A Book of Memory

by Sudhir Kakar

  I still remember the first woman—young, short and dark-haired—who smilingly accepted my invitation and once we were on the floor signalled with the pressure of her palm on my back to draw closer when the music changed to a slow waltz. What has stayed with me even after a passage of fifty years is the distinctive and exciting smell that seemed to come wafting up from between her breasts that pressed softly against my chest. (When I later told my more experienced friend about the woman’s scent that had so aroused me, he only laughed and said, ‘It was probably the smell of stale sweat fighting its way through generous splashes of eau de cologne. Germans bathe only once a week, on Sundays.’) I felt highly embarrassed with the instantaneous reaction of my body and mumbled an apology before hurriedly leaving the dance floor. Rushing off to the men’s toilet, I locked the door behind me in one of the cubicles. There I lowered my trousers and using a large handkerchief I carried with me, secured my erection against the stomach by tying the ends of the handkerchief into a knot at my back. In my imagination, women were pure and unsullied beings who would be shocked, indeed outraged, if they felt a male hardness brush against their bellies during a dance. Fortified against further mishaps, I returned to the dance floor and looked for my partner. She was no longer there.

  Together with the wallet and the key chain, the handkerchief became an essential item to be taken with me when I went out dancing on weekends.

  The kiss! Strangely enough, it is disembodied. I have no memory of what she looked like, whether she was short or tall, thin or plump, blonde or brunette. I remember it was a mild summer evening near the end of August. We were on a cruise pleasure boat, festooned with coloured lights and with a live band in attendance, which went up and down the Elbe for five hours. We met soon after the boat left the harbour pier and danced together the whole evening. She spoke some English and my German was adequate but I have no memory of our conversation. I think I remember some of the music: Bill Haley singing ‘Rock around the Clock’ and Chris Barber playing the haunting ‘Petit Fleur’ on the clarinet (or was it the soprano sax?). But I could be mistaken. In the summer of 1959, these songs, as also ‘Down by the Riverside’, ‘Besame Mucho’ or Perry Como singing ‘Sway’ were part of every dance band’s repertoire. In their headlong flight from the Nazi past of their parents’ generation, young Germans had jettisoned their own songs and fervently embraced American popular music.

  After alighting from the boat when it returned to the wharf around one in the morning, we sat on a park bench and kissed for a long time. I would love to say that this happened under the cool light of a full moon, and perhaps it did. At first, I was startled when she put her tongue in my mouth. My Hindu self, brought up on the notion of jootha in which spittle is a source of pollution, at first recoiled at the incursion, disapprovingly noting the taste of Bratwurst and mustard paste on her tongue and the smell of wine on her breath. But soon I let myself be commandeered by forces infinitely more urgent and stronger than Hindu cultural taboos. We kissed for hours, or that is how it seemed at the time . . . also because I did not know what else to do. I went back home alone.

  If I give the impression that the sole activity in my brain in my first few months in Germany was of neurons firing in the inferior temporal cortex, the paralimbic areas of right insula, right frontal cortex and the left cingulated cortex while the blood concentration of testosterone was at a high level—all signs of sexual arousal—then the impression is due to the selectiveness of my memory which downplays a mounting psychological crisis. For it was during the spring and summer months of 1959 in Hamburg that a questioning of the future my family had laid out for me became so urgent that it set me off on the road to conflict with the person I loved the most, my father. My later memories of the conflict turned it into a friendly disagreement that did not last long and was soon amicably resolved. It was only when I read my letters to my father during those months that I could no longer deny the seriousness of the rift that had opened between us.

  I had spent the first six weeks of my training in the foundry of the shipyard’s machine shop. I got along well with the workers. Initially intrigued by my origins—their notions of India were formed by the clichés of snake charmers, naked fakirs and fabulously wealthy maharajas which a recent movie hit, Fritz Lang’s The Tiger of Eschnapur, had only corroborated—they would have loved to ask me questions but were stymied by the fact that my German was virtually non-existent. It is a tribute to their friendliness that I felt included in conversations even if I did not follow what was being said.

  The morning shift in the foundry began at seven forty-five, with a 15-minute break for breakfast. The workers downed thick slices of brown or black bread with cheese or ham, washed down with a bottle of beer. The heat in the foundry and the heavy work of casting iron made drinking a bottle of beer every hour almost mandatory and most of my new friends were slightly woozy by the time the shift ended at four forty-five in the afternoon. And although a month after my arrival I began to take language classes twice a week the first German I learnt was the slang of Hamburg dockyards; I could swear in the language before I could make polite conversation. I remember that my first curse phrase was ‘Himmel, Arsch und Donnerwetter—heaven, arse and thunderstorm’. I proudly used these expletives of frustration at every opportunity, much to the amusement of my co-workers. I am still not sure what the phrase means but guess from the order of the words that it refers to the thundery weather that roars out of heaven’s backside.

  The men were not immune from occasionally having some linguistic fun at my expense. One day, one of them wanted me to go to the supplies store and ask one of the women working there for ink. He carefully coached me on the German phrase I was to use. Except that he changed one word, Tinte—ink, to Tante—aunt. I ended up asking the perplexed lady whether I could have her aunt.

  As was generally the case in German organizations of the 1950s and 1960s, Howaldtswerke had a pronounced hierarchical structure and was run in an unselfconsciously authoritarian manner. Orders originated at the top and were passed down from one level to the next till they reached the shop floor. My friends in the foundry grumbled at ‘die da oben—those up there’ but never questioned a single instruction they received, however misguided. Political democracy had not spread to the workplace and my co-workers, who were from working class backgrounds and voted for the Social Democratic Party during elections, were content with the prevailing state of affairs. Coming from a caste-based hierarchical society myself, I did not have any quarrel with the German system except for the fact that, in contrast to India, I now found that I was at the base of the pyramid. The view from below was unfamiliar and unexpected, and the experience salutary. For instance, whenever I came across a German policeman on the street, he somehow loomed larger in my mind’s eye than warranted by his actual physical proportions, whereas an Indian policeman, never a figure of authority while I was growing up, always appeared smaller than his actual stature.

  Living in a foreign culture, without being able to retreat into an Indian ghetto to shield its impact, the identity question ‘Who am I?’, the birthright of privileged youth, surfaced with an urgency that could no longer be ignored or denied by flight into the delightful indolence produced by repeated sensual immersions. Now, identity lives itself for the most part, unfettered and unworried by obsessive and excessive scrutiny. And that is how it should be. ‘Who am I?’ is not a question generally asked by a mentally healthy adult. Everyday living incorporates a zone of indifference with regard to one’s identity. It is only when this zone of indifference is breached that one or other aspects of our identity come to the forefront of our consciousness. Living in another country first breaches the zone of indifference around our cultural identity. Observations such as ‘They think like that’, ‘They believe this’, ‘Their customs are like that’ inevitably lead to questions which were not self-consciously addressed before: ‘What do we think?’ ‘What do we believe?’ ‘What are our customs?’

  Much of
this questioning is below the surface of consciousness. Together with the mourning over the losses inherent in leaving home, this identity confrontation, as I’d like to call it, produces a growing sensation of psychic discontinuity. The Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral captures the essence of such psychic fracture:1

  I am two. One looks back

  the other turns to the sea.

  the nape of my neck seethes with good-byes

  and my breast with yearning.

  Of course, not all or even most of these encounters in a foreign country are emotionally neutral. Exposed to indifference or condescension towards their cultural traditions in a foreign country, migrants tend to idealize the myths, memories, symbols and rituals that are a part of their cultural heritage. Indeed, they may embrace their cultural identity with a fervour that is far in excess of that of their counterparts in the home country. Others seek to abjure their cultural identity altogether, seeking an assimilation within the dominant foreign culture by what psychoanalysts call ‘identification with the aggressor’. By identification I do not mean an adaptation to one’s environment, which is a laudable achievement. It is only when Indianness is completely rejected, when Gurcharan is not ‘Tony’ and Sheila not ‘Sally’ only at their workplace and to their American friends, but begin to think of themselves as Tony and Sally, and feel as Tony and Sally that we may talk of an identification (or rather as over-identification) with the dominant culture.

  My own psychic movement was in both directions. I immersed myself in German culture with the same eagerness as I reclaimed my Indianness. During my stay in Germany, I was to read books on Indian philosophy, music, and Sanskrit literature with the same enthusiasm that I had devoted to readings on Western culture in Kamla’s well-stocked library in Ahmedabad. And although I continued my clarinet lessons in Hamburg, which I had begun in Calcutta, I resolved to learn the tabla when I returned; the fantasy was that one day I would play the Indian drums in an amateur jazz combo, a musical combining of India and the West in my own psyche.

  Germany, then, was a chance to begin anew, align both head and heart. The possibility was dizzying and I could have said, with a character of the Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul’s novel, A Bend in the River, ‘I’m a lucky man. I carry the world within me . . . I can choose. The world is a rich place. It all depends on what you choose in it.’2 I did not realize, of course, that my choice becomes my identity only when it is also confirmed by my social group which, for me, remained my family. Lacking outer affirmation, an aspired identity remains fragile. Self-definition without external validation has the same status as that of an inmate of a psychiatric institution who believes he is Jesus or Napoleon.

  The psychic breach caused by questions around my cultural identity was widened by a resurgence of issues around my professional identity. I sensed that I, too, had die da oben—my father, grandfather and uncles, who constituted the management board of my inner company, with my father as the CEO—whose plans for my life I had so far only feebly questioned. It was in the machine shop of the shipyard that my future life as an engineer was no longer a distant prospect but threatened to become an imminent reality if I did not act now. I recoiled from the vista I created in my imagination: bent over a drawing board in the design office of a large corporation drawing the same machine parts over and over again, or walking around the engine room of a cargo ship in blue overalls hoping that a passenger who played chess would come aboard at the next port of call. Even at college, absorbed in competitive sports, discovering the infinite variety of people and possible lives through books and Kamla’s friends, I had studied engineering with half my head and none of my heart. From the safe distance of six thousand kilometres, at a time when letters from Europe to India took a fortnight and international telephone calls were not only an ordeal of waiting and screaming into the mouthpiece but a luxury only the rich could afford, I wrote to my father:

  I am absolutely fed up with engineering. Before coming here I was resigned to it in the same spirit as a condemned man taking the last step to the gallows. I thought it was too late to make a fresh start. But here I realize that most of the students begin their university at my age . . . I have a choice and [am] at an age where I can exercise it . . . if I persist with engineering I know I’ll probably be well paid but all misery in working hours & low ebbing of self confidence will be the result when I find I am no longer the top card or the leader that I have always been accustomed to be and am just another also-ran. Instead I want to join a university in a subject which I find very interesting and which from the practical point also has not bad prospects. The subject comes under the department of Philosophy in the University although it is listed as ‘theoretical Physics’. If you remember, in my list of books which I intend to have the top place was occupied by these two books Eddington’s ‘Nature of the Physical World’ & Einstein’s ‘Evolution of Physics’. I got both of them from London and I find them deeply engrossing . . .

  I don’t have my father’s letters—they were lost together with my other belongings in Baghdad when I was returning to India in 1964—but my own in replies to his give a fair picture of our long-distance conversation. In my next letter dated 10 April 1959, I wrote:

  It seems we have been at cross purposes . . . however I must confess that there is one point in my favour. I try my best to understand and appreciate your reasons but your use of terms like ‘slightly amused’ and ‘at your age’ have a slightly patronizing ring and a ‘Oh!- he-is-again-at-it’ attitude . . .

  As for ‘Perseverance’, these are just words depending on the viewpoints. One might call it my ‘stubborn foolishness to admit that I have made a mistake and then lacking the courage to rectify it’ . . . As for ‘career and livelihood’ I absolutely refuse to admit that only Engineering is the ‘chosen’ profession through which I might enter this ‘Promised Land’.

  I know that my attitude to money might change when I grow older but I am certain that I do not have the ‘keeping-up-with-the-Joneses’ attitude which makes it so important to earn as much as I can. If I can convince myself on good grounds that I am intellectually superior to a person it would not matter in the least to me whether he is very powerful or very rich. I am afraid this is a very naïve attempt to express my values and I’d better stop pursuing this point before the difficulties of expression lend a meaning to my words which is not intended to be there.

  As for other people’s examples I am afraid I am absolutely irreverent which is perhaps the spirit of the age and there is no person to whose judgment I am willing to defer. As you see again that depending on the viewpoint [different] words can be found for it. You might call it ‘conceit’ while I’d prefer calling it ‘independence of thought’ or [in the] American phrase ‘to hell with what other people think’.

  You have the means of stopping me from doing what I would like to do but you cannot convince me that it is not good for me. I must look for myself where I’ll fit in the society. ‘Spoonfeeding’ and ‘We-know-what-is-good-for-you’, though indicating the amount of love and affection is much worse than leaving me to decide what is good for me, for even if it is a mistake (which I do not for a moment believe), it is my mistake.

  My letter of 24 May 1959 from Hamburg reads:

  I was very pained to read that my last letter had made you think I was in an angry mood. I hope you have enough confidence in the upbringing you have given me to know that I would not for a moment think of being angry at you. I had just thought that you were taking the matter a little lightly and wanted to impress the fact that I was very serious about it. As for the term ‘patronizing’ it was used in a way entirely divorced from ‘patron’. Please do not think for a moment that I will for a moment go against your wishes. Ultimately, of course, if you say ‘no’ I would not dream of disobeying you but I always thought that you also shared my belief that no man has a right to decide what kind of life another should lead. In my opinion the main difficulty lies in the universal reluctance of parents to recognize th
at their children when grown up have a personality distinct from theirs and are no longer the extensions of their own. I think you’ll remember that in my very first year in Ahmedabad I wrote a letter to you expressing my dislike for the profession I had chosen. As for being [not] vehement in my dislike I can only plead my immaturity since I did not then have guts enough to oppose what every one of my relations thought to be a very good career for me. I was like a small puppy wagging its tail in its desire to please everyone. It was only the growing dislike coinciding with my growing up that prompted me to write to you in my last year and I have been determined ever since. I am afraid you mistook the meaning of the story from Calcutta. It was meant to be a satire on the life I was heading for, where the greatest intellectual excitement comes from bidding seven spades . . .

  I know I cannot be an Eddington or Einstein but at least I have them as a goal to aim at rather than just drifting through life being comfortably unhappy. As for the fortunate few, I see absolutely no reason why I cannot be also one of those for whom vocation and avocation are one. I have been very fortunate so far and with your cooperation I can leave the ranks of ‘others who have to make the best of a bad job’. If you can only convince me why I should not be one of the lucky ones! Anyway at present I am applying to both Goettingen University and the Technical Universities. Then we have till November to settle this.