On Thursday we enjoyed a spirited discussion at Osians , a fascinating mix of auction house, film festival and art magazine. Friday had seen two talks at Jawaharlal Nehru University. The first a small political discussion group chaired by Ashley Tallis and the second a big set piece lecture. Work done we can contemplate a relaxing dinner. We invite Ashley, who has been so crucial to the success of our visit, and he brings Akshi Singh and Agastaya Thapa, another student who is interested in coming to Consortium. Ashley is wearing a woollen cap and looks like a very mournful pixie. He has just had yet another professional set back and my heart goes out to him. He is intellectually brilliant and genuinely learned, both real handicaps for any academic career. As if this isn’t enough not only is he a Dalit and a Christian but he is an out gay activist. I simply cannot imagine the strength of character and bravery that this requires in India. And as if that wasn’t enough he has the most waspish tongue I have encountered since I was friends with Eric Griffith in the 1970s. We talk of the epigraph to the Wasteland. It’s a fragment from Petronius’s Satyricon in Latin and Greek which Eliot, in rather typical manner doesn’t translate but the lines are chilling : I saw myself, with my own eyes, the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a bottle; and when the boys asked her: “Sibyl, what do you want?” she responded: “I want to die.” I’ve always thought that Ovid’s version of the Sibyl’s fate is one of the most misogynist of stories, condensing, like the similar story of Cassandra, masculine hatred of a flaunted feminine sexuality which cannot be enjoyed. In both stories young women promise to put out in exchange for Apollo granting then extraordinary powers and, once granted the powers, renege on the promise. Apollo’s revenge is savage. Cassandra has been granted the gift of prophesy but when she then refuses the God’s advances, he adds the rider that she will never be believed. The Sibyl’s fate is almost worse. She had picked up a handful of sand and asked to live as many years as there were grains of sand in her hand. Like Cassandra once Apollo had granted him her wish she told him to get lost. Apollo then added the rider that she would not retain her youth but would age with every grain of sand. Thus the despairing cry that Petronius records and Eliot quotes. We pass from The Wasteland to the subject of kissing. I had been very struck on first arriving in India to notice that the social kiss, what the French call la bise, is strikingly absent from Indian social life and that, if you leave the educated elite, even shaking hands is considered far too intimate a contact. In my conversations with Satya I had reflected that one of the few definite gains of the hippie revolution of the late sixties is that kissing became a part of normal social life in England. Satya seemed curiously relieved to discover that it was so recent a development and confessed how strange a custom he found it. I was given proof of this when immediately after Flavia arrived we went out to lunch with Satya and Pavana. At the end of the lunch Flavia kissed them both warmly and, while I would not say that they objected, I would say that they both jumped out of their skins. I tell the table that for us in the late sixties kissing both men and women was a deliberately ideological against “the fools in old-style hats and coats” as Larkin called them. Waspish Ashley:“Did you kiss Stephen Heath?”. “Occasionally” I reply after some thought. I warn the table that I am going to kiss them goodnight as I set out on a one man mission to introduce la bise to India.
As we say our goodbyes I hear Akshi’s tuneful voice behind me “Did he kiss you?”
Ashley: “Yes”.
