The Revised Kama Sutra: A Novel
By Richard Crasta
Copyright 2010 Richard Crasta
Published by Invisible Man Press on Smashwords
All rights reserved by the author and by Invisible Man Press. This book may not be reproduced in any manner except for brief quotations in the course of a review.
Author’s website: http://www.richardcrasta.com
History & brief notes regarding this edition: This novel about an Indian boy who grows up with an American Dream has been published by over ten different publishers in countries such as the UK, Italy, Austria, India, the Czech Republic, the U.S.A., Latvia, and in Hebrew, and has received rave reviews. This is a new edition that incorporates the best of the original, critically acclaimed first edition with a few later improvements, while attempting to preserve the tone and flavor of the original. Please feel free to contact the author with any comments at rc@richardcrasta.com
Brief Praise for this Book
”Exuberant, unabashed picaresque novel... indefatigable good humor transcends the personal to stand for the contradictions and struggles of India as a whole. Considerable, irreverent charm.” —Publishers Weekly
“I salute you as a full-fledged colleague. Yes, I am reading you and finding you very funny!” —Kurt Vonnegut
“Irreverent, unputdownable . . . has a comic timing never seen in any Indian novel to date.” —The Indian Express
“An Indian novel with a difference . . . an entertaining romp of a novel, with the Hindu culture at odds with Western sexual freedom. A startling change from A Suitable Boy, Heat and Dust, or The Maneater of Malgudi.”
—Tim Manderson’s Special Selection, Publishing News, U.K
“A verbal craftsman . . . hilarious.” —Time Out, London
"Should be a recognized classic. An exuberant Catcher in the Rye, a South Indian Confederacy of Dunces. Uplifting and powerful."--Mark Ledbetter, linguist
(Review quotes are continued at the back of this book)
OTHER BOOKS BY RICHARD CRASTA
Beauty Queens, Children and the Death of Sex
Impressing the Whites
What We All Need
Fathers, Rebels, and Dreamers (jointly with 2 other authors)
The Killing of an Author
and new e-books on various platforms.
Table of Contents
PART I: EARLY ENCOUNTERS WITH DHARMA
Chapter 1: The Beginnings of Sorrow
Chapter 2: The Aunt Who Loved Watersports
Chapter 6: The Five Pillars of Oppression
PART II: ARTHA, OR HOW TO SUCCEED
Chapter 8: Low Living, High Thinking
Chapter 9: Prometheus Unzipped
Chapter 11: Love in the Region of Filaria
Chapter 12: The Road to a Woman’s Heart
Chapter 14: Kiss Kiss Kill Kill
Chapter 15: Love’s Labours Lost
PART III: KAMA, or THE LOVE MACHINE
PART IV: MOKSHA, or THE SALVATION EXPRESS
Chapter 24: The Beautiful and the Dispossessed
Chapter 26: The Return of the Native
Appendix I: Preface to the E-book Edition
Message from the Author and Richard Crasta’s Other Books
Dedication
To the late Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, who taught me that it is permissible to laugh at the once sacred, and that the satirist’s religion is to have no sacred cows.
To Saul Bellow, who taught me to love words brilliantly used, and whose lusty but brilliant male characters suggest a possible symbiosis between sex and intelligence.
To the late Seymour Krim, a ballsy writer, for believing in me, and inspiring me to put my all into this novel.
To Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin, for inspiring me with their honesty and courage to stand up for the Invisible Man.
To the late Henry Miller, for introducing me to the laughter and joy of sex, while teaching me to despise and laugh at the censorship of thought and language.
And finally, to the all-encompassing Goddess, the Female Oneness, and her Cosmic Yoni, the Temple of Joy and the Source of Existence, the English slang version of whose sacred name forms the last word of this novel. I am sure you wouldn’t have minded sharing this space with her, Henry.
Epigraphs
“Man, the period of whose life is one hundred years, should practice dharma, artha, and kama at different times and in such a manner that they may harmonise, and not clash in any way. He should acquire learning in his childhood; in his youth and middle age he should attend to artha and kama; and in his old age he should perform dharma, and thus seek to gain moksha, that is, release from further transmigration. Or, because of the uncertainty of life, he may practice them at times when they are not enjoined to be practised.”
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana, circa Fourth Century A.D.
“Man, the most exquisite part of whose life is perhaps ten or twenty years, should practice Kama as soon and for as long as is biologically possible, and emigrate to America—where, according to Hollywood movies and assorted Western novels, millions of insatiable and sexually ravenous women await his arrival, ready to serve his pleasure, and theirs.”
— The Revised Kama Sutra, circa Twentieth Century A.D.
Prelude: The Churchill Factor
“I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.”— Winston Churchill, opposing Indian independence
Many years later, when the dogs of reality bit me on the behind, and I wondered at the reason for the extraordinary course my life had taken, I remembered that distant morning when a dog I was meaning to pet bit me and impressed upon me the fragility of the life that now powers this tale. At that time, Mangalore, a small fishing port on the west coast of southern India, was just waking up from the nineteenth century. Though the Russians had by now hoisted a dog into space, life in this corner of the universe was as slow as a line of loaded bullock carts on a hot summer day. In this town of a hundred thousand people living under an almost unbroken umbrella of coconut palms, fewer than a hundred owned cars, and fewer than a thousand had travelled farther than fifty miles. Except for the appearance of a smattering of Studebakers, Prefects, Vauxhalls, and Landmasters, the town was essentially the same as it had been a hundred years before, a town whose easy coexistence of Portuguese-style churches and small South Indian temples, of cobra-worshippers and devotees of Saint Anthony, of tiger dancers and piano players made it unique, a piece of India and yet not quite of it.
It was September, just after the harvest feast of the Nativity, when the monsoons have carpeted the district a rich green, and sannas or soft rice cakes are eaten with coconut curries made from the newly harvested vegetables. And I, a rickety, sunbaked, short-cropped and wide-eyed four-year-old, had just arrived a few weeks back from Bombay with my mother on a vacation, visiting my uncles. The story of how the dog bit me begins, curiously, with a pig, and the pig-eating habits of the locality.
It had so happened that the day before, my uncles’ landlady had slaughtered Dukor, a small, coal black squealer who had reached his prime. In this Konkani-speaking, pork-fancying, Catholic neighbourhood, populated by lapsed or converted Brahmins, the slaughtering of a pig was a ceremonial occasion. You let your neighbours and friends know, and they would reserve their favourite portions at a pre-bargained price. Those who hadn’t been warned would be awakened by an unremitting squeal—Vox Piguli—at about five in the morning, continuing till almost six, because the dull, desi knife could put up only a poor fight against a thrashing porker pinned by ten family members, usually with a little, pigtailed servant girl grasping the tail. By seven, the entire neighbourhood would have arrived to fetch their meat and their pig blood while it was still warm, wanting to make sure their reserved and choice portion was not snatched up by pre-emptive bidders.
It was the morning after Dukor’s brief candle had been extinguished. The family dog, a brown-and-white mongrel with a semi-amputated tail, had been frisky, which was to be expected when there had just been a murder in the house and the Great Chain of Being had been temporarily cut at its porcine link.
My mother was languorously engaged in her bi-weekly “head bath,” which meant the smoke-blackened bathroom would be off-limits for the next forty-five minutes while she soaped her waist-length, jet-black hair and ladled over herself chembufuls of water from a great black cauldron—a cauldron heated over firewood that gave more light than heat and more smoke than both.
Unnoticed by my adult caretakers, I slipped out of the house and drifted past the just-watered earth around the banana trees, skirted the deep well from which water was drawn in round, narrow-necked kolsos (whose coppery smell I loved to inhale with my nose to the cool metal), and skipped over puddles of rainwater till I reached the verandah of the landlady’s house, where Doggie was chained to a pillar.
“Doggie, Doggie,” said I, reaching for the dog in the spirit of idealistic camaraderie that would be such a hallmark of my later years. But the dog quickly taught me the danger that lay in bared but unsmiling teeth. With a lunge, it sank its teeth into my thigh, and then, as I fell forward, into my behind.
Was it my shock at this first revelation of the evil hidden in benign Nature? Or was it the viciousness of Doggie’s bite? Whatever the answer, I was unconscious when my mother found me. Tears flooding her chestnut eyes, she screamed, “Arré baba, what happened to you, my poor baby!” Was it to end like this—her boy, to whom she had hoped that the mantle of Churchill’s greatness might pass, felled by a dog bite? Wasted, though not yet tasted by more discriminating customers, by History?
For this her second and favourite son had been begotten in the house on 8, Cambridge Road, Bangalore (yes, Bangalore, at that time an imperialist army cantonment with skirted women galore, two hundred miles east of sleepy, coastal Mangalore). It was the very house in which the pre-porcine Winston Churchill, then a young lieutenant, had hung up his long johns to dry and indulged in the vices that were to result in his later baldness (and therefore his overcompensating pomposity). Surely, I fantasised later, Churchill, being young and single and probably lonely for suitably imperial female company, had splurted his seed onto those very walls (which for the future Preserver of the Empire was a politically incorrect act, but wildly pleasurable nevertheless). And so had I grown up to a chorus of millions of cigar-smoking, bald Churchillian spermatozoa, yelling “Right ho, Vijay!” “Keep it up, old boy!” And never in the history of the Free World did one baby owe so much to so many.
“Hees going to be furrpecttly pine, Amma,” Dr. Seshadri Doomappa told my mother fourteen injections later. His lips opened wide in their usual five-second imitation of a soundless, breathless smile. He had gambled with my life, injecting me with anti-rabies shots before waiting to verify if the dog had been rabid; and this at a time when the shots themselves had a ten percent chance of being deadly. But his white-smocked assurance made my mother sigh with relief: her son had not yet set.
Looking back at it many years later, I challenge Dr. Doomappa’s flamboyantly optimistic assessment. For how could this “doctor,” this smug puncturer of native bottoms, this transmitter of foreign agents into Indian blood, sitting there in the Stone Age surroundings of the Lady Winelock Hospital, breathing, exuding, and stinking of phenyl like the nurses and the hospital itself, know everything there was to know?
Such as: if a mad dog can transmit madness by biting, can a neurotic dog transmit neurosis? Can a disaffected dog breed disaffection? A maladjusted dog maladjustment? A sexy dog sexual obsession? If you prick us, the dogbitten, will we not bark? And if you wrong us, the twice-bitten, will we not write dyspeptic tomes?
Part I
Early Encounters With Dharma
Chapter 1
The Beginnings of Sorrow
The sex life of the average human male begins with his Mummy. This most secretly erotic of bonds, more intense in some cultures than in others, is energized and inflamed in our country by unlimited breast-feeding, oil massages, and intimate caresses such as may never recur in an often-poor, often-blighted life. And some would argue that this Original Sin of Love, this original love affair, never ends, that every significant woman in his life merely takes the place of his dear, dear Mummyji. So momentous is our maternal obsession that we idealise it in concepts such as Divine Mother, Mataji, Goddess, the Eternal Female Principle, and so on, and one out of every three Bollywood movies reaches its point of emotional climax with a scene such as this:
SON [ditching his current skirt-chasing interest and rushing to dying mother’s bedside]: Maaaan!
MOTHER: Don’t call me “Maaaan”! I’m not your mother!
SON [in tears]: Don’t say that, Maaaanji! What all you are talking?! If you are not my motherji, who are you—my Uncleji?
MOTHER [sobbing]: I lied to you, son! I’m not your real mother.
SON: Not my mother?! Haré Rama! Then who is my real motherji? Indira Gandhi? Ganga Devi? V.V. Giri?
MOTHER: Your real mother is . . . Your real mother is . . . [she croaks].
SON: Maan! Maan! Oh, poor, poor, motherless me!
As the plot lurches into the son’s tearfully hysterical search for his real mother, he bursts into a heartrendingly melancholy song and dance. The audience washes the theatre floor with its tears and the box office packs in the loot.
This mystical and sometimes exhausting maternal relationship is the prologue to my own tale, which had begun in Bangalore, where I was born on the morn of April 22, 1953, moving from the hospital to the very house that Winston Churchill spilt his seed in, presiding over the seminal staining of a tiny fraction of the Empire’s walls. Those early years of innocence, the first fresh years of India’s independence and of the Republic, before assorted dogs began to corrupt my Paradise, were as benign as a mother and child walking in a garden—a timeless scene in a timeless dream-movie.
Look at me, then, in my third year of Paradise, in my first, full-fledged, Technicolor memory: I, a little monkey and recent mud-eater, tugging at the blue-flowered sari of a beautiful lady, my mother, as we amble about the luxuriant grounds of the tree-studded garden compound of Churchill’s sometime sub-imperial residence. Mummy’s face is powdered, fair, and young, her dark hair falls straight to mid-back, except for two braids pinned together and adorned with a string of jasmine blossoms, and her red silk blouse is cut low to present to me the twin orbs of my infantile desire. Brilliant white sunshine is tamed and softened by the garden’s jacaranda and gulmohur trees, its begonias and marigolds and chrysanthemums.
We walk out onto the road, empty except for a horse carriage trotting by in a vapour of horse dung and urine-flavoured hay, the horse’s silver anklets tinkling; I am lifted up into a soft cocoon of arms, bosom, and feminine perfume; and soon, we are inside a grey, steepled church, Mummy kneeling, I standing on the bench and saying, “Pitty flowers! Pitty eerings!” as I play with her ears and hair.
“Sshh! Sshh!” two old ladies in the front row, saris raised to cover their heads, turn back and say, eyes scolding.
And I bury my face in my mother’s sari, brush my nose against the soft skin of her neck, and breathe in her rapturous scent—a mixture of soap-of-the-day, Himalaya Bouquet talcum powder, and fresh underarm sweat—a benevolent scent in a benevolent world.
At that time, Bangalore was a paradise blessed with cool breezes, pure air, milkwhite sunlight, endless gardens, and ancient trees. And life, for me, was as colourful and rich as a hawker’s basket of plastic bangles.
What, then, caused the end of my Paradise? The causes, dear reader, have their roots in my beginnings and those of my parents and my race, in the poisons planted in me by the dogbite, indeed perhaps in Adam himself (yes, Adam, who was compelled to be a one-hander before Eve came along, and came again, and who represents the original male condition of loneliness and impossible longings, of free-floating male anxiety).
Consider that the primary reason that I was born was that my father had a talent for escaping death . Indeed, by the time he was twenty-six, Daddy, Pater, Paterfamilias, Pop—also known to the world as Melvin Prabhu—a stolid caramel-skinned youth of medium height with thick black eyebrows and a pencil moustache, had escaped or survived numerous falling coconuts, two cobra bites, one earthquake, one charging bullock, two mad dogs, and one plate of lizard-poisoned chutney. Then he made one tiny miscalculation. Just months before the Second World War broke out he chose to enlist in the army of the Sun-Never-Sets Empire. Shortly after, he was shipped out to swinging Singapore, only to be captured two years later by the future inventors of Walkmans.
Not only did my father survive his four-year imprisonment and the extreme culinary deprivations, sickness, and torture that destroyed half his camp, but more impressively, he escaped the bomb-happy Americans who, in their eagerness to vaporise the soon-to-surrender Japanese, had mainly been bombing their own side. So it was that one day, Dad narrowly escaped an American bomb by jumping into the trench on his right, instead of into the trench on his left as was his usual habit; the bomb killed all the occupants of the left trench. Later, as he was wasting away on the starving and bomb-strafed island, the American atom bombs precipitated the Japanese surrender and a nick-of-time rescue by Australian soldiers. Thus do I—though it embarrasses the life out of my bleeding-heart, peacenik soul—owe my existence to three American bombs.
Dad returned, a proud survivor posted to a cushy Army job in Bangalore, and soon took a bus trip down the steep, winding road through the tiger-haunted Western Ghat Mountains to Mangalore. There, he went about the much-delayed business of hunting for a wife, following the tradition in which matchmakers arranged formal social visits for the “viewing” of nubile females.
“My British Commanding Officer wrote in my report, ‘He is handsome—for an Indian,’” Daddy recounted proudly, pointing to a photograph of himself, rugged, broadfaced, sunbaked, unnaturally stiff and erect, in an olive-green, beribboned military uniform—the way I remembered him in my early days. “Some big families tried to pawn off their daughters on me!”
“But when I saw your mother . . .”
The encounter took place on a sunny late afternoon on the verandah of a Roman-villa-like residence whose walls were covered with cracks, moss, and peeling yellow paint, evidence of my maternal grandfather’s slow decline from big landlord to frayed-jacketed debtor. The verandah looked out onto a two-acre garden dense with coconut, mango, tamarind, jackfruit, and papaya trees, and animaled by one dog, one cow-with-calf, and one perpetually bleating goat. Here it was that Mummy, or Lena Agnes Pereira as the world then knew her, had entered Dad’s life, walking out onto the verandah demurely, her light brown, long-lashed, almond eyes downcast, full lips trembling, bearing a cup of coffee for the honoured guest. Deftly moving her waist-length hair out of the way, she had soundlessly perched herself in a corner chair and simultaneously found a place in my father’s heart.
“She was shy, simple, and would not talk to me, but I wasted no time waiting to ask my parents to tell her parents. I simply told her parents, ‘I want her!’”
“Mehnnnnn!” the goat had bleated at that precise moment and in an unusually loud voice, as if in assent.
Grandpa, a bald-headed, patriarchal eccentric whose worldview was founded on nuggets of wisdom from Reader’s Digest and dozens of formulaic and magical prayers to the Virgin Mary, the Little Flower, and assorted saints, believed that the Virgin had spoken through the beast, for which he had a special affection, as he personally milked it each morning. He promptly affixed his paternal thumb print on the deal.
Everyone present looked relieved, especially my mother’s ill-fed brothers and sisters, who wore the expressions of concentration camp survivors and looked forward with lip-smacking relish to the traditional one week of festive meals with their promise of unlimited helpings of calorie-rich, gourmet food.
But after having escaped death with the skill and comic indestructibility of Brer Rabbit, after having found himself a local beauty for a wife and having married her at a boisterous wedding during which a band comprised of tin-eared village louts played “Rosalie Mujha Mogachen” and “Oh My Darling Clementine,” and after having been merry enough for three years after the war’s end as to buy himself a violin and learn to play “Santa Lucia,” while his bride bore him two sons in quick succession, Dad stumbled through the rest of his life like a wounded, sense-impaired, prehistoric beast in some primordial darkness. Perhaps childhood poverty, his narrow escape from wartime starvation and extinction, and the slow realisation that he was stuck forever as a junior commissioned officer had caused the decline of his felicity, and his obsession with only the basics of survival and therefore his disdain for such superficialities as bourgeois physical appearances: every Christmas of his adult life, he wore the same stone-washed three-piece suit, and he never could knot a tie without looking like the victim of an unsuccessful hanging.
I see how hopelessly entwined our fates are, for I fear he may also have bequeathed to me his hard-headed un-pragmatism and his naive and disastrous misunderstanding of life. It was only natural, then, that I would try to enlarge my inheritance by unconsciously looking for new and improved fathers: at various times, God the Father, Saint John “Don” Bosco, John F. Kennedy, Father Joseph Maximus, S.J.
Why these Western (or Westernised) stiffs?
Because it is the fate of every educated Indian, whether or not he admits it, never to be completely Eastern, but to be something of a psychological and intellectual masala with some Western ingredients stone-ground into the original mixture so finely as to make them seem indistinguishable from the rest. In fact, we are all of us irrevocably mixed-up, as mixed-up as a shrouded Hindu corpse in Varanasi being driven to the Ganga—to its immortal moksha or dissolution in the holy river—on top of a scooter rickshaw: nirvana powered by an internal combustion engine, no less!
Indeed, cruel Dame History herself has been a gigantic mixer of our race, starting with the original blending of Aryans and Dravidians, and throughout its later history when the gold-and-jewel-rich country was the destination of choice for conquerors—Greek, Arabic, Mongolian, Persian, Portuguese, and English—not all of whom onanistically spilt their seed here, but some of whom let it sprout in India’s fertile and soft loins, taking their pleasures any way they could get them.
When I was born, many years later, there was the problem of naming me, a Christian descendant of Brahmins who allegedly owed their descent to colonizing Aryans from south-eastern Europe.
My mother was like many Mangaloreans whose extreme anxiety not to displease the One True Christian God (which Mom assuaged by whispering quick prayers to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph about once every fifteen minutes of her waking life, and also every time she got up at night to pee) had made them conceal their Hindu ancestry from their children.
Oral tradition has it that our Saraswat Brahmin ancestors had migrated from North India to Goa in the early part of the first millennium after Christ. But it is only in the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese landed in India with the Divine Mission of spreading Christianity and syphilis amongst the Brown Races—winning pepper and souls for the mother country—that most official histories of Mangaloreans by Mangaloreans begin. What a telling state of affairs: that your racial memory is a blank slate until the moment that sword-wielding Jesus freaks from five thousand miles away invade your country.
This was the Portuguese swordus operandi: Virgin Mary, Ora Pro Nobis while we relieve the heathens of their intestines. They also used less violent stratagems such as throwing beef or pork into the vegetarian Brahmins’ sacred family wells, polluting them forever. The Brahmins’ only choice was to leave their properties behind and flee south to the Canara coast around and to the north of Mangalore, areas outside Portuguese control, or to stay on as converts to the religion of the conquerors, pragmatically accepting Fate’s decree.
My broadminded ancestors took the easier road, learning to worship the foreign God. But when the Portuguese continued their oppressions, forbidding the speaking of the Konkani mother tongue, insisting that the new converts wear skirts, give up the ritual daily morning bath for an occasional evening bath, and abandon all their other Hindu paraphernalia and customs, my ancestors fled south, taking with them their new religion and their new habit of a heavy Sunday lunch of pork curry washed down with spirits.
More than three centuries later, having survived the circumcision of their identity by their Portuguese conquerors and of some of their male ancestors’ foreskins by Tippu Sultan, my father and mother were now in a free India, undecided over which heritage of mine, the Western or the Eastern, would prevail in the name they gave me.
Daddy was sitting one evening in his striped easy chair with his bottle of Army ration Hercules XXX Rum beside him, and the day’s Deccan Herald before him. On that same eventful day, British High Commissioner Sir Alexander Clutterbuck had arrived in Bangalore, the wicked U.S.S.R. had exploded three atom bombs, and advertisements for BOAC, Parle Gluco biscuits, and Lux Beauty Soap floated before my father’s bleary eyes.
Overcome by a momentary surge of nationalism, he announced that he would name me Harry Krishna Gandhi Netaji Nusserwanjee Tajmahal Prabhu, compressing in this name India’s assorted legacies to the world, including the names of freedom fighters, an industrialist, and his atom-bombing lifesaver President Truman.
“Harry Krishna? What you are talking, we don’t have a Harry Krishna in our family, and, and, he doesn’t look like Gandhi, Gandhi is bald, ha ha,” Mummy quickly responded with feigned lightheartedness, sensing that “You’re drunk” would be the wrong thing to say. With some justification, Daddy maintained that he was a man of self-control, discipline, and moderation.
“Lion I don’t fear. Tiger I don’t fear. But you--I fear you, Madam,” Daddy said, defensively slipping into a joking variation of a popular Konkani proverb: Lion he doesn’t fear, Tiger he doesn’t fear, but Mouse he fears. He added, laughing, “Mother Hen is the queen of her chicks. You choose, Queenie.”
“No, no, you say,” Mummy said.
“Okay, then, we’ll name him after a king.Vijay the Great.”
Though she had heard of no such king, she agreed. At that time, the local Catholic Church still badgered most of its members into choosing European names or the names of saints—the same thing, because all the saints then were white. This along with a habit of choosing rhyming names, had resulted in siblings named Winibald, Archibald, Theobald, and Ubald, or Titus, Vitus, Eusebius, Genesius, and Pionius (if a sixth son had arrived, he would have been named Clitorus, the locals joked). But a few Catholics had slyly begun to reclaim their long-suppressed Hindu heritage, choosing religiously neutral Sanskrit names like Suresh and Santosh and Prakash, meaning sun and happiness and light respectively. Trying to offset her impiety by slipping in the sainted Anthony as the middle name, she acquiesced to my father’s second choice: Vijay.
It must have been a special bottle of rum that Dad was drinking that evening, for he never again confessed to having ambitious plans for me. After that, my mother was the sole bearer of that ambition. Using available resources, she had me massaged with coconut oil by a special ayah.
My subsequent demotion came rather rudely. In keeping with the Indian tradition of prolonged breast-feeding, I had fed on the milk of her kindness for three years, but when my younger brother Anand was born I had to defer (when suitably threatened) to another Christian whose need was greater than mine. It was a loss I would never recover from. Milk, liquid cow, condensed milk, cheese, doodh peda, milk and cookies, buttermilk, creamy Polson’s butter, milk sweets, rossogollas, phirni: long after I shed my milk teeth, these would be some of my favourite things to eat and drink.
The final step in my descent from my milk-fed Eden to middle-class purgatory came six months later. It was one of those senseless army transfer orders which ejected us from the mountain-pure air of our garden paradise to the din and congestion of India’s commercial and cinema capital, Bombay, on which had settled the dust and grime of India’s industrial revolution.
Chapter 2
The Aunt Who Loved Water Sports
Until Aunt Meera, my next partner in polymorphous perversity (or what Sigmund Freud, claimed was the nature of all human beings until repressed—to be sexually available and capable of pleasure in every part of their bodies—arrived on the scene preceded by her large bosom and followed by two large scarlet suitcases, flashing lipsticked smiles that melted all surrounding hearts and made a few flutter, life in Bombay was drab and mean and scary and fenced in by barbed wire, and the food was never enough, and the monsoons flooded our low-rent locality with floating sewage. To top it all, my mother, full lips ready to kiss, hair parted in the middle and bunned behind like a demure housewife, seemed lost to my younger brother, the newest sucker of the clan.
Except for its cosmopolitan Southern and Western parts—Colaba, Bandra, Malabar Hills—the the Rest of Bombay was then a vast, slummy, congested, lower middle class sprawl where people lived, ate, and copulated like rats in holes in the ground, even if these holes sometimes rose up five or six stories above the surrounding landscape. We lived here in a three-room structure that the Army called a quarter, but which felt more like a sixteenth.
This was when my Aunt Meera burst into my drab life with soft, dark chocolates and an unabashed love, a love so uncommon in these parts that it must have been imported too, like her wondrous chocolates with their gold and silver wrappings, like her pink and brown Cadbury’s chocolate “eggs” with almonds at their centres, like her multicoloured candies whose wrappers we washed and preserved for years, like trophies from a foreign conquest. Meera, my mother’s aunt, but barely thirty-five, had been the most adventurous of her family of seven sisters, the other six being Dotty, Maisie, Kitty, Letty, Winnie, and Dillie. Following a brief spell as a nun in a North Indian convent run by British sisters who used the Indian nuns for kitchen work, she had stormed out in protest at their color-coded behaviour, scandalously breaking her sacred vows and thus rendering herself unmarriageable in Catholic eyes.
It was Aunt Meera who gave me my first definition of an exotic woman: wavy bob-cut hair, bright red lipstick on Cupid’s-bow lips, fashionable green dot on a broad forehead, large brown mascaraed eyes actively engaged in seduction, a dreamy whiff of perfume as she walked by you or embraced you, a rustle of precariously draped nylon sari nearly falling off her hips, and between her high blouse and low sari, a creamy smooth and exposed belly and navel to die for. Sweeping in one day from Hong Kong, where she had been typing her backside off for a British firm, she had brought along with her a gramophone, a magic black box bursting with songs by Tony Brent, Pat Boone, and Harry Belafonte. In our granite-floored, bare-walled house, with dirt settling between the unpolished edges of the granite slabs, the gramophone was like a visitor from Heaven, an object of holy awe.
Along with her gramophone, Aunt Meera brought a suitcase full of brightly coloured trinkets. Later, I learned of a quantity of watches she’d smuggled in, hidden in the false bottom of her suitcase; but all I noticed at the time were those wondrous thingamajigs, so phantasmagorical and foreign to my world: little jade statues, pieces of ceramic art. Things-in-themselves, things without a pedestrian, grimly utilitarian use. An aunt who had extra money, cash to spare, and didn’t use it all to stuff her belly was astonishing; but everything about Aunt Meera was astonishing, including her speech.
“What, Vijay, you little rascal, you pokri fellow,” she would say, kissing and hugging me, or fondling my cheeks and pinching them lustfully. “Why you are looking at me with those big eyes of yours? You want a kiss from your aunty? Already want to run after girls, is it?”
Given hugs and chocolates like that, it’s not surprising that a child will sense some merit in rascality, as I secretly must have.
And she, falling for my unruly page-boy haircut, my bright black eyes so new to life, my innocent smile, my way of singing “Mama Look a Boo Boo Day!” was fonder of me than of my sickly baby brother Anand, or my older brother Arun, who had already developed an adult seriousness, and was a fanatic about combing his hair neatly and having not one lock out of place—an unwise course, because it discourages adults from indulging in their favourite pastime of ruffling kids’ hair. Running her fingers lightly through my coarse, uncombable hair, gently stroking my caramel custard skin, enfolding my spindly arms and legs with her warm flesh, she quickly became the magical second Goddess of my childhood imagination: a combination of Diana and Eros, uncommonly beautiful, self-confident and cheerful. And above all, a teacher of life’s secrets: it was spinster-she, rather than my prudish parents, who taught me to pee without wetting my feet, holding my little pecker in her own hand during the first, exciting, lessons—which I, sensing her expertise, prolonged by pretending to be a slow learner.
She also launched my musical education and my erotic vocabulary, teaching me “Dark Moon,” “Daylight Come and I Wanna Go Home,” “Cindy, oh Cindy,” “Diana,” “Jamaica Farewell,” “How Much is that Doggie In the Window? Bow Wow!” and the nearly erotic and wicked “Game of Love,” which I crooned endlessly in my untrained voice, sincere and calf-like, to entice her and Mom’s love: “A five and a six, and a Kiss Me Quick!” My instant memory for the tunes and words of these songs amazed her.
I in turn was fascinated by Aunt Meera’s picturesque habits: for example, the cigarette she had to smoke whenever she went to our hole-in-the-ground outdoor toilet—to counter the overpowering stench, I guessed. And unlike my mother, forever wrapped in a sari except on the rare occasions when she was changing in a corner of the in-between room and briefly exposed her ghagra or petticoat, Aunt Meera often walked about the house in a loose but thin and revealing dress with nothing underneath, or in a stylish dressing gown that made it seem as if her body had been elegantly wrapped—for quick unwrapping. Outside, she often wore sleeveless blouses exposing her luxuriant black underarm hair, doused with perfume. This practice would elicit sarcastic comments from female relatives who noticed their husbands behaving like excited puppies around her, overpowered by her feminine scent. “Poor woman, she couldn’t afford enough cloth for her sleeves!” they’d say with bitter sarcasm amongst themselves—comments that Aunt Meera would simply laugh off when they were reported to her.
The aggrieved women had a point, sensing the erotic heat she radiated, possibly leftover from some Hong Kong passion. And I could not have enough of her.
Then I ran into her dark side. Ah, Aunt Meera: so beautiful, yet so cruel. Why did you have to epitomise that great truth of my life: that women (some beautiful, some not) would often be cruel to me?
Because Aunt Meera, in addition to her gramophone and chocolates, had also brought along a king-sized British implement for the administration of enema inscribed, “By Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen.” So when Mummy said one day, “He is constipated, Vijay,” Aunt Meera laughed in reply, her brown eyes lighting up. “Got just the remedy for it, Lena.”
Fine, Aunt Meera, you believed in enemas; in your lexicon, they were the right thing to do. So I don’t grudge your administering them to yourself over-frequently, morning and evening, your face flushed with pleasure. But why me?
The effect of these painful enemas, apart from the too—obvious one, was to make me view adults as tyrants whose joy lay in internally hosing down kids . . . so I thought, as they suppressed me and—ouch!—compressed me on a bed: two gigantic adults pinning down a puny child’s limbs, while my aunt, her eyes glowing, inserted the thin plastic tube.
“Now stay quiet now. It will feel very good in a little while, so good you’ll ask for it everyday now, you pokri boy,” she said laughing as I wailed, “Please, no, no!”
A few weeks later, having been denied an extra helping of vorn, a Mangalorean delicacy made with jaggery and lentils slowly cooked with cardamom seeds, raisins, and cashews, I flung away the family thermometer, an incident my mother would recount to a decade’s worth of gleeful visitors as conclusive evidence of my wickedness. I paid for that five-rupee thermometer with a priceless whipping: Dad, Mom, then Auntie, each politely awaited their turn according to the official order of precedence, then came back for seconds.
“Tup Tup you will get on your bum next time, you see!” said Aunt Meera, eyes flashing three parts fake anger and one part lust, as she landed a whack on the anatomical portion in question. She and many Mangaloreans loved the word bum, because it was the only permissible quasi-sexual word in the God-fearing social discourse of the time. Alas, it could only be used with reference to the bums of minors, particularly minors below the age of reason or protest.
After a year with us Aunt Meera, buoyed by the profits from her smuggled watches, moved out of my life and into a large apartment in upscale Bandra, home of Bombay’s film stars. Requiring an electric train ride and a bus change, the visits to her grew rarer and rarer.
And then, in gloomy June, when the Bombay sky opens up to let forth a deluge that will relent only in September, and when a minor deluge actually flooded the neighbouring houses and we were one step away from evacuation, the news came like a sentence of execution: With Dad’s transfer to a village near Calcutta, Arun and I were to be sent to a convent boarding house in Mangalore, a continent away from my parents.
“But it’s a dirty village, full of deadly king cobras!” Dad said, trying to persuade us of our good fortune. “No good schools! You want to become cowherds and catch flies with your mouths?!” To send a child away to a residential boarding school and thus to have its lowbrow Indianness sandpapered away and glossed over with a pseudo-Western sophistication—it was a widespread dream among middle class parents.
I would learn later, much too late, that Dad had begged his haughty superior for a change of transfer but without success, then had unsuccessfully requested his brothers to keep us, before settling with wounded pride for the boarding house; that Mom had had fits of weeping at the thought of being separated from the children she had obsessively taught and fed and stitched clothes for, tender flesh of her tender flesh, body parts she would soon be dismembered from. But at the time, I understood nothing.
I saw all my worldly belongings disappear into the steel trunk Mummy was packing for us: clothes, nine WIMCO matchboxes, six empty Gold Flake cigarette packets, and four Charminar packets with which I built houses and which comprised my first and last toy collection. Was I being sent away forever?
Koooooooo! The meter-gauge train that whisked us southwards over green hills and muddy rivers without undue rest was reddish brown and canary yellow. Southwards and further southwards, tatatatatatatat it went, this crudely-welded machine of steel, wood, and bolts, leaving behind entire subcultures and geographical zones, reddish brown, black, and fertile green, a world so natural and timeless even the telephone poles seemed to grow out of the ground, and Bombay and Mummy and the box-like house became a dreamy memory.
At Kadur, we were transferred to a vermilion Dodge Fargo bus that sputtered and groaned through an eight-hour ride over cloud-shrouded hills into the coastal depression that was South Kanara District, a patchwork of yellow rivers, tiled houses, coconut trees, and green hills, culminating in the church-dense town of Mangalore. The day after that, our care and feeding, the welfare of our bodies and souls became the responsibility of the nuns and their house of bondage called Saint Juliana’s Convent.
I still remember that evening, how the sun threw long shadows on the verandah of the convent’s parlour, how my father committed me and my brother to this institution by handing over a hundred-rupee bill to the Mother Superior, who was dressed like Death, like a Horsewoman of the Apocalypse—all in black except for the part of her chubby face that peeped out. The nun pocketed the money, held us by our little hands, and dragged us into the dark, tiny-windowed intestines of her establishment.
It was shortly afterwards that the dreams began . . . years and years of dreams continuing well into adulthood, in which I pursued old friends and love objects, friends who had inexplicably turned cold, and begged them for their love, argued for my worthiness, pleaded for understanding, scolded them for having unjustly withdrawn their love from me, and implored them not to send me away.
That night, when I opened the small steel trunk containing my belongings, I did not find the matchboxes and cigarette packs inside. And I understood. My always practical father had thrown them out on the way.
What I didn’t understand then was that at age six, my childhood had ended.
Chapter 3
Underwear
I now see that real life and true sex, which I define as debauchery with a female who has played no role whatsoever in bringing you into this world or in changing your nappies shortly thereafter, began for me in the convent. Not that the nuns came out of this experience with sticky fingers; so far as I am aware, the role of nuns in the future sex lives of their charges has yet to be scientifically documented. Still, I have no doubt that a black habit that hides twenty times as much as it reveals must provoke dark thoughts in the darkest recesses of the human mind, which, like a cat, always is trying to ferret out secrets (such as: what does a nun’s shaved head really look like?). No doubt too that the nuns, my first teachers of dharma (i.e. the religious life, without which sin loses most of its delicious and forbidden pleasure, as you may notice these days in the godless West), gave me the kick in the pants that started me on the long road to real sex.
The Convent School, a three-acre complex that consisted of old bungalows with unsightly, box-like additions to accommodate its ever-increasing population, was fortified by a high redbrick wall strategically decorated with shards of broken glass. Once you were in, you were in! Because the only exit was a massive iron gate manned by a Gurkha: yes the Gurkhas, formerly the pride of the imperial British Army, were now among the chief protectors of the virtue of India’s convent residents. And Virtue was big business at Saint Juliana’s Convent, Mangalore.
Mother Ottila, who cracked the whip over the bevy of nuns who assisted her at this Virtue factory, seemed to have done a good job at keeping them innocent and rendering Mortal Sin inconceivable. Once, when a nearby seminary had sent the convent its torn clothes, including a few items of male underwear, the nuns, whose pure minds precluded an understanding of male anatomy, stitched up the slits in the underpants.
The convent was a miniature city-state ruled by dolorous nuns: prayers carved in flesh. And it was in this kingdom that I was placed two months past my sixth birthday. Besides me, there were fifteen nuns in itchy-brown habits topped with whipped cream around the face, fourteen housemaids in the regulation blue-checkered calf-length cotton skirts, sixty-six uniformed girls aged six to seventeen, and twenty boys aged six to ten. Kingdom, city state, nundom: because the outside world—the city of Mangalore and the India that contained—was merely a concept kicked about in geography class and asserted by the day students. Within these convent walls, my entire world for nine months in a year, I knew only a gynocracy: strangely dark-costumed females in absolute power. And in this republic of women, conceived in piety, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created evil and must therefore be walled out of existence, the only adult male granted a permanent visa was the semi-bald Father Fernandes, who arrived on his scooter at 6:45 every morning to say Mass and left at 8:15 a.m. after a royal “English” breakfast of fried eggs, bread and butter, bananas, apples, and consciousness-piercing, aromatic Western Ghats coffee.
* * * * *
“Kyrie Eleison!” exclaimed Father Fernandes as he bowed before the chapel’s altar, an embroidered gold cross gleaming from the back of his vestment, petals of smoke floating up from the incense burner behind him.
It was just past sunrise, and the muddled light of this September day streamed into the small convent chapel and, mixing with the absurdly yellow electric light, spattered the vermilion-and-blue saints painted on the walls, the faces of the nun-speckled congregation murmuring through the morning Mass, the scapulared sinners nervously regarding the mumbo-jumbo in progress.
Shifting my bruised knees from time to time on the hard wooden kneeler, I gazed at the awesome gold-painted tabernacle with the ever-lit red and gold lamp pointing to that awesome Presence, the Body of Christ, magically trapped in a host the size of a large peppermint.
From time to time I became aware of a chocolate brown ridge of nuns occupying the entire back row, silently moving their lips, counting their frenzied beads. Or repeating in emotional whispers, “Jesus! Mary! Joseph!” “St. Jude, Pray for us!” and so on (it is a truth universally acknowledged that nuns ejaculate frequently).
The nuns’ placement had a strategic purpose: we, the boarders of Saint Juliana’s, were being policed by the Soldiers of the Good. There were eyes in back, eyes in front. And behind them all, in the last row, all by herself, knelt Mother Ottila, her chubby, arrested face’s stern expression tempered by an inner smile as she regarded her virtuous flock at prayer.
And I trembled to think of the sins I had just committed, of the whipping I would get if discovered, and the poor impression it would make on Judgement Day.
At the age of six, I had already begun to look out for the end of the world. It had been at most a hot rumour circulating through the Catholic world of late 1959 and early 1960 that the world would end. But the nuns passed the news on to us with apocalyptic certainty.
“World is ending, world is ending! Pray, children, pray! Fall on your knees and beg God to save us!”
Standing on the podium in catechism class and tapping the desk with her footruler for emphasis, Mother Ottila had implored us in her honeyed voice. Apparently, the news had arrived officially, in a letter to the Pope from Mary Mother of God herself, delivered through the agency of three Portuguese shepherd-children.
“How wonderful it would be to die as a little innocent child, pure of heart, and go straight to Heaven! Wouldn’t it? And now: take down the syllabus for next year,” Mother Ottila had continued. But I was not ready to die yet. I wanted to go home and see my mother first.
“Dominus Vobiscum!” said Father Fernandes in the sonorous, mock-singing voice of someone in training to be a bishop.
“Padrin Marli Puskum!” echoed in the minds of twenty little boys kneeling in church. The Konkani equivalent of: Thus farted the priest.
Being one of the few “jokes” any of us children knew, it intruded compulsively, the secret laughter briefly shushing my fears about the End of the World. Whose signs, Mother Ottila said, anyone could see: Sputnik, Khrushchev, atheists—and, most dramatically, the coming to power in the neighbouring Kerala, of wicked people called Communists. Communists meant guns, bloodshed, children brainwashed with Commie lies and murdered in their beds, dogs shot into Space, to Heaven’s very doorstep, to insult God the Almighty. And worst of all, godlessness! All we could do was pray, and children’s prayers went straight to God, bypassing screening committees of saints. So said Mother Ottila: Ottila the Nun.
But my anxiety about the end of the world was balanced by pleasure at my life’s first brush with the feminine element—with girls! Girls with brightly coloured ribbons and jasmine and dahlias in their hair, too much talcum powder, mascara, artificial beauty spots to avoid the evil eye, white petticoats to camouflage their delicate forms, thick white underwear . . .
Girls seemed to drop tears for scores of reasons: the “Shame, Shame song” (for having shown their chaddies or more), wetting their chaddies, being beaten with one or more broomsticks or a twig, the untimely death of a beloved domestic cow or goat, the memory of an absent parent or a grandmother, being called harsh or teasing names, being told they were stupid or bad or would be sent to hell, getting their answers wrong in front of the whole class, losing at games, being told the Communists were coming.Their tears would sometimes remind me of my mother as I last saw her, standing on the platform of Bombay’s Victoria Terminus Station, shedding quiet tears and wiping her eyes with her sari’s pallav as she waved goodbye with her free hand.
My reverie rudely cut short by a pinch from Blanche (who like all senior girls had carte blanche to pinch me whenever my devotion seemed to falter and drift off into that devil’s territory called distraction), my thoughts drifted once again to Boarding Mistress Sister Domina Mary. What did she want to see me about? I didn’t remember her ever looking so angry. My mind ran through my possible trespasses . . . God, had that sin of mine, that terrible, evil sin, been discovered?
Or could Sister Domina Mary have sent for me about last night’s sin of emission? Emission control, or the lack of it—it was my life’s curse. It had happened again last night, as it did so often, as I dreamt of pissing against a tree trunk, or of flying in space flapping my hands like wings. Then I woke up. It was dark, except for a solitary nightlight. I felt wetness between my legs, under my buttocks. Oh God! Trouble!
Tiptoeing out, I had wrung out my wet shorts onto the wooden floor, then hung them up to dry against the bed’s headstand in the hope my bedsheet and shorts would dry by morning and my crime wouldn’t be nosed out. After that, I had tried to keep awake all night so when daylight threatened, I could quickly slip my shorts back on.
This grim nocturnal scene seemed to repeat itself despite repeated “Hail Holy Queens” to the Virgin Mary, special magical invocations to the Precious Blood, and a final, direct plea at bedtime to the Big One, God the Father Himself: “Not tonight, dear God, please!” Sometimes I would try to stay up, focusing my mind on the sounds of St. Juliana’s Convent by night: the pit pit pit trr trr trr whoo whoo whoo of the thickening rain; a late Number 14 or Number 11 bus braking to a stop, then restarting; an ageing, overloaded lorry groaning up a bend in the road. Yet I would finally doze off, and when Christine Bai, the potato-faced housemaid came to check on my bed and shorts—I can picture her now checking a debutante’s knickers for semen stains—she would find them soggy with my guilt.
“Made sussu in your bed, hah? Dirty fellow! Mutro!” She called me Mutro: The Pisser. (This was before Morarji Desai made mutr or urine respectable—and the Indian Prime Ministership less respectable—by admitting he quaffed, as a holistic elixir, his own pee.) I supposed she had, as usual, reported her finding-of-the-morning to Sister Domina Mary.
Sister Domina Mary, wrinkled, fair, sternfaced and tall, wielder of the fastest cane in the East. Her wrath had by now mapped itself on my anatomy: cane marks like juicy red and blue rivers. Sister Domina Mary’s sinister, wrinkled face hit you like the lash of her whip, her black veil complementing her dark looks and her sharp, crocodile teeth, her steel cross so large as to seem like a back-up weapon.
She seemed to relish most the infliction of “punishments,” during which her face became red with excitement and pleasure. At the end of such a session, I would turn away and, when she wasn’t looking, mock her, mouthing a soundless and exaggerated “You have a big bum!”—the ultimate curse in my vocabulary at the time. Sometimes, I wrote these words out—“BIG BUM! BIG BUM!”—in my exercise book, then crossed them out till only a large blue stain remained.
When I grow up, I will come back and beat her, I thought bitterly. Or maybe my Daddy will. As an army man, he has a double-barrelled gun, which can kill two people at the same time. Perhaps he could get rid of Mother Ottila with the other barrel.
But if the world ended, or if the Communists arrived in Mangalore by early afternoon, perhaps in the confusion, I might escape my punishment from Sister Domina Mary?
But that was not to be. “Sister Domina Mary wants to see you in the dormitory right now,” said Blanche. I followed her like a beaten dog. As I approached the dormitory, girls tittered.
“Filthy fellow!” shouted Sister Domina Mary. Lash lash lash!
And then she dragged me, pleading tearfully against the cane in her hand, to the servants’ area in the back with the banana and bimbli trees and the open gutters. Lash lash lash. Stations of the cross, I thought, as I was dragged to the granite washing stone in five-foot increments to wash my urine-soaked pyjamas and bedsheet myself—my shameful secret, of a rebellious penis with a will of its own, publicly exposed.
What really kept me going, I think now, was the hope that somewhere, somewhere outside the convent, there existed a just world and fair-minded people. Some day, when it all came out into the open, justice would be done—and children would never be unjustly beaten ever again!
But there was also My Sin.
It was a sin so wicked and so monstrous to my mind that for ten years thereafter I was weighed down by my guilt, by the fear of dying in my sleep and going straight to Hell (even though I partly blamed my sin on Sister Domina Mary, who by tarring me with the label “wicked” when I was not in the least, had made wickedness irresistible to me). It was only at seventeen, when the entire edifice of Sin As Anatomical Knowledge collapsed, that I was able to dwell coolly on it and write about it—with a pen whose flow had been eased by rationalism, literary ambition, the retrospective vision of mid-pubertal heat, and the discovery that there was no wonder in the world like the wonder between maidens’ legs. The Sin and my foolish guilt had become:
AN IMMODEST PROPOSAL
The Confessions of an Anatomical Detective
or, Leela, the Enlightenment of my Early Life
It all happened suddenly, without preparation. At the time, the subject hadn’t even come up between me and my convent playmate, Leela. It was as if some dark, hibernating forces in our natures had suddenly awakened and made us into its puppets. One Sunday evening, as we found ourselves standing in front of Bathroom Row, not a soul in sight, opportunity proved the catalyst.
With her twin, ribboned braids, her pouting chocolate lips, brooding mystery, and frightened, large rabbit eyes, Leela was a natural victim, like me. She wore faded, “poor” clothes, servant-girl prints, except on feast days such as the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, when she paraded in her one good dress, a scarlet number. There always was a smudge on the white blouse of her school uniform to match a smudge on her cheek. She had pierced ears, but without the customary golden earrings. And it was whispered about, because we rarely had a parentally sent sweets box with us to raid for that hungry, evening time between meals, that our parents were poor. So we had gravitated toward each other. We became playmates, playing all the nameless games that are listed in no book and require only the bare, natural equipment: stones, twigs, leaves, flowers, pebbles, legs.