Free May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons by Elisabeth Bumiller

to be spent in sexual passion, but when things cool off, as expected, then parents believe it is fortunate that they had the foresight to match up two compatible people who can settle down to the everyday business of life. “Love is fine,” Usha Seth, a forty-one-year-old New Delhi housewife, told me. “But after the first few years, that’s when you realize how important it is that a person is considerate and kind.” Parents are also aware of the all-consuming lust that can rage between a young man and woman who have never had sex before. This is sometimes cited as one reason that the bride spends time away from her husband during the first year of marriage, usually in long visits to her family. Mahatma Gandhi says in his autobiography that it was this custom that helped keep him from drowning in sexual obsession during the first year of his arranged marriage, when he and his wife were thirteen. Every few months, his bride’s parents would summon her home. “Such calls were very unwelcome in those days,” Gandhi wrote, “but they saved us both.” (The Gandhi biographer and psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, however, sees something more significant in Gandhi’s admission of adolescent lust. “How ‘passionate’ such a boy or man really is becomes a moot question, for we can only know ofthe quantitative threat which he feels the need of confessing,” Erikson writes. “But one thing is devastatingly certain: nowhere is there any suggestion of joyful intimacy.” Erikson argues that Gandhi in fact harbored “some vindictiveness, especially toward woman as the temptress,” which in his later years made him attempt, at first with mixed success, a life of celibacy.)
    Whatever may be true of Gandhi, the common reality appears to be closer to what Meena experienced. The psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar, in a 1987 lecture delivered at the University of California at Berkeley, spoke of the “widespread sexual misery” among all classes in India. “Even discounting the sexual woes of a vast number of middle- and upper-middle-class women who come for psychotherapy as an unrepresentative example,” he said, “there are other, direct indications that sexual misery is equally widespread in the lowest castes.” The standard notion in India has always been that very poor and very rich women enjoy sex because they live free of repressive middle-class morality. But Kakar cited interviews with Harijan, or “Untouchable,” women in Delhi—members of the lowest of castes—who described sexual intercourse as “painful or distasteful or both,” portraying it “as a furtive act in a cramped and crowded room, lasting barely a few minutes and with a marked absence of physical or emotional caressing.”
    This does not surprise the country’s growing band of “sexologists,” as sex therapists in India are called. A foreign traveler cannot help but notice the advertisements for aphrodisiacs, sex “cures” and special medicines on billboards across India. “Most Indian men, whether rich, poor or middle-class, use their wives as sleeping pills,” Prakash Kothari told me. “They do not know that foreplay and afterplay are important ingredients in the sex act.” Kothari, the country’s best-known and most publicity-conscious sexologist, a professional who should not be confused with the “doctors” who advertise on billboards, runs a thriving high-priced practice among the middle class of Bombay. He has done some serious research, yet has an unfortunate style that gets in his way. He autographed a copy of an American pornography magazine and gave it to an Indian woman journalist I knew; for me he brought out his collection of seventeenth-century miniature ivory penises and breasts from Rajasthan. Less flamboyant is R. H. Dastur, another Bombay sexologist and author of the best-selling
Sex Power
, a how-to book now in its sixth printing. In interviews that Dastur’s researchers conducted with 695 middle-class women from 1983 to