A Book of Memory

by Sudhir Kakar

  Anita went on to have the life she had set her heart on: renown for her beauty, marriage to a rich businessman and success in films, not as an actress, a profession she looked down upon, but as a celebrated scriptwriter of Bollywood movies. Over the years, we have not met more than three or four times at public events where we exchanged polite greetings. During these fleeting encounters, I have always been conscious of a sudden revving up of my heart as it strained to part aside memory’s heavy curtains. She always wore her public face—selfsatisfied yet straining to seduce the world in order to partake and feel alive in the elixir of its admiration—on these occasions, and I have wondered whether these meetings held any resonance for her. The hot flush of shame that I have felt on these occasions cautions me of how unsure I always was that my passion approximated her experience of our affair. I would hate to believe, though, that her public mask has now become indistinguishable from her private face—that they have fused together. Unless explicitly summoned, as here, Anita has quit my conscious memories but occasionally surfaces in my dreams; a deeply etched presence in the neuronal pathways of the brain endlessly traversing the track of unhappy love.

  In contrast to Anita, my love for Mala, perhaps the most important one of my adult life till I met my present wife, did not leave me diminished but enhanced, grateful for its bounty of erotic grace that animated not only my emotional life but also enriched my creative imagination.

  Although we were at the edges of each other’s social circles, the first time we really met was at a dinner party in the winter of 1981. Both of us were together with our respective spouses. As we regarded each other from across the room, the attraction was mutual. Responding to an unsent signal, I ambled over to where she sat, listening to a man trying to regale her with current political and social gossip. Once we began to talk, we shut out everyone else around us. Other conversations swirling around us receded into the background as a low murmur. Mala was funny, very bright and very, very beautiful. She taught English literature in a women’s college and we discovered we shared a taste for poetry. Indeed, the exchange of poems in our letters, accentuating the many colours of love—from its celebration to its despair, from its yearning to its protests—were an integral part of the letters we exchanged over the next few years when one or the other was out of Delhi.

  A week after that evening, Mala called me to ask if I would speak to her students on psychology and literature. I had been thinking about her all this while, searching for but not finding a good enough excuse to call her myself. If she could come to my house in the afternoon to discuss the talk? We became lovers the same afternoon.

  Memory becomes least reliable in the presence of strong emotions and almost useless when erotic passion is involved. I will, therefore, give an account of the ‘affair’ through the letters I wrote to Mala over the years. Not that letters are a faithful representation of all that that transpires between lovers. Love letters have a dynamic of their own that is independent of the writer and the recipient. Their tone is plaintive as if they cannot allow the expression of joy unless it is contained in the expectation of a reunion. They cultivate a particular mood of self-pity as the writer indulges in a comparison of his or her unhappy fate with that of the beloved. Their confessions foster the illusion of an all-consuming obsession that leaves no room for anything else in the lover’s existence.

  Three months after we had met, my first letter, from Patna where I had gone to give two talks, although infused with the joyfulness of being in love, already hints at the obstacles that lay in its path.

  I gave my first lecture this afternoon on spirits and demons. The subject was apt enough since the two hours of the lecture and discussion were the first hours I have had for a long time that were free of you, someone I have come to regard as a desired demon, a bhuta all my own. You were locked up in a corner of my mind, not roaming at will as you are otherwise wont to, while I talked to an attentive and deferential audience. Perhaps they were a bit too deferential. They did not laugh at my brand of understated humour or smile at the puns, daunting in their solemnity.

  Now, as I sit in this slightly shabby room, the mosquito net on the cot warning of more corporeal marauders, I am again full of you and our mutual obsession (Why not call it love?). I’d like to sing of it but you know I’m no singer or at best a failed one. My voice is ironic and monochrome. I know, though, what kind of songs they would be if I could sing, of a banal (only to others) longing, of gratefulness, and of a surging vitality and aliveness ever since we have been together. And there you were the other day questioning the reality of these songs, yours and mine, maintaining they were only an itch of the loins. Of course, the body gives birth to these songs, as to everything else. Fucking (or the lack of it in the present case) is certainly their progenitor. Yet do these origins make them any less valuable, any less real? Do the songs not transform the fucking itself? Heightening it, personalizing the elemental, adorning the simple? But there I go again . . . Do you promise to check my pedagogic inclinations firmly?

  Oh, my love, how many visions have I had of us together, of our joining, mouths and limbs, spits and exudations, eyes and hands! Of course, I too am aware of my responsibilities to others, to my life if you will. And dearest, if I exaggerate a little sometimes—you will call it ‘smooth’—then I can only quote my soulmate [the poet W.H. Auden], even if he screwed little boys (personally, I prefer big girls).

  By all means sing of love but; if you do,

  Please make a rare old proper hullabaloo:

  When ladies ask How much do you love me?

  The Christian answer is cosi-cosi;

  But poets are not celibate divines:

  Had Dante said so, who would read his lines?3

  Mala, I love you intensely, even if honesty compels me to say that I adore my intensity. You are the soul of both, though.

  Mala’s doubts in my love for her (‘Do you really love me or is it only sex?’), exacerbated by the guilt of adultery and the disapproval of her closest friends who were privy to the affair, occasionally came out in a cold withdrawal. I would react with the bewildered hurt of lovers through the ages as I sought to defend myself against her accusations.

  Dearest,

  One of those Sanskrit love poems goes:

  She let him in

  She did not turn away from him

  There was no anger in her words

  She simply looked straight at him

  As though there had never been

  Anything between them.4

  I have been feeling awful since that day . . . What happens to the woman I love (and love so intensely) when her voice disappears in the warning cacophony of friends and relatives and she begins cowering behind all the images of the woman she should be?

  To me, you are the end of a long search: passionate devotion given and returned, so miraculous and so different from other encounters and something I value beyond everything [else]. It is with a sense of wonder and immense gratefulness that I turn to your image inside me, sharing my thoughts, emotions and work. I could not, even if I wanted to, erase your image. If you choose to cut yourself off from me, then cutting is what it really would be all about. It’ll be an operation in which I will bleed and scream and even afterwards, when the scars heal, the thought of you will send a shivering wave of pain through me, like the twitching of a phantom limb that has been amputated. And you? Do you feel a nagging ache can disappear in one big great pain of separation? Or am I the sacrificial ‘bakra’ [lamb] on whom all the violent and vengeful feelings against men can be acted out so that you can feel pure and good again? See, I too don’t know you and my idealization of your lovability is not completely blind. My feelings of love, cherishing, respect, far outweigh the doubts, though, and I still prefer the experience of pain you cause than the far greater pain I’d cause myself by letting my love go or of forcing myself to think the lover unworthy.

  If the above letter and extracts from the ones below give an impression of the affai
r being solely one of raw nerves and bleeding wounds then this has also to do with the fact that the letters were written when we were separated for longer periods and Mala was especially vulnerable to misgivings and qualms of conscience. Even in Delhi, given the necessity of keeping the affair secret, our meetings were infrequent. Once or twice a week, we would meet for a couple of hours in the afternoon before she needed to go back home. Then there were the quick telephone calls, cut short by the fear of being overheard, exchange of polite phrases fizzing with feelings when we met at social occasions. Even being present in the same physical space as her, in a large hall where a music recital was taking place, for instance, made me feel more alive than the chance to converse with the prime minister of India. The dream of going away for a few days or even spending a full night together remained just that—a dream.

  The hothouse quality of our meetings certainly increased their steamy intensity, both in the positive and negative senses. Two years after our first meeting, when I was at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton for a year, working on a book on erotic love, I was actually writing about us while musing on the fate of sexual excitement in an adulterous situation (‘Every philosophy is disguised autobiography’). In this case, it was the poetry around the erotic passion of Radha and Krishna where the poets make it clear that Radha’s arousal is sharpened by the threat of discovery; that her betrayed spouse, in being an obstacle, enhances her erotic intensity:

  The clandestine life of the adulterous is composed of snatches of stolen time, rather than long periods of coexistence. This mitigates demands for intimacy on levels other than the sexual. The body, shackled by social and moral restraints and enmeshed in a web of unconscious expectations and attitudes from the past, glimpses in the adulterous a promise of newfound emancipation and expansiveness. Therein it is liberated by the spontaneous, vivid, if transient, encounter.5

  The body’s liberation, however, is paid for by the soul that longs for intimacy when the physical embrace is absent, when being in each other’s arms is but a memory. It is that missing intimacy which our letters sought to recreate and whose seeming absence in our short meetings so filled Mala with doubt.

  On the afternoon of 22 April 1982, I was lying with Mala when the telephone rang. My father had passed away. He had lain down for a short nap before lunch. When the cook went to wake him up, he was no longer breathing. I put on my clothes and rushed to the bus stand to take the next bus to Jaipur.

  My father’s death threw our relationship off its already precarious balance. Its circumstances had an eerie similarity to the death of Gandhi’s father. Gandhi tells us in his autobiography about a lifelong guilt when, instead of attending to a sick father, he was making love to his wife when a servant came and knocked on the bedroom door to inform him that his father had expired. The origins of my imbalance, however, were much more obscure than any straightforward feelings of guilt. I behaved in an inexcusable manner and left for Boston for two months. I displayed an untrustworthiness that Mala had feared, and this at a time when we most needed each other. Before I left, Mala told me that she wanted to stop seeing me.

  My letters to Mala from Boston play on all the registers of a rejected lover: grovelling, raging, self-pitying. There was silence. I sought out her best friend Leela who taught English literature at one of the Boston colleges and had just returned from Delhi for news about Mala. She told me that the ‘affair’ had indeed reached its predestined end and that Mala felt relieved, a relief shared by her confidantes.

  25/5/82

  What can I say, not having heard directly from you and thus not knowing exactly how you feel? For in spite of her efforts, Leela’s perceptions of what you feel towards me and of my feelings for you are bound to be somewhat distorted; here three can be a crowd . . . I have tried to be with you, magically trying to send thoughts and feelings across the distance, reading the metaphysical poets you have liked. Yet your image blurs sometimes, a blurring to which I don’t react with panic any more but an immense sadness. I love you, Mala, with an inconsistent but increasing love. And if ‘Reality’ has become overpowering for you, I understand that too. In any case, do write for till you do I wouldn’t know who I am writing to. And I am helpless when blind.

  Another letter tried to address her doubt, often in the form of an accusation, to which I reacted with anger—that our relationship for me had been fuelled solely by the workings of sexual desire:

  A big disadvantage of not living together is that hostility cannot be direct and easy but must be circumspect; the attack on your ‘easy’ morality was a reflection of my feeling of being deserted . . . I too have that ‘awful striving’ [after Truth] though, perhaps like Dostoevsky, I may well be sinning my way towards God. Mala, I love you deeply though I realize that in my current turbulent state this may scare you as a threat to your ordered arrangements . . . I will try to renounce it [sex] if you wish it so strongly. The wish for closeness, intensity and honesty (and humour) though, persists. Wasn’t this what we wanted, and provided each other, at the beginning and haven’t I kept my end of the bargain?

  In face of her persisting silence, my hearing turned inwards, the ear acuter to the sound of my own feelings. In a long letter from Boston, I tried to make sense of them.

  4/6/82

  The trip brought home to me, if it needed to be done, the depth of my response to you and the realization of how much you mean to me. ‘What is this love of yours?’ you may ask, as you have often done before and as I imagine you doing now with your characteristic hooding of the eyes. I can only grope for an answer to something that tormented you when we were together and which I have agonized over while we have been apart. I can, of course, look at it from the outside, like a detached colleague reaching a preliminary diagnosis. It is the search for excitement, he would say, a grasping of sexual rejuvenation that staves off the depression of a middle-aged man getting painful hints of his mortality. It is an effort to fill in the feelings of an inner emptiness that often plagues you. Mala is only a means, a weapon in a battle that must be fought on a different battlefield with quite different armaments. The colleague would then go on to my life history, fill out his sketch by pointing out patterns and tracing origins. I don’t doubt for a moment the correctness of his view though I may protest here and there as I squirm under the harshness of his gaze.

  But I have other colleagues too, the writers and the poets. It is an escape, they would say, but remember ‘man needs escape as much as he needs food and deep sleep.’(The last one is by our old friend Auden.) At certain moments of life one needs to be carried beyond the demands of the rational self and this is the only transcendence (glory?) we’ll ever have. For my falling in love with you is not an isolated act but a part of this movement. The irrational movement of this love coincides with and reinforces what I feel to be a whole new modulation of my life where themes that were in the background are slowly emerging to the fore as inexorably I try to orient myself towards newer constellations. It is not a new life I am talking of but the same one with a different trajectory. I cannot grasp its direction yet nor its details, but feel the difference in the way I respond to ideas, react to things, in the shape my writing is taking and, above all, the way it expresses itself in the choice of you as a lover who will both share and quicken it. For somewhere I perceive you as sharing the same disorder and dis-ease (to use words with which both the clinician and the poet will be comfortable though they would attach the opposite values to each!), striving at this moment of your life to give love (and its obsessions) greater room, no longer content with living out a life of limited passions. We really did ‘choose’ each other, even if it was not a deliberate, rational choice. What I ‘saw’ in you was not only a pretty face and a great body but also a soul that clung to the physical being and made it a human figure. You were pleasing to the eye, yes, but I believe I also touched you with other perceptions, as you did me, feeling the harshness and gentleness of your other contours. If you now feel you made a ‘mis
take’, that is possible but not probable. I am as I appeared to you then and your disappointment is with the way I am, perhaps with the very thing that appealed to you the most? As you can see, I have great difficulty in getting over your disappointment in me or hearing that you feel you made a mistake. No amount of reflection or experience can take away the vulnerability. Falling in love is no respecter of age (that is why we embrace it so joyfully) and nothing protects me against its rejections. There is not even a question of having a defence against any charges you may make against me. All I could do was to go through the pain. Do you know how?

  The mirror becomes an enemy, reflecting lines of age and ugliness with all the noor [radiance] and all that is appealing gone with the turning away of the eyes that had found it so. But you know all that; you must have felt like this with someone in a similar situation before. (Why are things in love so repetitive and simultaneously so fresh?)

  All very fine, the detached colleague would say, but what about wives and husbands and children and responsibilities? I was only trying to give a fuller view of my love, I’d answer, not seek resolutions which may be premature. At the moment I am more concerned with protecting the emerging shoots and shading them from the harsh glare of reality everyone seems to be so totally aware of. I don’t want to be blinded by that glare, while at the same time I don’t want to shut my eyes to its light. Is it an impossible task? Too much to ask for?

  After I returned to Delhi, I called her and we began to meet again. Mala, too, was enmeshed in the web from which she wanted to free herself while my only wish was to reinforce its skeins, make them stronger and enduring. Closeness and discord followed each other, bringing home, again and again, the truth of Freud’s observation that we are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love.