On Lust and Longing Read online

I had chosen to use the thriller genre, which I’d not tried before, and did so clumsily. Only my spiritual confrères got the point, and the book, although published in various countries and languages, was a flop. I felt discouraged and took stock, realising I had not found the voice or language to express what I wanted to say. M had carried me through five books; now the inner strength I felt was my own—but it was not to empower writing, it was not a Muse. It had one purpose only: love.

  I turned to shorter, straightforward work.

  I was researching a piece for the New York Times about the Great Barrier Reef when the hydraulic system in the seven-seater seaplane in which I was flying failed and, with one wheel jammed out, one in, the pilot attempted a water landing. We hit with a terrifying bang and nosedived into the sea. I and the others swam out through a window, getting free just before the plane sank. A yachtsman in a motorised dinghy rescued us. We were covered in bruises and avgas. Once ashore, I rang our discreet social secretary to ask him to tell M what had happened, but that I was okay. He rang M and in a stage whisper announced, ‘Your friend has been in a plane crash’.

  M felt himself struck dead.

  The keeper of secrets added, ‘But she’s all right’.

  By then, however, M’s life had changed.

  It was another week or so before I saw him. When we met, our relationship had transformed—from happy affection to a sober, passionate longing neither of us had ever known before. We longed for each other day and night. For the first time he told me he had remembered all the details of our introduction, in Jakarta, decades earlier: the dress I was wearing, what he felt when I walked into the room.

  One evening he came to my apartment; as we lay together a fiery spirit swept through our bodies, as if we had been cast into a furnace and were being burned alive. The experience was so intense we could barely move or speak.

  M began the process of getting divorced. I felt the pain of it deeply and spent hours talking it through with my spiritual director, who said ‘The rule is love’. I believed that this time M would be doing the right thing, for all of us. But, hurt once, I carried a scar of doubt: in the end, would he go through with it? His married men friends were advising him against divorce. They had mistresses themselves and one way and another had managed to keep their formal and informal relationships going. All sides of their triangles, M observed, were unhappy as a consequence.

  In late 1994 I travelled to the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan to write about the plight of Afghan refugee women whose courage virtually defied translation into the comfy language of newspaper readers. A Christian Pakistani told me, ‘There are bad people here’. I realised later that he referred to Osama Bin Laden. Telecommunications were difficult, and for days I could not speak to M, whom I was to meet in Hong Kong on the way home. But when I arrived at the airport in Peshawar to board my outward flight I found it had been cancelled. With an upset stomach, I had to spend twelve hours in a small, stifling airport waiting room, where I was the only unaccompanied woman, the only non-Moslem woman, the only woman not covered from head to toe in black. The more I pestered airport officials to put me on another flight, the more I became the object of silent stares from male travellers. I had no way of contacting M to tell him what had happened. I missed the connecting flight from Karachi. Eventually I reached Hong Kong a day late, and very wan. M was strangely ill at ease when he greeted me. I asked him what was wrong. ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  Over the next week it became clear he did not believe the flight had been cancelled: when the aircraft out of Karachi arrived in Hong Kong without me he had rung Pakistan and been assured flights from Peshawar had been on schedule. So where had I been for that lost day? Why had I not rung him for almost a week? Islamabad, to which he had made a state visit some years earlier, had presented no problems. Well, not for him—but I had been out in the badlands: two million refugees were living in camps on the Afghan border; every male carried a Kalashnikov; there were no mobile phones, no schools, no running water. There were mud houses, tawny mountains, silence, calls to prayer, a sky so full of light it made you wince.

  But M’s mind jammed on why he was told the flights were normal, if they were not. It didn’t make sense. Where had I been? What was I doing? He was not angry or reproachful. He was so heartsick he could barely summon the energy to speak. All the pain and agony of divorce, all the visions of happiness together, all our years of longing for each other shrivelled.

  In the end I said, ‘You just have to believe me’.

  He couldn’t. He was about to do something irrevocable to be with me, and the thought that I had deceived him was unbearable.

  Back in Sydney it was clear we’d come to the end of the road and, whimpering with grief, we said goodbye.

  Decades earlier, in Indonesia, I had seen the Ramayana performed—by wayang puppets, by wooden puppets, by dancers. It is the greatest classic of eastern theatrical art, a glorious allegory on the spiritual struggles of humanity presented as a boy-girl story: Rama’s wife, Sita, is kidnapped by a demon king; Rama storms the demon’s kingdom and rescues Sita. Then he has doubts: has she been faithful to him while in captivity? She says she has. He decides to test her by burning her alive.

  Sita sits calmly on her funeral pyre as the flames leap around her.

  I thought of this story as I sat, brokenhearted but dry-eyed, to pray ‘Not my will, but Thine’. I wanted never to see M again. I needed to be alone for a while, with just one dear friend for company, to mull over the ruins of the love affair and my dreams. I had, at last, learned the strength that flows from submission. I was sad, but it was a bearable sadness, without loneliness. That inner being, that life within my life, was always present, and in time I knew, my heart would heal and the sadness would pass.

  In the midst of this, our former go-between asked me to meet him for an urgent discussion: over dinner, he told me he was deeply concerned about M who was, he said, ‘devastated’.

  Unwillingly, I agreed to speak to M, but only on the phone.

  Within minutes he rang. He sounded subdued and asked if I would reconsider my ukase on meeting. He wanted to apologise in person. Why? For what? He said that the Pakistani ambassador in Canberra had telephoned the control tower in Peshawar for him; officials had gone through their records and confirmed that flight XYZ to Karachi on that day had been cancelled.

  These years of thwarted desire to be with the man I loved would have been unendurable without the strength I was given by my spiritual life. I don’t believe that a spiritual practice is important or necessary for leading a good life. The happy, useful, intelligent, industrious lives of atheists and agnostics make that obvious, while pious frauds, spiritual shysters, religious fanatics and hysterics bellow nonsense and create misery. Everywhere the world’s great religions appear as once-magnificent palaces, their rooms closed with ancient locks that post-Enlightenment people don’t know how to open. Our locksmiths are dead, or have forgotten the combinations. The soulhungry must satisfy themselves with peering through windows. This is a tragic flaw in modernity, for there is a day in every life when spiritual training is important: the Day of Awe. Death’s day. We know that the game we play with Death has a stacked deck—but what delight to play it wild and free, like Cleopatra, queen of gamblers, convinced that immortality awaited her. In the end she longed to get rid of her body—as did that other dashing gambler, Kerry Packer. His ‘death’ on a polo field had been, like much else in life, misunderstood and misreported: he had fainted from ventricular fibrillation, he had no pulse. But fifteen years later, he did long to die.

  I witnessed the longing for death in my mother, at whose bedside in a nursing home I stayed for three days as, in a deep morphine sleep, she struggled and laboured to die. She was not a religious woman and she went to church socially rather than piously, but she did have an easy, natural acceptance that Christian teachings could be true. As her failing heart grew weaker, I felt her intense longing to be done with her body. It seemed as
if she were patiently freeing herself from a million tiny hooks that were keeping her tethered, undoing them one at a time. I feared she would go at any minute, and only once in all the hours I was there, did I leave her room—to shower. I snatched sleep on a cot in the corner, and lived on sandwiches and scones I ate on the balcony. As the third day wore on, my mother’s distress increased and the nurses gave her a bigger dose of morphine. An hour or so later the tip of her nose and tips of her fingers turned blue. I was so tired I’d been dozing, but something made me wake and look at her again. Her eyes, closed for three days, showed a peep of light at the lower lids and slowly began to open, wider and wider until they were fully open, as if she were awake. She seemed to be staring at something. An expression of joyous wonder came onto her face, an unimaginable gladness, a look of pure, blissful rapture—that what she had longed for in all those hours of anguish stood waiting for her. Her soul surrendered its burden, that sack of meat and bones.

  Her breath rattled in her chest, and she gave a long sigh.