Some more thoughts on Marriage

As I’ve stated earlier, I’ve been reading Doris Lessing’s “The Golden Notebook”. No one ever talked of it, at least I in India hadn’t heard of it even though the book has been going around for 45 years, because it’s so very stupendous.

‘Lolita’ by Nobokov was all of a rage when we were children, I remember when my eighteen year old cousin (male) who had just entered college was reading it his father disapproved, though it wouldn’t do to name the two books in the same breath. TGN, though as revolutionary in sexuality, is of course a far, far superior book in terms of analysis, from the point of view of a woman and that too a woman of the intelligence of Lessing, even though she lacks the poetry of Nabokov. But I wonder why Nabokov was a rage while Lessing was unknown, at least in these parts.

But to get to the topic, as I read Lessing’s TGN, which has been to me, at age fifty, a revelation of the working of the female mind or rather the working of the mind of an extremely intelligent female, it seems to me, Anna, having gone through a bad marriage early on in their lives, want a marriage with a man they love. That I agree is a universal need for both the sexes, assuming that the word ‘marriage’ denotes a dreamy sort of a long period of life with ones beloved, where attrition of the love of both parties for each other is inconceivable. However, as put forward by Lessing in TGN as far as I have read it, the problem with it seems to be that the man will ultimately move on. She hasn’t explored how a woman who gets her man will move forward in her life. Will she explore other men? I have seen one such do this, tentatively, possibly for fun, for the thrill of romance once again. But I am out of touch with her and don’t know how it went. Probably her husband, they both chose each other at the beginning of their youth and the husband held the traditional views of monogamy and permanence of marriage, I thought he was the insecure type, very aggressive and dominating, though in a very polished way, and climbed very fast as far as money and career was concerned when I last saw him, frowned upon and was derisive of ‘open marriages’, possibly because he was apprehensive of losing his spouse, ultimately got fed up with her escapades, of which there were a few and which she felt guilty about and moved away. She has now turned lesbian, the reasons for which I am in no position to surmise having been out of touch with her for sometime.

So it again boils down to this. A man and a woman want each other, naturally, and they are under the illusion that they want a permanent union/relationship but after some time (the period depends upon what we call compatibility) as has been said euphemistically, ‘outgrow each other’ (which I would put as ‘get bored/irritated/repelled/consider the spouse irrelevant’, again depending on the period that one has been putting up with each other under social pressures towards permanence of marriage or possibly, to provide security to minor children, which is a justified cause) and begin consciously or unconsciously to look for other partners. Marriage is a losing game. No. A rotting game where both parties ultimately rot.

The new poem

Now for the new poem that I am so fond of . Its not so new, having been written in the first week of January this year. This poem is dedicated to Tanmay. I can't think of a name for it. Nor does every poem have to have a name. But if one were to give it a tag, lets call it 'Is' for the moment.

Is

Ashes float in the sunlight of the new rice
And the deep purple melancholy
That oozes from every pore of the earth
And congeals around the trunks of deceiving luminescent green
(leaping to low branches in evenings)

The empty cold wind turning
Turning on itself
And again
Floating on the new light of the new year
Can no more lead me astray
To her tripping alleys of pleasure
Of the mischievous running staircases to the terrace
Of skirts and knees and the warm surrender of laughter on my chest
Of her hair on my neck across her face of the salt of her kiss
Of the fullness of love.

No more.
For I who have traversed fifty cycles of the sun
Who has been drowned nine lifetimes
In the endless gutters of monsoon afternoons
Who has lost his steed and sword
And is condemned to ration queues for life
When on a wrong turn of the dice
Exchanged a Mohenjodaro of sighs
For the endless brook of her chitter chatter
Who in the endless wait for the yet unformed
Has watched kites as dusk condensed on her inconsolables.

Have worked it out (though not understood)
That only the light
Is.

Copyright : Tapas Bandyopadhyaya

More on Marriage

Yes. To continue with the marriage bit. The recent scandal about Mr.Spitzer was delicious. A high ranking politician in the US, from a rich, educated family, a law graduate, in short, a leader of the conservative society of the leading country of the world is caught with a prostitute! My. My. Isn't that something. The news reports show him (I couldn't find a better casting for the devil, sunken eyes and no eyebrows, jaws of a bulldog) and his wife, once pretty, vulnerable, open, just the sort of woman waiting to be taken for a ride by a hustler. And she was. She was persuaded not to practice law after she graduated from the same law school. And now look at her. She has to stand and be photographed beside her husband defending his right to go to a prostitute! That is marriage for you.

The second interesting bit of news is about the teenage British girl who was raped and killed in Goa and about which the Goa police initially said it was death due to drowning till her not too virtuous mother screamed foul from roof tops. The interesting bit is from the diary of the unfortunate girl, which was unearthed to put pressure on the mother who was accusing even the home minister of the State of complicity in suppressing the crime. The girl is sixteen and she says going without sex for more than two days stresses her out. Thats a truth society has never acknowledged. And has no solution to. That a teenager needs sex. There is no outlet for this strongest force in young people. Society has no solution and prefers to sit and pretend it doesn't exist and go about being mindlessly engaged in making money.

So we tell our children be a good boy and girl and in time you will find a good girl and boy. We tell them the virtues of virginity. You shall enjoy it more. It is sacred. Or else you will get Aids or worse. And show them hell and heaven. Keep quiet. Keep quiet. But the body will not be kept quiet. It needs sex just as it needs food.

But now for the poem promised in the previous post.

Love and Romance
Romance is in the dreams
Pleasure is in desiring
Togetherness
is summer rain.

The incomplete is complete
The unfulfilled fulfilled
The fulfilled wasted
It always ends in pain.

Copyright : Tapas Bandyopadhyaya

This was written in Dec., 1998. Now Amy Winehouse sings on a similar vein in 'Love is a Losing Game'.

More on 'blues' to 'I'm loving it'

On Friday, its clearer as to how the transformation from 'blues' to 'I'm loving it' takes place. Actually if I had said everything there was to say on the matter in one post there would be no necessity for a blog, would there ? So here is what Friday tells me about my state in exile.

I'm loving it. Why ? I have myself to myself once more. Thats the reason. One has to go back to Derek Walcott's 'Love after Love' with which this blog started. I have my life back. I don't have to be what my wife wants as a husband. As I said earlier, we didn't choose each other. We, this family, was a product of the social conventions of a time, may be five or ten years behind the year we got married in. She wasn't supposed to have a choice, I didn't know then that she did. And I surrendered that choice to my parents. Had I known what I know now things would have been different. But then if my aunt had a moustache she would be my uncle, as they say in Bengali. However, I know this for certainty, after Bertrand Russel's 'Marriage and Morals', which elucidates thoughts that I had arrived at independently, which though I had wanted to read since my teenages found only when I was thirty seven or so, after 12 years of marriage, and after Doris Lessing, that I am just beginning to read, thanks to the Nobel Committee, that there was every possibility that I would have made a mistake. For, once again my convictions regarding marriage, that a permanent bonding between any two individuals such as is supposed to happen in marriage is an artificial bond and involves falsehood after falsehood after falsehood, have been confirmed by people more courageous than me, viz., Russel and Lessing. People do grow away from each other and a life long love, when the lovers are together, is a myth. (I should add that Marquez too has made some invaluable comments on marriage, in the early chapters of 'Love in the Times of Cholera'. Though the book is about a life long love but there the protagonist hasn't had the opportunity for uniting with his beloved. I should put down my poem 'Love and Romance', written a decade back, which is relevant to this issue, in this blog. )

But I digress. This 'I'm loving it' comes from this beauty of a reclamation of my life. Spending all the free time I have on myself. Wearing what I want to. Sleeping when I want to. Reading when I want to. Food isn't such a problem, as it isn't so important to me. In short being who I want to be. The only thing missing is sex. But that is a small price to pay for getting ones life back. The greater price is loneliness. I am eager to read what Doris Lessing has to say in the matter in 'The Golden Notebook.'

From the 'blues' to 'I am loving it'

10th March, 2008
Returning after just three days with the family at Calcutta to this absurd, dreamy, lost, landscaped township full of trees and birds, with sudden spouts of flaming pink bougainvilleas, at one corner of this hated dusty coal mining town, this unimaginably dirty town, that hasn’t heard of sewerage or rubbish disposal systems, taken over by rough pan chewing, tobacco chewing people from Balia and Chhapra, the emptiness hits you. You can’t imagine why you are here and what you are doing here and, in general, what’s going on. You can’t imagine examining how you are and if anyone happened to ask you the question you would mentally shoot the fellow and reply with a wan smile, “Cholchhe” and hurry on.

Its hard to imagine that only a few days ago, the first day of the forty fifth weekend (a luxury of a 3 day weekend) of the presumed one hundred and fifty two weeks of your banishment (which is the minimum, the maximum being till retirement ten years later), you were turning over in your head the idea of not seeking a transfer to Calcutta at the end of the minimum three years, since at your present location once more you had the time to write (you were on another start on a novel, putting together the framework). This was a golden opportunity for you to set out on the path that would enable you to live on writing alone, for here there was no sweat-wringing, draining commuting to work, no endless repetition of the same work, no family to be attended to and the job wasn’t too demanding.

But to get back to the blues. Last night C asked me how I was. It was the last night of the weekend at home and I told him that at the moment I didn’t know how I was and that if he asked me the question on different days of the week the answer would be different. On Mondays, I would tell him how many-eth Monday of the 152 Mondays it was. On Wednesdays I could tell him I couldn’t be better. On Fridays I could tell him, that this life was good except for the travelling that one had to do every week.

But to get back to the blues. At this moment at three thirty on such a March Monday afternoon it is suddenly urgently important for me to know how the transformation takes place from such immense loneliness and the feeling of being utterly lost that cannot be defined (I choose the word ‘blues’ instead) to acceptance, and then attachment to the situation. What I find is this.

The first assault on that feeling is by the activities that one must make a superhuman effort to perform at office, for that is why one is here, the interactions with other people who are so, so different in that they don’t have this creativity worm in their head and are considered normal in that the limit of what is required of them is earning a living, any living. Then at the end of the Monday office hours with a cigarette at the tea shop in the ‘little shopping complex’ (it should not be mistaken for the swanky things that metropolitans are use to.

It is a row of properly constructed shops with asbestos sheets covering the porch in front, set behind a levelled concrete quadrangle, stepped, to follow the ground contours. On its left side is a wall that separates it from the Durga temple; there is a Shiva temple to the left of the Durga temple and a Hanuman temple to its left and Kali temple to its left and then a Ram Sita temple. The first shop on the left of the quadrangle is a sweet shop and its owner has set up a shed adjacent to the left wall below a radhachura tree where jalebis, singaras and alu chops are fried in succession throughout the evening. There is another tree against the left wall to the front near the road. Between the two trees against the wall a plank has been nailed to two small stumps and serves as a bench where some regulars, middle aged locals, sit and chat out their boredom throughout the evening. Knowing that the owner likes his tipple I wouldn’t be surprised if a bottle were to be nested somewhere between the shed and the wall later on in the evenings. Some faded dirty red plastic chairs have been provided for the customers, mainly students from the nearby Pataliputra Medical College, which existed in its infancy in the late 1970s, auto-drivers, local labourers and a few forced-bachelor exiles like yours truly.

The next shop is a stationery shop, whose owner stands up and says namaskar to me with folded hands whenever I visit him, and who will stare at you blankly if you asked for ‘Pears’ soap or any glycerine soap. How about Surf Excel ? No. In all sincerity, meekly and apologetically he states that he only has Tide. The next one is a grocery where the sugar is brown. He stocks biscuits but in large packs and since I couldn’t buy them as I had no container to stock that quantity of biscuits he gave me a plastic air-tight container for free which he emptied of mosquito repellent tablets and advised me to wash well before use. I still buy my biscuits from the stationery shop, in small packets. The grocer stocks, rice, dal, cooking oils, as well as jharus and phool-jharus stocked against a pillar in front of his shop.

The next shop has been shut for a very long time. I was told that it was owned by a drunk who rented it from the coal company, whose township this is, at fifty rupees a month and rented it for fifty rupees a day to a fellow who ran a take away joint (again, its different!) which exiled forced-bachelors blessed. When it was doing well the drunk jacked up the rent to a hundred rupees a day and the fellow shut shop.

The next shop is a pan and cigarette shop, very ominously dark and insignificant, despite a dirty red cloth hanging from the aluminium sheet covered table for making pan right upto the floor and shiny pouches of pan masalla hanging from two thirds of the way up between the pan table and the top. The owner isn’t visible as he doesn’t sit on the raised platform as pan-shop-wallahs generally do, as here customers are far too few and he would fall off the place out of boredom were he to sit waiting for them the whole day. Instead, if one were to approach it he will appear from the left, silently, ghost-like. To the left of this shop is a dark curtain of an undistinguishable colour. The fellow lives with his wife and three visible children. Visible, because two are toddlers that are running all over the place with the third elder girl of about eight trying to mind them. She also minds the shop when daddy is away and once accurately gave me a Filter Wills and the correct change without asking me the price as I had expected her to. However, the shop-keeper’s age and since these fellows marry at fifteen, leads me to think that there was every possibility that he had a couple of adult boys working as auto drivers or khalasis somewhere in this decrepit town.

The shop to the right of this shop sells potatoes, onions and a few three or four day old vegetables and opens in the evenings, when it pleases the owner. Sometimes the shop is closed for a month when its owner goes to his ‘native’ village to Gaya or wherever.

Further to the right is another shop which too opened only on evenings, again at the whim of its owner, who worked as a clerk in the coal company. You could have your TV or music systems repaired here, all the locals did, if you had enough courage or planned to replace the thing shortly and were short of cash as many, obviously including yours truly, here were. He even repaired black & white sets.

The last shop sold milk and bakery products, (again, different! Bakery products means biscuits and puffs of the kind found in tea shops all over India and not Black Forest pastries). He has a large wooden board saying “Doodh Hai” in large Hindi letters on one side and “Doodh Nahi Hai” on the other for the convenience of customers. The tea shop where I have my tea in evenings is to the right of this shop at the edge of the concrete quadrangle.) I puff out the relief ‘Monday over’.

I get back to my room, change, groggy with sleep, write down the expenses incurred, which I started doing very religiously, right down to the last fifty p so as to be able to tell my wife exactly how much I spent on cigarettes and alcohol, which was insignificant when compared to the unnecessary wardrobe or kitchen cabinet or washing machine (maids are still cheap and easily available) though the final picture of where the thirty five or forty thou for the month went was never worked out. This takes about half an hour. Then there is puja. And after that I am not really there till called for dinner sometime after nine.

Tuesday mornings are heavy with where I was falling behind in the job re my boss and getting a fresh start on things. At the end of the day after running around the boss and tinkering over this or that job that I am never sure of and which I find quite amusing and absurd or bossing over the department I start liking the place. After tea and a cigarette at the tea shop I am keenly waiting to start on ‘my writing’ which so far has mainly been this blog. I am scared of the novel that I am supposedly writing. But neither my wife nor my boss will kill me if I finally don’t manage to write it. But what the hell, Tuesday is over!

Wednesday is positively better. The work is fun. Mornings whiz through starting with chai at the tea-shop and a cigarette from the ‘ghost’, and the newspaper that I have again begun to take from October, 2007 but don’t manage to find time for except for the time that I am having my brief lunch that I carry from ‘home’ and Puja. Of course it helps that it is nearer the weekend.

The evenings are easy paced after any shopping that I have to do and the mandatory tea and cigarette at the same tea shop and muri followed by self made black tea, which takes about 45 minutes. There is music on the lap top, a collection of Rabindrasangeet by ‘unknown’ artists and now three songs of Amy Winehouse that have possessed me and then Puja and then writing interrupted by dinner around quarter past nine. Though I still can’t afford to access the net at my place it’s nice. Lots of space. No unnecessary expenditure of time and energy on the concerns of my wife. No listening again to how she lost out on all avenues for employment because of my family. It isn’t an issue with me. She lost her life marrying me and I lost mine marrying her and we didn’t choose each other. No quarrels. And some time on my hand that I still have to learn to use better.

And thus on to Friday, happy at the prospect of being at home on Saturday evening with the irritation of the prospect at the interminable five hour journey that takes all of the Saturday evening in that impossibly crowded Black Diamond Express and getting back to the choking madhouse of a city and all the patient hearing that I have to give my family in matters that are their personal concerns and do not interest me at all and all the things that I have to get done in one Sunday and all the things that I have to get done in one second Saturday in a month and that do not all get done.

That’s how the transformation from the deep dark blues to ‘I’m loving it’ takes place.

Goldfish

Time
like a falling stone
through yellow green foliage
through sunlight of the liquor tea.
Feelings
half understood

After half a life
Sometimes
Pebbles on the stream bed.

Then
Life
is that love
as the gold fish.

(C) Copyright : Tapas Bandyopadhyaya

The expenses of loneliness & loving the darkness

3-Feb-08
The expenses of loneliness. A five kilometre trip to the city to get a newspaper. Nine rupees worth sweets consumed in the course of circling around the liquor shop debating whether to buy that pint bottle of rum or not. Two pirated CDs, one of ghazals of Jagjit Singh and the other of Kill Bill parts 1&2 dubbed in Hindi when what I wanted was a porn flick; even a stupid, coarse and revolting Indian one would do. And that pint bottle of rum. Two hundred and twenty seven rupees.

Found the connection to Rakesh after 26 years last evening. Deepak was found after 14 years and I didn’t want to meet him. I didn’t want to change the impression I had of our university days. Like I hadn’t gone back to Darjeeling since I was thirteen in 1971.

Indulging in loneliness. Accepting this transfer on promotion in the first place. And not going home this Saturday. Not that I didn’t want to. But the boss doesn’t like his going away every Saturday, for we (the boss and I, the company doesn’t count for it doesn’t really exist, except for the those that reap a killing out of it, either in terms of position or the loot or both) lose a full days work, the second half of Saturday and the first of Monday. It cannot be denied that we did have a disconnection in the continuity of work. And then I had just returned from Calcutta after 5 days leave only on Wednesday last.

Just completed one-fourth of the assumed tenure of my banishment and heading towards one-third in another two months time. (Looks like an arithmetic sum and God knows I had hated arithmetic. Never found its logic. I had once failed in Arithmetic and maxed Algebra in class seven.)

25/02/2008
Just back from a heavenly Sunday at Calcutta. For once I was clear about the work at hand and attended to it as it should be attended to and missed his haircut schedule but that is one thing I can now live with, as I can now with many, many omissions.

And once the work was put away, one and a half vodkas in the afternoon, not too rushed, before a heretofore unimaginably late lunch at three in the afternoon, though the chat in the les room with the vodka wasn’t satisfactory at all.

Then the evening of poetry reading at Srijan. Confident with the last poem that I am even now very enamoured of. And that darkness that had a very high possibility of imploding into hell one day. I wonder what it is with him and darkness. Will he ever get out of it? At the back of his mind he knows it is a game. A game he can get in and out of whenever he pleases. Or so he thinks. A remnant of that vital dark one. The one who played with him and when the game got serious chickened out, shall we say? Or did she make a conscious, hard, adult, responsible choice as he had always done with women when they were hooked proper.

And the darkness and the night when she didn’t feel like sex. And the warm torrid sinful darkness so far removed from him in age as to be the next generation. And a night that tossed and turned and she wouldn’t be persuaded. And he fell off to sleep guiltily clinging on to the new darkness and then responsibly, though reluctantly, let go to wrap himself around sleep.

And then the morning; not the morning after and yet so. In my drunkenness with the rum in the evening which I insisted on and was not refused, I had, just before going off to sleep with the lights off and without my specs, wrongly adjusted to 4.10 instead of 4.40 from 4.30 that I had initially set on my phone alarm. Ten minutes of sleep on a Monday lost is irreplaceable.

And so a wrong morning. But such wrongs didn’t matter any more as there was the day to be got through and the week and another one hundred and thirteen weeks before I was eligible to beg,

“Please, please, sir. I beg you on my knees. Grant me the boon of getting back to my family. I shall do whatever you ask. Type. Photocopy. File. Carry it to your house at ten on a Saturday evening should you need to wipe your arse with it in the morning. Year after year after year I shall do the same killingly repetitive menial work and not complain. I shall never ever allow myself to show any intelligence, for only you can be intelligent, experienced, and knowledgeable and have perfect judgement, besides having all the good qualities that a man can have. For you are the Managing Director. Do we know how much you endured to get this far? We do not. We can’t even imagine. When you joined the company you slept on the roadside beneath a tree. And we got to stay in brick and mortar buildings and then had the gumption to complain that those were workers quarters, and the door to the loo had been so eaten away by termites that it had just fallen off and wasn’t worth putting up again and that we were entitled to at least B type quarters.

I am so ashamed of having behaved thus abominably. I promise I shall never ever complain. For anything. Even if my salary is delayed by six months. I can wait a year for my pay. But please, please let me get back to my family now. I know I would be unbelievably, impossibly fortunate if that were to happen. That there are so many who have offered to resign in writing and are waiting for two years now for your decision on whether their resignation is to be accepted. If they leave before their resignation is accepted they loose a lot of money from their retirement benefits.

I shall wait. I shall come again next Saturday and wait the whole day at your ante-chamber and not leave it for an instant for food or water or smoke for no one ever knows when you might have the theme to see me, especially your secretaries and peons. I shall wait.”