WHAT’S LURKING IN THE SHADOW OF INTIMACY?

Comments Off

Paradoxically, intimacy can be the easiest or the hardest thing in the world. But one thing I’m very sure about is you don’t need a yoga or meditation guru to give you lessons in it…

F there is anyone who needs lessons in intimacy, it is me. I have traumatic childhood memories of violent sexual intimacy.
One of my earliest memories is of my father – a country bumpkin – pulling my sleeping mother’s saree, almost tearing her panties, and literally raping her.
It was at that moment that a hypersensitive seven-year-old decided he would never touch a woman without her formal and explicit consent.
I grew up in the Bombay of the 70’s — in a leftist environment of liberated bra-burning women. And, when it was common to have passionate interaction between people of different sex – at least among the upper middle class Marxist elite.
After all, if you were debating the nuances of Marxist Leninism in an Irani chai shop, gender did not matter.
I was quite popular among liberated women as I was one of the very few of the genuine proletariat by a long chalk. I checked out all the boxes of being a proletariat – I lived in a chawl and stood in a queue for my turn at common washrooms.
Besides, I was, perhaps, the only one who had read all the Marxist bibles and testaments, in letter and spirit – Karl Marx’ “Das Kapital,” Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg. Subsequently, Mao’s Red Book, quotes of Cuban revolutionist Che Guevara and even the biography of late Vietnamese president Ho Chi Minh, who liberated Vietnam from the United States of America (USA).
We did not shaken hands. It was “lal salam”or a bear hug. Among the major attractions of the left was that the prettiest and brightest women were part of it. They had no issues shedding their chiffons and branded jeans.
But they enjoyed watching plays and listening to music. I was the only one with a financial paper, where I worked as an art critic. This would get me free passes for art shows and musical concerts. Young Marxist women were only to happy to accompany me.
Many of them became good friends but my childhood traumas inhibited me from any physical intimacies. This went to absurd lengths. It became a standing joke. I would seek consent even to give them a hug on their birthdays.
I became everyone’s confidante. If I attempted a physical overture, the response would be that we should remain warm friends. Romance was for the decadent bourgeois. We could live together but for that we had to be fully committed.
I WAS too busy taking care of the economical needs of my mother and younger sister after we were abandoned by our father. So much so that when I got married for the first time, I was totally innocent in the ways of love and romance. My first marriage to a budding artist, at the age of 28, was a disaster.
She also came from a broken lower middleclass family. It was a marriage arranged by my younger sister, seven years younger than me, who needed to be put through college. She fell in love with a trade unionist and against my mother’s wishes I encouraged her to elope and marry him. It was my sister later on who found a girl for me to marry and in the initial year our mutual ignorance on intimacy was a recipe for marital disaster.
Not surprisingly, while doing an art course in Baroda, my wife was easily seduced by a reputed senior artist – incidentally, who claimed to be an expert in tantric sex, which I later learned basically means don’t rush things. Capture a woman’s heart, and mind first, and her body will readily respond to your lust later on.

SUSPICIOUS: The late finance Mughal Jeffrey Epstein was allegedly operating a pedophilia and prostitution racket for the bold and the beautiful, and the rich and the powerful.

Anyway, it was an English girl, appropriately named Eva, who taught me intimacy. Her father – a famous English actor and director – was in Goa, working for a film on the late Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. His name was Kenneth Griffith, a grand human being.
Griffith lived at a beach resort down the road from the basement flat where I was living. His 25-year-old daughter was with him for a Christmas holiday. Since he had a possessive Italian mistress, he entrusted Eva in my care.
She was a lonely girl, who had enjoyed brief celebrity status as a child artist, when she played the role of a daughter of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in a film on divorce.
In Goa I was the first to treat her with affection. Over a period, she fell in love. To make her interest evident, she stopped wearing her bra. It started with hugs and then kisses. She had to teach me patiently as Indian men do not kiss.
Which is sad as it is the gentlest and yet very intimate foreplay. The challenge being to ensure the noses do not clash and yet you caress each other with tongues. The transition to making love was very smooth.
No frenzy, no anxiety but a lot of caresses and tender loving care. The father invited me to a holiday in London and instructed me in the care of Eva. There was nothing scandalous about my living with the father and making love to his daughter under his roof.
In the late 80s I discovered that marriage as an institution was disappearing. You lived together as long as it suited both partners, then it was okay to move on. There were no expectations in a marriage. Given my Indian mindset, I did propose marriage.
She agreed to come and stay with me for three months to see if it would work. I gave her a return ticket. She decided at the end of three months that East is East and West was West and the twain could not live in lifelong companionable intimacy.
It’s all these memories of mine which make me suspicious of all the advertisements online of intimacy workshops that have crept up on social media and all around in Goa. You don’t need Indian gurus, who are supposed to be celibate, to teach anyone intimacy. Tantra has nothing to do with sex. If you try to practice the positions prescribed by the famous and infamous Indian Sanskrit sex treatise “Kamasutra” you might break a bone or two.
Which is why I doubt these pricey intimacy workshops – which perhaps Epstein-style international sex trafficking activities may be catering to paedophiles too – remember Fr Freddy Peats, who was convicted for running a paedophile racket in Goa under the guise of an orphanage?