I was thirty. Yet I was single though I was very much willing and open to mingle. One obstacle remained. I was not willing to marry in the timetested Indian way of marrying what is called as an arranged marriage. You get a bride chosen or selected by your parents and elders. I was for love marriage, the western way. The problem was I was extremely shy so far as interactions of any nature with women were concerned.
It was the beginning of a week in 1970 at Ajodhya high School Balasore, Orissa, India. I was studying in class 10. For many years till then there used to be a short period of prayer followed by reading of a few lines from the Gita before the classes started. In a significant departure from the usual routine, the venue of the prayer class had been changed recently from the school verandah to the Science Hall, the only hall in the school. All these changes were taking place at the behest of the school Headmaster, Mr. Prusty. It was his idea also to read aloud some selected lines from the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi on some days in addition to the lines from Bhagabad Gita. It fell to the lot of Hindi and Sanskrit teacher Shri Brajabandhu Pani to read those lines from the Gita and “My experiment with truth” as Gandhiji’s autobiography was in Hindi, a translation from the original Gujrati.
That day all things proceeded as usual; first the prayer, then readings from the Gita and Gandhiji’s autobiography at the last. But just as we were about to disperse and return to our respective classes the Headmaster’s stentorian voice rang out loud and clear in our ears. He called out the name of Niranjan, a boy of my class, and ordered him to come to the dais. Niranjan came unto the dais where the Headmaster was standing to a side along with all the teachers behind a large table on which scientific experiments were usually demonstrated. The Headmaster, Mr. Prusty asked him “Why didn’t you bend your head and say Namaste on Saturday”? Niranjan replied in a most feeble and terrified voice, “Sir, I couldn’t understand your instructions”. Then what followed was something beyond my imagination. Even now as I am writing about that episode my blood is boiling within me in shock, anger and rage. Mr. Prusty beat Niranjan more than 100 times with all his might using both his hands simultaneously. Sometimes there were slaps raining and sometimes there were blows. The beating continued for full 15 minutes in front of the whole congregated students and teachers of the school. During that time the Headmaster’s wristwatch with a steel band unclasped five times of itself due to the force of the blows and slaps. Each time he took a breather for a few seconds to clasp the strap and resumed beating. It seemed the beating would be interminable. One hundred students and seven teachers stood there as dumb and mute spectators. Not a single voice was raised against the most barbaric act. Such was the tyrannical power and authority this headmaster wielded! By the time the beating had ended Mr. Prusty was as exhausted by beating as Niranjan was from being beaten up. I think that the periodically unclasping strap of the wristwatch had saved Niranjan from another fifty blows and slaps. The violence of the beatings was so severe that Niranjan’s shirt was torn into tatters and was loosely hanging from his body.
I knew what had happened. On the Saturday before, after the school had been over, some of us boys from the school hostel were filing past towards the playground situated just outside the school campus to play. I was bringing up the rear of the line and Niranjan was at its head. Just when he was about to cross the gate, two outsiders came inside the school campus accompanied by the Headmaster. As it turned out later, they were the P.E.T(Physical Education Teachers) inspectors. What went on at the front was not as visible and audible from my viewpoint at the rear as the whole incident passed in a second or two. Our line moved on, we never stopped for a second. As I collected and pieced all evidences and fragments together after the beating, it emerged that Mr. Prusty had signaled by some gesture to Niranjan to bend his head and say Namaste to those PET inspectors which Niranjan failed to do. Had Niranjan bowed his head and said Namaste to those strangers then the next boy would have also taken the cue and all the boys down the line would have bowed their heads and said Namaste. That would have pleased the Headmaster. According to Niranjan he couldn’t correctly interpret Mr. Prusty’s sign language. He thought the Headmaster was gesturing to bow down to himself which Niranjan found preposterous as during the course of the day he had already done that much earlier. But the Headmaster took that as willful disobedience and insubordination.
Whatever that may be, during and after that beating my attitude to Mr. Prusty changed into disgust and hatred. Since then 42 years have passed. But the scene is as fresh in my memory as ever. I was a very shy boy then and Mr. Prusty was a tyrant. I have shed a lot of my shyness as I grew up. With my present mental makeup, if I had witnessed that event, I would surely have reported the matter to NIranjan’s parents and probably would have gone with them to the police. I would have written petitions to the higher authorities. But as I was then I could do nothing. NIranjan’s tattered shirt and bruised body have haunted me since then in so many of my dreams. I promised that day I would never be a teacher like the Headmaster. Subsequently I became a lecturer in Mitrapur College, Balasore and BITS, Pilani, Rajasthan. I have never hurt any student in any way. I condemn corporal punishment and of the view that it should be banned from all schools. Only the perverts and cowards terrorize students and wards in their charges. Wise do things differently.
So much punishment, beating and humiliation before the whole school for just failing to say Namaste to two total strangers! It just doesn’t make any sense. This incident of beating was also not an unusual or exceptional behavior from the Headmaster. For the sake of brevity only I am confining this article to this single incident; but I can write a whole book on the barbaric and inhuman treatment of the students, especially the boys, in the hands of this tyrant. Sadly, there were many parents who encouraged the teachers not to be sparing with their rods while dealing with their children or wards. The most dangerous and complicated thing was that the Headmaster did have some sterling qualities. He was the most energetic, dynamic, and knowledgeable and the most widely read among all the teachers of the school. That was his trump card. By flaunting his knowledge and eloquence he wielded such power over students that fell just short of awarding death sentence and could silence all the signs of revolts from the students and some guardians with an iron hand for more than a decade. He just lacked compassion which is also called as wisdom in action. In all else he shared much commonality with many tyrants in history; many brilliant qualities and capabilities combined with much cruelties and a false sense of honor and prestige.
Sometimes I wonder why such senseless events occur. Why such otherwise brilliant and dynamic persons turn into tyrants? The best possible answer that comes to my mind is that perhaps Life was making Mr. Prusty play the role of a tyrant, that hideous monster lurking within all of us, and letting us see how ugly, inhuman and macabre we all could be if we became unaware of the monster lodged deeply in our unconscious. The tyrant in us could be found in action in schools, in homes, in offices, in playgrounds, in business, in all places, in all relationships and in all roles. The tyrant like a rapist only seeks an opportunity and a suitable environment to manifest itself. The weak, the children, the old, the unprotected and the vulnerable are the ones whom the tyrant pounces upon as its preys because they can’t retaliate. In truth every tyrant is a coward, it can’t face up to its equals. It too is insidious, manipulative and capable of disguising itself in honorable robes. Therefore none of us is secure against it. Mr. Prusty that day by his actions gave free play to it and brought out the tyrant in us from the darkness of our unconscious to the light of the consciousness so that we all could take heed and bring all our actions and motivations under the microscope of alert awareness. Gandhiji said that a man can be known by the way he treats his servants; by the way he addresses the waiters in a hotel. Only in conscious and deliberate actions lies our freedom and Nirvana. As the Buddha said, “Ignorance is the cause of all our miseries and bondages. Only wisdom frees”.
Do you know any tyrant or bully ? How did you like his/her bullying? Would you like to share ?
“There is an incredible intelligence and power within you constantly responding to your thoughts and words. As you learn to control your mind by the conscious choice of thoughts, you align yourself with this power”.
Today I am to align myself with this power by consciously choosing to think and write about Nisha, my wonderful and mysterious muse, a woman of many dimensions and complexities who was never ashamed of her difference from most others. What others thought of as the things “wrong” with her, she considered those as the expressions of her individuality, her uniqueness and her specialty. Of course, she never claimed herself as someone special, but to me she was certainly special. She thought we were meant to be different. Hence, for her there was no competition or comparison. It was as if, we all had come to this planet just to express the uniqueness of ourselves.
It was another of her greatness that while she actually granted me her sexual favor, she made me feel always as if I was obliging her. As if I was not the beneficiary of her favor but her benefactor. As if she was the one receiving while in real conferring this great honor and privilege to me. Her joy was in sharing everything she had with me. As a result, our sexual escapades, after that first encounter during the course of an afternoon about which I have already told in an earlier story, became regular ones. But like everything else in life, the sex between us too had its ups and downs, its valleys, plateaus and bottomless pits. Once, during the initial days, I lost erection consecutively for two days. Howsoever I tried, my thing remained unmoved and lifeless. I told Nisha to take the thing in her hands and especially in her mouth. She sincerely did her utmost to revive the flagging, lifeless thing that had almost turned into a vestige of a penis. On the second day, while sitting astride me, after half an hour of all sorts of cuddling and cajoling, she finally called it a day and we lost all hope of resurrection. Even though this episode came very early in the course of our sexual intimacy I behaved as though I had been prepared all along for such a thing to happen, as though it were quite normal and ordinary and there was nothing much in it to write home about. The fact is I had heard from a friend in detail what had happened to him and his wife on their first night. In short, as his erection failed that night, his new bride after making all attempts to revive his libido concluded that “her life was finished” as she had unwittingly married an impotent man. Thereafter she became hysterical and cried, shouted and threw so much tantrum in and around the house that my friend reached the depth of despair and thought of committing suicide. It was very fortunate that he confided everything to me and I advised him to consult a doctor and assured him that his erectile dysfunction was curable. I also said that his problem would have sorted out itself of its own accord in course of time even if untreated, with patience and understanding from both. But as his wife had gone hysterical and was not in a positive frame of mind herself to render the cooperation and understanding needed, it would be better if they both sought medical advice and treatment which fortunately they did. In fact she was brought to the doctor by force. But such was her hysterical state of mind that it took a year of medical treatment to bring her to normalcy. I knew my friend from infancy and as we reached puberty we had experienced and explored our sexuality together. One of our pastimes was to masturbate simultaneously before each other to reach the goal of the quickest ejaculations. From those sessions I knew from the first hand that my friend’s erectile dysfunction was not organic or congenital and hence easily curable.
When the same thing happened to me with Nisha I was not at all worried or scared. I knew, with understanding and patience, it would very soon go away. I had the most understanding sexual partner any man could ever hope for. I had also the Buddha on my side. He said, “I don’t say enjoy life or be happy. Just allow the “suchness” of things to be. That’s enough”. In other words when there is an erection and a sexual mate around then have and enjoy sex; but when your thing doesn’t move in spite of being goaded, cajoled and cuddled a lot then enjoy even the non-moving, non-stirring, non-penetrative sexual state also. You have the whole body of the other before you to explore, to bathe, to soak, to stroke and marvel at. Why confine your imagination to only a few inches of her/his body between the thighs, you are now released free to roam around the sky of his/her whole body. I was precisely doing that. There was not even a trace of the feeling that opportunities for penetrative sex were going by. I had surrendered myself to the moment and had let the isness of life to be. In short, even in that surrendered, seemingly awkward state, I was experiencing some grace in the shape of a relaxed, quiet and serene state of mind while I could have been extremely tense, frantic and even crestfallen had I believed in the false notion that an overpowering burden of proving my manhood in the eyes of Nisha was heavily upon me. But there was no such heaviness in me; rather I was in a most playful mood. After all, if sex was not a play, what else it was for? Being shorn of the heavy responsibility of parenthood by the invention of contraceptives, it was only comparatively recently mankind has reached this stage of enjoying the sex act as a play. But alas, even now there are millions who are ignorant of or careless about using contraceptives and spoiling their mental, social and physical wellbeing. I was thinking about like this when all of a sudden Nisha did a thing which was beyond my imagination. I recollect it vividly till this day. All of a sudden, she lay over me with her belly down, bringing her face above mine and her whole body straddling above mine, matching limb for limb. At first I thought she was up to the game of pressing her breasts against mine, a very pleasurable activity for me at all hours of the day, to compensate me for my supposed loss of joy from sex. But she, the mysterious one, had no such thought in her mind that day. Therefore what followed was a complete surprise for me. The first drop of her tear fell on my left cheek. Then it fell like a torrent on both of my cheeks. I became flabbergasted at her tears. Sheepishly I asked, “Have I let you down so badly? Are you so much aroused that you badly need an orgasm?” What came in reply was nothing short of a bolt from the blue. She shook her head twice and said, “Can I not see you well, healthy and strong for once? When you came to this colony your face was so big and you were looking so strong and stout. Within a month and a half you have shed so much weight. Your face looks so small and your cheeks hollow and eyes so sunken that I feel pain at looking at you. You look so pulled down. I feel guilty for bringing you to this state. I wish you soon regained your health and strength as before. ” She was right. A month and a half of hectic life with her with all my routines and schedules thrown to the winds and leading a kind of life with gay abandonment as if to demonstrate to the whole world that taking food was something that men did just out of an unnecessary, primitive bad habit that could be easily and safely dispensed with, more especially on the altar of love, without any consequences whatsoever. All these had no doubt taken their toll on me. The immutable laws of life had reasserted themselves and had shown that my life in imagination should be and could be borne on the shoulders of reality only; it couldn’t exist in and as itself. In fact nothing could exist in and as itself; everything in the universe is interconnected. In short, the food that I eat or don’t eat, the thought I think or don’t think, the words I speak or don’t speak, the silences and stillnesses that give the depth and spaciousness to a relationship I maintain or don’t, all have a bearing on the kind of erection I get or don’t get. I had also been suffering from amoebiasis for long despite all kind of medication. To confound the matter, I had been repeatedly refusing to take any food whatsoever from Nisha’s house that she had generously been offering to me, on the ground that those foods rightfully belonged to her children and husband. However, she made me promise to take more care of my health. For treatment of amoebiasis she referred me to a doctor who turned out to be an excellent one at his profession. Nisha’s knowledge of doctors and drugs was tremendous. Those of my readers who have read my story “The story of my anus itching” may remember a reference to a woman who recommended me the drug Albendazole to put an end to my discomfort and she was none other than Nisha. Considering that her schooling or formal education had been finished when she was forcibly married at the age of seventeen; I am often amazed by her knowledge. I wonder what she could have been if she had been allowed to complete her education. She could easily have been a doctor.
Instead of diagnosing me as a patient suffering from amoebiasis like many other docs before, this doctor diagnosed my dysentery as due to “Loss of vegetable spores in the intestines due to prolonged antibacterial and antiprotozoal treatment.” He radically changed the medicines, the course and regime of the treatment. I followed all his instructions religiously. I paid more heed to my diet. Then the problem of general weakness and erectile dysfunction went away for good within a week. She was right. When I myself couldn’t stand properly how my thing could be expected to stand? And thereafter, what a plethora of juicy sex sessions we had! By and by Nisha’s name got associated in my mind with lots of love and juicy sex. Juicy sex because she exuded a lot of juice, along with love and tenderness, while lovemaking. Those sessions of juicy sex were so pleasurable, powerful and intoxicating that I would, not imagined at that point of my life, be left pining for them for the rest of my life. Buddha said, “Conquering the craving for sensual pleasure is great. But even greater is the conquest of craving itself.” During those heady days I was heedless of all such maxims. I read those from the books and thought those were best left buried there. What was wrong with sexual pleasure? Why should one stop craving? Especially if a juicy sexual mate like Nisha was around and available? I thought my favorite seer Buddha was wrong for once. But alas! That was not to be. Buddha could never be wrong. But that is the subject for another story.
There is nothing in my life that could be termed as exclusively mine, in the sense that something or some quality could be attributed to me only and to nobody else. All ideas, sensations, feelings and emotions, desires and impressions I have, I share those all with others. Those are from the common pool of existence. We all are one. We have more things in common than we can think of. The Yogi and the Commissar, the saint and the sinner are all in me. As my friend Bill once wrote, “The life we live and the love that we are, is the same.” Sex is not opposite of saintliness or Godliness. The way out is the way through. The way to Godliness can be traversed with sex too. Buddha, of course, had a different view. For him life has no joy. What mankind called joy is only a short gap between two sorrows. Later on Thomas Hardy also said in similar vein that happiness is but a short episode in the general drama of pain that is called life. Buddha said that all our sorrows are due to the reason that we are all “joined to the unloved and separated from the loved’. In other words what or whom we love we never get, and we get what or whom we never love. This in short is the cause of our miseries. In real, the world has nothing of lasting value to offer us. The best we can do to end our suffering is to love whatever or whomever we have got as though we have consciously chosen it/him/her. In surrender lie the peace, harmony and grace. But that surrendered state is not so easy to come by. Because that would be the death of our egoic self that thrives on wants, fears, comparisons, interpretations, and feeling in some way separate from and superior to all others. If I can’t be superior in any other aspect then I can claim to be the most miserable man of all. But the truth is that even if there are much sorrows in my life; they are not the real me. My past, my history, my story are the contents that unfold in the consciousness that I am. As I go about my life can I remember that I am the awareness, the field of alert stillness in which all perceptions, memories and experiences happen? Can I shift my focus from the world of forms and objects to the one who perceives? From the world of impermanence and change to the One who is unchanged and abiding? The One who is of lasting value in a world of flux and change? All my stories try to illustrate this. I write only from and about my experiences. If only I can make a truthful rendition of them in my writings then in some miraculous ways that would strike a chord in your hearts too. After all, we are not separate selves, but only under a powerful illusion that we are so. It is only the existence experiencing through us in myriad ways. It only fell to my lot to record this particular experiencing as truthfully as I can. Once out of me it is as much yours as mine. As I write of Nisha I am trying to show not only her formal aspect or dimension but more about her eternal, abiding, spiritual aspect; Nisha as part of the knowing consciousness, full of beauty and love.
Now back to the story. The juice or seminal fluids flew freely out of Nisha during sex, so much so that sometimes I thought I was drowning. One day, halting in the middle of lovemaking, I said,”Nisha, you are in flood and in full spate again. I am drowning. Is there any way to dam this flood?”She understood my plight and as in many other situations before, took the reins in her hands. She wrapped a portion of her petticoat around her right middle finger and shoved it deep into her vagina and rotated it clockwise and anticlockwise till she thought the field was just suitable enough for me to sail through. I had not known till then that among the many uses of the versatile Indian petticoat, the garment Indian women wore under their saris, one was to clean dry the hallowed chamber of love during sex as and when required. She remarked that that was a demonstration for me and I was to replicate the procedure subsequently as and when I needed one. I admit, I had to dip my right middle finger with a portion of her petticoat wrapped around it into her vagina many a time after that and each time as I did that I was filled with an enormous amount of love, tenderness and gratitude to her for granting me the privilege to do so. Indeed it was a privilege granted to me by her very generously with no strings attached. By this one privilege she made me feel a lot of good about myself. To a confidence lacking youth of thirty this acted like oxygen and fired my imagination like nothing else in life ever had. She showed me my strengths. Up till then I had thought of myself as a bundle of weaknesses and frailties. As if by a magic wand, she proved with kindness and untold love that all so called weaknesses were just long- held thoughts in my head and thoughts could be changed. Indeed she changed a lot many of them. Being smothered with love above and under her, nestled in her body in sex, sucking her nipples in my mouth on the slightest pretext and opportunity as children do chocolates and sometimes dipping my right middle finger inside her, I began to bloom and thought of ways of making her and myself proud. It was no mean transformation for an extremely shy and diffident youth whom many had forsaken as hopeless and beyond redemption.
She made me feel prosperous too, though I didn’t have a great deal of money with me. She brought out in vivid illustration a truth about which I had only read somewhere but hadn’t been able to grasp its real importance so far. “True prosperity begins with feeling good about yourself. It is also the freedom to do what you want to do, when you want to do it. It is never an amount of money; it is a state of mind. Prosperity or the lack of it is an outer expression of the ideas in your head.” She put all the right ideas in my head that induced a calm, stable and happy state of mind and a prosperity consciousness which was foreign to me till then. Each time just before sex, she would make me sit straight on the bed beside her for a couple of minutes and instruct me to inhale deeply and repeat with her these three sentences silently:
1) Everything I need comes to me.
2) Everything I need to know is revealed to me.
3) All is well in my life.
I wish I had kept up that habit of repeating those powerful affirmations to myself as many times as I could in a day till this day. But Nisha having gone out of my life just as suddenly as she had appeared and my disastrous plunge into the mission impossible which is also called as marriage and its catastrophic consequences on my life, one of which was to render me into a forced celibate at the grand old age of forty and having to bear many scars on my body and psyche as a result of that misadventure, all this made me drift asunder and I was again cast away in the ocean of aimlessness and hopelessness. Just when I needed those affirmations most I let them slip off my mind and memory and reaped a heavy harvest of sorrows, despondencies and sufferings.
Again life has its balances and blessings. It gives us an opportunity to turn every mistake into a learning experience if we accept it in the right spirit with grace. These stories about Nisha, which are consciously written to put myself in the trajectory of love again where Nisha had showed me that we both belonged and indeed all of mankind, animals, birds, insects, fishes and trees also do really belong, should hold me in good stead and give me enough courage to repeat to myself “All is well in my life” notwithstanding my Quixotic adventure into the mission impossible. After all, all the commotions and agitations of life are on the surface. In the depth, all is only calm and no agitation or disturbance can reach there.
So in a sense, all is really well in my life, in your lives too, dear readers, if anyone of you should be feeling low or lost at the moment for any reason. If there are some sorrows, unhappiness in our lives we are just to find out what attracted those to our lives in the first place. If I am enmeshed in a relationship with a person who is wrong for me, then also I am to find out the causes that attracted her to my life. If my thoughts and beliefs had been on a higher level to hers then she could not have attracted me, she would have had little appeal for me. Nothing happens by chance in life. Whatever is and whatever happens are the result of a chain of innumerable causes and effects. There is inevitability about everything and every happening. So I have to first accept my lot forsaking all bitterness, whining and complaining. I know acceptance of a bad situation is the first step towards improving it or bringing a happy solution. In acceptance there is peace and grace. Grumbling and complaining only brings more of those bad fortunes, bad things and negative energies. Nisha had done her part in improving me a lot in a pleasant way. Who knows the one with whom I am currently having a most painful relationship might have been entrusted with a lesson equally or even more important for me to be delivered for which painful surgery is the only way, I won’t know. Who knows how much role the pains and sufferings have played in shaping me as I am at the moment. Life has its own ways of teaching us. Learning is less painful when we accept it graciously. With resistance the learning process drags on and much suffering ensues. Therefore, I have to accept things. I have to maintain serenity, peace and mental quietude at all times because stillness is required for wellbeing and creativity. I too believe in the words of the Buddha that one that remains serene even when reviled not only stays calm but also helps bring the other person calm down. That in itself is a “shining victory” in Buddha’s words. Of course, it hasn’t worked in that way in my case always. But one lifetime is not enough for spiritual practices. Creation of a marvel like the Taj Mahal for example, even on a physical or material plane, takes time. Or I might have much more bad karma to suffer till the equilibrium of the pendulum I might have caused to upset is neutralized on repeatedly hitting, knocking, beating and finally stopping on me. I am only doing my part, offering a little bit of olive branch to all, fostering peaceful thoughts for all, including those who hurt me. I can’t change others. I want to be the change that I want to see. It is all a self purification effort purported to be accomplished with understanding and right awareness. Each one is a soldier here for conducting himself in the best way that his understanding dictates.
Now let us be back to the story, the story woven around juicy sex, to be precise. This kind of journeying through past, present and future, through facts and speculations will continue. At the bottom and in the depth only the juice counts. Juicy women not only symbolize good sex but also have warm and loving personality. Intellectually they are vivacious and their conversations are stimulating. They are liberal and flexible. They are also compassionate, sociable and wide in heart. Dryness in women symbolizes frigidity, rigidity. Something in their system is not working. Wise among them consult a physician. Some have the sense to use on advice artificial gels, either water-based or silicon-based, for lubrication during sex. They avoid using petroleum jelly in there as it is harmful for vaginal environment. These women though born dry or have acquired dryness later on in life as a result of some infections still keep the thoughts of the happiness of their partners and the stability of their relationship in mind and thus are actually warm and loving. I count them as juicy too. A little bit of intelligent use of a good artificial gel would surely bring them many notches higher almost to the level of juicy women. But there are some, who would refuse to use any gel, however safe and comfortable they might be, for the barren pleasure of just spiting their partners. I think this specie in the west is already on their way out for extinction under the threat of divorce and a lifetime of loneliness. But here in India where divorce is a social taboo and almost a four letter word, the members of this tribe thrive. Sometimes I weep for myself, after having been on the receiving end of one of the members of this tribe but mostly I laugh at the foolishness of such women who would deprive themselves of a healthy, natural joy and spend their lives in search of joy from acquisition of things like gold, silver, dresses, crockery, shoes, rugs, junk food, fat and what not just to spite their partners. A strange kind of vengeance or there might be some method in their madness which a lesser mortal like me can’t understand.
What a contrast was Nisha from this mad, unintelligible and unknowable world! Whereas just living with a dry, loveless woman is prone to bring about a serious bout of neurosis on oneself, spending a couple of hours with a juicy woman like Nisha was a joy in itself. At the end of the hour with Nisha I would be feeling good and great about myself. Silently I would be repeating to myself that I approved of myself in all ways. And those sessions of lovemaking following those affirmations on the bed with her were so powerful and incredibly joyful that it seemed to me as if with each intercourse I was being flooded with powerful chemicals in my brain and in my system which not only induced supreme joy in me but also fostered a powerful and deep bond between us that knew no fear, no misgiving and no serious thoughts about consequences. We were just deeply into each other and playfully exploring the joys of sex in its entire splendor. Strangely but happily, regarding sex, bodily parts in general and sexual organs in particular, we both believed the same kind of thoughts and ideas which could be summarized thus:
“Every organ of our body is a magnificent expression of life with its own special functions. The anus is as beautiful as the ear. Without our anus we would have no way to release what the body no longer needs, and we would die very quickly. Every part of our body and its function is perfect, normal and beautiful. Our sexual organs were created as the most pleasurable part of our body to give us pleasure. To deny this is to create pain and punishment. Sex is not only okay, it is glorious and wonderful. It is as normal for us to have sex as it is for us to breathe or eat”.
The joys of sex I and Nisha were exploring included a lot of foreplay, like cuddling, stroking and manipulating her whole body and especially kissing and sucking her lips, tongue and breasts. All this foreplay took much time and we didn’t have a safe place to ourselves for that much of time. After that first afternoon of sex in her room and a few sessions thereafter we got bolder and thought my place too would suit us equally well or even better. We truncated the sexual act into two parts. The foreplay part was done in my small kitchen while both of us stood erect. She leaned slightly on the wall and received my impassioned kisses on her lips and breasts. She was not cold or passive either. She responded completely to my commands or requests. During one of these foreplay sessions while both of us stood erect, after half an hour of tongue, lips and breast sucking, I had an inspiration to inspect her genital. I wanted to see the condition in there in response to our impassioned kisses. As I sat down at her feet and tried to lift her sari up to her waist she unexpectedly held on to it firmly in between her clenched knees and thighs and won’t let me see her genital. This was novel and instantly I knew I was in for a surprising discovery. I became determined to unravel the mystery. I tried to separate her legs with force initially but as that failed I requested her to let go and show me all which she obliged with a smile which I have not yet forgotten. Happy memories associated with a good sexual partner are so deeply imprinted and etched in our mind that even a quarter of a century of time has not been able to dislodge them! What I saw there was beyond my imagination. The whole area between her thighs and around her genital was flooded with juice and it had trickled down in a neat stream to her feet where it had touched ground. I remarked in surprise and joy, “You are in flood again. It promises a very slippery journey ahead.”
Sometimes in the midst of our impassioned kisses, strangely, she would start crying. Those crying were without gasping, sobbing or making any noises. She would stop kissing and copious tears would just start flowing from her eyes. On being asked about the reason of her unaccountable tear-shedding, she would invariably just shake her head or say that that was nothing. But I always thought that probably she had been reminded of Hari and his passionate kisses of yore. Or the shock of his tragic death came home to her most vividly and forcefully during those times. Or she might be having some kind of a mystical experience, I would never know.
We performed the second and the final part of the sexual act on the bed. On reaching this stage only we shut the doors and windows of my room so as to minimize as much as possible the time when my room actually remained completely shut. I think it never exceeded twenty or thirty minutes at the most. But, that much of time was just sufficient for us to make a relaxed sexual act complete. Almost always we both came out of the act having been thoroughly relaxed and deeply satisfied. My reaching of the orgasm was invariably a violently explosive event while strangely Nisha’s had been a much muted and subdued one, so subdued as to be hardly noticed from the outside. In fact, if she didn’t almost always report in the affirmative to my query, after sex, if she just experienced an orgasm, I won’t have known. Sometimes I thought she was lying to make me happy. A peculiar and strange habit of the human male! Unlike males of any other species we suck female breasts before, during and after sex and worry if she did or didn’t have an orgasm. And proud like a king and happy like a god is the man who has been just confirmed of his mate’s orgasm! The gait of that man for the next forty eight hour assumes a cockiness that sets him apart from the rest of the mere mortals. One day to clarify my doubt I asked her the cause of her so subdued and muted climaxes. She replied that she was fine with them. Any spectacular, violently explosive orgasm like mine would only bring her a migraine which she dreaded most. I was relieved. An unusual woman with an unusual symptom! So juicy, so loving and yet burdened with a curse, or so I thought.
Mating with a juicy woman has many rewards besides being bombarded with lavish doses of chemicals that fill one with feel good emotions which is an experience by itself. It keeps the youth in you alive. Each sexual act with Nisha assumed a life of its own with its own novel experience, its own set of anecdotes and stories woven around that experience to describe it. Here I think it is fit to share an anecdote woven around a particular sex act. I was on her that day and relaxedly humping and pumping away just to keep my erection alive and keep the sex act a going concern. I was in no mood to bring an early, hasty end to the act. That irritable reaching after a swift climax, so prevalent in the animal kingdom and among humans too, most probably inherited through our genes from generations of practices and racial consciousness born out of the need for quick sex as a survival tactic which in the changed circumstances of twentieth century has become an anachronism, was playing spoilsport to my resolve for prolonged sex. In my quest for prolonged sex I had made Nisha take the active role on top of me so many times before and usually it had worked. Like a perfect partner she obeyed all my requests. But that day I was on the active mode and fully in charge. Or so I thought. After a silent count of a hundred pelvic thrusts and a good deal of humping and pumping I felt the powerful pull of inertia and breathlessness bringing me to an abrupt halt. In fact I halted so abruptly that a pelvic thrust was cut short half on its way home. In that restful state I was about to consign myself to a state of forgetfulness for a couple of minutes, to think of everything except sex, in order to nip in the bud that well-known sensation of impending ejaculation welling up from deep within me like a rising crescendo, that dreaded enemy of the much sought after prolonged sex, when exactly a second later I felt a distinctly discernible upward pelvic thrust from below me, from Nisha, and a distinct sound of the creaking of the cot going along with the thrust. In the midst of a rhythmical swing of thrusts and counterthrusts while she was ready for another of my thrust and when that was missing due to my abrupt stop she could not halt herself and her upward pelvic thrust was the result. And what a pleasant surprise that was for me! It uncovered a world of wonder to me right inside her.
I have treasured the touch of that upward pelvic thrust and the crisp and clear sound of the creaking of the bed till this date and will continue to treasure it till my last. In fact I don’t consciously hold it but it gets held. Such is the power of sex and joy and wonder in life! It may not be an earthshaking event for the world but it was immensely important for me. For some, mounting the peaks of the Himalayas or the Alps, going on a long cross-country long drive or dining on a fifty course dinner followed by a bottle of vintage excellent wine may be more important. But to me getting a glimpse of human nature from a very ordinary act or behavior has been more important and a constant source of joy. That missed pelvic thrust from Nisha that day was an eye opener for me. It brought home to me in vivid detail that women too enjoyed sex as much as men and one could be actively contributing to the joys of sex even while seemingly passive and in spite of having been pinned down under a humping and pumping gorilla. For unknown to me and unthinkable for me at that point of life, Nisha was not only enjoying my pelvic thrusts she was also actively preparing her pelvic area perfectly so as to receive the full impact of each thrust that would stimulate her clitoris and other spots deep inside her maximally. In this participatory universe of love she was deeply into a joyful, participatory sexual experience which many women with outlandish ideas and outmoded thoughts might not have an inkling of. That day with that pelvic thrust which exposed her sexuality so beautifully she became my most preferred mate. I had an unexpected glimpse into her mind through that missed pelvic thrust that melted away all the remaining vestiges of differences, separateness and I felt at one with her and the universe. Didn’t I say that even through sex that highest feeling of Oneness can be reached and our most tenacious illusions of separateness can also be dropped?
She asked not without a visible trace of embarrassment, while incredulously opening and blinking her eyes which she always kept shut during the entire duration of sex leading me to think that she enjoyed sex most in that shut-eye, dark position, “Why have you stopped?”
I said smiling,” If I didn’t stop I would have missed a masterpiece which you created from the world of your imagination that you kept firmly shut from the rest of the world including me so far. Now I know what went on behind those shut eyes during sex. Now I know sex is less on the outside and more in the imagination. It is all in the head, behind those shut eyes more specifically. You are an artiste in there.”
She just smiled shutting her eyes again.
I went on looking at her face, so loving, innocent, pure and alive with that touch of embarrassment for having been found out at her secret joy. Little did she know that I had just discovered the perfect match for me, thrust for thrust, thought by thought.
She asked,” Will you do something or continue to just look at me?”
I smiled and said,”Oh dear, you are just perfect. I love you so much.”
Then I resumed and completed the unfinished joy.
I was thirty then. Little did I know that I was rapidly exhausting my quota of joy from the outside world, the world of physical sex. My joyful days with any sexual partner were hurtling down to an abrupt close. Thereafter was to loom before me the prospect of a lifetime of wandering and inhabiting in the world of imagination behind the firmly shut eyes. Now I create my joys by discovering them in myself, in my imagination. During these two decades I have had innumerable times of sex and almost ninety nine percent of those had been imaginary. There is a whole world to discover within, all the beautiful women and all the joys are there within me. I have already discovered that even forced celibacy is not without its blessings. It compels one to go within, to dig within where all joys, all blessings, all love, all welcome reside. Our loving mates, whether from life or from the imagination only become an occasion, a medium and an opportunity to bring those to the surface. If those emotions were not there, no mates however loving and beautiful would be able to make us see, feel or experience love. In fact, the whole world becomes the screen for projecting the very love and beauty that I have within myself. Loving love in the outside is good but seeing the projector of mind in operation is even better.
All that I need to know is revealed to me. All that I need comes to me. All is well in my life. Buddha said, ”Never forget any person, for howsoever a short moment you might have come across him.’ It meant that nothing that happens in and around you should escape your awareness. To that I only add that never forget or neglect even any tiny pelvic thrusts or counterthrusts; whether on target, missed or otherwise.
I was thirty. Yet I was single though I was very much willing and open to mingle. One obstacle remained. I was not willing to marry in the timetested Indian way of marrying what is called as an arranged marriage. You get a bride chosen or selected by your parents and elders. I was for love marriage, the western way. The problem was I was extremely shy so far as interactions of any nature with women were concerned. So days passed by and I had almost resigned myself to a permanent bachelor’s life. Parents were concerned as I was the eldest of their five sons. My younger brothers were each just 1 and half year younger than the immediately preceding ones. So for them I was unnecessarily causing delay in their marraiges as being the eldest I enjoyed the privilege to marry first. I could feel their frustrations and told them repeatedly to go ahead in their marriage plans leaving me to myself. But they couldn’t break the social custom, instead they chaffed and snapped at me. They were miserable and made me miserable. But I was determined to marry if only I fell in love, otherwise not.
All of my friends were married by then. In indian society you married as soon as you got a job, with the exception in case you had one or more marriageable sisters. Then you waited till they were married off. I was doing a govt. job for the past seven years and none of my sisters were of marriageable age. So how could the delay of my marriage be explained by my parents to other relatives or by me to my friends? Shy as I was, how could I say I was not to marry unless I fell in love ? O.K. in short I was in a bind, I was bound by myself. With an extremely introverted and shy nature I was never to draw any woman to myself, this was a fact I was dead sure in my gut feelings. I didn’t have an inkling then of the havoc, the hurricane this one decision of mine was to cause later on. When I set out to write this story I thought I would just narrate the incidents as they happenned and I am going to stick to that decision. But where to begin,from which vantage point the storm, the hurricane, the cyclone, that was the love when it unfolded, were to be described so that the readers get a fuller,complete view of things as they happenned, that I find difficult to decide. In fact, I feel I am not equal to the task and that is the reason why in spite of so many resolutions to write this story it couldn’t be written so far. I have been putting it off so many times to some other days, some other times but the story demands expressions and I am helplessly dragged to its sway, to its appeal just as I was whirled into love helplessly one day. So God, please help me in my helplessness. I surrender myself into the moment, this moment of reckoning that I don’t want to put off any further. So here is a blow by blow account of what had happenned.
I had been served a stern notice from my landlord to vacate his house within fifteen days. Yes,It happens in India. I protested against such short notice but he was adamant. I offered him a 50% raise on the rent I was paying, yet he declined. He said he had got an offer of 300% of the rent I was paying and his tenant-to- be wanted the house within fifteen days. If I didn’t vacate he would lose that golden offer and he was determined not to let go of that. So I had to acquiesce to him and his demands although I smarted a lot under such authoritarian, arbitrary action. I set out to search for a house. Where to find a house at such short notice in such a large city ? I was worried like hell. I heard that a friend was vacating the house he had rented. So I met him and he confirmed that it was true. He said he had already shifted but as he had paid the rent till the end of the month the key to the house was still with him. He agreed to show me the house and we set off on his bike. Just as we got down the bike at the gate of the compound, a woman passed by us who came from inside the premises. She looked at me straight in the eyes and unusually didn’t lower or avert her eyes away, so I had to lower my eyes after a few seconds. We passed each other and a little later I remarked to my friend,” What sort of women you have here that they look at you straight in the eyes and never lower their eyes?”
My friend jocularly agreed and said, “Yes,they do.” And we let the matter rest there. He opened the house and we went in. To say that that was a house would be wrong. That was just a room with a four by four feet kitchen. He pointed to a row of three latrines at a little distance which around ten familes in the compound used and shared among themselves. I could share those too, if I chose to stay there. As for bathing he pointed at a well in the compound which was the common bathing ghat or platform for all families. One flimsy, rickety bathroom was there beside the well but that was solely for the ladies. It was completely a new experience. I had never been in that sort of house before, yet I had to accept that with gratitude because within that short time no other alternative was there. We went to the landlord and my friend introduced me and I paid one month rent as advance as demanded and we left the place.
A few days later we moved in, myself and Suresh, my younger brother who was born a year and a half after me, who was also staying with me. He too was doing a job like me in another Govt office in the same city. I had a large collection of books with me, some of which I was to lose in this cramped and damp house to the termites as I had to pile them in whereever I found some space, under the cot, in the shelf, on the skylight etc. from which I couldn’t take many of them out even if I wanted to read. That was an unfotunate thing to have happened but I have to leave them here as I have set out to write a love story, the story of my romantic involvement with a woman who won’t be bound by any restraint, won’t be caged in however gilded and hallowed a cage and who won’t leave me, in the least,as she found me. She was a woman who would dance only to the tune of her heart’s beats and accordingly she had found steps to go along with it.
That was Nisha, the very same woman whom you have already met, the woman who had looked straight into my eyes as I encountered her at the gate of the housing colony I was to live in. Since the time I moved in, I felt I was under her constant watch. As I was extremely shy I usually lowered or averted my eyes away as they met hers and put her watchings to just her curiosity which she might be sharing with all other men and women of the colony. I didn’t read too much into her curious gaze at me. Her house was just ten feet away from mine. As I kept open my door at all hours of the day and quite late into the nights to get some ventilations to that jam packed room and as I had just that one room, anybody could see whatever I was doing in my room. So could Nisha too, more easily from her vantage point of a raised veranda in front her house where she sat most of her free time. She was at first glance not that strikingly beautiful. She was rather plain and ordinary looking. She had by then put on a bit of weight after being the mother of two boys and well after ten years of marriage. While she sat on the veranda, a couple of yards away from me, she was very often accompanied by her husband and her children. I tried to avoid meeting their eyes which were always trained upon me, a most shy newcomer to their immediate neighbourhood.
She didn’t lose much time in talking to me. One day, may be a couple of days after I moved in, from the veranda she sat, being accompanied with her husband and children, she asked me about the place, the district I came from and the office I worked in. As I replied to her queries it was discovered that we both belonged to the same district. A few questions later we found she was youger to me by only two years. But the question she put me a couple of days later was the most surprising and embarassing one for me. She asked, from the same place and while being surrounded by her husband and children,” Do you go to the fields outside to attend to the calls of nature ?” I was embarassed at her question of such private nature but I found she had done her research well. As the place was at the outskirt of the city, just beside the airport, where planes used to land or take off just above our heads, I found there was a large field beside the airport which reminded me of my village where we used to go to fields in the early mornings to attend to the calls of nature. I actually went there for the early morning job. Afterwards I went to a nearby pond, which was on a private property, to do the washings like so many other persons did and thereafter returned to my den. I was surprised that even this fact didn’t escape her notice. She warned me never to go to that pond again as, according to her, I might contact serious diseases as that pond was used by almost a thousand of “scums, bums, lepers and wretches of society”. Really I stopped going there since that day, she had scared me so much! But she also left me wondering as to why she took so much interest in me. She was the only exception in my life, no other woman, except my family, took any interest in me. I was in a state of bewilderment and puzzle.
But Nisha didn’t keep me in that state long. One day, as soon as her husband and my brother had left for their office, it happenned that both of them worked in the same office, she came to my room. She wanted to say something serious and earnest to me. I motioned her to my chair, the only chair in the room and I sat on my bed. She made a dramatic announcement at the outset. “The story I am going to tell you now has been known so far to only two human beings. After I have told you it will also be limited to two human beings only. Can you see how ?” I expressed my inability to solve the conundrum. She said that was because the other one besides her who knew that was dead. She said she assumed that I was never going to tell that to anybody else.I promised I would never. Then she told her story.
When she was at school she loved a boy named Hari. They were class mates and they also belonged to the same village. Both were madly in love with each other. Both had promised to marry after he got a job at the end of their studies. But her parents after coming to know of their clandestine love affair searched frantically for a young man to marry her off. Thus she was married off to her husband at the tender age of seventeen, just after her school exam had been over. Just before the day of her marriage Hari had called on her and they had had a long chat. He had wept and was disconsolate but little did she know that that would be their last meeting. The next day as she was leaving her village, after the marriage ceremony was over, sitting in a car, beside her husband, she saw a bier being carried by some men coming from the opposite direction of the road. As the bier passed, by her side of the car, she could recognise just in time that it was her Hari lying dead in it. She could barely restrain herself from stretching her hand out and stroking his face with her fingers.
After that it was all a blur for her how she reached her husband’s home and like an automaton she kept on doing all that was demanded of her. She was losing her consciousness often and going into repeated faints and people put that to her leaving her family and dear ones behind. She said she gradually became adept in keeping all her grief to herself and yet somehow managing to do all that was expected of her. But in her heart of heart the sorrow of Hari’s death always kept on smoldering. What a great loss ! That boy couldn’t know the life he was meant to know. Before he could enjoy life, his life was snuffed out at such a tender age! Thus she came to the end of her story with a deep sigh. Her eyes were red with tears. Her ordinary, plain face till that time had assumed a tragic dimension I had never associted with her.
I heard her out and expressed my sorrow at her loss. But I was even more puzzled as to why did she have to tell her story, to me of all persons, that she had kept private for a decade long, not even telling her huband, why? I put the question to her. But what came in reply was even more puzzling. She replied, ” You looked exactly like Hari. The day I saw you with your friend at the gate, I could hardly take my eyes off you. I was surprised at the resemblance of your face with Hari’s. He would have been exactly like you had he been alive. Your eyes, your nose, your lips, even your hairs which are always in disarray resemble exactly like his. I became happy when you moved in. Every day I have loved watching you since you came and I feel I am with Hari again.Today I thought I would bare it all.”
I protested,” But you know now better that I am not Hari. I am Paresh. However my appearances resemble his, I can’t be him. I can’t even love you as he would have.”
She said she could trust me and love me as Hari. She said I was God sent for her, she had absolute faith in me that I was as lovable as her Hari was. In fact, Hari and I were one for her, she could see no differences.
We talked through out that day about her past in detail. Then the talk spilled over to the next day and then to the next day. It went on and on. She too lapped up everything I talked about myself and to my surprise even demanded more. It seemed as if I could talk no nonsense, no rubbishes. It was a completely different experience from being carped, commented and interrupted by friends and family, as I used to be before. I had never seen a better and more patient listener. I too listened to her till she was through. When one talked the other just listened, soaked in. There was absolutely no interruptions from the other side. There was the least judgements of the other or of anybody else in those conversations. It was straight from each other’s hearts, those feelings and thoughts which were never expressed before because there was nobody to listen to them without questioning, interrupting and complaining. I didn’t know one could be happy for as little a blessing as having a nonjudgemental companion. I had thought that I could never be happy unless I owned a lot of money and a lot more books than I had. But here was something strange happening to me while I was with her! I never felt the lack of money, in fact money didn’t ever barge into our conversations. As for books I rarely fell on them as I used to previously at all hours of the day and night. The books I had with me seemed to be more than enough that I would be ever in need of. Her infinite and inexhaustible patience in listening and nonjudgemental attitude to everything and everybody put me at ease and I began to shed oodles of my complexes and shyness. For the first time I began to feel that I was a man, someone important, at least in someone’s eyes. I began to walk with more confidence, I became less awkward and diffident among people and like her when I talked with anybody I began to look straight into his eyes. I began to love her and felt grateful to her for doing all that to me. As for her, even to this day it has been a mystery to me as to what she had lacked that made her fall at my feet, as it were, to love her and talk to her apart from the reason, not at all convincing to me, that I looked exactly like her dearly departed lover, Hari. But God’s ways are mysterious, so were hers. I let myself trust in her. I thought I had nothing to lose, except may be my virginity which I was in any way dying to lose for some time.
It became a routine for her to come to my room as soon as her husband and my brother had departed for office and she had sent her sons to school . Those sessions of talks lasted for more than four hours at a stretch each and only ended due to some external exigencies like my having to go to work or internal emergencies like serious pangs of hunger or having to attend a call of nature. But as I returned from work at night and she had cooked dinner for her family and had fed them, again she would come to my room and we would resume from where we had left till it was midnight. I remember once she left for her home at 11.30p.m.after we had talked for more than two hours. I thought after so much talking I couldn’t fall asleep unless I read for at least half an hour. So I shut the door and took out a book to read. I was finding it difficult to concentrate and my mind wandered. Just about half an hour later, a little past midnight, I heard a light knock on the door and when I opened it was Nisha on the outside. I asked her what had happened ? She replied that she could see light in my room still burning, so could she come in for some more talks? I laughed at her madness and gently shooed her away. I wondered did she forget that she had a husband very much present in the house even though at that moment might be deep in his sleep. I had thought that only men could be foolish in love, women were always grounded in realities. But she seemed to prove me wrong on many points besides that.
It was nothing short of jugglery on our part to keep talking for hours and at the same time keep some of our major engagements, commitments,duties and responsibilities alive in our mind and to some extent get them accomplished. But those were heady days and nights. If anything got neglected and as a result any of us got scolded or punished it was never mentioned to the other. We tolerated all as martyrs in the cause of love. Didn’t we know that everything in life came with a price ? And the more precious the thing the greater was the price to pay? To cook my food twice a day, doing a job, buying vegetables, grocery etc from the market and attending to those calls of nature in a housing colony which provided only the barest minimum or modicum of facilities of them and yet at the same time keep talking for hours with a woman who thought you were the most brilliant talker she had heard in her life was a task fit for only tougher men than I but love made me do all those and even some more. On her part it was even a far greater ordeal. She had to cook for and feed a family besides doing many other household chores.
We were conducting those marathon sessions of talks in my room which was almost like a open space as the road into the colony encircled it and everyone passing by could see us both always talking. And there were so many prying eyes. Yet disregarding all, she came to my room and spent the larger part of the days and some part of the nights with me. She sat on my chair, actually that became her chair, her usual place to sit on, at a distance of two and a half feet away from me, her legs sometimes tucked in under the chair and sometimes extending them to my cot for a change in position to make her comfortable. It was an ordeal sitting like that for hours and only the most determined ones could carry it off. I was no God, no Moses, no Buddha or Krishna. Yet she listened to whatever I said with complete attention. It was all humbling and mysterious to me. I knew then and now that my talks were not inspired or life giving or lifting or even positive in the conventional sense, yet she displayed an unusual and unaccountable interest in them. Today while writing this a profound sense of love and pity for her wells up in me that she had squndered so much of her time in listening to someone who was a rank and out mediocre person and a poor conversationalist. I wish she had heard Eckhert Tolle or Wayne Dyer or Byron Katie. She was deserving of a far greater man, yet she seemed even content with me. There was no trace of comparison, no accusation of having let her down in any way, she was just content with what she had. I,her dearest Hari, was returned to her, a gift to her from God, and she won’t, as it were, count the teeth of a gift horse.
But I was not a gift horse, not even a horse. I was a man, that too an ordinary man, irrespective of what she thought of me. In the mean time a full month had passed with our incessant talking and sharing. One day, leaving her usual seat of her chair, she sat on my table beside my bed on which usually I read my books and for the last month or so I was resting my hands while I was talking to her. The table was a medium sized one and she could sit on it comfortably. Sometimes she dangled her legs down and sometimes she tucked them under her. That day it was her that did the most of the talking. I was all attention to her words as usual. But now that she had sat just a feet and a half away from me, her bodily gestures too assumed a life size attraction for me. I could even smell her and the smell of a woman was also playing havoc with my feelings. Every sensation was magnified and having some heightened effect on my perception of her. She looked extremely beautiful. She was laughing a lot that day and each time she laughed she looked lovelier and lovelier. I had never seen any one else whose face changed so completely from being an ordinary one to the most extraordinarily beautiful with the appearance of a smile. She had worn a red blouse which made her look even more ravishingly beautiful. Her so much proximity, her scent, her joyful laughter, her red blouse and her gay abandonment of all social norms and customs made her so desirable to me that I thought I would burst if I didn’t express my feelings. Just at that moment she lifted both her hands up and began to untie and tie again her strands of hair in to a bun. Her eyes were on me, I knew, but I chose to fix my eyes on her breasts which were jutting forth prominently in that straight posture while she sat erect tying her hair.
I said,” If you forgive me, I want to tell you some thing.”
She replied,” Go ahead.”
I said,” Your breasts are lovely. I have an irresistible desire to hold them.”
I thought I had uttered the unmentionable. I had made a breach of trust. I felt guilty and waited for the punishment to come. But what she replied was a complete surprise for me.
She replied,” I have been waiting to hear these words for a month. Any other man would have said these and much more within the first few days, especially after I had offered my love to you on a platter on the very first day. That you took so long to express them shows that you have a lot of restraint. I admire your kind of men.”
“There is nothing I can’t do for you. When Hari was alive, during some nights he was insistent on having sex with me, but I always refused. Since his death I have always repented for having deprived him the joy he could have known if I hadn’t refused. I won’t do the same mistake again. If you really want it I am prepared to go the whole hog with you, including sex. If you don’t want it I am content with you as you have been for the last one month.” She finished her words and smiled at me with her inimitable radiant face whenever she smiled. I couldn’t believe my ears. That I was lovable to someone was more than enough for me. Now to know that I am even acceptable for sex to her was heady and giddy enough. I thanked her and God for this miracle. I was grateful to both of them for their mysteriousness and large heartedness. I was sure I didn’t deserve any of this good fortune.
I spent the rest of the day and the night thinking how could we have sex in this colony of ten families with so many prying eyes. I couldn’t find a full proof plan. Every plan had some gaping holes in it. At last, having tired myself of devising plans after plans, I surrendered myself to God and Nisha, the two most ingenious, resourceful and mysterious elemental powers in my life and fell asleep.
The next day, in the usual hour as always, Nisha came to my room and sat on the chair. She was about to say something and I interrupted her for the first time. I said,” Nisha, for God’s sake don’t say anything today. Just tell me what have you thought about sex, our sex, between you and me and tell me where can we have it now.”
She was surprised at my insistence for a thing for which apparently I was not interested till yesterday. I too could see the comic aspect of the thing, though I was not at all non-serious or not making my demand as a joke. I was earnest, serious and at the same time felt comic. Sex always has a comic aspect to it, especially when it is watched detachedly from the outside. But from the inside it is a deadly serious thing, not to be trifled with or made light of. When I said that I was serious. Nisha replied,” Not today, tomorrow.” It was a great dampener. But at least I was given a hope to look forward to. I said,” Nisha, do you know, what I was thinking of ? If you were available for sex since a month, what was the use of those rubbish I was talking all the while? Let me confess it all now. Seducing you was the only motive behind those talks. Even behind my Adwaitin talks, those talks of and about non-duality or Oneness seduction was the real motive. They were just long detours to the same destination. In fact, since I entered my teen, say at thirteen or fourteen, I have not done a single thing or not said a single word to any woman, outside of my family, when seduction was out of my mind. I am as if a preprogrammed, hardwared sex machine who could behave or think no other way. That I gave you an unmistakable impression of rare restraint might be due to the same relentless and sophisticated programming which could surprise me into doing things I had never imagined. Anyway, You could have cut down those rubbishes and said to me ” Stop talking, get down to the real business.” She laughed and looked even more desirable.
The next day came. When I asked Nisha,” What have you thought about our sex? Do you think we can have it today?”
Mysteriously she replied,” Not today. Some other day.”
Thereafter, each day I was replied the same answer. Frankly, I began to have serious reservations about her intentions. In a suspicious state of mind I began to see faults with her which were previously showing as her strength. And as I felt the feelings of separation from her I suffered as a consequence. I began to glorify those days in which I hadn’t known any woman nor their mysterious ways. I began to see the good of my bachelor days. And all the while I suffered.
One day I couldn’t take it any more. As Nisha came to my room at the usual hour, I didn’t ask her the usual question. I pronounced her my final verdict. I said,” Nisha, don’t say the usual, not today, some other day thing again. It is today or never. If it is a no, then don’t come to my room again from tomorrow. I have not been able to sleep for the last two nights under this tension of to be or not to be. I hate to be kept dangling under tenterhooks of any sort.” Seeing my vehemence she, the mysterious one, took hold of my hands and told me to follow her to her house. I locked my door and meekly followed her.
Till that day I had never gone to her house. Her house was much more spacious than mine. It had privacy but as I later came to know from her that it was the very privacy that she feared most. As she explained, in my room she feared none as it was like holding talks with a man in the open, in front of hundred eyes. People didn’t have anything to imagine. But inside her house, provided with all privacies that a family needed, people would imagine everything because they couldn’t see anything. They just needed to see me come into or go out of her house. I liked her reasoning and understanding of things, her foresight and cautiousness behind her seemingly daring behaviour in flouting some social norms.
The room was dark even at noon as she had drawn all her door and window curtains. As I was going to shut the door behind me she forbade me to do so. She wanted to let the door remain widely open so that none could imagine anything. She led me to her bed and as I lay on her bed she draped a mosquito net over me and quietly moved in beside me. She instructed me to lie motionless in case any body should come into her room. She was sure in that darkened room and inside the colored mosquito net I should not be visible to anybody. She would meet the intruder at the door and dispatch him from there. Oh, God, how meticulously she had planned everything. Compared to her intelligence I was a novice. Compared to her plan my plans were childish. I surrendered myself to her care and meticulousness and concentrated on love making for which this elaborate arrangement and plannings had been made.
The much awaited time had come. She was lying beside me. I was full of excitement. My heart was pounding furiously loud and fast agaist my chest. This was going to be my first sexual experience of which I had seen so many dreams in my sleep and wakeful moments. I began to kiss her and fondle her breasts. My restless hands went on exploring and stroking every inch of her body. She seemed to me like an unknown and unchartered continent of which I was the explorer. My hands reached to every cranny, nook and corner of her body. Simultaneously our lips were locked in a prolonged kiss, to say more accurately as if she was a glass of beverage of the sweetest make and I was drinking and draining her out slowly. A short while later as my fingers explored the inside of her vagina, I had a mad desire to see its inside. I sat up at her feet and parted her legs and tried to peer into her inside in that darkened room. She quickly understood my intention. She sprang up with a jerk and in a moment got out of the bed and I thought I had perhaps committed some blunder of which she had taken an umbrage. She went straight to a cupboard and brought something and handed that over to me. I was flabbergasted to find that it was a torch light. She said,” If you must see, see it clearly and thoroughly and get over this obsession for ever.”
I was beside myself with joy at her gesture of generosity and magnanimity. I knew no better words to describe it. Yes, I saw her inside clearly and thoroughly under the bright light of the flashlight. I found love in all her glory sitting within pitching her tents. As a confession I may say now that I proved Nisha wrong for once. I haven’t yet got over “this obsession”, in fact I have steeped myself more and more into it. Yet I don’t feel any sense of guilt; I feel pure and innocent. I have not yet understood why one part of our anatomy, say face, be so much praised and poeticized and another part condemned or considered lowly.
When I entered her, after my inspection was over, she was all soft, supple, tender, juicy and full of love. In the course of an hour I spent with her that day I spilled my seeds twice besides being glued to her body all the time, cuddling, caressing,kissing and stroking her. I had a strong feeling all the while that as if life was loving itself and being loved through me and her. As if we both were not part of time in the moments when we loved. As if we were eternally present, had a most ancient origin and there was no time when we both were not present. We were the eternal lovers. When finally I took leave of her and took those three or four strides that carried me to my place, I felt that those were the biggest strides I had ever taken. From a chrysalis I had become a butterfly, from a thirty year diffident boy I had suddenly grown into a man. Yes, I can vouchsafe it, a woman can make a man of you if only she is intent as Nisha had been. And I stand guarantee that you will love the experience as she reshapes you by her flame of love and attention. Of course, a woman can also unman you with her cold stares and rude words; but that is another story with another woman which I may write some other day. I was and still am grateful to God and Nisha for doing all she did for me besides letting me enjoy a natural joy of which even the tiniest creatures are not deprived of. She did all that free, without any charge, with no string attached. Therein lies the beauty and mystery of it. Glory be to God and women like her. She had the deepest impact on my life.
I think it no longer can be put off any further. Its time has come. I had wished to ask you at the outset. But I thought that let me discover it for myself and find the joy in discovery as a bonus. But how incorrect I was ? I didn’t know it would prove such a hard nut to crack. Now I surrender. I confess that I have failed to find the answer on my own. I really need your help, friends. I hope you won’t mind extending a helping hand. But unless I tell my problem, how would you help ?
After I joined Facebook, exactly two years ago, I began inviting all of you one by one, to be my friend, which all of you accepted and made me so obliged and proud of you. I had noticed at the outset a thing which has always surprised, puzzled but pleased me since. For the last forty years I have been reading mainly western literature and philosophy and almost neglected the literature of my own country, India , including its spiritual literature, saints and seers. When I joined Facebook I had expected it to be full of western contents. I had assumed western people talking of only about their life in the west, their religion Christianity and their saints Paul, John, Matthews, Francis, Joan, Theresa etc.
But here began my puzzlement. I saw most of my western friends, you could see they numbered upward of two thousand, whenever they posted anything, they shared mostly their interest, knowledge about and devotion to Hindu saints and spiritual and religious literature. I discovered to my amazement that many western men and women used Hindu Gods and Goddesses as their profile pictures. Some wrote down incantations of mantras of Hindu gods on their walls and the contents of their posts remained largely spiritual of the Hindu kind. Some even asked me to explain the meaning of some Hindu/Sanskrit names which I did for them. I was pleased to find that they had been correctly informed that every Hindu/Sanskrit name had a meaning of its own. But their so much interest and knowledge about Hindu religious and spiritual thoughts never ceased to surprise me. Their so much devotion to some Hindu saints bordering on devotion to God Himself,as it were, never failed to flabbergast me. I began to have a thought continuously running at the back of my mind that probably instead of joining Facebook, as I had planned, I had inadvertently joined Facebook (India) and that’s why its pages were splashed with Hindu contents. I had always wanted to ask Facebook to clarify this, but I didn’t know how to ask, what was its Email address etc. I thought of asking the western friends themselves. I particularly wanted to ask Russie as she was my first western friend who had responded most cordially and with the maximum of warmth. I wanted to ask her why being a German she was so spiritually Hindu, in all her posts, in all her effusions of devotions to Indian Gods and goddesses . One day I also took courage to ask her. I admit asking someone about his/her caste or religion or income and in case of a lady her age, demanded a courage which I normally found hard to muster up. I asked her if she was a Hindu. She replied no, she was a Christian. I was even more puzzled. Thereafter I asked no one else. I thought she might be representing all, meaning, they were all Christians but yet at home in worshiping or loving Hindu Gods. If that was so, what a great contrast they formed, in my mind, to Indian Christians. I was reminded of an incident in my childhood.
I was studying in standard six in a school deep in rural India. I had no knowledge that any other religion than Hinduism existed anywhere because I had never seen any one belonging to any other faith. That I was a Hindu, even that would have remained unknown to me if Govt didn’t want me to mention my religion at the time of taking admission to schools or at the time of filling up a form prior to the school Board examinations. Once you were born to a Hindu household you were a Hindu for your life. You didn’t have to do anything to remain a Hindu. You were required to read no scripture, attend no temple or worship no God or Goddess unless you yourself did on your own accord. So I never worshipped in or visited any temple except to satisfy for once or twice a curiosity to see what was there inside of a temple .
But two Pujas we did in schools annually because they were more like festivals and colorful carnivals than Pujas. In fact all Hindu Pujas were like that as I was to discover later. The incident I am going to share happened at the end of a Ganesh puja. As all the staff, students and the villagers around the school were Hindus all took part in it. At the end of the daylong festival the much awaited time for distribution of Prasad came. I was among the group of boys who volunteered to distribute them. First we distributed among the teachers. All of them ate Prasad sitting on a long mat spread on the floor of the school veranda. We found our craft teacher was not among them. So we went to his room in the school where he was reclining on a bed. Seeing us he sat up. We offered him Prasad in a large plate which he strangely and unaccountably refused politely. When we pressed for knowing the reason, he said he couldn’t take it as he was a Christian. Till that day we didn’t know he was a Christian. He had come on transfer a couple of months ago. In fact we didn’t know if anybody was a Christian in the world except from the books where they said everything, that there were people who ate cockroaches, snakes and even other people which we didn’t believe, any way. I couldn’t believe my ears and eyes when he refused Prasad, such a tasty, sumptuous meal actually. I had seen people waging mini wars if anyone got overlooked at the time of distribution of Prasad. But I had never seen anyone refusing Prasad. I have also never understood why adults always camouflaged their desire for tasty food with such high sounding name as Prasad. To me what was religious about some food items, for the life of me I would never know. And here an intelligent teacher was refusing Prasad which was nothing but vegetarian food, for some spacious and outlandish reason that he was a Christian. Suddenly as if a screen dropped off before my eyes. He was one of my favorite teachers. I used to watch mesmerized for hours at him making wooden articles and furniture of all kinds. So many beautiful forms from his imagination were taking shapes before my eyes with the help of his dexterous hands and so furiously fast that I was spellbound while watching him at work. I used to think what a marvelously gifted genius he was, considering that it was impossible on my part to draw a penciled picture of even a mango which all else were able to do with ease. My respect for him and his craft was so much that I had begun to underestimate all other teachers of the school in comparison to him. And suddenly he appeared to me to be a fool, nothing but a self-opinionated fool. Who else could refuse good food ? I thought Christians, if they really existed anywhere, were bigots.
But here in Facebook, I found Christians worshipping and venerating the Hindu gods themselves. What a surprise! This was beyond my expectations. I had only wished them not to be bigots. But how was I going to be actually sure that what I had found with Russie applied to all ? That all Christians venerated Hindu Gods and loved Hindu religious thoughts ? And I was not going to find out with anybody’s help. To complicate matters I found somewhere written on a page on ISCON that it was the largest single group of Facebook users, numbering more than one hundred thousand. So I had a hunch that all those western men and women venerating and loving Hindu Gods and Goddesses and spiritual thoughts belonged to ISCON. But a doubt also rankled. If they were all ISCON followers why should Russie say she was a Christian. ISCON followers normally identified themselves as Hindus.
One day I found my dear friend Carmen mention “My Guru Papaji encouraged me to be myself, to share from my own experience.” I thought why should she write Guru with reference to a Hindu spiritual teacher. I know she was a Christian. Was she a ISCON follower too ? I hoped not. But I also didn’t seek her help in clarifying my confusion. I was determined to find out myself. Days passed but I was getting nowhere nearer regarding the correct position of these western friends so far as their religious affiliations were concerned. Only yesterday evening something happened that I decided I could never be able to solve this conundrum on my own.
Last evening a new friend from Texas invited me for a chat. I mentioned Texas because I found him, during the course of our chat, extremely mindful of the place one came from. Normally if someone confused something with the other, I would correct for instance, “No,that was not Ram Dass who had said that, that was by Alan Watts”. But this friend, I noticed would always correct like this, “That was not by RamDass from California that was by Alan Watts from New York”. I found that very interesting. I would think he was the most scholarly of all my western male friends. The pity was I always forgot who came from where, though in all my interaction that was the first question I asked to all to make amend. But that never made any difference. In the end, sometimes by the end of the chat or the evening I would forget the name of the place the friend came from. As if my mind refused to register man-made borders one found on maps.
Nine times out of ten, chats bored me. So I desisted from inviting anyone to chat. But when someone invited from the other end I generally gave in, at least for the first couple of times. Hoping against hope that perhaps this time there might be God at the other end seriously thinking of sharing with me one of his secrets or revelations that would take me out of the confine and confusion of myself and drown me in the beauty, colour and glory of a sunrise in a clear mental sky. Last evening’s chat was nothing of the sort but it was not a let down either. It certainly would come among those one out of ten in which I had not been bored and that spoke enough about my new friend’s style and substance. I began from a point of no expectation, that may have contributed a lot towards its success.
In course of the chat, which ranged very wide and far and included politics of our respective countries, he expressed his fondness for and gratitude to India, especially its saints,mystics and spiritual teachers. He had genuine praises for them. I mentioned that it seemed to me that the majority of Christians have deserted their religion in favour of eastern religions, especially Hinduism. I said it seemed so from the Facebook pages in the praises and panegyrics of Shankara, Raman and Nisargadatt ; in the invocation and incantations of Hindu Gods and Goddesses. He corrected me with a report on the ground reality as he found it, for which I was grateful to him. He said he was the only man in his neighborhood who had both white and Indian friends. He said he wished the Christians who also believed in Hindu religious thoughts were in the majority but sadly that was not so. They formed a minuscule minority. Some priests have accommodated Hindu nondual thoughts in their services in churches but they formed a tiny minority. I asked him then why it seemed to me from my reading of Facebook that they formed the majority. He said some chilling, blood curdling things to me. I was really astonished. He said the hard core traditional Christians of America and the west won’t even hold talks with me. They hated my religion, its saints and seers and literature. And they were the majority. The ones I found so much in love with India and its saints and who loved to talk and share with me were currently a tiny minority. I said I didn’t know this. To me Eckhert Tolle,Wayne Dyer, Ram Dass, Alan Watts, Donald Jacobson, Adyashanti, Mooji etc only represent the best of the west, the intelligentsia of the west. They were all influenced by Hindu thoughts. I even predicted to him that the tiny minority that he and his likes formed at the moment, supported by the cream of the intelligentsia, would certainly see their rank swelling in future. The majority would one day find their churches deserted if they didn’t accommodate them in some way. And if a hardcore traditional Christian won’t hold talks with me I was not dying to talk with him either.
Then I thought this man seemed to be knowledgeable, why not I take his help to remove my confusion of 2 years. I asked him if he thought that most of those from the west who had a reverence for Hindu religion, thoughts and saints were followers of ISCON ? He waited, unusually, for a few seconds and asked what was that. I laughed and replied that I thought I got the answer. He said sure, but what was that. I said, that stood for “Society for International Srikrishna Consciousness movement” founded by Prabhupada. He said he had never heard of that. He was a follower of Yuktananda and Yogananda and their system of Kriyayoga. He said he had been holding workshops on present moment consciousness sine 1980s much before Eckhert popularized it so hugely. He said Ram Dass had written a book on Here and Now much earlier, in the 1960s. I said I didn’t know. I should certainly read it if I found it. Then he wanted to take leave. I concurred and bade him good bye. He said Namaste which never failed to surprise me pleasantly when it came from a foreigner. I said Namaste and thanked him for removing some of my confusions and false impressions.
I implore you all, my American and western friends, if my confusions have been correctly addressed with correct facts and if my learned friend and I were wrong anywhere in our assumptions or conclusions. Please feel free to write as you like. Any one reading this article even after months or years after its publication should feel welcomed to share his/her views,opinions on a subject which has never failed to fill me in wonder, amazement and awe.
Accidents, clashes and surprises do happen in life and Facebook being a mirror of life how could it be free of them ? As I have been a diehard fan and prolific user of FB I have had also my share of them in it. Today I am going to share one such experience of mine that I encountered in FB. But first a confession I have to make. I am a bit ashamed of a particular weakness of mine which I have to make a clean breast of before you all friends now, I hope everyone that reads this story is a friend, and what better way to honor friends than to confess one’s weaknesses, with warts, spots et al. In one of my earlier essays I had mentioned that I invited friends to my account in Facebook , on two bases only. To recapitulate them, in short, firstly on the basis of an interesting or humorous comment and secondly on the suggestion of FB itself. But actually there was a third basis also which I chose to hide from you as it threatened to expose one of my deep seated weaknesses. But today I am going to make a clean breast of it all. The truth is I am partial to beautiful women, howsoever I proclaim from the rooftop that I am a pure nondualist, a modern descendant of Shankara to whom woman’s beauty was nothing but an illusion or maya. From my early youth, one of Shankara’s famous shlokas was dinned into my ears by many elders at different times, “Oh you ignorant ones, you are attracted to woman’s beauty, especially her breasts; but what are breasts except rounded formation of human flesh and thus subject to all corruptions the flesh is heir to. Leave aside your such worthless obsessions after perishable things and remember the holy name of the Lord, Govinda, only He will deliver you from your miserable state.” In spite of all attempts of elders and all the assistance of Shankara employed in their cause to detoxify me of the toxic venom of woman’s beauty, injected into my system by my constant thinking about them, I remained unredeemed from my fallen state. I still remain a worshipper of woman’s beauty. Only thing the elders and Shankara did to me was that I began to associate the enjoyment of woman’s beauty with a sense of forbidden pleasure, a guilt which was previously not there in me. Today when I look at a beautiful woman I look at her on the sly, like a thief, always fearful lest she confronts me why I looked at her the way I did or as if some elders would appear from nowhere and catch me red-handed looking at her and start reprimanding me for my moral laxity. It is another matter that all those elders are long since dead, but how to get rid of their voices in my head which I carry day and night? So I confess here that I also invited friendship of some women on the sole consideration of their beauty. The story I am going to narrate is related to one such woman whose beauty or to say more accurately the beauty of a photo she had uploaded on to her page, had been the sole criterion for invitation of her friendship. But I didn’t know that she would prove too hot to handle for me.
Her name was Lisa. I found her comments on a man’s post in FB whom I had befriended just the day before on the basis of one of his comments. His post was based on some local American political issues and political persons, having no international significance. I was amused at the discussion but found very little of interest to me. The friend and Lisa seemed to be very well known to each other and her comments were lighthearted and good humored. Just for curiosity sake I opened her page and found just one photo of a girl around 25 uploaded besides those photos of dogs, cats and flowers. The girl’s photo was a long shot, she was wearing jean half pants and a T-shirt. She struck me as beautiful. So I immediately invited her friendship. She was on line and probably finding a common friend between us accepted my invitation readily. I posted a thank you message on her wall ending with “peace and love to you,” my common message of greeting and thanksgiving to one and all. Little did I realize that this, my universally well-accepted and innocent greeting message, would be made an exception of and an issue would be made out of it.
As soon as she had read my message she wrote back,” Thank you for your invitation and for your wish for peace on me but I cannot accept your love because in my culture love is not accepted from a stranger.”
I was flabbergasted and couldn’t believe that I was in conversation with an American girl. I was intrigued at her response. For a moment I thought she was joking. In order to be more clear of her intent, I wrote back again on her wall,” Dear Lisa, I have almost 1000 friends from almost all the countries of the world and this message of thanksgiving that I posted on your wall has been a standard message to all that have accepted my invitations . So far none had taken any exception to the word ‘love’ in it. I think love is a lovely word too. Why are you objecting it? Are you serious or joking?”
She sharply shot back, “ I have already told you that love is a very personal matter and one only accepts it from someone very dear and near to oneself. In my culture it is never expressed to a stranger nor accepted from a stranger. And by the way, I don’t joke with strangers either.”
Now I was even more intrigued ,astonished and a bit shocked too. Out of my 1000 friends at the time, now their numbers have exceeded two thousand, more than half were Americans and more than half of them were ladies. None had objected to the use of the word. Were they not Americans? Didn’t they have a culture too? What culture she was speaking of? Was she the sole custodian of a vanished culture? Truly I was boiling inside. She got me completely riled. I thought what sort of a friendship this was going to be with such a bumpy ride from the start? I was in no mood to yield or quit, her being a beautiful woman no longer mattered to me. I thought if I gave her a befitting reply, what was the worst that could happen? At the most she could unfriend me then and there. Let me take the risk but I would take the matter to its logical conclusion. So I wrote back,” Dear Lisa, the word “love” which is very often used as a synonym of “God” or “Truth” and so memorably immortalized by Jesus Christ by his” Love thy neighbor as thyself’’, and here it is so unfortunate to find that you have been invoking your culture to find fault with my usage of the word addressed to you! Besides it was a formal usage, you know as well as I know that no other meaning of any sort was intended. Really there was no issue involved in it, so please don’t make an issue out of it. Accept it gracefully and let bygones be bygones.”
She proved herself to be of a different mettle. She stuck to her point that her culture forbade her to accept love, even a wish for it, from a stranger which I was and nothing more. I then made a rejoinder to it and even took an exception to her use of the word ‘stranger’ thrice in the course of that short duration. I wrote,”Whom are you calling a stranger? The one who thanked you and wished peace and love on you? Please remember your best friend of today was also one day a stranger to you.” Then she too replied. Then I replied. It went on and on till our dialogues filled a long page. None of us was yielding. One of my American women friends, I don’t know how she got wind of the verbal duel that was going on between the two of us, appeared and remarked in a tongue under cheek manner, “Paresh, I see a lot of heat being generated here over “love”. Are you both out on a global warming mission? LOL.” I replied, “Read the thread through and find for yourself.” Then she disappeared. Lisa suddenly suggested that if she was not behaving as per my expectations then I unfriend her. I was expecting her to unfriend me, but lo ! here she was telling me to unfriend her. That made me softened. She sort of won me over by this surprising gesture. Moreover, I was noticing, throughout the time our ping pong of messages ran to and fro, that she never hit me below the belt, there were absolutely no personal incriminations or innuendoes. It can be said as if a full- fledged debate took place in the pages of FB where neither opponent yielded to the other but also neither deviated from the rule book, neither failed to show respect to the other. That impressed me much. Secondly the quality I loved most in any man or woman, I found that abundantly in her, it was her energy.
I wrote back,”Dear Lisa. I am here to make friendship with you and with all. I have never unfriended anyone for difference of opinion. So unfriending you is out of the question. We have had clearly a difference of opinion. You are entitled to your opinion as I am to mine. Let’s not harp on that again. We will find many common grounds, common interests to build our friendship on. I wish you the best.”
She too wished me well. Then we said good night and good day to each other as we were under different time zones. Well that was an accident and clash too. Didn’t I tell you that I was going to give an instance of them in FB pages ? But I would give an example or two of surprises too, with the same girl again.
After that incident of initial hiccup and bumpy ride I checked into her info page, for the first time. She seemed to be a humorous, fun loving girl. Some of her entries in her info page would give you an idea why I thought so. In the column for employers, she wrote, ‘ Law enforcement’. In the column for post she held, she wrote,” If I told you, I will have to kill you”. In the quotations column she quoted some outrageously funny and witty quotes from famous American humorists. I loved all of them.
Favorite Quotations “We’re only given a small spark of madness; we mustn’t extinquish it.” – Robin Williams
“What fresh hell is this?!?” – Dorothy Parker
“I’m working on becoming someone that I will never quite be.” – Josie Natori
“I don’t care what is written [or said] about me as long as it isn’t true.” – Dorothy Parker
“There she goes into a sea of mediocrity where her talents are foams evaporating into the thin air of shine.” – John Tiong Chunghoo
“Take me or leave me, or, as is the usual order of things, both.” – Dorothy Parker
“Forgive your enemies but never forget their names.” – John F. Kennedy
Then after some initial interest in her posts and after some ‘likes’ on some of them my interest in her plummeted sharply . The main reason was her interests. Her interests were in American local affairs and events and western songs and music. On both these topics my knowledge was nearly zero. But she had a coterie of friends, both male and female, with whom she discussed and shared her interests almost regularly. It seemed she was a master in her areas of interest. Reading her posts, comments and discussions that ensued among her friends, who obviously knew each other well, I had a feeling, a sort of déjà vu, as if I was reading provincial British women novelists like Margaret Drabble, Elizabeth Howard Zennings , Rose Macaulay etc after having had a long stint with continental novelists like Camus, Sartre, Kafka or Mann. It was a bit too much provincial and claustrophobic for my taste. It seemed she was well liked. She loved pets and used one of her pets as her profile picture. She never used her own picture on her profile. Well, gradually with mismatch of interests, I almost stopped frequenting her page after the initial month or two and I nearly forgot her, for nearly a period of six months. But fate had other things in store for us. Even though we had nearly written each other off, fate didn’t, as it turned out later. Didn’t I promise you a few surprises? They were going to be unfolded.
One day I invited one of Lisa’s friends, Dina, to be my friend, for the same reason for which I had sought Lisa’s friendship, namely her beauty. She accepted. One day, some days afterwards, for no particular reason, I wanted to open her page and read whatever she posted on her wall. She had a strange post on her wall that day. It was strange because I couldn’t make any meaning out of one word. Her post was a short one, “I was deknotted yesterday. It felt good.” My problem was and still is that I don’t know what “deknotted’ meant. And that acted like a teaser, a riddle or a conundrum for me. However I tried I couldn’t understand its meaning. I googled it to find what it meant but that was also of no avail. Strangely, four or five of her friends seemed not only understand the word but also each shared,in the thread, that she had also been deknotted once,some said more than once. They were all women. But here I was getting infuriated out of the frustration of not being able to make any sense out of the word. I began to see a conspiracy in their posts. I thought probably the word was a code word, it stood for something else. It was designed to keep all others out. It probably stood for a sexual word, may be the sexual act itself. I decided to let them know that I knew what actually they were talking of. A sort of hey guys, I have broken your code and here it is what you really meant, ha ha ha. In this state of mind, I wrote something on her wall, under that particular thread, for which I have felt ashamed since that day. But I didn’t know the repurcations it was to cause very shortly later on. But first, let me write what I had written there. I wrote,”I was deflowered yesterday. It felt good.” Then I exited from her page.
I continued reading some posts of other friends from the feed for about an hour when all the while at the back of my mind a thought was constantly going on that what I wrote on Dina’s page was not correct, decent and proper. I resisted for an hour an irrepressible urge to go back and delete the comment. The urge was seriously affecting my concentration in reading posts. So I reverted back to her page and deleted my comment, the first and last such comment I made and the first and last comment I deleted. Then I felt at peace and continued reading some other posts. Sometime afterwards I logged off.
As I logged on to FB some four or five hours later I was instantly greeted with a message from Lisa, she was as if livid with rage. “ I have unfriended you, Paresh. You had posted a very indecent and inappropriate comment on Dina’s wall which she has removed out of disgust.” I couldn’t see her but I could imagine her spitting fire on me. Remember it, we hadn’t communicated for the last six months or more. I remember I had sent two or three of my stories to her, but finding her unresponsive I had stopped sending anything else to her. I verified and found that she had actually unfriended me. So only messaging through inbox was open to us. I replied through that a message, after carefully drafting it, for which I have been happy and proud since. My joy was due to the fact that I didn’t mismanage or botch the issue and I successfully came out keeping my friendship with Lisa intact. I consider it as one of my greatest triumphs in life. But let me first write what I wrote in reply.
I replied,” Dear Lisa, let me first thank you for giving me this opportunity to explain things or putting my point of view of the matter before you. Many friends have unfriended me before. But none had given me a hearing as you have so magnanimously done. You could simply have unfriended me without giving me the reason. Really, I had made an indecent comment on Dina’s wall. For that I am really very sorry. That was due to my inability to understand a word in her post. But at about an hour later I removed the post myself. You can ask Dina if am speaking the truth or not. Probably she remained blissfully unaware of whatever happened on her wall during the last few hours. I am surprised how you came to know of it so soon. Probably you were notified through your mobile phone as you had ‘liked’ her post. I am really sorry for what happened. I assure you that was my first and last such indiscretion. I am sending an invitation of friendship to you. I hope after verification with Dina you will accept it. I have always held you in high esteem and after this incident it has even grown higher. I can’t write “I love you” knowing your reservations against the word and its usage but that describes, more accurately than any other word, my present state of emotions regarding you. Yours ever, Paresh.”
Was that not a surprise I had promised you, whatever happened that day ? But even more surprises were to come afterwards. Please hold on to your seat on this rollercoaster of a relationship. Yes, from this end it was nothing short of a relationship, of course the Platonic kind. Really, as I was drafting that letter I was experiencing a whole gamut of emotions which I can only call as love. I was struck by the honesty,energy,outspokenness, her old world conservativeness in feelings and expressions and finally her pitching in and taking cudgel for a friend when she thought someone was out to make a pass on her indecently, all this and some more aroused a feeling of love for Lisa.
The next day, the day after I had sent her the above message, I was notified that Lisa had accepted my friendship. She welcomed me back but with a rider that I was to maintain decorum and decency at all communications and though she liked humor and banter there should be no sexual innuendoes and double entendres, which I readily agreed. Fortunately she had placed no embargo on writing “love you” which I was in the habit of writing after every third or fourth sentences to all my friends, especially female friends (LOL). May be she thought I had already understood that which frankly I hadn’t. Had she placed that restriction, that would have galled me the most. She also wrote that I hadn’t read or commented on her post for a long long time for which she wanted an amendment in me. She opined that if we didn’t interact what was the meaning of carrying such a lifeless friendship ? I replied that what about her? Did she read the stories I had sent her. Did she communicate or share anything with me during that time? I confessed I had tried my best but her areas of interest were so confined to America, its local affairs, western music and songs that I couldn’t sustain my interest for long because my knowledge about them was like peanuts. Only thing about America I knew was its literature, its Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne, Hemingway, Saul Bellow, I.B Singer, Malamud et al whom I loved so much. She confessed she had read some of my writings and found them good. She added like me she had majored in English lit which was fine for me. She also said there was a Pakistani boy in her class in college whom she liked much which was again fine for me. At least these statements dispelled a notion in me that her interest was confined to America only. We resolved to stay in touch and share whichever way possible.
I have always been surprised by the way things happen in life. While visiting Dina’s page I had no preconceived desire or intention to find that unusual post or write that unfortunate comment. But that happened. After deleting that comment I had thought that that was the end of it but that was not to be. But inspite of this apparently senseless event happening what ultimately emerged was a far more happy outcome for me in the form of a sturdy and lively friendship with Lisa which in the days to come would unfold and unfold and unfold the like of which, may be, the world may not have witnessed given the constraint of a long distance friendship solely sustained by words. Many times in my messages I would, out of nowhere, in the midst of sharings of a completely different nature and topic I would remind her of that unfortunate indiscretion of mine and apologize to her again and she would implore me to forget that incident of the past. Once she wrote,” It was on Dina’s wall you had written that. If Dina didn’t have anything to complain about then who am I to complain ? I had verified with Dina and she denied having seen or removed any of your post on her wall. The matter is closed there. Forget that and get ahead.’’
Once I asked her a little about her personal life. Was she married or did she live with a boyfriend? She replied her boyfriend had left her. I assured her he would be back. She asked why did I think so. I replied where else he would find a more lovely and loving girlfriend. I described her as the most beautiful creation of God. I quoted half of a Keats’ poem in praise of her. I concluded that her man must be regretting his decision to quit her and must be trying hard to get back to her and patch up things with her. She wished her man could she in her all the qualities that I saw. But she said she had no such hope of getting him back as she had given him a severe dressing down while sending him away. I told her she didn’t know men as much I knew. Men loved being scolded by beautiful women who loved them. She asked how did I know her as beautiful. I said I could feel her beauty in my heart. My eyes also could see her beauty in the jean half pants-clad photo of her she had on her page. She said that was not her photo. She didn’t keep a single photo of her there. I asked why. She said for security reasons. She said she even couldn’t disclose where she worked. I was surprised at her concern for security. I wondered if she worked for a James bond like secret agent but didn’t ask her. She told me I had a very high opinion of her. She said she was not even beautiful, she was just plain. She thought though she liked my high opinion of her she tended to believe what her boyfriend thought about her, which was not much. I told her even boy -friends and husbands could be wrong. A lover was always right because he never gave much credence to eyes and ears as senses could deceive. A lover’s heart was always right. But staying as a lover throughout the relationship is a difficult job. Boyfriends or girlfriends very often fail. I asked where did her boyfriend go. She said to the sea. He was a sailor or marine I forgot which. I said he would come back. One day she said one of her ears ached and water oozed in and filled the ear. She had sinusitis. She had infections in her throat and ears. She heard loud plonk plonk sounds when water drops touched her eardrum in that ear. She said she had temperature in her body. Then I felt concerned for her. Truly, I had a choking sensation in my throat. What a pity! A single woman alone in her apartment and none with her to comfort her or to give her a warm massage or to accompany her to a doctor. I implored her to go to a doctor forthwith. A doctor could completely cure her in short time.
Thereafter her health became the prime subject of our sharings. She assured me that she had consulted a doctor and was regularly taking medicines. She said she was plagued with this disease for long. She doubted if she could ever be completely cured. Somedays afterwards I asked if her boyfriend had returned. She said no. I said don’t lose faith, he would certainly return. One day she asked why did I always have such good opinion of her. I knew in her conservative way, that much she could imagine her culture allowing her, she couldn’t possibly ask me why did I love her. I knew she was substituting high opinion in place of love and after all what was love but a sincerely felt high opinion. I said there was no other way to know her. She asked why did I want to know her. I said without knowing her I couldn’t know God. She said she didn’t see the connection. I said we are all connected. If I could know her or any one for that matter or anything else then I could understand the whole universe. While trying to know her I was actually trying to know myself.
One day she really surprised me. She asked me to guess how old she was. I said she was in her late twenties. She said no, much more than that. I said then she must be no more than in her thirties. She said she was much more than that. I refused to guess her any older. She asked would I still have those romantic thoughts and high opinions of her if she told me her real age. I said tell it and see for yourself. If you thought I would run away from you after knowing your real age, then it was all in your interest to tell it forthwith. You would get rid of an undesirable dud out of your back so easily. She didn’t immediately reply, but the next day her message reached me. That was the surprise of all surprises I have got in life. She said she was fifty seven years old, two years older than me. My year of birth was 1955, she must have got it from my page in FB, unlike her I had mentioned many things about myself there. I said I was surprised, even shocked. Not only that she proved so much older than I had thought her. But I was also surprised how she kept up such a girl- like enthusiasm, energy, humor and zest in life. I said I had to believe her words as I had never doubted her. But I would rather go by my heart which told me that she was a young girl, youth in spirit, as young as anyone could be. I would go on visualizing her as before, eternally young, vivacious and beautiful. She said I was incorrigibly romantic.
Days went by. We kept in touch. She had a peculiar habit which I fully understood as I was not completely free of it. She never wrote me a message first. But if I wrote her she almost always responded. I confess, with most friends I am like that. But with her I always took the initiative. That she responded was enough for me. I sometimes wonder at the power and sway of love over us. It always made you do many things with pleasure that you had never in your wildest dreams imagined before. I thought probably secretly, unwittingly ,even unaware to herself she was half in love with me. Not to the extent I was with her; but in her own way, caged, confined and cirmcumsized as she was by her unwavering faith in her tradition and culture. She wore her culture as her skin while for me love was everything. For me anything that came before love didn’t stand a chance of surviving like that of a bullock cart placed in the tracks of a speeding train pulled by a 500000 horsepower engine. But I could feel that she responded to my love for her in her own way. Otherwise why would she care to reply to almost all of my messages. She never ever declared her love for me, but without love could anyone care to reply or would anyone have the patience to read my long outpourings of love or would anyone find the words to reply, I wondered.
One day, in reply to one of my impassioned letters she asked what I thought was the future of such love to which she didn’t believe as her culture forbade her. I replied what mattered was her moments with me, did she find them enjoyable or boring. I said I had no concern with the future. In future we are all dead. The importance of love was that it immediately put you at ease with yourself. To me the love that had no future was a very beautiful thing in itself. If it is present in the present it is enough to itself and to the ones in it. The day you told I bored you that would be the end of it. From my side that was a very long long way off. I didn’t think about that at the moment. I knew I would continue to love you even after your boyfriend returned to you, which one day he certainly would. I always wished he returned sooner to take care of you and your physical needs. I had nothing to do with your physical aspect of being except I always wished you good health and to be well provided. I was connected with your heart with love,affections and fellow feelings. I had no illusions of ever living with you physically. I knew I was nothing physically, more an expender of energy myself than an energy giver to anyone. But connected in love I am everywhere, everything. So are you. So let’s feel each other only in heart, In love where we have our original face and our true identity.
I am grateful to Facebook for making this kind of love possible where man and woman can communicate, share and even love each other being unburdened by the dictates of a physical existence which very often assumed a tyrannical power over us. I am reminded of one of many episodes of one of my most favorite authors, Sasthi Brata’s autobiographical novel, “The Confessions of an Indian lover” where he described how he and a white woman with whom he had shortly started to live with were hounded out of a largely irish neighbourhood in London by inhuman and violent means just because he was an Indian. The bloodchilling account of a night while Brata and his girlfriend were sleeping, stones began to be hurled at them and finally a brick came crashing into their room with a paperwrapped around it where it was written,”you cock sucking whore,living with a wog, get out of here before we kill you both.” That is what the tyranny of a physical existence has gifted us. A little difference in color of our skin or iris, a little difference in accents, a little difference in build and height and our separateness assumes gigantic proportions and manmade difference in culture and tradition only stokes the fire. Our connection in one heart, one truth, one love is forgotten. Facebook has been doing a seminal work in making us connected as we are meant to be, connected in heart and soul in love unburdened by a woefully inadequate physical existence. What Plato had conceived centuries before and what is so well known as Platonic love has been given, for the first time, a chance to be practiced on the Earth. If mankind couldn’t accept each other physically, the body posed the major barrier, a threat; let it then learn growing familiar, accepting, allowing and accommodating the other being shorn of body, as it were, in the pages of Facebook. Even that will not be a mean achievement. It may also prepare for a fuller and more integrated acceptance later.
Let me be back at the story of Lisa and me and let us see if I can provide at least one more surprise. One day Lisa disappeared from the Facebook unannounced. I waited for her return. Days merged into weeks and weeks into months. My posting on her wall, “Where are you Lisa ?” remained unanswered. Nobody was there to answer. My concern for her ran high during the first month. But as months passed by and when it exceeded three or four months I began to feel elated and relieved. I was fairly certain that she had been joined with her boy friend. How I knew I won’t tell but it conformed to a pattern I had observed with many in FB. Now I waited for her announcement. Not many days later she resurfaced in Facebook. That same day I messaged her,”Dear Lisa. This time please don’t deny that your boyfriend is back with you. I am sure he is with you or you are with him.” I was correct. She replied, she was with him. Her beau had presented her with a diamond ring and a bracelet. She requested me not to divulge anything because nothing has been finalized yet. I suggested that at least she change that line “In a complicated relationship” to “in a relationship” which she did. I asked his name and she magnanimously complied. A few days later I requested her to upload his photo which she in a way did. She uploaded a sketch of him, and oh boy, what a handsome guy he was. And he was may be about forty. Now I knew why my heart was refusing to believe that she was nearing sixty. Didn’t I tell you she was just a wonderfully lovely,vivacious and beautiful young woman. They will form a lovely pair too. My blessings will be always with them. Won’t you bless them for me ?
Dear Raj,there are so much of praises of positivity and confidence in your article and in the comments that follow that I am a bit hesitant to chip in a discordant note into this harmony. But I must be myself, otherwise I am just useless. Has anyone met people like N.D.Tiwari, who at the age of 86 made the Raj Bhawan a den for gamboling with girls of one fourth of his age,and A.Raja who swindled public money to the tune of thirty thousand crores ? Have you met hardened criminals ? Have you read of misdeeds of Hitler and Nazis? Have you heard of the speeches of Osama Bin Laden ? Have you heard of the speeches of Obama after he got Osama assassinated ? They all have one thing in common, they are full of confidence in themselves that they can pull off anything. People lose everything they own in stock market being full of confidence that the companies they bet on will outperform all others. I have seen two of my confident friends losing everything in stock market and finally die of heart attack and a third one committing suicide along with his wife. So being confident is not everything; confidence is a double edged sword. It can cut the wielder too. That’s why it is said caution is the better part of valour. E.M. Foster said,” Death destroys life, but the fear of death saves many lives.” So fear of failure also saves many. But extreme fear of failure also can paralyse all entrepreneurship. Maintaining balance is the hardest thing but the most desirable one also. If positivity invented aeroplanes, negativity invented the parachutes. Positivity must be balanced with negativity too. Life can’t exist in either of the extremes.
Thanks Raj for the tag. As always you have not mentioned the author of the passage or piece. You are incorrigible. Lol! But I know from its style it can belong either to Dale Carnegie or Norman Vincent Peele. Some thirty or forty years back I used to read them both very devotedly. They were best sellers then, at least in India they still continue to sell well. I don’t think in America they are still the craze that once they used to be. At a certain point of mankind’s evolution the message of confidence and positivity they preached was very much needed. Not only their books sold in millions but also the authors were in great demand as public speakers too. The western countries in general and America in particular took maximum benefit out of those books. Whoever read the books became confident and confidence is a heady emotion too. It made the people feel better about themselves. Salesmen refused to take a no as an answer from their victims, sorry, customers, to their sales pitches. LoL! Not only common people became more confident, Hitler, Mussolini, Japanese, British, Americans all became confident of themselves. And then the Second World War inevitably began. It took six years to completely douse the raging fire of war. After the death of millions and thrice as many wounded, some thoughtful and sensitive people paused, pondered and found that being full of superficial positivity and confidence is not enough; rather it is a sign of mediocrity. W.B. Yeats voiced the truth correctly in his lines:
“The best lack all convictions, and the worst are full of certainties.” But good sense was again drowned by the heady confidence and cheerfulness brought on by the victories in the Second World War. After all, America for the first time proved its strength and mettle in the Great War on the global stage. It didn’t create a colony for itself but it defeated almost all colonial powers. Confidence was at its apex. Whenever confidence is at its apex, how can a war be far behind? Thus began its war on Vietnam. After a protracted war for long fifteen years, after dropping of Napalm bombs on innocent civilians and after causing deaths of millions and suffering lots of casualties of its own, finally its confidence level dropped to an all time low. Then sanity could find some space to prevail in the minds of some of its thinkers, leaders and general public. The younger generation was no longer as confident as their predecessors. They began to feel disillusioned. Rebel movements like hippies and beatles appealed to them. To differentiate themselves from the old school of thinking they called themselves as “the flower generation”. Albert Camus and Colin Wilson correctly captured the public imagination by naming them as “the outsiders”. They were anti-establishment. Not only they were against their political leaders but confidence boosting books by Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale couldn’t sustain their interest. They were in search of something deeper, they were, in short, after their spiritual quests.
Eckhert Tolle, while tackling a question why senseless events occur, for instance like the Vietnam War, made a very excellent observation. He said that though he did not justify the war, yet he could discern human consciousness taking a radical paradigm shift during such apparent senseless events. Probably those long peace marches, forming miles and miles of human chains by linking hands, overnight sitouts and demonstrations against the power that be and the establishment couldn’t have been possible without the senseless event that Vietnam war was. And also the gradual shift of peoples’ interest towards eastern religions and mysticism happened almost at the same time, may be as a result of their disillusionment.
Pride goes before fall. When your confidence in yourself dips to its lowest, then only surrender happens. You surrender to a greater power knowing your ego’s utter worthlessness. It is almost like experiencing an orgasm. You surrender and awake into a completely different, much happier and relaxing state.
So today’s American youth leaving its Dale Carnegie and Peale have opened themselves to eastern mysticism, Indian, Chinese,Japanese, Sufi,Zen all varieties. Ramana Maharsi and Nisargadatta Maharaj have taken the place Of Carnegie and Peale. In place of confidence in themselves they seek a state of complete surrender to the Self. To me while an average Indian youth is still at the confidence building or boosting stage, out for achieving material benefits or earning money for himself and his family, his western counterpart has become more truly Indian in his spiritual quest and outlook. It is a great shift in consciousness, indeed. It is as if everyone will awaken at his/her own time. There is no such thing as mass awakenings or mass homecomings. But ultimately all will. The Guru sitting in each of us will see to it.
I hope this review or comment on the article you tagged me, has just added something to the content which I felt was left out. Wish you well.
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I am now absolutulely comfortable in writing stories, but that was not so before. This I have gained after almost a half century of struggle. The struggle was not to be found anywhere out there but inside of me. The struggle to reach a conclusion as to why take those endless hours of time, energy and effort to fill blank spaces of paper or a monitor screen to populate it with characters who are only phantoms in your imagination, why take the pain to weave a story through their interactions and conversations and why not just surrender to your natural inertia and indolence and put down your pen or typewriter and just sleep or relax ? The invitation of the sleeping couch or switching on to the T.V. for a readymade entertaintainment served for you on a platter as it were is perennial to every writer, especially more so to those who like me write for a purely nonpecuniary medium where even the incentive of money is not there to hold interest. And above all, the greatest of all dampeners is why take the trouble to write stories with so many words to just demonstrate that we all are One, one life, one love, one heart, one truth and why not just write these few words like so many do in FB and be done with it? As one of my dearest friends Julia confesses, “How to write when everything dissolves (into one of those words I just mentioned), so every second or third sentence ends with the same words? The book disappears as quickly as it is written.” I love those Koan like short poems, those haikus full of wisdom, those short and pithy epigrammatic lines and quotations but my inner child also sometimes demands a regular kind of story,or a fable or a parable where good is pitted against bad, innocent and vulnerable pitted against powers of dark.
With this background, having to come forward and stake one’s neck out in the field of creative writing is a brave or foolish venture depending on the inclination, attitude and perspective of each individual writer. I have finally chosen to go full steam in that direction after a life time of struggle with the demons I mentioned above. What clinched the issue, in my case, in favor of expression and unfolding of story after story is what I am going to write in this essay. For a long time in my life, after may be I entered into my teens say at fiftten, I was a pessimist. The one question I couldn’t solve was why was I born ? What would have happenned if I had never been born ? From this question it was just a few steps ahead to encounter the ultimate question,” What would have happened if the world and the universe had never happened and if they happened what would happen if they die and disappear now ?” These questions repeatedly came to my mind and took away all peace and happiness from my life. I was on the brink but the final push into the chasm of despair came when at the age of seventeen a friend gave me a book named “Of Human Bondage” by W.S.Maugham. I lapped up the book as I had never done any book before. The book just held me in thrall and confirmed all my homespun passimistic ideas, all my desperate questionings in such powerful language, through the unfolding of a story, that I was literally drowned in despair and meaninglessness of my existence, in fact all existence. I was more or less in that lifeless, moribund state for the next two or three decades. From hindsight, from today’s vantage point I suspect that a forced but inevitable separation from a girl I so dearly loved when I was eight, the episode which I have described in some bare detail in my story “The first love of my life”, may have sown this seed of despair and meaninglessness of life in me in such a large measure.
For the next three decades I was to read many books, attend many satsangs and spiritual gatherings and also indulge and splurge in many kinds of distractions and orgies to get out from the vice like grip of this depression and sense of meaninglessness in life. I came to know the hell in life intimately because I have been there for a long long time. Those who once cast their glance into that abysmal chasm are sucked into it and rare is he who comes out of it . I am one such fortunate being and I lived to tell the tale how it felt when one was there at the bottomless pit. I take it as a mission of my life. My mission is not to speak of despair but to speak of love, the lack of which, I discovered, was the cause of all despair,despondency and meaninglessness in life. Not that I only lacked love in life but also I reflected no love back to the universe which was all the time sending that to me in the form of people,animals,birds,rains,sunshines,colors and sounds etc but I didn’t have the eyes to see, ears to listen and heart to feel. But I was not without eyes,ears or heart; only I was not using them, I was not giving them freedom to function the way they were meant to be. I was in a mode of extreme contraction and they were made to be expansive. I was afraid to love and they were raring to love. How could I get peace and happiness from such an unaligned and mismatched state ? Without the sunshine of love my inner being was withering and here I was finding fault with universe and its maker whereas the cause remained deeply lodged in me only.
Now I know Love is health,wealth, truth, beauty, meaning and everything. Now I am despondent no more. In fact, I am inoculated, as it were, against all despair and meaninglessness. I see a great purpose, a cause, a meaning operating everywhere. So much so that, contrary to all my decades of ravings and rantings at various podia and fora, now I am willing to believe and trust that the world or universe is perfect as it is, not withstanding so much of pain, sufferings, hunger, poverty, squalor in living conditions of so many millions, corruption, graft, war, death etc. It is as if we need a contrast to experience things properly, otherwise we may just look at things but may not be able to see things as they are or see into the heart of things. None would understand the value of good if no bad was there, the value of rest if motion or activity was not there, the value of health if sickness was not there and value of night if day was not there and vice versa. I am reminded of a speech of Osho where he spoke that if you found beggars and deformed lepers in front of all temples of India, showing their fingerless hands or toeless feet to all that came to the temple and supplicating alms from them, he cautioned against thinking them as eyesores,nuisances or out of place; they were there for a purpose. They supplied,according to him, mysteriously and unaccountably, the necessary contrast without which the templegoers’ faith and devotion perhaps won’t have been so earnest and expedient. It is the sight of the deformed and limbless that makes us grateful for as simple a boon as having a body with no limbs lost.
Previously coruptions and scams in public life in my country, India, used to upset me so much that I used to plunge into severe depression at the breaking of news of a new scam. As there were and still are galores of scams involving billions of Rupees of public money, my days of recovering back to normalcy were few and far between. Depression became my normal mode of living. But now I am a completely changed man. Corruptions have reached sky high and scams of such large magnitude are happening that earlier ones seem peanuts in comparision, but my mental peace is not broken. I have now seen God’s ways of doing things and how perfect and inexorable they are ! Who can deny how inexorably but surely the public opinion of Indian masses have turned livid against the scamsters and their patrons ? Would Anna hazare and Baba Ramdev have got the attention and adulation of the masses if there were no 2G scams, CWG scam or Adarsh scam ? I take Lalu Yadavs, A.Rajas and Suresh Kalmadis as forming necessary contrasts so that we realise the worth and value of probity,decency and integrity in public life. God’s ways appear slow to us but while He thinks in terms of billion of years we can think only in short term. For Him there is no hurry, eternity is His time. Understanding His ways and operations from our limited view point of a few decades is an exercise in futility. By loving Him and putting our trust in His ways we would also gain the required patience. After all what is depression but incapacity to be patient ? And what is impatience but incapacity to trust ? When you trust you are patient and free from depression. In Him I trust now.
Here I am reminded why I had set out to write this piece about why I write stories. Stories deal with people and their situations, ideas, beliefs, opinions, desires, expectations, hopes and thus lead inevitably to conflicts, clashes and in short contrasts.The One has become many. The Nondual has expressed Itself in dualities and multiplicities, in many colors and many forms. It is His pure play,His way of experiencing things throgh His creations. If He were just Unmanifested Pure Potentiality, then there would be no creation with myriad forms. But as He has chosen to manifest Himself through forms, colors and contrasts so that we can understand Him better, be aware of Him more vividly and intimately even through the shroud and illusion of separateness, so also He lets Himself captured by the esemplastic imagination of poets, writers, artists etc. As long as God’s show on earth continues His stories will be told and retold, afterall all stories are just variations of the same theme, His Love and His Glory. Story tellers only highlight Love by contrasting with hate or fear, make bold and prominent His glory by contrasting it with man’s vanity and self-obsession and too much fuss over me-mine-thoughts. I hope I am on the right path and in good company.
T.S.Eliot once wrote that the progress of an artist is a progress from self expression to self-extinction. More or less the same things happen with a lover too. The beloved soon takes precedence over his own choices and preferences, in short his own life. The first time I fell in love at eight with a girl, I couldn’t understand what was happening. I was beside myself in joy. One enormous desire that held me under its thrall whenever she was present before me was to hug her all the time. May be I was hugging her almost fifty times a day. Those hugs were not the least like the ones the adults do. Each time I hugged her I lifted her off her feet clasping her very tight to my chest. Each such hug lasted as long as I could bear her weight and lift her off the ground and I yielded only to the gravity and no other considerations like society or who else saw us ever entered my mind. At this age, while writing this, I take an indulgent view over the weird hugging behavior of that love-struck boy and a question comes to my mind to ask, did he ever ask permission of the girl like “May I lift you up on my chest or may I hug you?’ But I know the reply, those questions were never asked. Intuitively I knew that it was O.k. to hug. She never protested but surprised she certainly was initially. May be probably none had lavished so much attention, so much hugging and lifting her. As for me it appeared as if my heart would burst if I didn’t hug and lift her. I was under the sway of a powerful emotion the like of which I had never experienced before.
The wonder of wonder was that the two of us were never alone, nor did we seek to be alone ever, it was always a three some. Runu, it was her name, was a friend of a cousin named Minu. Minu, my cousin, used to come to our village to visit her grandma every year and whenever she came she used to make calls on us too. As I was of the same age as her she always sought me out to play with her. Though I liked to play with her and show her around our village as she was like a migratory bird who didn’t stay long, I didn’t have a very great love for her. On one of her annual visits she brought with her Runu, a friend of her from her village and she made such a dramatic entry into my life that I shall never be able to forget her. It was Runu who made me come to terms with an emotion I had never thought to be there in me in such abundance. It was love. Some may call it puppy love but to me it was as real as any love I was to experience later in my adult life, not even a jot different. It was a love at first sight. Today howsoever hard I try to recollect I cannot recall a word that passed between us and even I cannot recollect whether she was beautiful or not. Nor I can recollect the color of her skin, the tone of her voice or how she looked when she laughed. As if all these were completely irrelevant and extraneous to loving. As if what one loves in the other is utterly indefinable and only some foolish/clever adults try to locate it where it resides to no avail. All I can remember are her surprised eyes as I hugged her and lifted her off her feet at all hours of the day. Minu was a constant companion and I clearly recollect her amused look at my shenanigans with her friend. I never hugged Minu even once and so my effusive demonstration of love to her friend must have been a riddle to her. It was a riddle to me also and I think to Runu too. Only It was beyond doubt that Runu and I loved to be together.
We wandered far away from home picking berries and flowers. We walked down the river that flowed beside our village. We loved running errands for Minu’s grandma. Minu’s grandma and my grandma were two sisters. Mine I had never seen, she had died before I was even born. So practically Minu’s grandma was like my grandma too. Granny was a widow by then. Whenever she needed something to be bought from the village shop we volunteered to buy that for her. We loved doing anything that would keep us away from home and won’t separate one from the others. On such outings I would never let Runu walk, I would carry her sometimes by clasping her front to front and lift her and march on and when she became too heavy after some time I carried her on my back. She never protested even once. Minu never ceased to cast her amused glance at us, but she said nothing nor she took off her eyes away from us nor she acted unseeing and ignorant. From my present adult view point, I wish I had hugged at least a couple of times to Minu also but playing that kind of politics was beyond the thinking of that love-struck boy of eight. I don’t think I ever kissed Runu because that was not part of the gestures one showed while in love, at least it never came to my mind. May be I had never seen anyone kissing. I was simply engaged in a one-point task only, how not to suffocate under a powerful current of emotion from which the only relief and freedom was to clasp on to Runu and be one with her at any cost. As long as she stayed in our village, I think it was less than a week, from morning to evening we were inseparable.
Wordsworth said that the child is the father of man. How true! That child of eight in me has never died. Though Runu and myself were never to meet again in life thereafter, yet she will remain immortal in my heart till I live. She brought out the lover in me to full play but how and with what means I can never know or tell. In fact if I knew I would have loved to tell you, my friends, everything here. What words she employed, what smiles and gestures or what else she bestowed on me I would never know because all those are blank in my memory. At least I can certainly say she never clasped me to her heart nor tried to lift me off my feet even once on her own accord. She only yielded to my passionate hugging, may be as one surrenders to a symphony or as one surrenders to a passing tornado. Yet she conquered me so completely that I was willing to be her slave for the rest of my life hadn’t a wiser and brainier adult world in its wisdom and farsightedness (?) sent me to schools, colleges and boarding houses and hostels for the next two decades at the end of which I was deRunued so completely that she became just a memory to me. If it sometimes wrenches my heart so violently that it pains me and wakes me up from sleep in the middle of nights, at least no one else is disturbed in his/her sleep due to it. Then I sit on my bed and pray to God to give me strength and endurance to make my self- extinction complete, as I had so many times wanted both to be a lover and an artist.
