Imagine your life at rush hour: the pending calls to make, the meandering to-do lists, the fast lane and faster food, and oh yes, the intermittent flashes of dreaming about your ideal man. An ideal man, a dream guy, the Mr. Right, call-him-what-you will, the changes and twists of synonyms, but you are forever searching, forever rejecting. Other men seem commonplace, everyday stuff: good to laugh at, good to laugh with; but they are not your kind. You are searching for absolutes; you are looking for complete new beginnings, for complete annihilations. You still believe in valor and courage, oh god dammit, you belong to another world. An old, old world. Where Life was Life. Where Life was lived. It was no clumsy paradise of make-believe, no copywriter’s in-a-jiffy invention. It was slow. It was in sepia tones.
In the glaze of sepia, there are a million earth-tone shades. The color compresses the others, winning a manipulative game amidst hues and luminosity, swallowing the power of blue, suppressing the tints of green and robbing red of its shocking brightness. It is a speculative wonder that the color that represented earth had qualified to paradise. Only to occasional unsuspecting believers it revealed its tantalizing compositions.
She is the color of sepia, the color of treasured memories, the color of red-brown earth washed by a raging monsoon. He is blue-black, the color of original men, the color of darkness thrusting itself so vigorously that it came to contain light so mellow and so blue.
They are playing their love-games in paradise: teasing and tempting each other in their rehearsed attempts.
His head is framed in laughter, her body writhes in longing.
From far away, the intimacies look inviting.
And how very often you crave to go back there. How much it aches, deep down to your bones, when you want to be amidst that slow and shocking universe. You are willing to hang yourself, to be back in that melodrama, to share that brutal existence. You shun the modern world, the plastic shades, and the fake love. You long to run away, but you are always searching: where are the routes, where is the guide, and where to get the hope? You search for precedents, but you draw blanks. Large gaping blanks. Billboard-sized blanks. You battle with the blankness, the secrecy and the hypocrisy that surrounds your world. Even music is no longer a solace, no longer your escape to other-worldliness. The jerkiness is part of a growing world’s unsteadiness; the escapism is a staged disillusion. You are aware you don’t fit in here. And one of the reasons, you know the truth of the assumption is because of the easiness with which you pull off life. It is sham, it is fake, it is a game; and you as a girl know how to play along, how to bend and break rules, how to cheat, and how to gloss over the difficult areas. You still manage your eight-hour sleep schedules, your dietary regimens, your skincare therapies. Your friends say that your life looks a seductive multi-color many part ad-campaign. Only, you have grown up to be internally frightened by the fine print, the terms and conditions, the statutory warnings, the precautions. You know your friends’ shallowness, you know your reality. In your well thought out opinion, your life looks like a brilliantly made copy for a luxury condom sold in third world countries: beneath the façade of comfort and class, behind the élan of beautiful brown bodies and sophisticated smiles; lurks the aim, the fear, the prevention and the rubber-thin distances, that are nevertheless distances.
They are huddled together in the dream garden in paradise, the Vrindavan of the skies. He carries her in his arms, her head against his chest, skin melting against skin, bodies merging and blending, redefining distances, and everything keeps vanishing into a transparency like what separates sleep and the dream …
But the world of your dreams is different. They are about your one love. And his many loves. You know how shamefully stupid it all seems in the era you live, you know the absurdity of your fetish as opposed to the authenticity of your feminism, but you don’t care. Your love for him matters, you reason. And he loves you back, in the dreams at least. And so what if he loves other women, you argue. And to friends and others, you drop in the Polyamory discourse. You sarcastically watch their jaws drop; you secretly make out their smirk-lines. It is not upsetting at all, you are happy to peddle this religion. Some think it new, some think it old, some think it rehashed, and the vast majority thinks it is an Internet Hungamma, a webzine nonsense that wouldn’t last a nanosecond. The Internet simply allowed you to coin a word for the essence of this love tangle, it allowed you to concretize your mania with a respectable etymology. Poly: many, Amory: Loves. Many Loves. Polyamory. And there was even a very good bunch of FAQs on Polyamory; only, you didn’t want to go through someone‘s answers. It looked easier to peddle someone else’s faith, though. That was your profession anyway, (something that broke the monotony of doctors, engineers, lawyers that your generations had produced): making copy to sell someone else’s goods. And you grew more mature learning how to shock, how to tease, how to unleash the devils of possessiveness in any angelic man. You were everything that you were indoctrinated not to be. You would talk of many loves, you would say about your heart’s infinite capacity to love infinitely many hearts. You would talk about honesty and the mockery of monogamous lies. You would go on and on, until you sit up and realize it was all a monologue. And the pale man would become paler and squirm uncontrollably, and you always laughed as all the masks were dropped, and deep down, deep within the many men you met, was always a resounding emptiness hidden only by their tumult of anger, their lunatic questioning. You never stood back to console or answer. But that was intelligent of you.
Intelligence does not produce answers, complacence does.
She thinks of the question again and again, turns it over in her mind like an incantation, and is bewildered by the absence of answers.
Why does he love so many women?
She stresses every word, though she knows that absolute answers are far away from him.
This one question had led them into hundreds of lover’s quarrels. It had led her into endless days of sulking only to be broken and erased by the memories of the delight of reunion. These days the question is internal, it does the rounds in her troubled head, percolates so deep down that she clenches her hands, nerves, toes. She is petrified too, of the answer that might land on her with the force of a thousand whiplashes. She never asks him the question now.
She knows he is her lord, his path is the truth, and truth is unsafe when revealed.
For it is the wisdom of the ancients that truth is safer when secret. You could have told them that you were an old-world girl, you could have traced the lines of your thought back to your pagan religions, but you would have been mocked. Besides, the landscapes of your past had been divorced forever and you never gave the reason why. It would not have been political, or so you felt. This respect for other’s sentiments comes on and off to you, like that flu you couldn’t ever wish away. So, you choose to remain silent. Hazy modern terms, like Polyamory, come in handy. And your dreams, about dare and desire, are shielded. But deep in those fragile layers of memory, in those depths where your embedded (or was it embossed?) conscious lurked, you want to be loved with an animal passion. You are spoilt rotten; the many hours of leisure which you had allotted for your creative genius to flourish had met the fate of slimy, stagnant waters. What bred in them was not what you had wanted. Yet, it all hardly ever mattered. You had changed, your perspective had changed: both interchangeably so. You could never look again at the Ganesha on the wall calendar your mother sent you with the same innocence that once hung about your large, child-like eyes. Your mind went galloping on stray thoughts: you thought about prayer and belief long after you had finished thinking about male elephants in mast, mahouts, tranquilizers, et al. It had become an obsession with you: this search for the sexual in the sacred, the sacred in the sexual. And the more it grew on you, the more significance you understood from old, old myths that you read with an obsession you reserve for your secret man. You no longer measure love in the SMS messages; you have love weighed against examples in the epics. Your yardsticks became severe, and as with all severity, ancient. You want to be ravished, but then, on your own terms.
It is a women’s fate that the man sets the terms.
Part of her silence and subordination was because she couldn’t dictate his life the way he did hers. He had been kinder to her, than she was to him; and in the rare ways in which power operates, he had taken to exercising his wishes over her. He had made her feel obligated, made her feel undeserving of the love (yes oh yes a voice hovered around her head for after all he had taken her as a beloved despite her own previous marriage).
Guilt gnaws her heart, guilt is the shadow puppetry in her mind. It renders her powerless to question.
Some of the time, she is able to console herself and heal the hurt in her heart. He spends most of his time with her but in the scales of the other world what sense did that make? In their world of timelessness, it had remained a mere consolation, devoid of meaning, or medicine.
Every new woman he had enjoyed had thrown her into envy, into agitation and anxiety. It had split her world apart. Momentarily, though. But every time she had gained him back, she had her world plastered into its original glory .While she had gained him—using her every charm that lay between sensuous voluptuousness and surefire cunning—she was lost unto herself, most of the time.
And while you are lost, irretrievably lost, lost in terms of time and place and age and culture, your friends continue to pester you to settle down, to reveal secrets, to let them into a little more mature level of intimacy. Even old classmates, now married and with children and tied down by breast-feeding, query you by their cheap email and costly phone calls. The new friends demand answers from you only to have you retreat into stonier silences. But all the time, you knew what they were up to, how crazy they were in their curiosity in your life and how they tried to mask it all. Once or twice you had caught them snooping around, looking into your desks, hacking your email, eavesdropping you over the intercom. What annoyed you was the jerky, eyes-popping mannerism they adopted when any friend called on you. The man would be scrutinized by cackling tongues and winking eyes, and even before you bid the last goodbye, the set of colleagues would have fixed not only your friend’s background, but also your wedding venue and date. This matchmaking was something they carried with them all the while, all the way, and it couldn’t be washed away with all that they drank from the espresso. You would walk back into your dry-and-decorated cubicle, to answer their 1001 questions with nothing but your brazen silence.
Silence is her weapon. Silence is her sulking.
She taunts him with it, as it envelopes the whole of their being. It is contagious, and over time degenerates into something mournful.
Her silence reins him, and because it is used so rarely, it ordains him into submission and surrender. Though her only other language is liberal laughter and the epic volumes she can speak with her skin and eyes and hands—silence is her way to enslave him. He tries to pacify, takes extra efforts at reconciliation. Her behaviour leaves him amused. And, alert.
Her occasional squabbles render him youthful and desirable. He remains, in reality, the man in women’s dreams.
Often you wished it was easier if your dream man came the way your middle-aged, much-married friends dropped in. You know better. It is Krishna you idealize; it is Krishna you are after. And his coming wouldn’t be so easy, though you search for him in every living thing that weeps and breathes. He is the Great Indian Myth. He is the most loved. He is the Playboy God. He has the record, he is the ravisher. It is not one or two or a dozen women, it is sixteen thousand hundred and eight. Sixteen thousand hundred and eight, yes, that was what it stood at last count, though your mother would never say that to you. A revolutionary leader like Ambedkar might have had his books burnt posthumously by Krishna-fanatic hoodlums when he wrote down the number, but for you it is no number, it is no fantasy: it is about sixteen thousand hundred and eight women aching to have him, sixteen thousand hundred and eight women in all their eagerness—hearts palpitating, hands going ice-cold, fevered foreheads. You long to be one of them.
None of them she decides. Not one of them.
It is she who knows the hallowed histories of those early days. She had been willing to be open then, she had understood his responsibilities, his dual roles as God and man. Now she knows his good side and the other side.
Every women in the sixteen thousand hundred and seven had tortured her soul. She is unwilling to take anymore, and yet, she is unwilling to speak out on his infidelities, his Casanova-ness.
He is hers because she guarded his truth.
In your voraciousness to know the truth, to learn his complete truth you take shelter in books. You read all the history. You nag your local librarian into stocking more books of the kind you needed; and she is convinced that you are into Orientalism, or in the process of completing your dissertation on Indian mythology. You search for every bit of information that deals with his women and finally you learn that there are a few out of that spectacular list: the celebrated Radha who ran away from her impotent husband to be with the younger Krishna, Rukmini whom Krishna stole away on the day of her marriage, Princess Meera pining away for Krishna in her marital home, and Andal who sang such powerful songs of Krishna-desire in the Tamil country that she has been immortalized as a goddess. You want to love the lord with every kind of affection: Dasya (servant), Sakhya (friend), Vatsalya (mother), and most importantly, Madhurya (lover).
Every woman had taken the same route to him: they had all started with subordinate positions and worked their ways into his heart.
He too, had worked his unscrupulous charm unto her, and used the guilt of her married status to visit his lady loves and satiate their ravenous appetites. She had condescended and compromised every time.
She wonders as to how he had, in spite of the various rules and the conditions she had laid down, gathered so many women who had all fallen prey to his charisma.
It seems so wonderful to think of the multitude of beloveds he had owned, and how every one of them felt he was not theirs alone. In the beginning, the materialistic conditioning and upbringing of your life had clashed with this negation of possessiveness that you had come to cherish so deeply. Now, you were firm that this was the ideal in love. By pulling out arithmetic there had been a grand change that had once swept the world, you long for that to recur. The books don’t speak of it this way. They connect this to spirituality, to devotion, to supplication and surrender. It is, in your opinion, about love. The divine shades had prevented people from probing into the truths, or from thinking of putting it into their lives. Perhaps, society was different then, there was no idea of AIDS. Or may be they had lived very risky lifestyles, seduced by the passions of the flesh, uncompromised by ridiculous standards, and had cared nothing for life-threatening terminal diseases. The present was all that mattered. It was encapsulated in the sonorous sayings of the ancients: na bhooto, na bhavishayati—neither the past, nor the future exist. And after all, the universe is so temporal a place to inhabit, even the stars die drawn out deaths, returning to final blackness and supernovas. There are other things too. The books speak of much about him: diplomat, king-maker, gospel-teller who gave the world the Gita. You learn of his many avatars, his descent to this world. You make it increasingly clear to yourself that it is his tantalizing manhood you adore, his godhood seems best restricted to the heavens. You long for Krishna, the mortal man to make love. You skip over the tedious sections, and concentrate on the parts that deal with love. And from the Panchatantra you learn that there were princesses, women like you, who had longed for him and none else. In those harsh days of monarchy the parents had been shocked to learn of the affair with Krishna from the nail-marks and love-bites that the lord so clumsily left on the necks and nipples of these dainty princesses. And you blush when you hear the stories of the Krishna taking away all the clothes of cow-herd women who were bathing in the river, and how he ordered that they must come out naked, hands clasped over their heads and get their clothes from him. You sigh deeply and mumble that he must be a darling rascal.
She remembers every one of his flings. She restores the women to memory, puts away the stories of their love with him carefully in the recesses of her brain.
She fights with him over it, and wins over his love by inducing guilt the way he had done. The victory, like him, is hers.
Victory, like defeat, is ethereal, transient and temporary. He is not shocked into a silence at having lost his argument.
He is resilient, he is not willing to lose out to her. He points out that he is not only man, but God too, and what made the women win over him was prayer. He reminds her that his profession requires him to answer prayers, to fulfill desires.
You offer daily prayers to him with incense and intrepid devotion. That’s what the old books say: that to attain Krishna the man, you have to approach Krishna, the God. To approach God was to assimilate oneself into organized religion and these many years you had made it clear that your love was for Krishna and not the cults around him. These heirs of his legacy said that to quench love with sex was trying to quench fire with oil: in your opinion they had missed the bus, they hadn’t realized that some things were best when burning. You had long ago lavished your little earned wealth in all the Krishna shrines across the country that you so neatly tracked down. You still visit his temple and listen to priests speak of Krishna and his chief beloved Radha, and you had grown tired of the monotony. In all your love you had been oblivious of Radha and every time any priest mentioned her name, it had come across as a jab in your heart. A few days ago, some of your earlier friends at the temple had introduced you to an attractive holy man whose clientele included the rich and famous in your community. You half-heartedly seek him out, and are astounded by his grasp of your plight. You had expected him to chastise you, instead he provides you with an agenda of action.
When actions takes effect, they have the capacity to shake the skies.
This time she refuses to listen to him explain. She refuses to go back into her silence. She is fuming.
She is consumed by tumultuous feelings: she is at once the Vipralabdha (the disappointed and the deceived), the Utkhantitha (the agitated and the anxious), the Khandita (the angry and the jealous).
She is isolated, almost.
Your weekends and evenings are no longer spent in social gatherings, in cooking up spicy food for the friends, in organizing the best parties. You fret as you do the necessary incantations, you chant the magic Sanskrit mantras with the right pronunciations, you live a life of prayer: hands constantly folded in obeisance. Your c.d. player booms out the Gita and you are humming distinct and incoherent bits of Meera’s love-songs to the lord. As Krishna’s birthday comes nearer, you are working yourself into frenzy. You grind the costly basmati rice with water to make a paste with which you trace tiny footsteps all over your fourth-floor apartment: the priests had told you the lord visited homes that were expectantly adorned with his footsteps. Most of your living days revolve around the three fingers tall altar where the flame is maintained and priests had asked you to feed the oblations: clarified butter and holy leaves. You do everything the priests had asked you to do. You even bore the searing pain as three toes of your right foot were sacrificed to the flame as a part of this sacred ritual. After the mutilation though, you sank into a shivering heap on the floor.
Three toes appear there, wiggling with their bloody ends. The sepia-tones of paradise now resemble painful wounds and dried blood.
It is time, he says to her. I need to visit. It sounds like an order, a shout of leave-taking. He doesn’t want any more blood on his hands. He tells her that three toes is, in itself, a terrific sacrifice.
Radha cries and moans and sulks and acts stubborn and refuses to give leave and holds on to him. To Krishna, it seems like an old drama.
So, they sit down to chalk out plans, to come down to a compromise.
And she decides to outwit him, just this one time.
Radha is playing with the maps of his mind, she asks him to repeat the girl’s wish. They delve deep down to whatever the girl had longed for and decide that what she wanted was Krishna the man. So Radha gives in finally, and says: Krishna, your godhood remains with me. You may go as a man.
He takes leave. Krishna the man, comes to his home on earth: Vrindavan a city that celebrates his memory in the north of India. She has ensured that he doesn’t carry his godly magical charms, though in his plain manhood, he is devastatingly charming.
You live in the center of contradictions; you sweat in the midst of an abominable winter. As the last of the customary preparations are done, you find yourself swaying. Your ecstasy is part sexual, part spiritual.
And as you wait alone on this appointed day, sitting cross-legged, spilling cleavage, biting your wet lips and throbbing with the intensity of a ten thousand-year old desire, you are certain that you can almost hear him coming up to you, with his blue-black complexion, the feathered crown, his bared chest, and yes, that mischievous smile that won the hearts of a million women.
The waiting seems to drain you out, it is dreadful.
But, the hope, is orgasmic, most of the time.
What makes you wince, once in a while, is the logical fear that your ultimate man Krishna—when reduced to his sheer and scintillating manhood—might not quite know the way from Vrindavan to your home tucked away in such a remote suburb in snowy Toronto.
