A stern critic recently took me to task for what she saw as an improbability in a story I wrote. This tale, called Kama, features a middle-aged Gujarati couple who live a life of utmost suburban respectability in north Mumbai. But the husband and wife, Chetanbhai and Ashaben, are swingers. Which is to say that they advertise—in the kind of magazine which is sold with its pages stapled together—for "like-minded singles/couples", and having found these sympathetic souls, they proceed to meet them in a flat in Colaba for what they describe as "sweet surprises, tender By thrills". My critic took severe exception to the supposition that such people could exist, do exist. She huffed: "It seemed improbable that a respectable Cutchi middle-class couple would ever get involved in such shenanigans." Reading carefully, and tamping down autho-rial defensiveness as much as I can, it seems to me that my critic is not arguing that these characters are flat, or unconvincingly portrayed. No, she is making a much more general statement about life in Mumbai, in India. Notice that "ever". She is saying that such people cannot exist.
But I must respectfully submit that Chetanbhai and Ashaben do exist. My friend Ravi looks about as stodgily respectable as a thirtysomething professional can. He's the kind of affable, paunchy guy you might notice sipping coffee at the cafe table next to yours, talking about the stockmarket. He is also a dedicated swinger and sybarite, and he snorted when I told him of the critic's objection. "Yaar, she doesn't know what the hell she is talking about. In this city, most of your active swingers are people who look completely ordinary and middle-class. Your next-door neighbours could be spending their weekends at my place, and how would you know? In fact, the people who engage in these activities come from every class, from upper to middle to lower-middle to, haan, even working class. Mill workers and chaprasis. There is an orthodox-looking Marwari lady who has her ghoonghat on top of her head until the moment she enters the flat where an orgy is to take place. And you won't believe the numbers. You can meet 80 couples in a few months. Believe me, it's a very large scene."
Eighty couples, or Ravi's large scene at its most engorged, might be statistically insignificant in a city of 14 million. I was struck, however, by the critic's insistence that middle-class Indian men and women do not, cannot do such things, and also by Ravi's tales of how the scene works and spreads, with stealthy telephone conversations and face-to-face meetings in family restaurants. It thrives in silence, because of silence. As long as you don't publicly rock anybody's respectable, middle-class boat, you can navigate your way to hidden islands in the vast sea of the city, to curtained apartments where you can disport and dance and swing to your heart's content.
When I was growing up in the Seventies, it seemed to my friends and me that Indians didn't have sex. We, being 14-year-old boys and so naturally obsessed with sex, passed around dogeared copies of Playboy and pursued the letters in Penthouse like explorers preparing for a perilous expedition. James from Iowa wrote: "One
night I stayed late in the lab at college, finishing a chemistry experiment...." Which was all very well. Lissome blondes in lab coats and crashing beakers might make for happy American lads, but we lived in India, where married couples didn't hold hands and lovers didn't kiss on the screen, where everyone was decently covered all the time, and where no adult ever talked about sex. It was impossible to even fantasise about Chemistry Lab 1B. We knew for sure that you could stay there all night, under the fatherly gaze of Gandhiji, who smiled down from a black frame, and nothing would ever happen.
But we grew older and we discovered that Indians do indeed have sex. In fact, it seems now that there are a lot of Indians having a lot of sex, and not all of it is of the happily married sort. The college kids I meet and know are sexually active, and are astonishingly blasé about it. Occasionally some of my even younger acquaintances, eighth and ninth-grade boys and girls, take a perverse pleasure in my amazement by telling me tales of after-school assignations and condoms tucked inside history books. Even taken with a very large pinch of salt, this is all a very far cry from my memories of the trembling awkwardness of high-school socials, where dancing with a girl was a landmark event.
Their elders, the working men and women who are my friends, have boyfriends and girlfriends. They break up, and have other boyfriends and girlfriends, and nobody ever doubts that they sleep with their partners. It is not worth remarking upon, and neither is unmarried lovers living together. Married people, both men and women, have affairs. Sometimes it seems that every second person I know is getting divorced.
It's very easy to assume this is characteristic of a tiny proportion of the population, of the largely English-speaking urbanites who unthinkingly ape the decadent promiscuity of the West. But it's not only the high-rise apartment-dwellers who are having sex outside of marriage. The people you might see on a suburban train from Churchgate to Virar, in second class, are also doing it. The industry of commercial sex in Mumbai makes gigantic profits, but there is more than that. I've stood at a window, behind half-closed shutters, with Kanta, a maid-servant who lives in a slum, while she's pointed at her neighbours walking to and from the basti. "That one, he's married, works as a driver, but he has a chakkar with a woman who works as a bai in his sahib's building. Now that one there, she's six months pregnant but won't drop the baby and won't marry the father until he can afford a kholi of his own. She doesn't want to live with his family. And her, that one with a small boy, she was married for 15 years, without any children. Then suddenly she got pregnant. So the husband beat her up and threw her out. Turns out he knew all along it was his fault."
KANTA is a hard-headed realist, and—as far as I can tell—is eminently reliable as a reporter, but I have sometimes wondered if she might be spicing it all up for entertainment's sake. So I asked a friend, a police inspector, and he said that in the bastis, "these chakkars happen all the time. Sometimes people get killed over them, when husbands or wives find out." He shrugged when I wondered why conservative cultural mores don't prevent these chakkars from starting in the first place."You have to be able to watch people, to find out what they're doing to stop them. Maybe in a village that works. Not here, not in this city."
It seems reasonable to expect that somewhere out there, in the villages, there exists that relatively pristine and famously conservative 'Indian culture' that shies away from unsanctified sexual contact. The villagers, however, prove as complicated as their urban cousins. I spoke to a volunteer working for an NGO in a cluster of 17 villages in western India. They have been conducting a research project on rural sexual behaviour, and found—to their astonishment—that the men and women in these villages frequently sleep with people other than their spouses. "In every home it happens," the volunteer told me. "Not only the married men and women, but unmarried boys and girls. A doctor in the area reports terminating 20 pregnancies a month for unmarried girls. Some of the married women tell us, 'there's no kami of devars in the village.' So when the husband is away, the nominal devar will play." I told her I was surprised, and she laughed. "There's no data on the subject. We've been working in this area for 10 years, and we had no idea until we started asking these questions. It's mindboggling. And it's a ticking time-bomb. They are absolutely not aware of the health reasons for using a condom."
It's tempting, on the basis of this very anecdotal evidence, to conclude—in the time-honoured and exaggerated manner of noir fiction—that below the austere surface of Indian conservatism is a fluid and lusty carnival of sex. Or, as Nirad Chaudhuri patriarchally puts it: "...traditional Hindu society provided a wide scope for licentiousness within family relationships as a safety valve. The only restriction provided on licentiousness was that it should be secret, always assumed but never paraded. This makes the licentiousness which is now being seen in India less significant than that which is rampant in England.... It is only an easing of the rigour of social inhibition." So, in this view, as a nation of seasoned hypocrites, we delight in a kind of Great Indian Tea Ceremony, where we ritually pay lip-service to 'Indian values', assuming everything and revealing nothing, and thereby keep the national and family izzat intact. You might see something very strange and very interesting going on under the ghoonghat across the table, but you must never, never say anything about it in public.
But I think it's too simple to assume that the public propaganda has no effect on private lives. Last year, my German friend Maria visited Mumbai and lived as a paying guest with five other young women. These were all Indian women in their early or mid-twenties, all from small-town families and well-educated, all in the big city to work. Each of these women, at some point in the six months they lived together, found a moment alone with Maria. She had the sense that they always thought of her as a typically 'loose' western woman, but now in these tete-a-tetes she became the knowledgeable and unjud-gemental sex expert. They asked: "What is sex like? Does it hurt?" "What are men like? What do they want?" And, within the context of arranged marriage, always one question that she never found a satisfactory answer to: "What is it like to sleep with a man you don't know at all?" These questions could only be asked in private, and could only be put to Maria, not to each other. Various silences and evasions had left them with these essential questions, and they asked Maria, because, as she said, "they liked me, and they wanted to know the things a loose woman knows."
We live, sexually, in this paradox, this curious patchwork arrangement of cynicism and naivete, of experience and innocence, of public posturings and not-so-hidden hedonism. I've often heard our contradictions described as hypocrisy, but it could be argued that we practice a sophisticated and properly lubricating civility. I am terri-fied, though, of the horror that is now resulting from our selective and voluntary blindness, our peculiar and incendiary mixture of ignorance and desire and shame. In November last year, RSS women workers, sevikas, demonstrated against the government's anti-AIDS campaign. They were objecting to the placing of informational advertisements in public places, because "such campaigns might kindle curiosity among children and divert their attention to sexual matters. And once their minds are preoccupied with sex, they will not be able to channelise their energy in a positive direction." The sevikas seem to believe that if we don't talk about it, if we leave kama out in the shadows, our homes will be safe. I hope they're right, but I have no confidence. The numbers won't let me. Millions and millions dead, our sons and daughters dead, is too high a price to pay for good manners.
