The rights of desire?

The recent leaking of the
names of the men registered with Ashley Madison, a dating site for the married, has hit the headlines. One important statistic from the data is that there are far more men registered on the site than women. This data has given further credence to the generally held belief that men are more promiscuous.
While this behaviour is well documented for young and middle aged men, the relationship of older men (say above 50 years old) with younger women is discussed to a lesser extent. Often such older men are conveniently placed in the category of ‘dirty old man’!
There is a telling couplet in Urdu that goes:
Jo aa key na jaey, burhapa dekha
Jo ja kar na aeyay, jawani dekhi
(Old age, what arrives and never departs,
Youth, what departs and never returns).
There is often great angst and a sense of loss in the journey from youth to old age. I remember an older colleague at work in Pakistan, Mr. Abdullah Jan, who was part of the company’s informal badminton club. Twice a week a group of health enthusiasts consisting of men and some youthful female secretaries would head out to a club for a round of badminton. Jan Sahib, as everyone addressed him, had joined the company as a young man and had been working there for nearly 25 years. One evening, as we were relaxing after a game, Jan Sahib cast a wistful glance at the young ladies flitting about in the court and remarked, “Ek waqt tha yeh mujhe jan, jan pukara karti theen, aab bhaijan, bhaijan kehti hein!” (There was a time they called me jan, jan (darling), now they call me bhaijan, bhaijan (brother, brother)).
It is not just badminton players who are rattled by the grim march to old age; poets and writers too have been grappling with the consequences of an aging body but strong desires.
The story goes that the poet Ahmed Shamim was travelling from Rawalpindi to Lahore in a mini-bus. The van was packed. One young lady sitting next to Ahmed Shamin spoke to him, “Baray mian, zara aur jaga deh dein” (Old man, can you give some more room?”) He was so traumatised by this comment that when he got to Lahore he composed his famous poem, Kabhi ham khoobsoorat thay (There was a time when we too were beautiful), which is an ode to childhood and youth.
There are many instances of such a lament in western literature too.
The 1999 Booker Prize winning novel, Disgraced by the South African writer J M Coetzee (born 1940), is the story of the love affair between an aging professor and his young female student. The affair becomes public and the professor is, well, disgraced.
In the novel, the protagonist Professor David Lurie, age 52, observes about a dog: “It was a male. Whenever there was a bitch in the vicinity it would get excited and unmanageable, and with Pavlovian regularity the owners would beat it. This went on until the poor dog didn’t know what to do. At the smell of a bitch it would chase around the garden with its ears flat and its tail between its legs, whining, trying to hide…There was something so ignoble in the spectacle that I despaired. One can punish a dog, it seems to me, for an offence like chewing a slipper…But desire is another story. No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its instincts.” Here Coetzee is asking if men have this innate urge, then why consider it disgraceful for them to follow their nature when they are old?
However, David Lurie’s appeal to reason is met with this response from one of the parents: “We never thought we were sending our daughter into a nest of vipers. No, Professor Lurie, you may be high and mighty and have all kinds of degrees, but if I was you I’d be very ashamed of myself, so help me God.” The same sentiment is shared by the University administration and as a result David Lurie loses his job and apologises to the parents of the girl.
Another celebrated South African writer Andre Brink’s (1935-2015) critically acclaimed book, Rights of desire, published in 2000, takes its title from a quote in Coetzee’s novel: “I rest my case on the rights of desire…On the god who makes even the small birds quiver.” Brink’s novel also revolves around the theme of an older man who has a relationship with a much younger woman. His main character, Ruben Olivier aged 65, is a librarian who is infatuated with a young woman who is a lodger.
It is not surprising that Coetzee was 59 and Brink 65 when they penned these novels.
Both writers raise a fundamental question: Is it moral for males to follow their instincts unchecked? The answer according to both writers is: No, it is not moral, and the desire should be checked, but the males should not be taught to hate their nature and should never have to apologise for it.
This issue of man’s nature has been simplified to a one liner in certain advertisements in the Pakistani newspapers and in writings on the wall: “Maard or Sher kabhi burha nahi hota!” (A man and a lion never age!). The question that the statement leaves unanswered is that while the lion is the king of the jungle and can do as he pleases, how is the much more constrained and vulnerable man supposed to act? Maybe the answer in a conservative society is that for the aging there are no rights of desire but just the last rites of desire.
A couplet summarises this angst beautifully:
Waqt joon joon raigaan hota giya
Zindagi ko kaam yaad aaney lagey
(As time trickles away, wasted drop by drop
All that remains not done, comes back to haunt me).
So be they members of Ashley Madison, Mr Abdullah Jan of the badminton club, a sensitive poet like Ahmed Shamim, or the luminaries of modern literature like Andre Brink and J M Coetzee, most aging men are confronted with the conflict between the exigencies of their nature and the demands of propriety most societies impose on them.

The writer is an engineer by training and a social scientist by inclination. He works as a consultant in the social sector