Skip to main content

Cleopatra’s Lovers

Sarah Bernhardt as Cleopatra


I was in love with Cleopatra as a young man. Yes, the same Egyptian queen who lived and died a few decades before Christ. The one who enticed many a great man including Mark Antony, the Roman General. I had a cat named after her until a few months back, a tabby with seductive eyes and who loved to lie in my lap. My feline Cleopatra could not survive her third litter.

Shakespeare portrayed Cleopatra as a royal seductress. “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety,” Shakespeare made one of his characters describe her. Mark Antony fell in love with that variety of moods and passions. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra could laugh and weep, love and hate, chide and exalt as she pleased and all of that suited her. It is that kaleidoscopic Cleopatra that I fell in love with.

That Cleopatra once inspired a short story of mine in which a young soldier of the ordinary rank falls perilously in love with the queen. He is aware of the dangers of his longing. Nevertheless he approaches the queen with his request. He yearns to spend a few moments in the queen’s embrace. He longs to feel her heartbeat and breathe in the aroma of the sweat between her breasts. Cleopatra looks at this adventurous young lover of hers. A variety of emotions flits through her skittish soul. Amusement takes the lead.

“I will grant your wish,” she says royally as well as playfully. “But there is a condition. Once your wish is fulfilled, you won’t be alive to see the light of day.”

The soldier accepts the condition without a second thought.

The lot of the man who sees life romantically is doom. Preachers and moralists can go on uttering platitudes about the folly of human passions. But human nature won’t dance to the tunes they sing. If it did, Shakespeare and Shelley, Hemingway and Marquez, and even our popular movie directors would all have been utterly bankrupt.

I wonder whether I have become emotionally bankrupt. I started writing this post with the intention of re-creating my old short story about the young soldier’s passion for Cleopatra. But my heart did not palpitate. I could not decipher the aroma between Cleopatra’s breasts. So I converted this post into this drab piece. But somewhere among the withering passions of my aging heart there stirs a nostalgic and romantic yearning, however feeble that may be.

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanFebruary 28, 2022 at 5:02 PM

    Hari OM
    ...or, as we age, we come to understand the wisdom that elders and widers had tried to impart, that lust fades and only intellectual understanding can open the heart? YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 1, 2022 at 7:08 AM

      Indeed. Lust is quite an animal passion. Understanding and Wisdom are at the other pole.

      Delete
  2. AnonymousMay 24, 2022 at 7:50 PM

    "Nay, but this dotage of our general's
    O'erflows the measure: those his goodly eyes,
    That o'er the files and musters of the war
    Have glow'd like plated Mars, now bend, now turn,
    The office and devotion of their view
    Upon a tawny front: his captain's heart,
    Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst
    The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper,
    And is become the bellows and the fan
    To cool a gipsy's lust.
    Look, where they come:
    Take but good note, and you shall see in him.
    The triple pillar of the world transform'd
    Into a strumpet's fool: behold and see..."

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...
8 comments
Read more

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...
22 comments
Read more

The Chhattisgarh Story

Deforestation in Chhattisgarh Kerala’s Catholic Church is teeming with rage these days because of the arrest of two nuns in Chhattisgarh on false charges. No one seems to understand the real politics behind the Modi government’s enmity towards Christian missionaries in Chhattisgarh as well as other backward states in its neighbourhood. Modi is selling the tribal areas and forestlands to the corporate sector part by part, his friend Adani being the chief benefactor. The Christian missionaries are a severe hindrance in that commerce. Let us get some facts right, at least. The Adivasi villagers allege that Gram Sabhas (local governing bodies) were forged or manipulated under pressure from Adani and the BJP government officials in order to take away their lands. In Hasdeo Aranya, minutes of the local body meetings were altered to show the villagers’ consent for land transfers. Also, the Chhattisgarh Scheduled Tribes Commission found that Panchayat secretaries were detained and coerc...
8 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
18 comments
Read more