Indian Love Stories Read online

  INDIAN

  LOVE STORIES

  OTHER LOTUS TITLES

  Ajit Bhattacharjea

  Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah: Tragic Hero of Kashmir

  Anil Dharker

  Icons: Men & Women Who Shaped Today’s India

  Aitzaz Ahsan

  The Indus Saga: The Making of Pakistan

  Alam Srinivas & TR Vivek

  IPL: The Inside Story

  Amir Mir

  The True Face of Jehadis:

  Inside Pakistan’s Terror Networks

  Ashok Mitra

  The Starkness of It

  Dr Humanyun Khan and G. Parthasarthy

  Diplomatic Divide

  Gyanendra Pandey & Yunus Samad

  Faultlines of Nationhood

  H.L.O. Garrett

  The Trial of Bahadur Shah Zafar

  L.S. Rathore

  The Regal Patriot: The Maharaja Ganga Singh of Bikaner

  M.B. Naqvi

  Pakistan at Knife’s Edge

  M.J. Akbar

  India: The Siege Within

  M.J. Akbar

  Kashmir: Behind the Vale

  M.J. Akbar

  The Shade of Swords

  M.J. Akbar

  Byline

  M.J. Akbar

  Blood Brothers: A Family Saga

  Maj. Gen. Ian Cardozo

  Param Vir: Our Heroes in Battle

  Maj. Gen. Ian Cardozo

  The Sinking of INS Khukri: What Happened in 1971

  Madhu Trehan

  Tehelka as Metaphor

  Mushirul Hasan

  India Partitioned. 2 Vols

  Mushirul Hasan

  John Company to the Republic

  Mushirul Hasan

  Knowledge, Power and Politics

  Nayantara Sahgal (ed.)

  Before Freedom: Nehru’s Letters to His Sister

  Nilima Lambah

  A Life Across Three Continents

  Sharmishta Gooptu and Boria Majumdar (eds)

  Revisiting 1857: Myth, Memory, History

  Shashi Joshi

  The Last Durbar

  Shashi Tharoor & Shaharyar M. Khan

  Shadows across the Playing Field

  Shrabani Basu

  Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan

  Shyam Bhatia

  Goodbye Shahzadi: A Political Biography

  FORTHCOMING TITLES

  M.J. Akbar

  Have Pen, Will Travel

  Peter Church

  Added Value: Life Stories of Leading Indian Businessmen and Women

  Michel De Grece

  The Bourbon Rajah

  INDIAN

  LOVE STORIES

  Edited by

  SUDHIR KAKAR

  Lotus Collection

  © Sudhir Kakar for Introduction and translators/authors for their respective stories: 1999.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher.

  This edition first published in 1999

  The Lotus Collection

  An imprint of

  Roli Books Pvt Ltd

  M-75, G.K. II Market

  New Delhi 110 048

  Phones: 6442271, 6462782, 6460886

  Fax: 6467185

  Also at

  Varanasi, Agra, Jaipur and the Netherlands

  ISBN: 81-7436-068-9

  Rs. 275

  Typeset in Galliard by Roli Books Pvt Ltd

  Printed at Pritha Offsets Pvt Ltd, New Delhi-110028

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgements

  Notes on Contributors

  Introduction Sudhir Kakar

  The Empty Chest Indira Goswami

  The House Combustible Subodh Ghosh

  Stains Manjula Padmanabhan

  A New Triangle Ratanlal Shant

  Chastity Belt Damodar Mauzo

  The Game of Chess Kamala Das

  The Bed of Arrows Gopinath Mohanty

  Housewife Ismat Chughtai

  Weekend Nirmal Verma

  The Weed Amrita Pritam

  Acknowledgements

  Grateful acknowledgements are made to

  the authors, translators and publications where

  the stories were published:

  ‘House Combustible’: Ananda Publications, Kolkata.

  ‘Stains’: Civil Lines, New Delhi.

  ‘Back to Square One’: PEN, Mumbai.

  ‘A New Triangle’: UBS, New Delhi.

  ‘The Game of Chess’: Caravan, New Delhi.

  ‘The Bed of Arrows’: The Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi.

  ‘Housewife’: The Eye, New Delhi.

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

  Indira Goswami (Mamoni Roysom Goswami) is a celebrated name in the field of Assamese literature. She has written several novels and numerous short-stories. She has been honoured with several awards including the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Assam Sahitya Sabha Award. She is at present a professor in the Department of Modern Indian Languages, Delhi University.

  Subodh Ghosh, born in 1909 in Hazaribagh, Bihar, lived mostly in Kolkata. A journalist by profession, he was also an eminent novelist and short-story writer. His Bharat Prem Katha, based on love episodes from the Puranas, is an eternal Bengali favourite. He died in 1979.

  Manjula Padmanabhan is a cartoonist and writer based in Delhi. Her latest work ‘Harvest’ won the Onassis International Cultural Competition for Theatrical Plays recently. Her comic strip Suki appears in The Pioneer six days a week. She also writes screenplays for film and television.

  Ratanlal Shant is a professor of Hindi at the Kashmir University but prefers to write fiction in his mother tongue, Kashmiri. His published work includes a collection of short-stories, Achharvalan Peth Koh. His stories have also featured in Sheeraza, Sone Adab and journals of the Sahitya Akademi.

  Damodar Mauzo is a Konkani novelist and short-story writer living in Majorda, a seaside village in Goa. His novel, Karmelin won him the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award in 1983. Mauzo is a regular columnist for the Konkani daily, Sunaparant. He has also written the screenplay and dialogues for a telefilm.

  Kamala Das is known as the ‘first feminine emotional revolutionary’. Born in 1934 in South Malabar, she was the first woman to write honestly about sexuality and love. Her short-stories in Malayalam are published under the pen-name of Madhavi Kutti. She was awarded the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award in 1969 and the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1981.

  Gopinath Mohanty was one of the most prolific writers of Oriya literature. He published an incredible twenty-four novels, eight volumes of short-stories and three plays. His works largely portray the life of tribals in Orissa, his native state. He was awarded the Jnanpith Award as well as the Padma Bhushan.

  S. Tamil Selvan has been actively involved in the literary movement of Tamil Nadu, his home state. His works include two short-story collections and an anthology titled Nellu Choru. He was till recently the Vice-President of the Tamil Nadu Progressive Writers’ Association.

  Ismat Chughtai is the enfant terrible of Indian literature known for her bold and unconventional ideas on man-woman relationships and religion. Born in 1915 in Badaun (U.P.), her novels include Terhi Lakeer Ziddi, Saudai and Ek Qatra Khun. She has also written several short-stories, the most famous being ‘Lihaaf’, ‘Badan Ki Khushboo’ and ‘Chauthi Ka Jorha’.

  Nirmal Verma took his Master’s degree in History from St. Stephen’s College. He spent nearly a decade in Prague translating Czech works into Hindi. A pioneer of the Nai Kahani movement in Hindi literature, he has several novels, short-story collections and national honours to his credit.

  Amrita Pritam is one of the earliest women writer
s of India. Born in Gujranwala, now in Pakistan, in 1919, her first collection of poems was published in 1935. She is the first woman to have received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1956 for her collection of poems, Sunehere. She was honoured with the Padma Shri in 1969, while in 1973, her Kagaz Ke Kanvas won her the Jnanpith Award.

  INTRODUCTION

  f the many enduring fascinations of the love story, a vehicle for the vicarious satisfaction of our hidden desires and obscure longings, is the pleasure we take in its subversion of the conventions that govern the relationship between the sexes. At least, this is true of tales about young lovers who are believed to express the purest of romantic sentiments. In some of the classical love stories of the world – Romeo and Juliet, Layla and Majnun – the lovers express wishes which are utterly at odds with the accepted ideology of their time on the man-woman relationship. As I have shown elsewhere, the love of Romeo and Juliet is neither innocent nor tender, as their cultural milieu would like to believe. It is imperious, violent and pervaded by the devouring hunger of the urge to merge. The teenage lovers are not virginal flowers or romantic innocents but, at heart, ‘roaring tigers’ and ‘loving-jealous’ jailers of each other. Similarly, in Layla and Majnun, a tale embedded in the Islamic culture of its time, with clear-cut stereotypes of male dominance and womanly deference, the lovers overturn these expectations. Majnun is like an infant in his surrender to the woman whereas Layla is the bold and active partner in their doomed romance.

  Reading contemporary love stories from all parts of India, I naturally wondered whether they too would be subversive of present-day social norms which define the male and female roles? Are there some particularly Indian themes in the fictional depiction of love in the last three decades of this century? I do not mean to imply that I read the stories with only questions in my mind. Like most readers of fiction, I read love stories, above all, for the pleasure they provide. If they must serve an edifying purpose, then I would prefer this to be a heightening of my aesthetic sensibility, a deepening of my sensate and metaphysical responsiveness. To varying degrees, the stories in this collection provide both pleasure and aesthetic satisfaction; they touch the senses and the heart.

  Here, I cannot discuss the ways in which each love story delights the psyche which, after all, in its original Greek meaning, is our amorous soul. Such a discussion will dim the reader’s own encounter with a story, rob it of its freshness. Explanation, the besetting sin of the intellectual, is too often used to foreclose experience. The task of this Introduction is how to discuss the stories without doing violence to the reader’s personal response. What I intend to do, then, is give my impression of the whole collection without referring to individual stories, preserving thus both the uniqueness of each story and the reader’s autonomy in discovering its pleasures.

  First, a word on the process of selection. Literary experts were approached for their recommendations on ‘two to three of your favourite contemporary love stories’ in their mother tongue. Except for defining ‘contemporary’ as a chronological category – the last thirty to forty years – no other criteria were specified. Essentially, we were trusting the judgement of our literary informants on what constitutes the ‘best’ in the literature of their language. If English translations did not exist, the stories were then translated. Ignorant of the tradition and trends of fiction in most Indian languages, my choice was based purely on the story’s appeal to one reader – me. If another reader believes this or that story would have been a better representative of the genre in a particular language than the one I have selected, he or she will be perfectly justified in putting the blame on my ignorance and/or aesthetic shortcomings. The selected stories are, therefore, neither representative nor, I suspect, will be found by some readers to conform to their notion of what constitutes a ‘love story’. The former is regrettable; the latter inevitable.

  Traditional certainty that a literary depiction of love is marked by the presence of the shringara rasa is no longer available to us. Today, we cannot subscribe to Bharata’s view in the Natyashastra that whatever in the ordinary world is bright, shining and beautiful is associated with love and that the erotic rasa is called shringara because it comes in a beautiful and charming dress. Alas, the contemporary world of love is rarely bright and shining; too often it is heavy and dark. The ancients could confidently proclaim that certain emotions such as laziness, violence and disgust do not belong to a depiction of love. The rasa of love today knows no such limits. Disgust can be as much part of erotic love as violence although the evocation of disgust has rarely reached the extremes portrayed in the fiction of Marquis de Sade. In de Sade’s stories, erotic unions are routinely preceded, accompanied or followed by the smearing and eating of faeces, drinking of or bathing in urine, the licking of spit and vomit, a revelling in bodily odours – all in the service of heightening the excitement of erotic union. Violence, too, physical or mental, is part of many contemporary depictions of love.

  Moreover, contemporary writers can no longer make the ancient distinction between love-in-union and love-in-separation. Union and separation are now more intricately related, the latter perhaps an inevitable consequence of the former. In modern fiction, the very birth of love often brings with it intimations of its end; the loss of love glimmers darkly through the fiery exultation of the moment in which it is found. Separation is to anticipate and reflect upon a predestined disappointment. It does not heighten love, as ancient poetics would have us believe, but only our despair as we confront our basic solitude. Union, too, is not ‘shining, bright’, joyous and ecstatic, but often depicted by today’s writers as illusory and accompanied by a more or less conscious awareness that the beloved presents himself or herself as a body that can be penetrated and a consciousness which will remain separate, impenetrable. These are a few of the universal themes in the contemporary love story which also find an echo in our own selection.

  Another striking impression I have of these stories is that the female protagonists are very often the more active, driving partners in the enterprise of love. Even when the woman suffers, the suffering is not in a passive, dull way which is often believed by traditionalists to be a woman’s lot, but with a full awareness of the causes and course of the suffering – almost as if she is choosing what must be. The writers and the milieu of the stories are overwhelmingly urban middle class. What we encounter in many stories is thus the middle class ‘dream of love’. The dream is of a love free of all social restrictions and internalised inhibitions. It is a dream of capturing love’s freshness and spontaneity, of becoming one with the beloved while overwhelming all forces that would dampen desire and the urge to merge. The dream is of love unimpeded by the shackles of family obligations and duties toward the old and all the other keepers of society’s traditions. This nostalgia for the freshness of love’s original vision is brought strikingly home in two stories by the conceit of a couple encountering each other after their marriage has ended in a divorce and the man–woman recover what had been lost in the mundane routine of marriage and its dream of safety.

  The ‘dream of love’ is not muted, as in the middle class milieu of most stories, but presented right up front, in brilliant, loud colours, whenever the protagonist – a woman – belongs to the lower strata of society. A stranger to middle class morality and fears, such a heroine can be passionate and single minded in her pursuit of the vision love sends all of us. She can be amoral since the only obligation she recognizes is to the truth of her love and the person of her beloved. Unlike her middle class sister, she does not have a conflict between what she unconsciously wishes and what she consciously wants. But, enough. Let me not hold the reader back from the feast that awaits him. A before-dinner speaker should be short; he should only seek to whet the appetite, not confuse his own offering with the main course. He would, however, be failing in his duty if he did not thank all who, through their recommendations, made this offering possible: B. Jayamohan, Sitakant Mahapatra, Ramachandra Sharma, B. Ranga Ra
o, Renu Bhan, K. Satchidanandan, Moitryee Mitra, Makarand Paranjpye, Nishikant Mirajkar, Arundhati Deosthale, Varsha Das, Manohar Shetty and Seema Sahni.

  Sudhir Kakar

  THE EMPTY CHEST

  Indira Goswami

  o one got up at this hour, not even the people who had come to live on the fringes of the cremation ground. A few bul-buls chattered in the hijol tree in front of Toradoi’s shack. A flock of yellow-billed garu-bok had just flown past, heading for the horizon to the east of the Brahmaputra river. The stench of burnt human flesh stole across the cremation ground to mingle with the sweet scent of distant lemon-blossom.

  Coming out of her shack, Toradoi saw that Haibor, the firewood-vendor from the crematorium, was standing under the hijol tree. Again, his spindly legs stuck out from beneath his black shorts. His white teeth gleamed like the chewed-up remains of sugarcane sticks.

  Toradoi darted back into the house.

  ‘What is left in this body to draw you back?’ she muttered. ‘Why don’t you leave me in peace?’

  How well she remembered his words. They fell on her ears, again, like hammer-blows.

  ‘It will be a long time before the drunkard of yours comes out of jail. That is, if he comes out at all! After all, he has killed not one, but two people by ramming into them. It has been proved that he was drunk while driving. But I am here, don’t worry! I will help, only keep the door open at night. This way at least your two kids won’t starve to death!’ Haibor had said.

  Since then, lured by the prospect of seeing Toradoi’s door open to him he had come everyday, even before daybreak, to stand under the hijol tree where the birds chirped and sipped honey from the flowers above his head.

  When finally Toradoi went out again and looked around, Haibor was nowhere in sight. No, this firewood-vendor was not among those who furtively came to see the wooden chest she had scavenged from the cremation ground.

  Toradoi peered around. Was someone still prying?