of the dance floor, looking foolish, while I awaited her return. All the other students were young Germans in their mid-teens, the boys in their Sunday dark suits and sober grey or blue ties, hair slicked back with hair cream, the girls in long party dresses, with freshly shampooed hair and wearing white gloves made from gauze-like material that reached up to the elbows. The dance school was part of an initiation into learning the courtship patterns of society and I was clearly from a different tribe, an outsider who was not only older but had a different colouring.

  A couple of times while I had been waiting for the teacher to get free, she had asked one of the girls to be my partner. We would hold each other awkwardly, our arms stiff, our eyes staring past the sides of each other’s faces as our feet tried to find a common rhythm. Once the music stopped, the girl would rush back to giggle together with her friends in a corner. I knew I was the object of their whispered attention but sensed that the conversation was animated by curiosity rather than an active dislike or animosity. Since sailors from the non-white parts of the world almost never ventured beyond the Reeperbahn, Hamburg’s famed red-light area, the rare coloured men seen on Hamburg’s streets were black American GIs on leave from their bases in south Germany.

  German racism, in spite of its recent Nazi history, or perhaps because of it, was not one of in-your-face virulence. One could choose to ignore it, as I did, since the form it took was of a patronizing, though amiable, curiosity. In fact, unused and thus insensitive to racist undertones, at first I was flattered by the attention that came my way. In my first letter to my father, a week after my arrival in Hamburg, I wrote:

  I like the country very much. It is very neat and clean. The people are very very friendly and they do seem to like Indians very much. London was a drab city, cold and foggy and the people closely resembled their climate. Indians were of no special interest there as you find one in every street corner . . . (here) I am always surprised and perhaps a little bit flattered to find myself the centre of interested glances and people looking for an opportunity to talk to me.

  It took me a while to discern the racial arrogance behind the interest, to realize that the object of curiosity was not an equal but, definitely, the child of a lesser god. It was a benevolent gaze that was directed at me; I could retain goodwill as long as I remained exotic and did not presume sameness. The racism was worst in the upper and upper middle classes where it was expressed, politely of course, in a cold and indifferent condescension, without the redeeming curiosity. It was unmistakably conveyed to me that I was privileged to be in Germany to learn the habits of discipline and hard work which Indians, Africans and other men of colour sorely lacked. It was regrettable that India did not have the Protestant ethic which Max Weber had conclusively demonstrated was essential for economic progress. Hindus and other non-Christian people of the world were thus fated to remain at a lower level of material development. Racism was most tolerable in some young women where a sexual undercurrent leavened the curiosity. I will return to this later.

  The long-awaited ‘sensual kiss’, when it finally happened, was something of a let-down, the invariable hard landing of a soaring imagination. As summer came, and I remember the 1959 summer months made up solely of sunny days and balmy evenings, Hamburg began to redeem its reputation as one of Germany’s most beautiful cities. The foliage was thick on the beech, maple and birch trees. Flaming orange-red poppies and violet irises bloomed in profusion. People strolled on the gravelled paths between the green carpets of grass in the city’s many parks, surrounded by the twittering of robins and thrushes in the old hedgerows and shrubberies. Small sailboats drifted gently in the breeze on the Alster on weekends. On an early Sunday morning, after we had returned from an evening of dancing on a pleasure cruise boat on the Elbe, I had my first experience of the ‘sensual kiss’.

  A few years ago, a German television interviewer asked me about what had struck me most when I first arrived in Germany. The country was in the middle of an unprecedented economic growth, the Wirtschaftswunder, and what struck me most, I said, was how Hamburg, a city that was ninety per cent destroyed by Allied bombing, had been rebuilt within fourteen years of the end of the war. I was struck by the newly restored facades of the public buildings and grand merchant houses, I went on to say, by the profusion of consumer goods I had never seen in India, and most of all by the real German ‘miracle’, a political democratization that had obliterated all signs of the recent Nazi dictatorship. My answer was a lie, a hypocritical nod to the persona of the grey-haired ‘eminent Indian psychoanalyst and writer’ that the interviewer was addressing. What fascinated and suffused the twenty-one-year old with delicious erotic warmth in the first couple of months of his arrival was the sight of young women’s slim, bare legs on the streets of Hamburg. The tantalizing glimpse of a thigh when a sudden breeze lifted the summer frock before the flustered girl could smooth it down again was an added bonus. This was not a simple matter of getting sexual kicks from the sight of naked female flesh. Bare midriffs, for instance, the expanse between the end of the blouse and beginning of the sari, were a common sight in India. I had never given a second look to the village women on the streets of Jaipur or the Rabari women in Ahmedabad whose wispy cholis bared not only the midriff but also the back. Bare backs and midriffs were not exciting; legs were, because they were covered.

  On Sunday afternoons, after recovering from a late night of drinking and dancing, my friend and I generally took the U-Bahn to the Stadt Park, a vast expanse of 150 hectares of woodland, meadows and public gardens around a lake, where we strolled through its green lawns and alleyways, licking at an ice cream cone. Our objective, by an unspoken agreement, was not the walk but a surreptitious feasting of eyes on young female sunbathers. Now, living in Goa, when I commiserate with visiting European women friends on their annoyance with fully dressed young Indian men who walk on the beaches to ogle the women lying on the sand in their bikinis, I hide from them the fact of my own not-so-discreet ogles some fifty years ago.

  I came of age in a middle class India where, from the beginning of adolescence, the segregat
ion of sexes was an unwritten rule. There were no girls in my school or in the engineering college and to go out with a girl who was not a family member was a situation encountered only in the movies; indeed, it was their chief attraction. I had never embraced a girl who was not a part of the family. Like most teenagers, I looked forward to occasions such as family weddings where I could steal hurried contact with female bodies, be it only a quick squeeze of the shoulder of a cousin. Holi was the most eagerly awaited festival since one could rub coloured powders of red, green or yellow on the cheeks of a girl or, spurred on by her squeals of delighted protestation, even lift her bodily to dunk her in a tub of coloured water. I remember the envy with which other boys in college regarded me because while playing mixed doubles in table tennis tournaments, I could touch the fingers of my partner each time I gave her the ball or that I could pat her on the back when she made a good shot. Little wonder that it was not the availability of a wide variety of consumer goods but the erotic plentifulness that dominated my first impressions of Germany.

  On Saturday evenings, my friend and I went to the dances in one of Hamburg’s many parks. These were open to the public at a nominal entrance fee and constituted a part of the city’s summer entertainment. Going up to a girl, giving her a slight bow to indicate good breeding and asking ‘Wollen Sie tanzen?—Would you like to dance?’ was an enterprise I engaged in with trepidation but carried it through because of the reward attending a possible success. To walk through a crowd of pale faces up to a woman I found attractive, to observe all conversations around her cease when I asked my question, to keep on smiling after she had shaken her head in refusal, and then walk back while a multitude of eyes bored into my back, my ears red with the effort to blot out the imagined whispers on the coloured man’s presumption, needed self-belief of heroic dimensions. This I would first try to gulp down through a couple of glasses of wine.