“Not yet,” I reply.
She nods, puckers her lips and breaks into a smile. That bit of her body language, always gives in when she doesn’t want an unpleasant confrontation. Her body has a swiftness of zephyr. She turns around to pour me some pepper flavored tea. I have a love affair with pepper and I let the waft penetrate through the lane of my memory, where I sat under the bunch of luscious, juicy, pepper with red and green seeds before the ripeness painted them black. The creeper died, when I turned twelve.
I’m twenty three now.
And I work in a bank, with its walls invaded by the paintings of Ragini Upadhyaya’s serpents, knotted in a passionate union, who breathe in the pastel of pink. Love remains eternal, frozen, in this corner of the world, where I conjure up reasons why marriage doesn’t appeal to me.
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I am not against marriage. Yet a society, where sex is an unbridgeable taboo, puts such an opulent value on marriage gets me every time.
We tread carefully on our thread of civility, lest we must stumble upon this taboo and mortify ourselves with unspeakable embarrassment.
Just the other day, a certain fourth grader from Rato Bangala School was telling me, how she tightly shuts her eyes every time they play the trailer of the movie Dirty Picture on TV.
And bafflingly enough, one fine day, our entire unhealthy attitude towards sex must culminate into a happier appreciation of an institution, based on mutual idea of sharing our sexual energies for procreation.
During our tea conversation, my aunt would tell me how this incomprehensive guilt takes over her after every “love-making”. In a quieter corner of Baneshwor, she would wonder why her husband’s request for the same would build a certain unspoken animosity between the both.
I think a very basic psychological contradiction that our culture puts in our mind as a Hindu girl is the fact that, more often than not, sex is always covered up in family discussions as a “profane” subject.
And growing up in the given influence, one day, you’re required to believe that Marriages are made in Heaven and your husband is your god. As Osho, the revolutionary spiritual master from India, argues, and reasonably so, how can a girl look up to the institution of marriage in spiritual light, when it is actually based on “profane” grounds.
During one of those engaging conversation with the writer Parshu Pradhan regarding the erotic literature in Nepal, he spoke of how our cultural immunization against sex contradicts the fact that every morning we go to Pashupatinath and worship the phallic symbol. When I researched deeper into Hindu perception towards sex, I was astounded to find out how liberal our tradition has actually been towards it. Apart from obvious phallus worshipping, if you study keenly, almost all Hindu gods share an enviable sexual appetite, to the extent that the whole creation actually was manifestation of Lord Brahma’s lust for his thought-child Saraswati.
Vedic-Hindu tradition accepted the life in its all dimension, with sex being an inevitable branch of the same. Hindu Rishis, or the seers, who were venerated as the bearer of truth, led normal life, relishing in desires and their fulfillment. Sex was revered as one of the medium for attainment of universal unison with the god, giving birth to the concept of Tantra, which remains the core of Hindu principles. Thus the phallus worshipping.
However, in the wake of great Shramana tradition, heralded by the likes of Mahabir and Gautam Buddha some twenty five thousand years ago, this Hindu perception of Natural living was questioned and challenged. The core practitioners of Buddhism and Jainism chose to live a celibate life, renouncing indulgence of every kind. This reactionary movement, baptized Dharmachakra Pariwartan, was anti-thesis to spiritual dialectics of Indian psyche.
Interestingly enough, while most of the Hindu avatars were born in Palaces (say, Ram, Krishna or Janak, to name a few) indulging in every earthly riches, Shramana ascetics achieved enlightenment only after renouncing it (say Siddhartha Gautam or Mahabir).
Shramana tradition had such influence in India that Adi Shankaracharya later adopted celibacy as a major requirement for Hindu monks. In order to divert the enormous fascination of youth towards Shramana tradition, Adi Shankaracharya remodeled Hinduism as a hybrid of Sanatan Hinduism and Shramana tradition. The result, Hinduism was restructured as a more moralistic, more restrained religion that shared the Negation Principle with its counterpart Shramana movement.
I am not trying to defend either way of belief, but it is important to understand that Hinduism is based on the concept of unison of male and female energy while Shramana tradition seeks annihilation of the Self. So, Hinduism today is based on theories as diverse as chalk and cheese.
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In the light of this hybrid upbringing, as much as I would like to be able to appreciate the institution of Marriage, I see that deep down I’m a celibate, a moralist to my core.
The negation of sex is so deep-rooted in me, that when a Police Officer caught me a few years ago, hand in hand with my boyfriend at Pashupatinath Temple, I allowed him to make me feel guilty for it. So much so, I cried for hours in embarrassment.
“Don’t exhibit any amorous activities around”, the officer would warn before setting us free.
I was yet another victim of a certain incomprehensive guilt, which thus tormented my aunt.
So, as much as I would like to be married, how I would ever live up to the joy of procreating, relishing on great sexual force, when my guilt lies in something as petty as holding my boyfriend’s hand, even around the place where they worship the symbol of phallus in sexual union.
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