by Sally Howard
‘You know, Kerala does have this mystical thing,’ says Dimple, ‘this land of plantations and smiles. So I understand why it’s romanticised by northern Indians.’
‘And by American retirees, too,’ I say. ‘Is that why they come, do you think?’
‘They come for the reason you’ve come, gori,’ says Dimple. ‘They come because your countries are monochrome. But here in southern India, India is in Technicolor: Technicolor in life; Technicolor in love.’
She’s right. The reason India is so instructive in these matters of love and life is because it’s all here. Even in a modern India fixated on the twenty-first-century dream, the India of the Tantras, the Kama Sutra and the Raj lives on, with all of its concomitant and conflicting takes on love, sex and sexuality. Unlike in the West – where we arrogantly assume we’re living a life that’s the summation of all human knowledge – here there is no one truth. That is why India is so illuminating and, of course, so bloody infuriating.
I wonder what’s left to come, smiling across at the now snoozing Dimple, as I settle myself down for a bumpy ride.
13 | CALLING DR LOVE, Chennai
A man who understands the heart should
enlarge his repertory of techniques for sexual ecstasy by this means and that, imitating the amorous movements
of tame animals, wild animals, and birds.
When these various moods are evoked
According to the particular nature of the woman
And of her region, they inspire
Women’s affection, passion and respect.
—Kama Sutra, Book Two, On Sexual Union,Doniger/Kakar translation, 2002
Listening to my moans as you touch certain spots,
The parrot mimics me, and O how we laugh in bed!
You say, ‘Come close, my girl’
And make love to me like a wild man, Muvva Gopla,
And as I get ready to move on top,
It’s morning already!—
Kshetrayya, itinerant Telagu poet, seventeenth century
The electricity has outed for the third time in less than an hour. Dr Reddy tugs the pull-cord on his Roman blind and throws open the window of his Chennai office. Outside, rickshaw and moped horns bleat helplessly as vehicles concertina at a failed traffic light.
‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry girls – ladies. Here you see our tragic flaw of Chennai!’
Rolling blackouts and load shedding owing to electricity undersupply benight modern India, though with daily power outages, Chennai is currently the worst affected of the major Indian cities. It’s in the summer months, when the mercury creeps up to the early 40s °C and even Chennaiites are reliably decorated with rivulets of perspiration, that citizens bemoan the nickname of the ‘city of fire’.
For now, Dr Narayana Reddy, Chennai’s premier sexologist, suffers the blackouts several times a day with practised sangfroid.
‘Tell me, what can you do? What can you do? The five-star hotels have their power, and the politicians’ district. The rest of us? Hospital patients? Hah!’ he tells us.
In the northeast corner of the state of Tamil Nadu – home to Tamil, the world last surviving classical civilisation and last living classical language – sits Chennai, India’s fourth largest city. Giving out to the sheening vastness of the Bay of Bengal, Chennai is hot, fast and congested. As a major transport hub, many tourists pass through the Tamil capital en route to the more crowd-pleasing outposts of the south; however, others stick around for the culture. This is not surprising, perhaps, as Chennai is renowned for its south Indian classical music and dance traditions, showcased annually at Masam Marghazi, an arts festival that has blossomed into one of the largest cultural events in the world, attracting, in the 2012–13 season, over a million out-of-town visitors to 1200 events.
To some, Chennai is seen as a conservative city: the lunghi and business shirt look is big here; neighbourhoods in the original city are still divided along caste lines; and traders in Georgetown congregate in streets according to what they sell. Yet Tamil Nadu also lives comfortably in modernity. Chennai is the location of one of India’s few women-only police stations. It’s where Bharathi, India’s first transgender pastor, preaches to an appreciative crowd. It’s also the only one of India’s four major cities with room to expand; and it’s doing so, with alacrity. Dimple and I had taken a tour of the new Chennai the morning we arrived, all shiny twenty-first-century property developments pushing along the coastline of the Bay of Bengal.
Chennai is home, too, to what Dimple and I have chiefly come here to see: a thriving industry of destination sexology clinics. The sex clinics attract visiting Indians – some candid metropolitan couples, many sheepish newlyweds – from across the subcontinent. Some clients come in response to spam SMS sent to cellphones: ‘Sad wife? Ayurveda prolong her satisfaction’. Some respond to adverts in the national press; still others follow the fame of specialists such as Dr Reddy.
He charges 1000 rupees (about £11) for a first consultation in his three by three metre office in T Nagar, south-central Chennai. He’s one of this new discipline’s most illustrious practitioners. Reddy chose the specialism after graduating in general medicine in the early 1980s. Back then he was ahead of his time.
‘My fellow medical students thought I was raving mad,’ he tells us, his eyes twinkling with implied self–congratulation. ‘They chose specialisms in heart and eye surgery. And they laughed at me. “Who will come to consult you?” they said. You see, there was a big stigma back then about admitting to sexual dysfunction. There’s still a stigma now, of course. But the people came; although it took me until the twenty-first century to find a woman who was willing to work as my secretary!’
It all changed, he tells us, in 1985 with the first Indian general synod on sexuality. ‘It was the time when HIV was beginning to rampage here. The world’s media came. At last the Indian medical profession began to talk about this area; this area that’s so much part of human life.’
Things have changed drastically since the late 1990s, continues Reddy, after apologising for offering us no chai due to the power outage. The turning point, he says, was 1997. ‘That was the very year the Indian media got wind of the fact that sex sells. I began to write a sex advice column for a Chennai magazine, and the magazine’s circulation quadrupled to 150,000. Now I write sex columns that syndicate across 19 titles, all through India.’
I nod. The Indian tabloid pink press always had its share of scantily clad wannabe actresses. But in my more recent trips to the subcontinent, there seemed to have been a mood shift. Today, Indian publishing’s love affair with sex screams out from every racy strap-line or gratuitous excuse to focus on sex scandals in parliament, or the reproachable habits of India’s youth. Nevertheless, as I’d seen when I met Cosmopolitan India editor Nandini Bhalla, these magazines tread a tightrope: reflecting the mores of a nominally conservative nation while simultaneously sating its irrepressible appetite for all things sex.
As far as Reddy’s concerned, the trend for all these column inches treating of (ostensibly conjugal) pleasures is far from simply rank titillation and magazine sales. In a nation where no or patchy sex education is the norm, his articles provide a public service. Reddy’s recent syndicated columns – and where I’d first discovered him, when idly flicking through a newspaper on the Delhi Metro – have included: ‘Is it the woman’s fault if she cannot produce a boy?’ and ‘Are my nocturnal emissions making me ill?’
‘My columns are read by workers,’ he says, ‘by bus and autorickshaw drivers; by wives who pick up a second-hand magazine when they’re out shopping for veg in the local market. For many, this is the first – and only – sexual education they will have. Still today, many couples come to me absolutely ignorant. They have no idea how to conceive.’
This reminds me of an illuminating conversation I had a few years ago with an elderly medic. The doctor, whom I met at a London wedding, had worked as a general practitioner in a Catholic village in Ireland dur
ing the 1950s and 1960s. Over wedding-reception Prosecco, he told me that on two occasions during his years as a GP, young wives unable to conceive had presented to him bearing bruises around their belly buttons. It’s here, in the umbilicus, that their husbands had been endeavouring to insert their respective penises.
But ignorance, for young Irish and Indian couples alike, is far from bliss. Dr Reddy taps the cover of a book on the desk in front of him, one of his own. Three copies are fanned out in the kind of display you might see in the dinner-party napkins of a 1950s American housewife. The cover reads Making Sense, the subtitle A Handbook for the To-Be Married.
‘I find young Indian couples need the very basics,’ he says. ‘They can have no hope of a happy sex life until I impart the basic teaching that Indian society has denied them.’
The lot of many young Indians, I think to myself, must be similar to that of Victorian British women kept intentionally innocent. Or the fate of the many ignorant wedding-night wives frigid due to sheer fear. Or, as Kama Sutra translator Richard Burton put it in his discussion of the superior pleasures to be found in the arms of ‘Oriental’ women, British women were schooled into sexual over-delicacy, to ‘porcelain where pottery is wanted’.
Dr Reddy and the new media-friendly Indian sexologists are performing a function similar to that of Dr Marie Stopes. Her trailblazing Married Love, or Love in Marriage was first published in England in 1918. The book, which talked in unfussy terms about the techniques and functions of sex, was banned as obscene on its release in Edwardian England; though it eventually brought about a quiet revolution, propelled by broader social changes, in Britain’s discourse around sex.
Dimple, who’s been listening quietly to Reddy’s state-of-the-nation sex report, suddenly pipes up, ‘Baywatch!’
‘What?’ I ask, startled from my reverie, and wondering whether her blood-sugar levels have crashed. Since our arrival at Chennai she’s been gorging on doodh peda, the city’s famous milk fudge. Grand Sweets in Adyar, where the most famous versions of these ear-tingly sweet sweets are sold, was our first port of call in Chennai, straight off the Guwahati Express from Ernakulum Junction; an overnight express train that was stocked with rabid mosquitoes and neatly moustached regional politicians. Since our arrival, Dimple has masticated as ferociously as I have scratched.
‘That’s where my former husband learned sex: Baywatch,’ she elaborates, addressing Dr Reddy. ‘This was before porn arrived on every Indian handphone. So it was from Baywatch. And from Bollywood movies of the 1980s, where the woman’s breasts heave up and down and she looks coy and prances about beneath a waterfall, or a bad guy moves in on her, and he’s frothing like a rabies case, and she’s whispering ‘Main vaisi ki ladki nahin hoon’ [I’m not that kind of girl].’
Baywatch. Many Indian 20- and 30-something males nurture fond memories of the pneumatic 1980s lifeguard drama, which continues to run to healthy viewing figures on the Starworld India television channel. Likewise, British comedy series The Benny Hill Show, in which the eponymous star chases bikini-clad women about the British countryside, is often on high-speed playback. It ran for seven seasons on India’s UTV and was dubbed into nine Indian languages.
Dimple warms to her theme as the electricity sputters to life. The ceiling fan above us stirs one full 360 then shudders off again.
‘You know, the consummation of my marriage was like being kicked, or hit with a cricket bat,’ she says. ‘I was just prodded: prodded with a penis, in silence. No love. But how could there be love? Arranged marriage: love-shove.’
I’m surprised. Dr Reddy must inspire confidences. I’d tried and failed to learn about Dimple’s marital sex life before. Like many Westerners, I’ve always been intrigued by what comes next in an arranged marriage, after the ceremonials. I’ve struggled as I tried to imagine myself in the position of being expected to perform, sexually, with a virtual stranger.
The Kama Sutra advises how a good citizen, having chosen his virginal bride (taking care to check his carrion for bad omens such as sweating palms, blemishes and ‘crooked thighs’), might seduce her three days after their wedding night. After a couple of days’ bathing, decorating themselves and ‘listening to auspicious instruments’, says Vatsyayana:
The man should begin to win her over and create confidence in her, but should abstain at first from sexual pleasures. Women being of tender nature want tender beginnings, and when they are forcibly approached by men with whom they are but slightly acquainted, they sometimes suddenly become haters of sexual connection, and sometimes even haters of the male sex.
I also found striking Indian journalist Khushwant Singh’s account of being an unwilling observer to consummation of an arranged marriage on the night train from Delhi to Bhopal:
The saree is very functional. All a woman has to do when she wants to urinate or defecate is to lift it to her waist. When required to engage in sexual intercourse, she needs to do no more than draw it up a little and open her thighs … Apparently this was what the newly married Mrs Saxena was called upon to do. I heard a muffled cry ‘Hai Ram’ escape her lips and realized that the marriage had been consummated. The Saxenas did not get up to go to the bathroom to wash themselves but began a repeat performance. More than once the quilt slipped and I caught a glimpse of the professor’s heaving buttocks and his bride’s bosom, which he had extricated out of her choli. Above the rattle and whish of the speeding train I heard the girl’s whimper and the man’s exulting grunts. In the morning, when I pressed the switch in the compartment – a memorable sight! Professor fast asleep with his buttocks exposed. Mrs Saxena also fast asleep, her mouth wide, breasts bare, lying supine like a battery pinned down on a board. Their glasses lay on the floor.
Even if they overcome the grim fact of being strangers to one another, for many lower- and middling–caste Indian newlyweds the concept of privacy is as alien as that of love.
I once saw the typical experience described as follows. The young married couple will rarely get a room to themselves, the bride-wife sleeping with the other women members of her husband’s family and the husband lining up his charpoy (woven daybed) alongside his brother’s and father’s. Occasionally the mother-in-law, anxious to gain a grandson, will contrive a meeting between the husband and his wife by, perhaps, getting her to take him a tumbler of milk, whereupon her son will be expected to grab the chance for a quickie. Rarely will the couple get the opportunity for a prolonged and satisfying bout of intercourse.
Understandably, many young married Indian men are unaware that women have orgasms; and many Indian women rebound from one pregnancy to the next with no idea that sex can be pleasurable.
Even if the young couple overcomes the twin disablements of having married a stranger and finding a private space to themselves, it’s likely there will be an elephant in that room. Or rather, a sprawling extended family.
‘In the West a man marries the woman and the woman marries a man,’ Reddy continues, when I ask him how his clients cope with the brute facts of arranged married life in twenty-first-century India, ‘whereas in India we marry our family-in-law too. And the marriage is a contract between two families. So if my son malfunctions sexually, his wife’s family will blame me.
‘For most families the sole intention of the marriage is issue. If the woman does not get pregnant two or three months after the wedding they start to worry. “Any good news?” they will say, “Any good news?” How do you think that affects a young couple’s sex life? What should be a story about when you’re in the mood becomes an act in obligation to your parents-in-law. And I know you girls can’t quite put yourselves in that position,’ Reddy says, smiling. ‘But that would give me erectile dysfunction…
‘There’s one remarkable thing I’m seeing,’ he continues as he fiddles with his blind to achieve a little daylight in the gloomy room. ‘Thanks to all the money of “India rising” something quite peculiar is going on. Cases are coming to me where parents are litigating in complaint that their da
ughter has been married off to a sexually deficient spouse.’
‘God, what does that mean?’ I ask.
‘I’ll tell you how it typically goes,’ says Reddy. ‘The couple is married, but no child has come. It’s because the boy can’t perform and she tells her parents this.
‘Now, a few years ago, the girl would be blamed. Instead, today, the family sees dollar signs. They take the case to family court to get a separation, putting forward the argument that the boy is “faulty goods”. Then, the boy might be arrested. There could be criminal proceedings. If the boy’s declared a cheater, or gay, or proved to be in love with a girl from another caste, they might get higher compensation.’
Dimple’s eyes widen. Reddy notes her reaction.
‘I know … a few years ago, I would have thought this situation remarkable; today it happens time and again. And the sad truth is that many of the boys in these situations will actually be gay,’ he says, shaking his head bleakly, as he echoes what Mavendra Singh Gohil told us back in Rajpipla. ‘But marriage is still seen as the great cure in India. So your son says he’s gay? OK, maybe you think he’s gay, but you’ll marry him off anyway. Marriage will cure him! If he’s mentally ill, marriage will cure him! Just don’t tell his wife or her family; they don’t have to know: just a phase, auntie, just a phase!
‘Because you see,’ Reddy says, after a stagey pause, ‘for Indians, marriage must take place at any cost: “Even if you have to tell tell 100 lies”, the saying goes, “get the couple married”.’
I ask him how he treats such sexually doomed unions, in a land where divorce is still comparatively rare.
‘Of course, I cannot say “You two will never get along, you must separate”. Right or wrong, the pressure for everyone will be to hold on to a marriage; they will have come to me, often, with their family members, who are also invested in their marriage. I tread a careful line.
