A teacher’s platonic love for a student

9/11
Dear Manoj,
I wanted to write a little letter to you.  But I found this sheet! What to do?

Do people know about platonic love? Or conversely, why have the young made a priesthood out of youth?

Your poem: your experience. Rimbaud’s Tattered Heart! How we do find correspondences: Dylan–Rimbaud–You– ‘The Quatered Heart’— Me — Rimbaud–You… Circular patterns; design from chance.

My poet-friend Jameela just returned from Bombay. She stayed at University Settlement for Women, where my mother in her student-days shared lodgings with Ismat Chugtai. A little to the right the young MF Hussain slept on the pavement opposite his future wife’s home. Further up at Khetwadi, my friend, the painter Bhupen Khakhar chatted up and painted bidi, chai and paan sellers. Their Bombay, my Bombay… And then my Tattered Heart!....

And the sad Bombay you described yesterday.

You are the last student I will ever teach; that I will ever want to teach. Ovid said: ‘In the end, it is the instructor who is best instructed’.

I value your youthful friendship. Thank you.
   
Love,
Hoshang.

Fear Eats the soul: Man has a sense of exaltation. Society works by exclusion. The excluded are exalted by love, by being recognised for their personhood by a beloved, however odd, however excluded herself. But there are still the un-loved. It is for them our child-hearts weep, yours and mine. And Rambaud’s and Fassbinder’s.

15 September 2012
Dear Manoj,
I stole this pen from the office. Very little ink in it. Beggars can’t be choosers! I might run out of ink while still professing friendship…

I write while you’re saying goodbye to your parents, Deepak is preparing for rehearsals, a boy of 16 who was my neighbour 8 years ago and is now 24 is coming to tell me of finding love with a girl from Khar (East)!

I’m 65. Gieve Patel the poet asked a student of mine in Bangalore today, ‘Does Hoshang still manage to find love?’

The fact is, the older I get I attract younger people to me. My best friend (who died last X’mas) would try to sort out my bewilderment by saying: ‘Some young people like older people’. Ours is student-teacher relationship. But I talk of ordinary boys: paper vendors, auto drivers, fruit sellers. I give every human being his worth. Maybe that works. And I speak to them on their level. Raj Rao tries to discuss political philosophy with his proletarian lover; trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear (to use an 18th C. phrase)!

I like young people. Not only are they physically active and attractive (something they don’t know), but they keep me young with their questions, even the ignorant ones. Youth like everything else is a state of mind.

How Yeats hated old age! (I talked to the son of a Bombay actor who played Hamlet on stage.  He said at 80 his father was mentally alert. Shakespeare keeps one young!)

After you graduate from your young poetic rebels (Rimbaud/Apollinaire) you have to digest Yeats and Ezra Pound, my idol.

Love,
Hoshang

This paper was stolen May 7th from US Embassy, Cambodia!

16th September 2012
Dear Manoj,
This is a continuation of what we spoke yesterday: The teacher in India.

‘The teacher is something sacred in India. They do not understand that a teacher has sex organs, has a sex life, is human’. I told you. I felt I shocked you, a good Iyer boy.

I also told you that putting the Project Bolo interview on YouTube was a mistake. Hundreds of students saw it. My own future students came with a preconception of me as a ‘sexual’ person to class. No amount of keeping sex out of the discussion or good teaching helps. I feel judged. A judged person cannot impart knowledge.

‘Liberation is not for the liberator.’ It is for the generation that follows. Moses saw the promised Land but did not enter it. His followers did. It means that a teacher may not liberate his students sexually himself. They have to find their own partners.

My teacher in America believed that sexual liberation was true liberation. He slept with younger and younger women-students the older he got. His wife saw him as ‘a helpless male’ who had ‘women flinging themselves on him’. He was no rascal but a liberator. He liberated me. But, to me, he was parent.

The pendulum has swung the other way. Now there is strict political correctness in the academy. American Puritanism invaded even India with its sexual harassment laws. But India has had traditional gurus for whom men and women followers would do anything.

PS:  I wish to publish these 3 letters in DNA Sunday’s magazine. Do you mind?

Love,
Hoshang
 

Letters excerpted with permission from Hoshang Merchant