Rajan Narayan
MEMOIRS OF AN UNDERDOG JOURNALIST!
“I have no sacred cows!’ `I’m the goonda with the pen!”

MY mother was very vain about her figure and beauty. She was very concerned about her breasts getting distended because of breastfeeding the children. So much so breastfeeding time was strictly rationed. This led to a feeling of deprivation of mother’s breast during infancy. This is perhaps why I developed an obsession for the female breast. It is my perception that the majority, if not all Indian men, are obsessed with female breasts. Unfortunately, not in a very healthy way. Men don’t realize that the breasts are sensitive parts of the woman’s body. Breasts have to be loved and not molested.
Perhaps I wanted to punish my mother for rationing her breasts. The result was that in all my interactions with women, I savagely attacked the breast – as if they were my enemy. My first sexual encounter was at the age of 18 years. I was staying with a male friend in a tiny room in Bengaluru. It was long room and narrow room. The cousin had his sister come to Bengaluru to stay with him. She was a young woman straight out of her village, well-filled out and very curious about the male anatomy.
I recall returning from college one day and embracing her. Over a period of time I started molesting her breasts. Understandably, she did not much like care for that but she did not protest either for she was innocent in the ways of the world and timid. Soon we got down to heavy petting. Unfortunately, her brother caught us in the air and I was thrown out of the room.
The love-hate relationship I had with my own mother made me very defendant and shy while dealing with women. When I moved to Bombay which is Mumbai now when I was 21 to study for my Masters, I worked hard at my studies but also came into contact with a lot of young women. I had also become part of the Left moment and fortunately for me, some of the prettiest women were in my Marxist group and with them I shared some of my happiest moments.
From what I remember my Marxist girlfriends had no interest in going to fancy restaurants or to see movies. They were more interested in theatre, literary events and art cinema. While on a date I would be so scared that I would ask permission to even hold hands. Maybe I never wanted any relationship of mine with a girlfriend to succeed; although inevitably I ended up by proposing the moment I was a little friendly with a young woman and they would get frightened off. I used to even take my girl friends boating at the Gateway of India and proposed to them during the boat ride! None took me seriously of course.
Those years there were quite a few flower vendors selling bunches of roses along Marine Drive in upmarket Bombay. I would buy huge bunches of roses for my successive Marxist girlfriends. It’s a practice I continued in Goa where I would need little excuse to buy a woman long-stemmed roses. All the women I wooed but did not win over would stretch from Churchgate railway station to Kalyan or from Pernem to Canacona. They would all say “Don’t spoil it, Rajan. Let us just remain good friends.”
Earlier on when still in my late 20s my younger sister decided I should get married. I had helped her to elope to marry her boyfriend and they subsequently married. My sister Lalita wanted me to meet an art student from Nagpur, the RSS capital. Apparently, Bhanu, who was around 25 years old, was keen on getting married. She had a come with her mother to visit relatives in Mumbai. I was then the editor of the monthly magazine “Mirror.” My sister brought her to my cabin at the “Mirror” offices and left Bhanu there for me to entertain.
As in the normal course of the day my office cabin turned into a drinking adda and used to get crowded with friends after working hours. So much so that when Bhanu arrived she saw a group of friends drinking in the cabin. I had forgotten that my sister was bringing her to meet me. With her arrival my drinking friends quickly departed and we decided to walk down to Churchgate station from the office which was located in the Fort area.
Those days there was a rooftop restaurant on the top floor of the Churchgate railway station building complex. After all it was a city terminal railway station and very large. We went up to the restaurant and I ordered a fresh lime soda for myself and a coffee for her. We kept asking each other questions as though we were from the CID. I decided that marriage between two strangers could not work and dropped her back in Sion suburb, some 20km away, by cab.
But when we got close to Dadar I decided we should go to a restaurant which also served beer. I had some beer and perhaps for the first time, she also tried a glass of beer. I was struck by the humor of the situation: Here we were, two strangers, talking about marriage. Except in the middle and lower middle class in India, couples rarely get a chance to even talk to each other before their families decided a marriage is to be or not to be. Anyway, Bhanu and me eventually jointly decided that we would try our marriage, if it did not work out we could always get a divorce.
So after a fortnight of meeting often to get to know each other better mentally and physically a date was fixed for our marriage in Nagpur. Since my mother was likely to make all kinds of absurd demands I refused to take her with me to Nagpur for my marriage. My elder brother and elder sister were the only two members of my family who travelled at their own expense to Nagpur.
I had made it very clear that there would be no dowry or any expensive presents from the girl’s family. We got married in a very simple religious ceremony complete with the “saath phera.” After the wedding, her uncle (she had no father) arranged for us to spend a weekend at the forest resort near Nagpur called Panhala.
This was the first time my new wife and me were really alone together with each other. Even at the resort we could not help touching each other and by the time we reached the resort we were very eager, if not desperate, to make love. For both of us it was the first time for we were both virgins. We did not know anything about how to celebrate our suhag raat. The traditional wisdom is that the husband literally forces himself on the woman. In most cases, because of conditioning, women accept the one-sided act of violence which passes off as love or at least an arranged marriage.
By way of memories all I had was my father forcing himself on my unwilling mother. The result of my diffidence and our combined innocence over sex was a total disaster. I could not admit that I was ignorant. She could not accept that someone like me who was a journalist and very mature would be so very inept and useless in bed.
Let me say if you start your marriage in life on a bad note, it does not improve later on. You may develop a complex about each other. My usual obsession with her beasts unwittingly hurt her and there came a when she would not allow me to touch her breasts. Over a period of time even affection for one another disappeared and we were back to being strangers anew. However, because of family pressure, we spend ten years off and on together.
Bhanu was an artist with a degree from the Sir JJ School of Arts in Mumbai. Being the art critic of my paper I knew all the senior artists including MF Husain and Akbar Padamsee. I naturally introduced her to all my artist friends. Akbar had a reputation for being a ladies’ man and it was perhaps not so well known that he had a way with winning over and seducing women… Bhanu got involved with him and was naïve enough to come and tell me that he was much better in bed than I was. That marked the end of my marriage to Bhanu. To cut a painful story short she later got married to Akbar Padamsee, 30 years older than her. In retrospect today I feel all fresh couples should get a crash course in sex education before they get married.
The breakup of my marriage shattered me. I lost all faith in living. The healing touch was applied by a young English woman who had come on holiday to Goa. Her father was the English film producer and actor Kenneth Griffin, putting up at the Prainha beach resort in Dona Paula. Griffith has just completed a biographical documentary on Jawaharlal Nehru and was waiting for it to be edited back in London. He had decided to give his daughter who was in her mid-20s a holiday in Goa.
Griffith was with his Italian girlfriend in Goa and asked me to look after Eva. Eva used to come to my underground basement flat down the road at Dona Paula every evening after I returned from work at the OHeraldo. She normally used to go back to the hotel around 10 pm. On one particular evening, she lingered on till midnight and when I asked her what the problem was she burst into tears. She told me that it was her 26th birthday and her father had not remembered.
I told her to come back around lunchtime and promised that we would celebrate her birthday. I picked up an expensive silk jacket, a birthday cake and of course my trademark long-stemmed red roses. Eva was very happy and kept hugging me. I think this was the beginning of a very satisfying relationship.
I was still nominally married to my first wife though we had stopped living together. I did not want to start another relationship without ending my first disastrous marriage. But after we celebrated Eva’s birthday she presumably fell hopelessly in love with me. I introduced her to various aspects of Goa and especially the feast and zatra celebrations of Catholics and Hindus. I recall taking her to the Hanuman zatra in Mala, Panaji. While we were close to the “palki” a white jasmine flower fell into her hands. She was enchanted by Hanuman’s blessing and our relationship blossomed. However, I still held back.
On the last day of her departure back to London, we could not resist and mutually decided to surrender to each other. I was invited to visit London and stay with Kenneth Griffith in a villa in Camdon in London. The late Gines Veigas, owner of O Coqueiro, very kindly offered to buy me air tickets to go to London. In London, Kenneth as Eva looked after me just as I had looked after her in Goa. I stayed with them in London and I revived our relationship. I am grateful to Eva for teaching me about love and sex. Women in the West are far more open about physical relationships. They insist on an equal relationship and are willing to demand their rights.
I suppose that is how relationships should be including those of marriage. Unless there is mutual respect and attraction both physical and emotional. no marriage can survive. But to cut to the present I am reminded of an article in The Times of India dated October 29, 2024 by the editor Santosh Desai on romance in the digital age. Desai notes that social media has been a game changer. Young people who are shy talking to each other have no such problems and are very bold on social media. “Sexting” has become almost universal among young people today. But this could also lead to problems as it enables partners to selectively share information!
I would say there is no substitute for personal interaction. Goans are perhaps luckier than most as Goa has an open society which encourages boys and girls to interact with each other from a very young age. This makes it easier for friendships and romances to flourish with the approval of their families.