E-Paper
Of blind faith & our 'gods'
From Khushwant Singh to Ranganayakamma, this was the week of questioning entrenched beliefs, writes Vijaya Sharma.
The grand old man of Indian writing in English, Khushwant Singh is back once again with a collection of stories, titled Paradise.
As the text on the inside flap of the book says, "In this sparkling new collection of stories, India's best known writer addresses some pertinent questions: Why do we believe in miracles? Can a horoscope guarantee the perfect wife? Is the Kamasutra a useful manual for newly weds?"
It goes on to say that the book is "humorous, provocative, tongue-in-cheek, ribald and even, at times, tender."
An introspection on the use of the word “tender” here: Love in his books is rarely of the tender variety. All, perhaps, boils down to sex between man and woman and that in Khushwant Singh's writing is hardly beautiful or tender. If you have read his recently published novel, Burial at Sea, you will remember the lurid description of sex between the lead character, an industrialist, modelled on Jawaharlal Nehru and the sanyasin.
Or the passages where the industrialist's daughter (modelled on Indira Gandhi) is pounded by the industrialist's protege (based on V Krishna Menon) and then the paras where she has sex with a comely yogi (based on Dhirendra Brahmachari), who walks around in a lungi with nothing underneath.
Sex between man and woman is just sound and fury, a maddening need which has to be fulfilled and then it is over. No place for tenderness here.
Coming back to the latest collection, Paradise, in one of the stories, sex between Deepo and the lead character Zora Singh is always described thus: Deepo undid the cord of her salwar and opened her legs. Zora Singh then proceeds to pump the ever obliging Deepo and then lies limp.
Tenderness?
That apart, what the new collection emphasises is that blind belief, whether it be in horoscopes or mere bookish knowledge, gets you nowhere.
What the learned Pandit Madan Mohan in the story titled ‘Life’s Horoscope’, knows is the 64 postures of lovemaking as the Kamasutra tells it. But when it comes to doing it, he wants to go word-by-word, escaping the essence, remaining mired in the words, which frustrates his young, eager-for-sex wife.
Or take the middle-aged journalist in ‘The Mulberry Tree’ who gets taken in by a roadside palm-reader and is cheated of Rs 50 by the charalatan who promises him a fool-proof method to make Karuna as hungry for him as he was for her, only to be proved a fool in the end.
