Have you
ever looked at perfect beauty and wondered at its source? I was, and still am,
an anthropologist. Not one of those new fangled ass holes studying the effect
of video games on teenage brats, a real anthropologist. Magic and medicine men
- basket weaving hotties and snot nosed children – that’s what interests me.
Sadly, no tribe containing the nascent features I desire seemed to exist in the
world. I spent the first 25 years of my life looking, and white men of some ilk
or the other had visited everywhere before. Where could I find my source? The
origin of something essential to my life as a man? The thing came to me in the
most mundane of locations, the dullest of places. Perhaps I should embellish the circumstances
of the origins of my quest to provide an academic narrative the drama of the
discovery deserves. Alas, I am not a writer of blockbusters, but a scientist, a
mere social scientist at that. And as such must remain true to the facts
despite the lack of drama that may ensue. I saw her first in the most obvious
of places. Yes, it’s a her, I shall be shoving obviousness down your throats
like the bitter cough medicine of pre liberalisation childhoods. The courtyard
of a sociology department – a garden filled with exotics in sub-continental
proportions – and a girl. She is beauty like I have never seen. At first the
remnants of the artist in me is reluctant to talk to her. Why ruin a good
thing? Sleeping with subjects has always led to a lack of methodological
clarity. But we are not engaged in acts of creation, of fantasy. An engagement
with the facts is essential. I talk to her and she smiles. It is no ordinary
parting of lips, the teeth that come through are not mere incisors and molars,
the eyes shine with an honesty that none of you will ever find anywhere, in
anyone. The scientific temper is gone; I am reduced from participant observer
to audience. She gives me a name, a mere signifier to this collection of
perfection. I vow to find her true name. To know what is already certain, we
spend the next few hour together, her listening and me rambling about what I
think she might like. Destiny is not
amenable to analysis, but it guides our lives all the same. Perhaps it irks us
more than love because unlike the latter it is not reducible to biology. I know
now with Cartesian certainty that it was destiny that made her put up with me.
There is no other explanation for her continued tolerance of my company.
I know what
you’re thinking. A man in love intellectualises the heady drug of his passion
for a younger woman. Hold back your cynicism. I attempted methodological
neutrality with all my ability as I courted her. I looked at every part of her
up close and surveyed her from a distance. I attempted find fault in every word
she said and tried to complete every thought she had. And it was not just I.
Every man who knew her thought her perfect. As the unreality of her existence
dawned on me I realised that the ordinary name she went by was in fact a lie. I
began to read, like Gandalf in the libraries of Gondor, I searched for the
truth of her origins. I went through the
available texts, by known authors. I began frequenting back alley chatrooms
where expelled grad students spouted their drug-addled filth. After months of
searching, I found nothing. She was happy in the pretence of an ordinary
romance with an older man, to keep up her comfort I had to hide my obsession.
It was in
the magic chatroom - part alcoholic anthropologists, part users of psychedelic
drugs – where I finally heard the name of the woman I loved. At first it was
untranslatable. A series of clicks and whistles from the language before babel,
the forgotten sounds of the first men, a language learnt from the birds in the
trees and the insects between the blades of grass. Twke%h£!a, my Maswara friend from
Botswana translated it as best she could. It was an old legend, never written, but
always passed down with a religiosity that would put the best evangelical to
shame. It spoke of the origin of Beauty, the first of her kind. Before her, the
hunters of the Great Rift Valley knew nothing except the vastness of the sky
and the harshness of the swamp. There was no question of her being reborn, she
permeated the tribe of the first people like the ubiquitous nose of Rushdie’s
Sinais. She was the heritage of all of us. As a scientist, I must share my data
and open it to the criticism of my peers. But I cannot bring myself to subject
her to your gaze, to make her aware of her own deep significance to our
sentience. What I have found in her arms may well alter our notions of who we
are. I could tell you how she proves that heredity has as little to with
genetics as love has to with sex. Alas, my selfish desire for individual
happiness keeps me giving you her false name, a name by which you could
recognise her. I give you the translation Twke%h£!a gave to me, and if you so desire, you may try
to find her in the multitudes that you consider beautiful. She is Boo, of the
Balu clan, reborn and ever present, immortal in her aspect, both diffused as
beauty in mundane objects and particularised in the name I shall not utter. And
fellow beings of scientific temper, approach her with caution if you find her,
for her splendour belongs to a time before our method and you must be a
stalwart of our inhuman neutrality if you wish to escape her spell.
