A Book of Memory

by Sudhir Kakar

  Indeed, one area in which most leaders score poorly is giving enough credit to those who work for them, in celebrating their successes and encouraging them in face of failure.

  After a quarter century of marriage, separation is not an account that can be closed without paying a heavy sum in psychological reparations. And this, even if the marriage bond had so weakened over the years that it no longer allowed for any anger, conflict and difference. For perhaps a year, the price I paid for being effectively homeless was a hidden depression that manifested itself in a transitional stance towards relationships. In comparing Indian and Western attitudes towards intimate relations, I have expressed the opinion that the ‘moving on’ culture of the contemporary Western person 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 was now discomfited to discover that I was myself acting out what I so readily censured.

  My psychic restiveness, more or less obscured by the veil of sensual pleasure I unwittingly drew over it, was also an expression of ending one stage of life in order to enter the next one. With the separation, the grahasthya, the ‘householder’ stage in the ancient Indian scheme of stages of life (ashramadharma), came to a literal end. I was now entering vanaprastha, the ‘retreat to or departure for the forest’, the third stage of life where one is enjoined to gradually withdraw from family affairs and turn to an engagement with the wider community. It is a shift from the practice of the ‘art of living’ (for this is how I would translate dharma in this context) to transmitting what one has learnt of its essence to the next generation. My vanaprastha was initiated by radical changes: in work, in personal life, and in physical location.

  By the mid-1990s, I was preparing to end my psychoanalytic practice by not taking new clients in psychoanalysis, which is a longterm affair lasting for many years, and accepting patients only for short-term psychotherapy. This was a process I hoped to complete by the year 2000. Along with a drastic reduction in my psychotherapy practice, I also decided to revive a cut-off part of my work identity: the writer of fiction. In the summer of 1996, when I again went to the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin for three months, I began to seriously work on a novel I had desultorily begun writing a couple of years earlier.

  There was a good deal of apprehension when I crossed over from one writing culture to another, from the culture of scholarly nonfiction to the writing of literary fiction. Perhaps the unease had to do with my being a late entrant to the new culture. I had been writing scholarly non-fiction for over thirty years and there was an increasing sense of predictability whenever I started a new book. I knew the book’s limits even before I wrote it. I knew the floor of achievement under which it would never fall as also the ceiling above which it would never rise.

  My non-fiction had been successful, yes, but success is so often the enemy of what could have been, of potential. I also felt that I was in danger of repeating myself, of becoming a self-caricature, a risk that besets all writers who have been practising their craft for a long time. Sentences that have been successful in the past tend to come unbidden to the forefront of consciousness, eager to be put down, and one has to exercise vigilance to catch them and send them back to the storeroom of memory or between the covers of an old book where they rightly belong. Thirty years of immersion in the culture of scholarly non-fiction had saturated my brain to a point where I felt that the space for fresh ideas had become restricted. I was increasingly realizing the truth of Nietzsche’s observation that many a man fails as an original thinker because his memory is too good. It was under these circumstances that I decided to emigrate to the land of literary fiction. This move also allowed, as I have said, a long cut-off part of my self to re-emerge and claim its rightful place.

  It was a heady voyage, then, when approaching sixty, I wrote my novel, The Ascetic of Desire, a fictionalized biography of Vatsyayana, the author of the Kamasutra. Fictionalized biography is perhaps too august a phrase for a novel where the only information about its chief protagonist is contained in a sentence in the Kamasutra which says that its author ‘composed it in chastity and in the highest meditation’, about which we may conclude, as he himself remarks about someone else’s claim of virtue, that ‘it may or may not have happened’.

  I came to the land of fiction as an immigrant animated by the challenges of learning the language and mores of a new country and excited by the promise of freedom for imagination emigration holds for newcomers. There is a distinction between the two in their writing. One is more imaginative and connotative while the other is discursive. But since I am the one who is doing both kinds of writing, there will certainly be some commonalities. The pleasures of fiction are the pleasures of giving a freer rein to imagination, going beyond prosaic reasonableness into a less tangible world of emotions, suggestions and impressions, escaping the tyranny of citations. The pleasure of nonfiction is in the greater exercise of rational thought and in the joy of thinking clearly. Of course, if they are to be successful, fiction and non-fiction should have as an ideal a smoothly working partnership of both kinds of writing; it is only the proportions of imagination and rational thought that are different in the two.

  Yet, looking back, I can see that I was more apprehensive about my move than I consciously realized at the time. I could not completely let go of the culture of scholarly discourse that had been my home for so many years. It was thus perhaps inevitable that the hero of my novel, Vatsyayana, was a scholar and a scholar of sexuality at that.

  I loved doing the research into life and letters of fourth-century India, an enterprise that provided a comforting sense of familiarity, while I embarked on the adventure of giving free rein to the imagination that sought to transform this material into fiction. The two cultures—scholarly and literary, discursive and connotative, my past and hoped-for future—were both present in the novel, sometimes in harmony but also, at times, discordant. Unlike Goethe’s Faust, the two cultures were not two souls in my breast where one would gladly sunder from the other, but both needed and struggled to be the only one.

  Ideally, I believe, the spirit of another time and place, and culture, can be best captured if both the sensibilities, the scholarly and the literary, are harmoniously fused. This is a rare achievement and the novelist I admire most and one who succeeded best is Thomas Mann and my favourite novel remains his Joseph and His Brothers.

  The Ascetic of Desire had a lukewarm reception in India when it was first published. An exception was the grand old man of letters, Khushwant Singh, who in one of his many generous moments called it the ‘best novel on sex and sexuality I have ever read’, an opinion I would have liked to believe. The novel, however, was well received in other countries, with translations in twelve languages and some glowing reviews which encouraged me to continue dreaming an old dream.

  The Ascetic of Desire was followed by three more widely translated novels, Ecstasy, Mira and the Mahatma and The Crimson Throne, each using historical characters as its main protagonists. Mira and the Mahatma received the ultimate accolade of being burnt in street protests in Delhi and Ahmedabad and I had to assure envious literary friends that I had not arranged the burnings myself. The protesters had, of course, not read the book but the mere coupling of Gandhi with a woman’s name in the title was enough to bring out incensed ‘Gandhians’ on the street. In Delhi, a donkey with a placard around its neck with the legend ‘Kakar ko sanmati do bhagwan—God give Kakar good sense’ led their march. In a television talk show, Nirmala Deshpande, officially regarded as the custodian of the Mahatma’s legacy, grandly proclaimed that an insect—me—could never understand the greatness of a lofty soul like Gandhi. My feeble protest that I had often written about Gandhi precisely because I admired him so much was not even registered. In the sound byte culture of a talk show it was difficult to explain that Gandhi was my hero not because he was ‘great’ but because he lived his life with a d
aily courage and minute awareness of the inner conflicts that being human brings in its wake. Gandhi strove for the only kind of happiness I truly admire, one that Walter Benjamin called the ability to look into oneself without being frightened.

  After the first three novels, I decided to revisit my old culture of non-fiction, to take a vacation so to speak. I found that my eight-year sojourn in my new culture had subtly changed the way I navigated my old one. There was more of storytelling and the use of the anecdote in the later essays. I also found I was willing to take greater risks by generalizing beyond the details I knew, normally a mortal sin in scholarly non-fiction. At last, I had emancipated my self from the accusing voice of my German professor—may his soul rest in peace—who had demanded I footnote each thought. Going back and forth between the two writing cultures in the vanaprastha stage, I have realized that you do not change completely by changing your cultures. There are beginnings, yes, but none can be completely new; we can only become what we are.

  Two of the abiding themes—passionate love and spiritual strivings—that are present in many of my non-fiction writings also appear in my fiction. I am fascinated by the interplay of both these themes, in my life as much as in the lives of other people. In my fiction, for instance, I have explored their interplay in the stories of Vatsyayana, Ramakrishna and Gandhi. My view of the human unconscious, the subconscious in popular parlance, does not only have Eros, or more broadly Desire, but also the ‘Spirit’ as its major animating force. The unconscious is like an engine running on parallel tracks of desire and the spirit. Desire and the spirit move in a common psychic space (to use St. Augustine’s phrase) ‘deeper than the deepest recesses of my heart’ and ‘higher than the highest I could reach’. The two may never meet, but in our most creative and alive moments they tantalizingly brush against each other in the empty space that otherwise stretches between them.

  It was in the summer of 1995 in Berlin that I first met Katharina, Katha for short, now my wife. She had come with a colleague to ask me to speak at a Festival of India she was organizing at the end of the year in Bremen, the port city in northern Germany. I agreed. She now tells me that though I was polite and offered them tea, both of them had the impression that I could not wait to get rid of them. I tell her that what she observed was probably my agitation on beholding her beauty. It was a discomfiture initiated by her azure blue eyes and long blonde hair falling down to her shoulders, her lightly tanned skin highlighted by a sleeveless white linen frock. To use the words of immortal Vatsyayana for both our statements, ‘it may or may not have happened’.

  Later in the same year, I was on my way back from the US and had a speaking engagement in Paris before I was to go to Bremen. When I landed in Frankfurt, I was told that Air France was on strike and the Charles de Gaulle airport was closed. I suddenly had two free days before my engagement in Bremen. I decided to go to Bremen earlier than I was expected. I cannot offer enough thanks to the Air France unions that went on strike that day on 9 October 1995. They played the matchmaker. Without the extra two days, I would have reached Bremen from Paris the same day as my gig was scheduled, and then left for Delhi the next morning. With the extra two days, I got a chance to meet Katha for dinner one evening. We talked till two in the morning, till the owner of the wine bar finally asked us to leave. Katha was very busy organizing the festival but we could still meet for a quick lunch the next day and then go out for dinner after my talk.

  As a young girl of nineteen, barely out of school, Katha had spent six months in India, travelling. It was an adventurous trip: hitchhiking on trucks from Ladakh till Patna where she had walked for a fortnight through the villages of Bihar, beating a gong behind two Japanese Buddhist monks on a peace march through the countryside. When she returned to Germany, she began studying anthropology and religion at the Free University of Berlin. India had bewitched her, as it does the Europeans who do not absolutely hate it—there is no middle ground of feelings towards the land—and she made many subsequent study trips to the country. One took her to the Sun temple at Modhera in Gujarat, another to Whitefield near Bangalore for her master’s thesis on the organization of the Sathya Sai Baba movement. After her master’s degree she started working at the House of World Cultures in Berlin, helping to organize its various events and getting interested in African and Latin American cultures. Almost ten years later, she decided to turn away from India—the Bremen Festival was to be her last contact with the country—when we met. It was a huge stroke of luck for me that she was emotionally unattached after emerging from an ill-advised recent relationship while I, too, was coming out of an equally ill-considered infatuation.

  Both of us did not try to hide the attraction we felt for each other. While she was driving me to the airport the next morning, I put my hand on hers as she was shifting a gear and asked, ‘Is this a beginning or an end?’ Katha smiled without giving a reply but her open face has never hid what she is feeling and I had my answer. Back in Delhi, we began writing to each other, a letter almost every second day; the whistle of the fax machine signalling an incoming fax became my favourite piece of music.

  In January, I flew to Berlin to spend a week with her, our time together further confirming what had become apparent in our exchange of letters: that we were deeply in love. This was no passing affair Eros had whipped out of playfulness but one that was imprinted with the gravity of devotion, and thus commitment. We shared not only passion but also interests: literature and music, fascination with the mysteries of culture and religion, distaste of hypocrisy and humbug. But the very intensity of my longing also frightened me. Wasn’t I too old for her? Katha dealt with my apprehension with a sure-footed, light touch. ‘I called Kama and asked him whether you are always so pessimistic about the future. Kama says that such queries fall under data protection laws. But he also said that he lets you suffer a bit by raising your temperature of longing for me till 17th May [when she was arriving in Delhi] to 89 oC. That has the effect of dissipating your pessimism about the future (since it disintegrates at 87.5o).’

  The more we saw each other, the clearer it became that we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together. Two years later, we married in Hawaii where we were living for six months while I was a visiting fellow at the university. The wedding ceremony was simple. It involved the signing of affidavits before a Chinese woman judge that we were not blood relations, and an exchange of rings and leis. Just as she had driven us in the morning to the judge’s chamber—our friends Vikram and Anita Lal who had come for a visit were the witnesses—Katha drove us back from the wedding to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, the coral pink landmark on Waikiki beach, built in a dizzying mixture of styles in which the Spanish-Moorish predominates, for a hearty brunch washed down with the pink palace’s special ‘pink’ mai tais. As we sat there, eyes dazzled by the play of sunlight on the surf, I could not believe my luck that Katha and I were man and wife. I am still amazed by the gift of grace that I have received in the autumn of my life.

  In the last chapter of The Ascetic of Desire, which I wrote just after we met, I let the narrator, living with his wife Malavika in self-chosen exile, imagine my own future life with Katha. Living in a quiet neighbourhood, far from the bustling sites of their earlier life, the narrator reflects on the closeness that has developed between the two:

  This closeness, where concealments have fallen away with time, ripening our love, has not been at the cost of a decrease or inhibition of desire. Passion has not receded with familiarity. When we touch or brush past each other during the day, or lie in bed at night, my arm around her breasts, my body curled into her back, fitting together like two unstrung bows in a sheath, our touch continues to vibrate with amorous tension . . .

  Our intimacy has also unveiled a very different face of Lord Kama, which Vatsyayana, following the ancient sages, has kept well hidden in his text. This face is invisible in a transient sexual encounter, no matter how vivid and spontaneous. Only now, after these many years of living with Malavika,
do I sometimes glimpse it in the aftermath of our nightly embrace. Like a rainbow after the passing of a cloudburst, I can see Kama’s other face in those rare, blissful moments of ineffable intimacy when our bodies have separated and are lying together side by side, but are not yet two in their responses. It reveals to me that the goal of desire is its cessation; what a wish wants is to stop being one. What men and women long for is the abiding serenity that comes from desire stilled, not satiated, conquered or denied. When lord Shiva opened his third eye to annihilate the god of love, he did not realize that he was fulfilling Kama’s most secret urge. I have seen this face of the love god but occasionally, yet the traces it has left behind have created a space in my heart which irradiates my body and mind with a deep feeling of tranquillity, a peace which is not complacency but voluptuous absorption and repose. It is a space untouched by passion even when I lie with Malavika—the eye of the sexual storm, Kama’s rare gift.1

  Over the years, what I wrote then has become manifest in the life we have built for ourselves. A case of fantasy anticipating reality? An author’s fictional dream foretelling his own future?

  On occasion, the very depth of our intimacy, the contentment in each other’s company, frightens us. Much older than Katha, I will probably die before her. Selfishly, the thought consoles me. I rejoice that I will not be left behind to live with the grief of parting or, even worse, with the memories of past happiness that makes mourning even more tormented. If there is an afterlife, in which I do not believe and about which Katha hedges her bets, I have promised to hover around her as a benign spirit watching over her dreams, a good ghost comforting her till she regains self-possession and lets me go to the afterdeath spaces, which I do not believe exist.