A Book of Memory

by Sudhir Kakar

  One morning in July, I received a call from the office of Rajiv Gandhi who was now the general secretary of the Congress Party and was being groomed by his mother as her successor now that his younger brother Sanjay was no longer alive. The government had many sources of information—politicians, administrators, intelligence agencies—on the Punjab situation, I was told, but would also like a psychological assessment of the state of Sikh militancy. Early next morning, I boarded a train to the Doaba region of Punjab, the heartland of Jat Sikhs that was to become the epicentre of Sikh militancy. I spent three days there meeting groups of villagers and was then taken to Amritsar to the heavily guarded Golden Temple. I was surprised to see the damage to the Akal Takht. To clear it of heavily armed militants, the army had used cannon fire from tanks. There were huge gaping holes in the building and the Takht was in ruins. Sikhs, mostly peasants from surrounding villages, were streaming in for a first-hand view of the damage. To avoid untoward incidents, their entry was being regulated so as not to have large crowds gather in the complex. I wandered around and was the observer of heated and anguished discussions among randomly formed groups.

  In my handwritten report after my return to Delhi, parts of which I later published, I wrote that Operation Blue Star had brought out the Khalsa warrior element of Sikh identity which, at least since the tenth guru Gobind Singh and at least among the Jats, has expressed itself in images of ‘lifting up the sword’ against the ‘oppression of a tyrannical ruler’, and whose associated legends countenance only two possible outcomes—victory (fateh) or martyrdom (shaheedi). The attack on the Akal Takht, historically the symbol of Sikh struggle against state oppression, had reinforced the two Ms—militancy and martyrdom—the inner counterparts of the well-known five Ks (kesh—long hair, kada—steel bracelet, kachha—underwear, kirpan—short sword, kanghi—comb) which constitute the outer markers of Khalsa warrior identity.

  The army action to clear the Akal Takht from heavily armed desperadoes had become an attack on the Sikh nation by a tyrannical ‘Delhi Durbar’, a throwback to the actions of later Mughal emperors, such as Aurangzeb. The Sikhs killed in the attack were now defenders of the faith and martyrs—this too is a pattern from the past. The encounter was being viewed through a lens crafted by legends from Sikh history as a momentous battle, an oppressive empire’s defeat of the forces of the Khalsa. The relatively heavy army losses were not a consequence of its restraint in causing least damage to the Golden Temple but a testimony to the fighting qualities of the Khalsa warrior. Paradoxically, the terrorist losses were exaggerated to simultaneously show the overwhelming strength of the army and the Khalsa readiness to die in martyrdom when victory is not possible.

  Bhindranwale, in dramatically exemplifying the two Ms of militancy and martyrdom, had touched deep chords, especially among the youth. His ‘martyrdom’ made his elevation into the Sikh militant pantheon irreversible. The tortures and murders in the temple complex or outside were no longer his responsibility; they were seen as the doings of deluded associates, acts of which Santji was unaware.

  The galvanizing of the Khalsa warrior identity, which boded ill for the state, was being actively fomented by the community’s women. This was brought home to me again and again as I listened to groups of anguished men and women in front of the ruins of the Akal Takht. Most men stood in attitudes of sullen defeat, scorned and derided by wailing and angry women with such sentences as ‘Vay Sikha—O Sikh, where is the starch in your moustache now?’

  The role of a community’s women in its men taking up arms, or in the making of a terrorist, has not been appreciated enough. Whether it was Punjab in the late 1980s, or Kashmir in the last two decades, or even other places around the world, there is no stronger goad to arousing a man’s fighting spirit than that of a woman mocking and challenging his masculinity. Militancy starts losing its vigour once the women turn away from demanding masculinity from their men and begin to think more of the survival and well-being of their children. Unfortunately, anti-terror efforts are rarely directed towards influencing a community’s women.

  My report painted a grim scenario, but at least in July and August of 1984, there was one sliver of hope to attenuate the looming violence. Many older Sikhs were still well inclined towards Indira Gandhi and laid the blame for Operation Blue Star on the machinations and wrong advice of another Sikh, President Giani Zail Singh. There was a chance that if the prime minister came on national television and made some kind of apology for the army action, much of the inflamed sentiment, at least among the older generation, would calm down. Indira Gandhi was respected, if not loved, and precisely for that reason words of regret from her could only help the situation. At least, this was my recommendation. I have no idea whether my report ever reached the decision-makers or whether it was summarily dismissed by the hardliners advising a ‘tough’ stance towards the Sikhs.

  There had been an earlier foray into the state’s service. This, however, had elements of a farce rather than being a minor footnote in the national tragedy following Operation Blue Star. In August 1982, I received a call from Rajiv Gandhi’s office that I should be prepared to board a waiting Indian Air Force plane immediately. An army car was coming to my house to take me to the airport. An Indian Airlines flight from Udaipur to Delhi had been hijacked by a Sikh militant who had ordered the pilot to fly the plane to Lahore. I was supposed to talk to the hijacker in an effort to free the hostages and terminate the hijack situation. What was expected from me just shows how unprepared the country was to deal with such situations in the early 1980s. I had no experience with hostage-takers or hijackers. My only qualifications were that I was a psychoanalyst and a Punjabi. I was inwardly quaking at the prospect of talking to the Sikh hijacker over the radio and being only partially able to follow his rustic Punjabi. The army transport was on its way to my house when another call came. To my relief I did not have to expose my limitations since the plane had landed in Amritsar and the hijacker had surrendered.

  After Rajiv Gandhi became the prime minister in 1984, my ‘services’ to the state became more pleasant, consisting of no more than attending a couple of lunches in honour of visiting dignitaries at Hyderabad House, the official venue for receptions hosted by the prime minister. I particularly remember a lunch for Queen Beatrix of Holland where I found myself sitting next to Prince Klaus, the royal consort, who was dolefully eyeing the fruit juice served on such occasions. On hearing that I was a psychoanalyst, he brightened and proceeded to tell me that he was a reformed alcoholic although one who felt he could easily lapse. Although generally nothing is quite as tiresome as a total stranger telling you his dream or describing his symptoms, Prince Klaus’s confessions, eagerly lapped up by the other guests around the table, is the only memorable incident in what were otherwise boring lunches where being invited to one was their only saving grace.

  One of the more amusing incidents in the country’s service was what I like to remember as ‘saving the son’s skin’. This was in Alpbach in Austria, ‘voted the most beautiful village in Europe’, where an India-Western Europe Dialogue was held in June 1983. High-ranking officials led by the then foreign minister, and later prime minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao, eminent personalities from the cultural arena, and ‘captains of industry’, most of them from Bombay, were representing India at the conference. Unfortunately for the Austrian organizers, India’s status in the world order was not high enough to attract equivalent participation from France, Germany, Spain or Italy—the major European powers. The dialogue partners were thus mainly from Austria, not exactly a European economic or cultural powerhouse. The Indians were miffed, none more so than Narasimha Rao who left soon after the opening session. He was sitting by himself in the foyer of the hotel when Mrs Jayakar introduced me to him. He acknowledged her greetings without an answering smile, gave me a cursory glance and finding nothing of interest there, sulkily turned away. To be fair to him, Narasimha Rao was a natural sulker whose face wore a sullen expression even in repose.
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  The industrialists decided to make the best of a bad job by treating their sojourn as an unexpected holiday in the salubrious climes of the charming alpine village. Champagne parties began in the afternoon and went on late into the night. On the last morning, as I was passing the reception desk after breakfast, I was accosted by the agitated hotel manager. He knew I spoke German and asked me for help in resolving an unpleasant situation that had arisen in a room occupied by a father and son duo from Bombay. It seemed that when the sixteen-year-old chambermaid from the village went to make the beds, the son, a joint managing director in his father’s company, tried to molest her, running after her around the room even as she tried to escape. The girl was in hysterics. Her mother was threatening to call the police. The manager would be grateful if I could help in translating what his Indian guests were saying since he found it difficult to understand their accented English. When we entered the room, I saw that the young man was standing in the middle of the room, his head bowed, while his father was berating him with choicest Punjabi abuses. ‘If he wanted a gori [white woman] the bastard should have told me,’ the father appealed to my good sense. ‘I would have gotten him ten of them. Saadi nak katwa diti [lit. He has got our nose chopped off.] How much does the bastard want to put all this behind us?’

  The girl’s mother was called, apologies accompanied by a present of money were made, and the matter settled. In the afternoon, when the duo entered the room where a farewell party was just winding up, there was a good deal of merriment at their expense. The young man looked both sheepish and proud.

  ‘You should have given the saali a couple of thousand at the outset and saved yourself the exercise of chasing her around the bed,’ the unofficial leader of the business delegation told him.

  Soon, everyone dispersed. Mercedes limousines followed each other on Alpbach’s winding road to the Autobahn, taking the businessmen to their various European destinations, not a few to Zurich.

  Two Loves

  This chapter is the hardest to write, the press to conceal far stronger than the wish to reveal, not as much to protect myself as to protect others. It is here that I most appreciate Samuel Goldwyn’s observation, ‘I don’t think anyone should write their autobiography until after they’re dead.’

  There are so many traps lying hidden in the terrain of remembered loves, even for the wary: self-serving explanations, for one. I could relate my adulterous loves to the state of my marriage where, after a while, as I have described earlier, there was little emotional connection between us. I was lonely or rather my loneliness was heightened precisely because it was in the presence of a partner with whom I did not share intimacy. I was entering middle age where in spite of marked professional success, the lack of intimacy in my personal life was threatening the onset of a leaden depression of which I was consciously unaware but which was priming itself to seek its own cure through immersion into the ‘highs’ of passionate love.

  Another trap that makes me hesitate to venture further is the distress I might cause to the ones I loved so passionately for perhaps remembering it all so differently from their own memories, and to others who I should have, but did not love too well. It is in remembrance of one’s loves that the danger of continuously varying and misrepresenting the past is most acute. Yet to keep the most valuable part of myself, or indeed, as I believe, of any human being, that ‘endless river in the cave of man’, hidden from view by evasions and rationalizations will be fatal to the intention of these memoirs. If it is only our memories, the stories we consciously or unconsciously choose to tell about ourselves, that reveal us to ourselves and to others, that constitute our identity, then there is one particular class of stories which is central to making sense of who we are. Except for the spiritually gifted, the mystics, who claim to have glimpsed a ‘true self’ independent of and lying beyond memory, for most of us the truth about the ‘self’ is laid bare by memories of loves that evoked our deepest emotions. These emotions are not only of the ecstatic kind which (in Ibn Hazm’s words) are ‘beyond the reach of the most cunning speech to describe: the mind reels before it, and the intellect stands abashed’,1 but also of almost unbearable longing, hurt and loss. It is thus inevitable that the following two love stories also have an unhappy end. In life or art, ‘happy love’ has always suffered in relation to its more melancholic counterpart. Not only has contented and fulfilled love rarely produced a memorable work of fiction, or of poetry, but even in our memories it is always trumped by its unhappy sibling.

  In the late 1970s, I fell violently, heedlessly in love. In retrospect, I guess the very violence of my feelings should have been a warning. A fire whose flames burnt so brightly and leapt so high at the outset was fated to die down equally rapidly. Its ash-covered embers, though, continued to glow in my dreams for years after it was all over.

  Anita had just starred in her first movie, an ‘art’ film as opposed to the commercial cinema of Bollywood. People who saw these ambitious movies that were rarely released on the commercial circuit but made the rounds of film clubs in large Indian cities and at obscure European film festivals, raved about Anita’s beauty and her obvious intelligence. I was introduced to her at a party in Bombay. I was in the city for consulting with a family-owned enterprise in which the brothers were fighting each other over its control. I was flattered that she had heard of me as the psychoanalyst whose recently published book, The Inner World, had attracted some attention in intellectual circles. Picking up a rare courage, I asked her if we could continue our conversation over coffee the next afternoon in the lounge of the Taj Hotel.

  I now believe that what doomed our affair from the start was Anita’s beauty. In my first novel, The Ascetic of Desire, a fictionalized account of the life of Vatsyayana, the author of the Kamasutra, Anita served as the model for its heroine, Chandrika.

  Her high spirits and glowing skin were not only revelations of youth but were also provoked by the lustful eyes that caressed her as she walked on the street, her head held high, looking straight ahead while her body soaked in a quiet excitement from the erotic field in which it moved so knowingly. I have seen more than one Jaina monk, renouncers of desire, clothed only in modesty, who walk with a hesitant gaze with their eyes on the ground lest an imprudent movement hurt an insect, look up and falter in their step, their ceaseless waving of the fly whisk coming to an abrupt halt in mid-air when Chandrika brushed past them on the street. Her instinctive sensual wisdom never dimmed even when she was alone . . .2

  I was so blinded by Anita’s beauty, magnified by her intelligence and independence of thought, that I never really saw her, my gaze remaining trapped by her bewitching outer shell. Even when we were alone, it was the after-images of her public presence that continued to cloud my vision. Anita was the luminous centre of any gathering. When she walked in, there would be a marked change among the men in the room. Their conversations became charged with an obvious excitement, a sense that something out of the ordinary was about to happen. The men would continue to talk to each other but throw her sideway glances in the hope of catching hers. Gradually, one or other of the more self-assured men would break away from the group and drift in her direction, eager and anxious to win her interest.

  Anita revelled in this dance of desire of which she feigned ignorance but in which she participated with shining eyes, an occasional tossing back of the glossy mane of her long black hair and frequent, much-too expansive smiles. A major part of my infatuation was due to my belief, struggling to become a conviction, that unbeknown to all the other men, I was the lead dancer in this dance, the chosen object of this ravishing woman’s own desire. It lent my sexuality the violence of uncertain possession that rightly dismayed her. My love for Anita, driven by desire as its engine and announced by desire’s triumphalist trumpets, was poor in the softer notes of longing. Adoration and cherishing, tenderness and vulnerability—that are longing’s contributions to love; that lend love stability and permanence—were overwhelmed by the imperiousne
ss of possessive desire.

  I was never sure of Anita’s loyalty or faithfulness in the months we were together. Actually we did not meet more than a score of times since I had only so many excuses to visit Bombay. The affair was mostly carried out through letters wherein my epistolary passion was far greater than hers. Anita kept my jealousy at a high pitch by confiding the details of her encounters with other men—film stars, rich industrialists and famous politicians—who pursued her. Sometimes she was tantalizingly vague on how the chase ended. Jealousy gnawed at my innards while I pretended that I was different from other men, that I was the calm psychoanalyst-lover who could be entrusted with her confidences and who even welcomed them. Drained of confidence in my own attractiveness as a man, I believed the only reason Anita was with me, however poverty-stricken that ‘with’, was because she felt I understood her. Basically, I might have been obsessed with Anita but I did not trust her.

  Even otherwise, from our outer circumstances alone, the affair was fated for an early end. Anita had made it obvious that she cherished the ‘good life’ and intended to marry a wealthy man, thus finally escaping the material starkness of her middle class origins that continued to haunt her. On my part, in the unlikely event she had offered us a life together, I would have lacked the courage to abandon my two young children and be wracked by later guilt. Love would have conquered all . . . except my cowardice and her self-absorption.